Stephen Grey - Operation Snakebite

Don Johnson was playing his guitar outside the Ops Room. Since that horrible mine strike that killed the interpreter they had had a couple of days off. It was a bit of a luxury. Someone came out and gave him a phone message.

‘You need to be on the helipad, right now.’

Don said it was a mistake. There were others due out on R&R on a helicopter that was supposed to have gone ten minutes ago. The messenger insisted.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Don.

He went into the Ops Room. A phone call came in again from the 2 Yorks HQ.

‘Right. It is definite. You need to go.’

‘Put me on to the ops officer, because I think you’ve made a mistake.’

The ops officer came on the line.

‘Look, I don’t know what it is. But you need to make your way back as fast as you can.’

Don put the phone down and walked away. He knew now. He just knew. He was with two lads called Private Shaun Utley and Lance-Corporal Christopher O’Malley. (O’Malley got hit later in Musa Qala and had his toes blown off, recalled Don.) They helped him pack his Bergen.

‘I think something has happened to our kid,’ he told them.

Then Sergeant Andrew Morrisson came in. Crying his eyes out. A big bloke. No one would expect him to cry.

‘Look, I’m sorry. Your kid’s dead.’

He gave Don a cuddle.

It was now about 11.15 a.m. Everyone helped pack his kit. He just took his rifle, his webbing, his ammunition, his night sights and his guitar. And then he walked down to the helipad and waited about ten minutes. While he was there, the Royal Marines sergeant-major, David Layton, came over.

‘Is it true?’ he asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘Oh.’

They just sat there. Then Layton said, ‘I used to go mad with your kid… because it was always the fucking ANA that ran out of ammo first.’

He said Jonno used to come running to the rear in the midst of battle, back to where the sergeant-major had his quad bike loaded up with resupply. The ammunition for the AK-47s and variants the Afghans used was always on the top – because he knew Jonno would want his first. And then Jonno would turn around and go running off with two boxes of the ammunition on his back.

The sergeant-major kept up with the stories, and then the Chinook came in, and Don jumped on.

The flight took them past Sangin district centre. That morning someone had dropped off a badly wounded man at the gates. He told them some lies at first but eventually confessed he was Taliban. He’d been handling a bomb that went off too early. The British soldiers took him on the chopper for medical treatment.

Don took a look at the wounded man covered in burns, and, for some reason, it made him furious. ‘The back was open and I honestly really just wanted to kick him out the back.’ There was a marine officer next to him. He grabbed Don’s leg, as if for reassurance. Don was saying to him: ‘Can we just throw him off?’ The officer just held him and said, ‘It’s going to be all right, it’s going to be all right.’ Don buried his face in his arm.

It took a while to work out the gunfire was coming from the rear, from the north-east. 2nd Platoon of Bravo Company, 1 Fury, hit the deck and then took cover as best they could, moving closer to the bank of the gravel riverbed.

They had been trying to link up with the British BRF who had collected Bravo’s resupply. But they did not make it. Now the BRF were up on the cliffs, firing in support with their snipers and their .50 cal. Anthony Fusco, the platoon sergeant, took a squad into attack, jumping up over the wadi bank and heading for the enemy’s compounds. Fusco had cleared about four buildings before they spotted the enemy getting away across open ground. Fusco recalled: ‘They were trying to carry their guys off the battlefield. Two were limping because we had hit them in their legs. I turned around and caught another guy trying to skip town and put one through his lung. And then, the Apaches came on station and basically scared them all away.’

Some of the Taliban moved across and attacked the compound where 1st Platoon was holed up. Daniel Price was behind a 240 machine gun. He looked up to see a man running at him firing. A bullet struck him by the heart. It went through his compass, bounced off his armour plating, cracking it, and then ricocheted off into his arm. Price kept firing though and it took two other paratroopers to drag him away from the fight.

His assailant had jumped behind a corner. He was killed with some grenades. And they killed two more men who came to drag away the attacker’s body. That was the pattern the paratroopers noticed. As soon as you killed a Taliban fighter, the rest of them got even braver – charging across to recover their comrade’s body.

It was getting close to darkness now, and the waiting was still not over. Jonno’s body was still in the Vector, and the promised helicopter had still not come with the explosive experts to clear the site. All day, everyone kept asking Jake, ‘When’s the fucking helicopter coming?’ Three times, remembered Dave McCarrick, a chopper came in and hovered about and said they couldn’t see the signal smoke or made some excuse. In the end, Jake said: ‘That’s it. We’ll do it ourselves.’

It was Lance-Corporal John Dickens, an engineer, who went down to do the clearance. He got out his metal detector and scanned the ground around the Vector and around the truck. He came back up in a sweat, but gave the all clear.

Then Jake and Benson, the sergeant-major, took a team of five down – those they thought would cope best: themselves, McCarrick, Fong and French. As Jonno’s best friend at the scene, it was hard for McCarrick. Jake had to ask him, ‘Are you up for it?’ McCarrick said, ‘Yeah.’ He didn’t want any of the young lads to see Jonno. As it was, it was OK. ‘He didn’t look too bad.’ As they prepared Jonno to bring him up the hill they found his bible underneath his body armour.

For Fong, it was some relief to go down the hill again. All day, he’d been praying for Jonno, knowing his spirit was sitting some place close. When the explosion went off, Fong had been just below the truck and heard a squeaking noise in the dust cloud as Jonno’s Vector slid backwards from the explosion. He and his boss, Craig Dawson, had been ordered to stay put, rather than risk another mine blast. But he had been wishing he had leaped over and tried to save Jonno. But – seeing Jonno’s injuries – his mind was put at rest. ‘I had felt that I would be able to save his life,’ he remembered, ‘but then the night when we got his body out and I saw his injuries, and I told myself there was no chance at all.’

It was nearly 6 p.m. when they got Jonno up, just as the explosive disposal team finally arrived on scene. The incident had happened more than seven hours earlier. Even then it wasn’t over. Jake and the others took Jonno’s body over, ready to carry on to the chopper. The message was: ‘We’ll be there in five minutes.’ Then an hour and a half later, the message came that it was just too dark to come.

McCarrick was furious. ‘It was just the way we sat around all day out of the game. And then, all the fucking lies that were coming back. I just wanted to get him out and away.’

Jake knew he had to act to try to restore people’s spirits, even though his own were at an all-time low. Under the stars, he gathered the company together in a huddle and gave his little speech. His face was weary and he spoke softly. ‘I’m shit at this,’ he confessed to the men. He spoke of the gap Jonno would leave behind and how he had died doing what he loved. He praised how the men had fought in the village the day before. ‘Jonno would have been proud of each and every one of you,’ he said.