Stephen Grey - Operation Snakebite

He explained the helicopter hadn’t come, and tonight the lads would have to stand sentry on the ridgeline over Jonno’s body. Emotions, he said, would have to be suppressed in the next few days. However hard, they needed to focus on the mission. There would be a time for mourning later. ‘We have to move on,’ he said, ‘but not forget.’

It was a miserable night. Rain began to pelt down on the ponchos of those who could find sleep. Andy Breach had the pre-dawn shift of 4 to 5 a.m. Normally in the British army, officers did not do sentry duty. But in the mentoring teams many traditions like that were ignored.

Only twenty-four hours earlier, on exactly the same shift, Breach had been sitting next to Jonno in a WMIK. Jonno had been in the driver’s seat and Breach in the gunner’s seat. Jonno had talked about how he loved what he was doing and how happy he had been to lead men forward in the village. ‘If anything happens to me,’ Jonno had said, ‘I want to die outright. Lisa would kill me if I came back in bits.’ Jonno had been fatalistic. That was why he was carrying that bible. He had told Breach how he was going to church. ‘I know something will happen,’ he had said. But he didn’t seem scared or deterred.

After Jonno had died, Jake had sent Breach back to the main desert camp to break the news to the 2 Yorks headquarters. He found the regimental sergeant-major, Richard Hind, was out with a team of soldiers, doing the heavy work of digging slit trenches for B Company’s return. But B Company hadn’t made it back to the camp, so Breach sat out in the rain, 50 yards from Jonno’s body, thinking back to what he had said and done. On the horizon he watched the flash of explosions. He heard on the radio a friend from the Household Cavalry in some battle in the distance. ‘It was a miserable night,’ he remembered. ‘And, for us, that was even before the big battle of Musa Qala had started.’

Don Johnson started dialling the hardest phone call of his life. He wanted to do it, though. There was no good way to tell the news.

When he had returned, Don had been told Jonno’s body would be brought back in a couple of hours, but that passed, and all the time he wasn’t allowed to phone anyone. When someone died or was seriously injured a whole procedure went into force across Task Force Helmand. Little red signs announcing ‘Operation Minimize’ were put up outside the phone booths and Internet shacks, and all of them were shut down. The idea was to cut off all communications between the soldiers and back home to stop news of the latest tragedy from reaching the families or the media before the next-of-kin had been properly informed. But in this case Operation Minimize was enforced on Don also. The problem was that, under the rules, Jonno’s parents and fiancée could not be informed until Jonno’s death and identity were formally certified. That required a doctor, a military policeman and a member of his unit to all be there to record a statement of his death. Those were the rules – in place, quite logically, to prevent someone being mistakenly informed about a death – but with Jonno’s body stuck all day and all night on the ridgeline, it all seemed rather cruel.

‘I wasn’t allowed to phone anyone. I wasn’t allowed to speak to anyone because they hadn’t positively identified him,’ he remembered. ‘Obviously I was getting a bit upset, because if they had brought me back from Kajaki, they must have been positive. You know what I mean, the lads that were with him, like Jake. They’d been mates for years. They would obviously know it was him.’

By 7 p.m., Don was getting quite distraught. He had known now for about eight hours. He said: ‘I need to tell someone.’ The reply was: ‘But we can’t yet because we haven’t positively identified him.’ It was pathetic, he thought. ‘It was like they have little rules in the army that sometimes might need to be broke.’

Then he remembered someone coming in about 10 o’clock at night and saying: ‘We can’t bring him back. The Americans won’t bring him back and the British can’t fly.’

‘Well, what…?’

‘Well, he’ll just have to stay out for the night.’

Don’s head was full of dark thoughts. He thought he knew what they did with the dead in Afghanistan. He had visions of ‘dogs eating the dead in the middle of the night’. It was awful.

At brigade headquarters in Lashkar Gah, Nick Haston, the deputy chief of staff, was trying to follow a rule book that, while well-intentioned, had been written in what he thought of as a ‘sterile made-up environment’ in the UK.

It had been his call to leave Jonno’s body on the hillside, ‘the most painful decision’ he made in his tour in Afghanistan. Ultimately, he recalled, ‘we couldn’t find a bloody helicopter to pick up a body because we needed that helicopter to go elsewhere.’ The shortage of helicopters was a hard fact, with a total of nine other casualties being dealt with that day by one medevac team. Hard as it sounded, if ‘someone is dead that comes low down on the priority list’ for being picked up. Those who were dying or severely injured clearly got precedence.

The shortage of helicopters would madden people across the brigade. When ministers came to visit, they would say, ‘What would you like more of?’ But the message, said Haston, was: ‘Don’t say helicopters, because you’ve got enough to do the job! But it was obviously not true, he thought, and ‘about time people understood that’.

Now Haston was in an argument with higher command, who were insisting that Don Johnson could not inform his family until Jonno was formally identified.

At about half past ten, the padre came back to Don at Camp Shorobak and said he ‘had convinced the battalion, or whoever it was, to let me phone home’. It was obvious that Don was in agony. ‘It was killing me,’ he said, and everyone could see that. And then he made the call and ‘that was probably the worst time I’ve ever had in my life, crying down the phone. It was horrible.’

Once approval to bend the rules was given, it was Don’s decision to inform his family by phone. Normally such things are done in person by a special welfare team. In this case, the welfare team were waiting round the corner from the Johnson household. ‘I think my mum and dad appreciated it coming from me and not anyone else. I don’t know, they just let me do it. It was good that they let me do it.’

The padre was sitting next to Don as he made the call. His mother answered.

‘Mam, can you put Dad on really fast?’ said Don.

She must have known it was something bad.

His dad picked up the phone.

‘Dad, there’s been an accident. Lee died.’

His dad said, ‘Oh God, oh my God.’

And then Don could hear his father telling his mum: ‘Lee’s dead.’

His mum’s screams down the phone were awful. Don would never want to hear such screams again. But then he asked, ‘Look, you need to be strong. Will you phone Lisa? I need you to go round and see Lisa.’ Don remembered: ‘I didn’t want them to just phone Lisa and tell her when she was sat at home with his little Lilly, by herself. Imagine her screaming in front of that kid, it wouldn’t be very nice. I said, “Look, you need to, don’t tell no one, go round and speak to her straight away.” And they went round and told her, which I think was the best way to do things. I couldn’t have done it anyway.’

After the phone call, things did not get any better for a while. There were more complications with the helicopters, and news came and went about when Jonno’s body would come out. But in the end Don went to sleep. Exhausted by the emotion of it all, he slept like a baby, for nine hours straight.