The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men #2

"Man Down! Man Down!” Two words, always shouted twice for some reason, that get your attention.

Actually, that doesn’t do it justice at all. When you hear them coming from your troops, a primaeval guttural cry over the gunfire, they rip every cell in your body away from what it was doing towards one single thing in the world at that moment in time.

You are lying on the ground, trying to locate the enemy while simultaneously attempting to dig a trench in the dirt with your eyelids, bullets zipping inches above your head. Then, “Man Down! Man Down!” A pause. Eyes wide. More adrenaline. Cold fear. Everything has just changed.

And then the training kicks in.

Headlines vs. Reality

12 years ago this week, the punchy newspaper article above was published in the UK. It was a tabloid take on another close call for our Reconnaissance Platoon in the Green Zone in Helmand Province, in 2011.

That report didn’t scratch the surface of how complex and challenging that day was.

This article re-examines it and draws out some personal lessons. I summarise these at the end. I hope it’s useful for others.

Corridors of weakness

As part of a larger Operations Company, we deployed to a contested area to ‘surge’ boots on the ground and deter the insurgents from harassing an ISAF/Afghan Police checkpoint. Our presence had the opposite effect. It attracted more enemy fighters to the area, escalating the problem for the locals who were caught in the middle (see part 1 for more context link).

During the weeks of cat-and-mouse between us and a wily enemy, we fought several intense skirmishes. But, little by little, we started to build a decent intelligence picture, identifying potential commanders, weapons caches and compounds of interest.

We couldn’t do much beyond that, though.

One big problem was that the insurgents were clustered in several villages a few kilometres to our north that straddled three NATO boundaries almost equally. We were part of Combined Force Lashkar Gah in the South, and two more British Battlegroups bordered us to the Northwest and Northeast. And some Estonian forces were also thrown into the mix.

This is important because when patrolling, we naturally give a bit of a buffer from the boundaries on the map. Crossing into another Battle Group’s area without permission is not good for various reasons – different radio channels, the risk of blue-on-blue, getting in the way of other operations, etc. So, these lines on our maps can become potential areas of weakness on the ground – corridors to be exploited if the enemy can work them out.

Which they had done.

The area was known as The Tri-Boundary Area. The troops affectionately called it ‘The Heart of Darkness’. Outside of a full-scale operation, planned and deconflicted with the other Battlegroups, we weren’t going to go in there.

Or so we thought.

The initial ambush

This particular patrol was to be a simple ground-dominating patrol. The Reconnaissance Platoon had split in half into two patrol ‘multiples’, of 10-15 men each. With the other platoons in our location, each multiple would take turns doing these local patrols to have a near-permanent presence on the ground. The aim was to deter the enemy while gathering information and ‘reassuring’ the locals.

We were stretched for numbers, too. The RnR rotation, where you get 10 days back home during the tour, was underway. This meant that we were always a couple of men short of full strength. To maintain enough numbers to keep patrolling, we robbed Peter to pay Paul – individuals came across from different platoons to backfill and plug gaps.

We had a couple of soldiers from another unit attached to us, and a brand-new platoon commander straight out of training. This was his first patrol. In all, there were 13 of us, plus an Afghan police officer from the local checkpoint.

We weren’t going to go far. Just 1.5 kilometres north, patrolling around some of the local village clusters, but close to the edge of where it might get cheeky.

It was late afternoon. It was quiet and calm. The atmospherics were good. Men, women and children were out and about doing their business. There were nods and smiles, kids asking for pens and chocolates. My ‘spidey senses’ were relaxed. We were alert, but it felt relatively benign.

We’d not long left our patrol base. We’d covered 600-800 metres. We were just leaving a small cluster of compounds, approaching a bend in the track. Locals of all ages were still about.

BRRRT!

From our immediate left, no more than 25 metres away, in the bushes, a long burst of machine gun fire sprays into our patrol.

We all hit the deck. “Contact! Wait, Out!” I call on the radio.

Then “Man Down! Man Down!”.

The shout goes up and down the line. I repeat it over the radio. This gets things moving back in HQ and all the way back to Camp Bastion. The start of the Golden Hour to save a life.

No more enemy fire. The locals have run inside. We can’t see anyone in the bushes.

“Scan your arcs! Stay down!”

We’d been in loads contacts in the previous months. But this was my first casualty. Time was ticking.

Casualty evacuation

You’ve done this so many times. Maybe hundreds of ‘CASEVAC’ scenarios. Again and again in training. You know what to do. This gives you a sense of calm in the most intense situations. “I’ve been here before”, you reassure yourself.

But when it’s real, there is something different that can never be replicated in training. Danger and responsibility. An immediate threat to our lives and a responsibility for someone’s life.

You are pulled in completely opposite directions. Care and aggression. And you must do both at the same time. Now.

The medic is calling to the casualty. He’s alive. Where are you shot? In the hip. Can you crawl? Yes. Come on then, crawl into that ditch beside you and we’ll sort you out.

The platoon sergeant jumps to action, and starts to coordinate the casualty evacuation. I must focus on the enemy at the front.

“Who is it!?” I shout.

I don’t immediately recognise the name. Which throws me a bit. It’s one of the soldiers from the other unit. I met this man less than 24 hours ago.

We’re going to need a helicopter evacuation back to Camp Bastion 25 kilometres to the Northwest. The heli is called. It’s on its way only a few minutes after contact.

We need a secure landing site for the heli. Four guys get busy clearing a space in a cornfield 150 metres to our rear. I establish a defensive perimeter with six guys. Medic and Sergeant on the casualty. That’s all of us used up. Not much left should the attack continue or escalate…

Wound packed. Casualty on a stretcher. HLS secure. I pop some smoke to cover our 150-metre run carrying the casualty to the HLS.

We were so tight on numbers, that I jumped on the front left of the stretcher. My interpreter grabbed the front right. Two more soldiers grabbed the back. And we ran.

This may have been the hardest 150 metres I have ever had to cover. A human is heavy. In all their kit, body armour and weapon they are very heavy. And you are carrying all your kit too. Lungs on fire.

We soon hear the helicopter. It’s a US ‘Pedro’ Blackhawk – the US Air Force Para Rescue. We pop orange smoke to mark the HLS. They swoop by to check the situation, then down, land perfectly on the spot, and two ninjas step off and walk towards us as we shuffle forward carrying our man to them.

We hand him over and give them the key information. He’s on. They’re off (they land in Bastion 35 minutes after our man was first shot, which is remarkable when thinking back). As soon as the heli is up, we are prone on the ground in a defensive circle.

The Pursuit

As the whop-whop-whop of the rotor blades fade into the distance, I hear a British voice shout out 100 metres further to our south. It’s our Company Commander, the OC. While all this was happening, the Quick Reaction Force (QRF) deployed from our patrol base. QRF sounds impressive. And it’s very much welcome. But it’s only another eight guys, including the OC.

A quick face-to-face with the boss. A 20-second brief of the last 20 mins.

Then, we get the call over the radio that our surveillance assets in the air are tracking a male carrying a machine gun, about a kilometre to our north, and heading up towards the Tri-Boundary Area

The OC gives quick orders for us to pursue and try to interdict this fighter. His rag-tag band of a QRF would be our reserve. Move quick to regain momentum. Go.

I brief the troops on the plan (follow me, be prepared to catch a guy, watch your flanks). We shake out and start the pursuit.

A walk-trot-shuffle while getting updates from the eyes in the sky to keep us on track. We began closing the gap. But we start to fatigue.

We (I) hadn’t prepared ourselves mentally for a pursuit after the CASEVAC. We switched from a defensive action to an offensive one almost immediately and it was discombobulating. Plus, we exerted a lot of adrenaline and energy to rescue our colleague.

The sun was starting to lower below the trees and dusk would soon be upon us.

The leaders in the team chivvied each other on. The platoon sergeant at the rear encouraging and admonishing in equal measure. My ‘leader’s legs’ switched on and I found an untapped reserve of energy. It felt clear that I had to keep pushing us forward, so I moved past my two point men in front of me to take the lead and keep the pace up. Speed was of the essence.

We were getting close. We’d covered another kilometre or so from the initial ambush in quick time.

I rounded a corner of a maize field and there he was on the other side of a flat field. The man with the machine gun.

The Catch-22 scenario in real life

I say man, but he was just a boy. The young lad can only have been 12-14 years old. He was carrying a PKM machine gun in his right hand and was walking away from us, 200 metres between us.  

And beside him to his right was a child. He was no more than 6 years old. They were walking together, casually, talking to each other. The little boy was looking up at the bigger lad, walking and skipping and chatting away in admiration. Big and little brother, perhaps.

They were approaching a small building. The building was a local mosque.

This was the situation that appeared in front of me, and one I’ve thought about many times in the years since.

My mind came up with a few options in the moment:

1. Gun. Danger – should we engage? We have the upper hand – the moment is now.
2. Shout out and assess their reaction.
3. Sprint across the field and try and grab them. If they turned, then shout to drop the weapon.
4. Continue to follow them.

This is a lie. These are actually the options I have come up with over 12 years of thinking about it.

I took up a position on the corner of the field, quietly called for one of my snipers to come forward and then watched the boys continue to walk together. While I was waiting for my sniper, I was thinking:

“What the hell do I do here? I could engage myself now, but this is bad – it’s a kid, walking away, with a child, near a mosque. But there’s the gun that shot at us – this is a chance to get it out of their hands.”

This thought loop went round and round in my head for what felt like hours but was only 30-40 seconds in reality. As I worked it through, doing nothing was the right decision in the moment. We could and should not engage.

• He was walking away
• He was not an immediate threat
• He had a child with him (he was a teenager himself)
• Plus, shooting towards a mosque amplifies the potential serious collateral damage from engaging.

This also showed how smart the insurgents were. They had worked out our rules of engagement and knew we were unlikely to engage this pair. Or, it could have been this young lad who fired at us, encouraged by his elders, and his little brother wanted to hear how it had gone now he thought he was safe.

I’m so thankful I took a moment to pause and think.

My sniper arrived by my side. “Yes, Boss?

“Keep your eyes on them.” I called up what I was seeing on the radio.

They disappeared around the corner of the mosque. They and the weapon disappeared from our line of sight.

But we maintained eyes on via our surveillance assets up above. The weapon kept heading north and went into The Heart of Darkness.

Into the darkness

We had about 30 minutes of light left.

The weapon was taken into the villages on the Tri-Boundary Area. It was passed over the wall of a compound. Our surveillance assets kept eyes on that compound. We were ordered to keep going and get to that compound now and search it to recover the weapon.

It was getting darker by the minute. The eyes in the sky team were talking to me and guiding us to the right compound.

The atmospherics were bad. Nobody was there. It was completely silent. Dozens of compounds, narrow alleyways, channelling and IED risks everywhere. Shadows moving. Spidey-senses firing.

We finally got to the target compound. Set a quick cordon and banged on the door. With the Afghan police, we explained the situation and went in to search the compound.

The sun was nearly gone. The compound owners denied any knowledge of the weapon. We searched high and low. We double and triple-checked that this was the right compound. There was nothing.

The weapon was gone. This family ‘knew nothing’ but obviously did. And it was now dark. No one other than special forces were allowed to search compounds after dark anymore. We had to leave empty-handed, other than names and photographs of the inhabitants, the location of the compound, and a belly-full of frustration. Surveillance assets would continue to watch the compound. We had to go.

The 12 of us, with 8 waiting in reserve some distance to our south, and some surveillance assets in the air. In the midst of the enemy’s stronghold. We took a knee, checked the map and came up with a quick plan.

Time to be a ghost and disappear. We went into the darkness, found some ditches and went to ground in complete silence for nearly an hour. We then crept our way silently south, bit by bit, through random fields and ditches and tree lines until we got back safely.

A close shave

Once back in the patrol base, we checked in with everyone. Two team members mentioned having felt something clip them during the ambush. One on the kneepad, the other on the shoulder strap of their body armour. For the soldier who had been hit, the bullet went through the bottom of his pistol grip on his rifle, into his ballistic shorts that protect from IED blasts, slowing the bullet down, and it went straight through his pelvis and out of his backside. It missed everything major.

We were lucky, again.

In fact, we were exceptionally lucky. The next day, the soldier with the graze along his shoulder strap, was checking his body armour. He found a bullet wedged into the middle of his chest plate.

All three are well today, thankfully. I’m sad to say I don’t know where my interpreter on the day, Rambo, is. I am unable to locate him via formal and informal channels, despite extensive searches. Two of my other interpreters are safe, thankfully. But I don’t know where this man is. He helped CASEVAC our soldier off the field of battle and served alongside us in the toughest of situations. But that is a whole other essay, tragically.

Some personal lessons from that day:

Train for your worst day

So when your worst day does happen, which it will, you are as ready as can be. Your training should kick in.

The Commander’s Pause

One of my instructors at The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst called it “The Hamlet Moment”, which is probably not appropriate these days. It came from an advert for a cigar in the 80’s/90’s. In the adverts, people found themselves in stressful situations and so would stop and spark up a Hamlet cigar and they would be okay despite everything that was going on.

Smoking kills, of course, but the point is there are times when the most important thing to do for a leader is to stop. Even if it is just for a second or two. Stop. Extract yourself as far from the current situation as possible and weigh up your options, make a plan, and then enact that plan. You go from ground level up to 30,000 feet to look at the view, and then back down to the ground. It’s a challenging bit of mental and emotional gymnastics. You need to keep doing that as things change.

In the catch-22 situation, what would you have done? Because we failed to get the gun at the compound, I often regret that I didn’t do something different, like sprint across the field to grab the lads. But that could have gone all kinds of wrong, and in the moment, continuing to track them was the correct decision, I believe.

The location of the leader is key

When things are stalling, leaders should be at the front. When things are running well, it’s in a position where you’re looking over the horizon for when things change, and making plans for that change. Leaders move to the best position to achieve their mission.

The importance of preparation and having the right tools to improve your chances of success.

Our body armour and protective kit weighed us down and made us heavy and slow. We were like big green turtles plodding along, among a flock of free-moving seagulls on the beach. Our kit made us vulnerable to a nimble enemy who could move quickly and quietly and blend in with the local population (most of the time they were the local population). On this occasion, though, our kit also saved at least one, possibly two lives. Lives of men who have gone on to create more lives.

The trade-off between risk and reward. The risk of wearing less protection and being nimbler probably wasn’t worth it in hindsight. More people would have died. It was right to have such good kit.

Having the right people in the right roles (and well-trained) – the platoon sergeant deals with casualties and all logistics. The platoon commander deals with the overall situation – Sergeant has the CASEVAC, I have the battle.

Trust underpins everything.

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I hope you found this interesting. Why do I write these articles? I do not want to glamourise conflict. Far from it. Rather, I want to show some of the hard and complex realities of the failure of politics and not talking to each other. I also find it helpful to reflect on some of the most challenging experiences and see what I can learn from them today. Hopefully, others can get something from it too.

Furthermore, my experiences are not unique or extra-special. Thousands of folks experienced more challenging and extreme situations than we did. These are just ours.

And finally, it was the greatest privilege to lead soldiers on operations. I hope I do justice to their service.