Stephen Grey - Operation Snakebite

The British prime minister, Gordon Brown, was addressing a group of 150 soldiers who were gathered around him. He had flown direct on a Hercules C-130 from Kuwait, and was exhausted. Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British ambassador, met him at the camp.

Speaking to the soldiers, Brown thanked them for their patriotic service. In an 800-word speech, he said ‘thank you’ sixteen times. He said, ‘I want to thank every one of you for what you have done in what is the front line against the Taliban… It is one of the most difficult of tasks. It is the most testing of times and it is one of the most important of missions.’ Defeating the Taliban and giving ‘strength to the new democracy of Afghanistan’ was ‘important to defeating terrorism all around the world’.

The soldiers’ reaction was subdued compared to the cheers he had received in Iraq a day earlier. ‘We have an operation ongoing in Musa Qala, we’ve just had people die, so it’s a different tempo,’ Lieutenant Andy McLachlan told a journalist.

Brown had some quick briefs from the few commanders who were left in base then stepped back on to the plane to head to Kabul to meet President Karzai.

The Times newspaper reported that his trip was ‘the closest a serving British prime minister had been to front-line ground battle since Winston Churchill visited the beaches after D-Day’. [20] Sam Coates and Michael Evans, ‘Forces May Be Locked into Afghan Conflict for Decade, Brown’s Trip to Front Line Reveals’, The Times , 11 December 2007. None recorded, however, that since it was constructed in the remote desert, Camp Bastion had never been attacked.

Sergeant Jimmy Lynas and the others changed their kit and restocked on their ammunition. They had broken contact and withdrawn from the green zone. ‘We were spanked. There is no way we could have stayed there,’ said Ibbotson. But they were happy to have hit the other side hard.

Then Major Barrie Terry, the commander of the 2 Yorks mentoring teams in Sangin, drove into the base and told them, ‘Right, you might have to go back out.’ There were groups of Taliban moving everywhere, he said. All the men – shattered by the ambush – stared at each other in disbelief. ‘No one said owt,’ recalled Ibbotson.

As they were waiting, Lynas came round and said, ‘Just go and try to get your heads down.’

Ibbo was sharing a room with Lynas, and he was lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling.

‘What’s wrong with you, Ibbo? Can’t you sleep or something?’

‘I fucking can’t sleep… Do you know how lucky we were then?’

Perhaps it was just a hangover from the adrenalin. Before long they did what soldiers do – had a brew and laughed about it. Then they got themselves up into the sangars of this little fort – manning the guns as the Taliban attacked.

Jimmy Lynas had been Jonno’s best friend. He had got the news of Jonno’s death by electronic message a day earlier. When he had last seen Jonno they had given each other a hug. Lynas had gone on to Sangin after the trip with the rest of B Company out to Delaram. Jonno sent him a Christmas package, with a couple of Christmas crackers, some chocolates and a miniature bottle of whisky. ‘Have a drink on me!’ said the card. That was the last he had heard of him.

For a while, the emotions of the battle these last two days had shelved his thoughts of Jonno.

When Scott, another close pal of Jonno, showed up at the base the day after their fight, he asked Lynas: ‘Are you all right?’ He meant, how was he coping in his grief?

Lynas replied: ‘Yes, fine. I just need some more link [machine gun ammunition].’

‘Just for a while I had forgotten about him,’ recalled Lynas. ‘I just put him in another place in my mind. It was just because of the intensity of what we had done.’

Major Terry sat on the roof with Lynas some time that day watching the Gurkhas moving through the green zone under fire. They talked about Jonno’s funeral and whether Lynas could get home for that. But Terry had darker thoughts. He could not help wondering if more people would end up being buried at the end of the day’s battle.

Pitchfork knew he had to get the helicopter in somehow. The ‘nine-liner’ radio message that requested a medevac had been sent. But he needed to win some breathing space.

He ran over to Lou Connolly’s platoon, which was still under heavy attack. Connolly pointed out where the enemy fire seemed to be coming from. But, between taking cover from incoming rounds and trying to spot gun flashes on what was now a bright sunny day, it was hard to tell exactly where the Taliban was.

To make matters worse they did not even have a proper map. They did have detailed photographic maps, but these covered an area that began 300 yards further north. The night before it was thought they would have reached there in fifteen minutes. But they were still stuck where they started at daylight, and not going anywhere soon.

The Apache finally found his target, and a Hellfire missile bought a brief calm. At 11.05 a Chinook made it in safely and took the wounded away.

There was fighting now going on all round Sangin. Terry and Scott from the 2 Yorks were running up and down the main road in their WMIKs, giving supporting fire to the Gurkhas while they themselves were being attacked. And so was every one of the Sangin’s five patrol bases. The larger FOBs at Robinson to the south and Inkerman to the north-east were also being hit. Teams of the enemy were said to have infiltrated Sangin’s bazaar and to be trying to lay mines on one of the bridges. This was clearly not just a minor skirmish or the group of fifteen to twenty fighters that the intelligence had predicted. It was an organized offensive.

Scott remembered: ‘When we first came to Sangin they told us: “Oh, you’ll be very lucky if you ever see a Taliban.” Well, we saw dozens that day. They were reorganizing, lining up, doing ambushes, using vehicles to get rid of injured and move weapons.’

Terry’s biggest concern was that British forces were overstretched. To the north of Sangin all the ANA were fighting on their own without British mentors. ‘I could hear all hell breaking loose in the north and I couldn’t influence that because I was fixed in the south,’ he recalled. If the Taliban overran just one of these bases, it would have given them a huge propaganda victory – a devastating counterweight to a victory looming in Musa Qala.

Watching the progress of fighting, 40 Commando headquarters now intervened – issuing a command known as ‘patrol minimize’. It meant all units should return to camp. Sangin was just getting far too hot. Any more casualties on the ground would divert resources from Musa Qala.

Returning swiftly back to base was easier said than done. The Gurkhas had to fight their way back. Pitchfork decided they would return the way they had come. By avoiding the green zone and walking up the gravel riverbed, he could use the riverbanks as cover from ambush. But it also ended any idea of encircling their enemy.

The cover of the tall riverbanks proved an illusion too. It lasted less than a mile. And at 12.30 the Taliban opened up again with machine guns and RPGs. One landed in front of Pitchfork in the gravel.

Everyone had dived into cover and, though now positioned ready to fire back, no one knew where exactly to fire at. Pitchfork ordered Connolly to get someone to stand up in the open and ‘draw fire’. It was a textbook way of spotting the enemy. But the textbook missed the hardest part of the drill. Connolly looked around at his men. ‘Shit, this is not very easy,’ he thought. Who was he going to tell to face the bullets? ‘Fuck it. I’ll do it myself,’ he decided, and began to run along the riverbank. Luckily for him the Taliban declined to engage. They were busy preparing the next ambush.