Reporting from the front line
ADVERTISER reporter Dan Churcher has returned from the front line in Afghanistan’s Helmand province where he spent a week with Nottinghamshire soldiers serving with 2nd battalion (Worcester and Foresters) the Mercian Regiment.
Read the first of his reports here with more to follow online, including video, and in Friday’s Advertiser.
"If you experience ground fire impacting around the aircraft don’t worry it’s normal", the pilot broadcasts over the intercom.
"If you can now don your body amour and helmet I will begin the approach."
There is darkness as the cabin lights are turned out — the only glow is the dull fluorescence of the arrows indicating the way out if the plane should ditch.
We sit, belts fastened, seats in the upward position.
There are around 100 of us, mainly British Forces personnel, plus myself and and other journalists as the Tristar begins to descend sharply.
My camouflage-clad companion in the seat next to me lifts the window shutter a fraction and announces we are hedge-hopping. He pulls out chewing gum and offers me some.
"I find it helps with nausea," he says.
"I find it helps not to use the word nausea," I replied.
He lifts the shutter fractionally for a second time and then momentarily again for a third.
I can’t help but think of the first world war trenches and the unlucky third light. Once for the sniper to see you, twice to take aim and three times...
I look around and, aside for the continual drone of the engine that has been ever-present since take-off from RAF Brize Norton some eight hours before, there is complete silence for the first time, everyone alone with their own thoughts.
The tyres connect to the ground with a thud.
"Please, if you come under indirect enemy fire when alighting the aircraft do exactly as ordered," says the pilot.
"We look forward to carrying you all home soon."
Welcome to Kandahar.
It’s 1am on Sunday and after nearly 24 hours of travelling or waiting for flights I have arrived in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province where I will spend a week with the Nottinghamshire Army battalion, the 2nd Battalion (Worcesters and Foresters) the Mercian Regiment.
They take on the Taliban and train the Afghan National Army to a standard where it can fight and win when called upon to help bring freedom to a country that has known nothing but war for more than 30 years.
Two days before we left Brize Norton the battalion sustained its first fatality of this six-month tour of duty, now a third of the way through.
Nottingham’s Lance-corporal Kieran Hill — Hilly to his mates — was a highly-regarded young soldier who had been promoted to Lance-corporal despite being just 20.
He was killed in an explosion.
The Taliban fighters are flocking back to a cause that they either believe in or that pays them a wage between harvesting the poppies used in the manufacture of heroin — it’s not just the weather, now routinely hitting 38degrees, that is hotting up.
Thankfully there is no ground fire on the tarmac at Kandahar — the Taliban often lob mortar rounds in from the foothills of the nearby Hindu Kush mountains — and we board an ageing bus that must date back to the 1960s.
The driver takes us to the terminal which is heavily sand-bagged against attack. The attendants here carry side-arms.
Tiredness is creeping in. There is a wait of around an hour before we board a Hercules C130 for the short hop to the British-led International Security Assistance Force headquarters at Camp Bastion, a relatively safe haven in the Afghan desert where there is nothing for miles around.
The biggest problem here is the dust that permeates everything. There are token efforts to keep the dust down on the camp’s inner roadways by trucks carrying water bowsers but, in the baking heat, the water quickly evaporates.
Bastion 1 is 1km sq while Bastion 2, currently under construction next door, will add another 0.8km sq area.
The Americans who are coming in their thousands as part of President Barack Obama’s promised surge into Helmand, are building something similar next door.
Bastion is home to 13,800 British and American personnel and 700 civilians.
At Bastion, we are told, 70,000 litres of water, pumped from desert bore holes sunk by the Royal Engineers, are drunk and that 100,000 litres of diesel are used daily to power generators kicking out enough power to serve a town the size of Newark.
At the height of the airlift of construction material and troops into Bastion, the airport was as busy as Gatwick.
When there is space on aircraft for a mail run, an average of 300 bags come in.
Even in the days of email, soldiers prefer hand-written letters that they tuck into a breast pocket and re-read at every given opportunity.
At Bastion I crawl gratefully into a cot and barely have time to pull my sleeping bag from its covering before I am asleep.
Five hours later I am awoken by the noise of American Black Hawk helicopters overhead and their Apache gunship escort.
It is time to get up as we are due our briefing from the Ministry of Defence’s Helmand press office.
We are given an overview of what is happening and a whistle-stop tour of Camp Bastion before we are told to put back on the helmet and body armour for the drive in armoured vehicles to Camp Shorabak where 2 Mercian are based.
We arrive on a sombre day. It was my privilege to attend a vigil for Lance-corporal Hill at Shorabak and then, later on Sunday night, the repatriation of his body in a Union flag-draped coffin.
While I felt like I was intruding on a very private event I felt honoured to be invited to see how these brave men and women look after their mates in death as well as life.
There are to be more vigils and repatriations during our stay, with three more British fatalities in a week. Two ANA soldiers are also killed.
A cricket match between the Mercians and the ANA planned for Monday is cancelled as a mark of respect for Lance-corporal Hill.
An occasion that is marked is of the battalion battle honour on the Glorious 1st of June. There is a parade under the Union flag in which the citation is read out.
The honour relates to the Worcestershire Regiment who, in the French war of the 18th Century, supplied drafts as there were few marines and won a famous sea battle.
From Shorabak we were to travel by road to Camp Price where 2 Mercian were based on their 2007-8 Helmand tour. It is now home to a Danish battle group and the small British mentoring team we were to patrol with the following day.
From there we were flown by USAAF Hercules back to Bastion.
With the rear ramp down so the loadmaster could man a machine gun and fire on any ground threat, there was an unprecedented opportunity to see Helmand from the air.
The Hindu Kush mountains, the lush Green Zone, the arid desert, Bedouin camps, simple mud and straw brick-built homesteads and compounds and the Helmand River were awe-inspiring.
We landed back at Bastion for what should have been a short hop back to our accommodation at Shorabak, but the Americans had found an IED in the road and it was some time before we could safely pass.
Top cover on one of our vehicles was provided by Mack and we whiled away the time discussing the contact that we had been in near Gereshk.
There was no timetable drawn-up that we had been able to stick to due to the operational demand for flights.
The place is full of stories such as that of the clerk who went to a forward operating base to sort out a pay issue and spent three weeks repelling Taliban attacks, or the chef whose seat on an aircraft was needed by a higher priority and had to wait ten days for the next flight out.
The men, living on ration packs for weeks on end, put him to useful work I am told.
Thanks have to go to Captain Neil Cresswell for his perseverance and dogged surety that we would experience as much as any 2 Mercian does, albeit condensed into a week.
Our last day was at Kandahar where the week began. In daylight it is a sprawling metropolis of shipping containers and US-led development which, when complete, must become the largest staging post created since the second world war, with the exception, perhaps, of Camp Bastion.
Contrast this to the most basic of forward operating base where the diet is ration packs and the toilet a plastic bag,
Kandahar’s boardwalk — a walkway made of wood built on stilts — has American PX stores, souvenir shops and, oh yes, Subway, Burger King, and Pizza Hut. Though they may be in refrigerated shipping containers, they are already there.
