Patrick Bishop - Ground Truth - 3 Para Return to Afghanistan

They are operating in an extreme climate in wild country among people whose culture, try as the soldiers might to understand it, remains baffling and opaque. There’s nothing in the recent memory of the British Army to draw on for help. You have to go back more than a hundred years to match the experience. Any soldier reading Winston Churchill’s account of his time with the Malakand Field Force fighting Pathan (Pashtun) tribesmen in the North West Frontier in 1897 would feel a buzz of recognition at his tales of Tommies and their native allies battling with heat, thirst, slippery local leaders and opponents steeped in a culture of violence.

‘The strong aboriginal propensity to kill, inherent in all human beings, has… been preserved in unexampled strength and vigour,’ he wrote. ‘That religion, which above all others was founded and propagated by the sword — the tenets and principles of which are instinct with incentives to slaughter and which in three continents has produced fighting breeds of men — stimulates a wild and merciless fanaticism.’ *

The strain of a tour is enormous, reflected in the number of soldiers diagnosed with mental disorders. * But the burden also lies heavy on the folk they leave behind. For those with families, Afghan duty means being absent from hearth and home not just for the six months of the deployment but also for lengthy pre-operational training exercises. By the end of 2010, some members of 3 Para will have done three Afghan stints in five years.

It is, as the soldiers say, ‘a big ask’. It is not as if they are going to fight in a popular cause. British public opinion remains resolutely sceptical about the value of the campaign. Most people seem unwilling to accept the government’s assertion that by fighting in Afghanistan we are defending the home front against a threat as great as that posed by the Nazis. The scepticism shows no sign of eroding. Progress, military and political, is deemed to be non-existent or far too slow to merit the cost in blood, money and effort.

At the same time, the public are full of admiration for the soldiers. The standing of the services in civilian eyes is probably higher than at any time since the Second World War. It is not difficult to see why. Their culture of stoicism and comradeship are points of light in a world of blighted materialism and egocentricity They remind us, perhaps, of the way we like to think we once were.

The soldiers are pleased to be appreciated. But they, who pay the price of Britain’s policy, do not share the civilians’ pessimism. From what I have seen and heard, there is no significant reluctance to serve in Afghanistan and if necessary to do so again and again. ‘Are we prepared to do it?’ asked 3 Para’s former regimental sergeant major John Hardy. ‘Yes we are. Every time.’ The soldiers are driven back by a number of impulses. One is professional satisfaction. Almost every soldier in a volunteer army welcomes the prospect of action. Another is their sense of duty which has stood up well to the climate of self-interest prevalent in civilian life.

But there is more to it than that. Soldiers have a refreshingly clear-cut sense of right and wrong. They sympathise with the Afghan people, caught between the cruelty of the insurgents and the venality of the authorities, and want to help them. The job is tough and dangerous and brimming with frustrations and disillusionment, but the prizes of safety at home and a better Afghanistan are considered, if they can be won, to be worth it. The soldiers’ enthusiasm, though, is finite. A military stalemate will eventually lower morale and degrade performance. If there are no signs that the Afghan government is serious about governing, that process will accelerate.

The phrase ‘ground truth’ is a military expression, meaning how things are compared with how they are imagined to be. Soldiers know the ground truth better than anyone; yet, it seems to me, their voices have not been given the attention they deserve. They have some extraordinary tales to tell. This book reveals some of their stories as well as their thoughts, fears and anxieties about a conflict that, for good or for bad, is shaping both them and us.

*Winston S. Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War , Project Gutenberg, E-Book #9404.

*In 2007, according to the Ministry of Defence, 375 Armed Forces personnel who had previously served in Afghanistan were assessed as having a mental disorder.

He had imagined this moment often during the last two years. Now, after an hour-long climb along a rocky, sun-baked ridge line, it had arrived. Corporal Stuart Hale shielded his eyes from the mid-morning glare and looked down at the corrugated hillside. The slope was the colour of khaki, bare apart from a scattering of rocks. It was just like a thousand others that undulated across Helmand. There was nothing to show that it was here that his life, and the lives of several of his comrades, had been swept so traumatically off course.

His mates left him alone to enjoy the satisfaction of having made it up unaided. It was cool up here after the baking heat of the valley, quiet too, the silence disturbed only by the occasional boom of mortars in Kajaki camp and the rustling noise the bombs made as they flew past.

Eventually he spoke. ‘I was up there when I spotted them,’ he said, pointing to a crag above. ‘They looked like Taliban, and they seemed to be setting up a checkpoint to stop people on the road down there.’ That morning, 6 September 2006, he had grabbed his rifle and bounded down the hill to get a better look. When he reached a dried-up stream bed he hopped across without thinking. ‘Normally I jump with a two-footed landing’ cause that’s how you’re supposed to do it. A good paratrooper lands feet and knees together. But this time I got a bit lazy and just jumped with one foot.’ The lapse was a stroke of luck. It meant that only his right foot was blown off when he landed on the mine. The detonation was the start of a long ordeal for him and the men who went to his rescue. Four more soldiers were injured and two lost limbs. Corporal Mark Wright was killed.

Hale was rescued after hours of muddle and delay. Back in hospital in Britain he was plunged into a new trauma. Recovering from surgery, he suffered vivid paranoid hallucinations. He believed the doctors were plotting to kill him and that his girlfriend was so horrified by his injuries that she was frozen with fear on the other side of the ward door, unable to face him.

Eventually the nightmares passed. Hale did everything the doctors and physiotherapists asked, determined to regain as much as he could of the fitness he had been so proud of. Now, two years later, he was standing on the peaks above Kajaki, a welcome breeze drying the sweat on his face, after climbing 300 metres up a goat track on one real leg and one artificial one.

In the summer of 2006, Stuart Hale was a private soldier, serving as a sniper in Support Company of the Third Battalion of the Parachute Regiment. 3 Para had formed the core of the battle-group tasked with bringing stability to the province of Helmand, which until then had been virtually ignored by the international force occupying Afghanistan. Helmand was a peripheral province, a pitifully backward corner of a very poor country. No one knew precisely what would happen when British troops got there. Certainly no one anticipated the storm of violence that blew up after the Paras’ arrival. From June onwards, all over the province, the soldiers were pitched into exhausting battles with bands of Taliban who fought with suicidal ferocity to drive them out.

The British were soon stretched to snapping point. They found themselves stranded in remote outposts, dependent almost entirely on helicopters to get food and ammunition in and to take casualties out. At times it seemed they might be overrun. But, showing a bravery and determination that have hardened into legend, they clung on. Their courage was reflected in the medals that followed, a haul that included a VC, awarded to Corporal Bryan Budd, who died winning it. Another thirteen men from the battlegroup were killed. Forty more were seriously wounded.