Stephen Grey - Operation Snakebite

Back inside, Fera got the Apaches straight on the target, and they pounded the Dushka team with their 30mm cannon. The Taliban fire came to a halt. The trouble was that they had silenced the Dushkas several times these last two days. But, in a matter of hours, they seemed to start up all over again. It seemed they were killing the gunmen but failing to kill the gun. Fera noted down the grid reference of the strike. He wanted to watch that place closely.

It was getting dark fast now, and, as they walked out of the compound entrance, Bravo’s 2nd Platoon lowered their night-vision goggles from their helmets.

Corona was on point again, and he had gone just 300 yards into a field before he saw a man in the road. The word from intelligence was the Taliban had banned civilians from the street, and the paratroopers figured that no one was going to ignore the Taliban. That night everyone out and about was a bad guy, fair game. This man in the gloom was a legal target. ‘We’d seen all the women and children leave, so you figure all the guys that are left behind are bagging us,’ he recalled. ‘So we weren’t just popping random people at night.’

Silently raising his arm to halt the patrol behind, Corona quietly lifted up his M4 and aimed through the laser sights. The man was walking across the road, but he stopped and looked in the patrol’s direction, as if he had spotted them. Corona opened fire. But after his second shot, the gun jammed. He bent down to fix it. As he did, he heard a massive blast and felt a shock wave. He was knocked a step back and felt something hitting him and piercing his skin. It was a grenade about 10 feet in front. An AK-47 started firing too.

Corona winced at the pain, but, correcting the malfunction, he raised his M4 and started firing down the alley. He was firing now blindly. The flash of the grenade had closed off his night vision. Another fire team also started putting down suppressing fire. Then another blast wave hit Corona as another grenade went off even closer.

Corona looked around and saw that his automatic rifleman, Specialist Evan Graham, was on all fours, with blood dripping from his face. Obviously a head wound. But he didn’t know how serious it was. So he grabbed him and walked back to where he found William Cochran, the radio operator, and Fusco, the platoon sergeant, taking cover behind a wall.

‘What the fuck are you doing back here? You’re supposed to be up there,’ said Fusco.

‘Well, I think Graham’s hurt,’ said Corona.

‘Well, what the fuck are you doing back here then?’

‘Hey, you know, I think I’m hurt too.’

That’s when Corona felt down and found blood on his right thigh and left leg. Corona realized he had left the two other soldiers of his team, Walker and Burgesson, up front. So he crept back up and told them what had happened and that they would be folded into another team.

Then Corona turned round and looked at what was going on. ‘Everything had just gone to shit,’ he remembered thinking. ‘It was like a salmon run in this alley. I mean, there were so many people, and nobody knew what the fuck was going on. I mean, it’s funny because you practise the most basic training manoeuvres in garrison, but when the shit hit the fan here, everyone just lost it. It was – I mean, it wasn’t funny right then, obviously – because I had just got hit with a grenade, but you know, looking back on it, it was pretty funny.’

Corona and Graham walked themselves back to the rear, back to the 1st Platoon compound from where they’d just emerged, and the 1st Platoon medic, Dustin Jones, helped patch them up. Graham was still fired up.

‘Oh, I’m going to get back out there and kick this guy’s ass,’ he told Corona.

‘Hey, Graham, time to sit this one out.’

Graham told Corona the second grenade had actually bounced off the optic of his machine gun before exploding in the dirt. Later, when the surgeons pulled the shrapnel from Graham’s face, it was tested and found to have been manufactured in 1947. A modern US high-explosive hand grenade would have wiped out Corona’s whole team.

After the casualties went back, Fusco started reorganizing the fight. Both Corona and Graham, Fusco recalled, had wanted to stay in the fight. But Graham had so much blood pouring from his face he wouldn’t have been able to see much longer.

But Fusco and the men were now pretty angry. Two Apache helicopters came and fired Hellfires into the compound where the enemy with the grenades had walked into. Cochran, the radio operator, remembered ‘the best Fourth of July kind of thing I’d ever seen’.

Then Fusco came up with a plan he put to the lieutenant, TJ. He was setting up the 240mm machine guns on a roof in overwatch and then was going to assault across the field with a series of leapfrogs. TJ said the plan was good. But then he got on the radio and told Fusco to slow things up.

‘We’ve gotta wait until the mortar gets set up and ‘til Spectre comes back on station,’ said TJ. It was too dark now for the Apaches to fly. They’d gone off back to Bastion.

The orders were coming all the way down from the battalion up on Roshan. While this was going on, there were other battles going on and more casualties. Things were getting critical. If anyone more got injured, there just might not be a chopper to take him out. So 2nd Platoon got hunkered down behind some walls. At one point they got some intercepts from the Taliban radio saying something like: ‘We are going to do some gardening.’ So the platoon dropped some grenades into the bushes. ‘Everything that looked like a garden to us, we put rounds in,’ said Fusco.

They pushed forward to the compound. That was pretty much it. The platoon moved back on the road a bit and found a place to spend the night.

Only in the morning did 2nd Platoon realize that the compound where they had rested was actually divided into two parts. The other part was some kind of medical clinic for children and ‘pregnant chicks’. It was empty, but on the floor they found some bloody clothes, some empty packets of pain-killers, as well as a metal pan which looked like it had contained an extracted bullet. It seemed the Taliban had been patching up their wounded just behind the wall where 2nd Platoon had slept. ‘That was pretty creepy,’ said Cochran.

Lieutenant McGovern’s 2nd Platoon of Alpha Company was shattered. It had lost six men in two days, including their platoon sergeant and two team leaders. They knew they were effectively out of the big battle. ‘After that,’ said one of the men, ‘we were combat ineffective and we didn’t have enough people to do anything. So they made us just stay on the tower for the next three weeks until someone came and relieved us. We were on that hilltop for a long time without some of our best friends, knowing that our team leader had gotten hit. And we were just angry, and then it started getting colder and it started raining. It was pretty horrible for morale, so a lot of people were really down.

It was to this battle scene that, just under an hour ago, Brigadier Mackay had arrived with a team. Up by the steel structure of the mobile-phone mast, they unrolled their sleeping mats and took their place for the night in a slit trench. Hooking up their radio-sets, his staff established what was probably the most front-line brigade command post in the short history of Task Force Helmand. It was an unusual position for someone who led over 8,000 men and women. He would be up on the hill for a day and two nights as it took incoming mortar and machine-gun fire. One of his own protection team engaged and killed two Taliban fighters. ‘If you have a brigadier firing, then you are really in trouble,’ he would joke later in an interview with The Times newspaper. [19] Michael Evans, ‘Brigadier Strides into Battle against Taleban’, The Times , 17 December 2007.