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We Were Warriors
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WE WERE
WARRIORS
JOHNNY MERCER
PAN BOOKS
For Felicity.
It was all worth it.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
EPILOGUE
APPENDIX
GLOSSARY
PROLOGUE
Nad-e Ali, Helmand Province, 2010
I took a brief moment to rest. I knew it would be short-lived. The enemy were close and it wouldn’t be long before we would be in action again. Holding my rifle by my side I gulped as much water down my throat as I could, spilling most of it down my front in the process. The temperature was unbearable, forty degrees, and I was sweating so much that my body felt lubricated, as if covered in oil. I constantly shuffled the two radios, spare ammunition, spare batteries and water in my rucksack to allow the air to get up under my shirt, albeit briefly. I glanced at my watch. We’d been on the move for four hours now. I was going to have to change my radio batteries soon.
It was late summer 2010. The previous year alone had seen a hundred and eight British servicemen killed in this sweaty, stinking, blood-soaked acreage. We were on eighty-eight, and it wasn’t even the end of August. Joint UK/US operations in the spring had cleared a lot of enemy from key districts around Marjeh but also squeezed many of them up to northern Nad-e Ali, where I was now plying my trade for the third time in four years.
Firefights canor short, ferocious or rather quiet. Sometimes they just become a deadly game of cat and mouse. Today was like that. We moved slowly, carefully; avoiding obvious ambushes and channels for IEDs – improvised explosive devices. After a few hours like that the senses dull, but I could still hear my pulse in my ears as the hairs on the back of my neck began to rise again. I knew we were approaching the climax of this patrol.
I leant against the forward edge of a ditch and peered through the grass along the lip; I could see across the field straight to the compound that lay between us and our patrol base. The high mud walls of the compound enclosed a simple square building that peeked over the top. It was quiet. Bullet holes around a small aperture in the wall marked the location as a previous Taliban firing point, also known as a murder hole. It was perfect for the enemy, just big enough to aim a rifle through, looking directly over our patrol base with an easy escape route into a treeline and another crop of compounds to the rear. They used these holes to pour murderous machine-gun fire onto our patrol base. I should have destroyed the compound months ago. Two five-hundred-pound bombs would do it, or a couple of guided rockets. Last time I attempted it we waited for six hours in this ditch, while battalion headquarters worked out the ‘environmental impact’ of me turning it into dust. What would happen to the watercourses? How would the trees recover afterwards? British soldiers’ lives were tumbling down priority lists out here.
I rubbed my eyes. The fucking sweat always blurred your vision after a while.
Looking at my watch, I worked out it would have been 0710 in the UK. Families would be waking up, getting ready for school. The morning commute would be well underway – trains packed out and roads jammed. All listening to the Today programme on Radio 4, Nicky Campbell on Radio 5 or even Chris Moyles on Radio 1. All the suits, picking up their coffees. I could have been one of them, but for some reason I chose this instead.
I glanced left along the patrol group. I was the ‘tail-end Charlie’– the last guy. The section commander was looking at me. He was a young lad; bright, engaging and determined. We’d been intercepting the Taliban’s radio comms and knew they’d been tracking us for more than two hours now.
‘Are you pushing through it?’ I asked him.
‘Roger, boss. What do you reckon?’
‘I’m happy if you’re happy,’ I lied.
There was no real way of bypassing this compound without getting into further trouble. We knew the enemy was very likely to be inside. In this crazy fucking war, we were about to advance across open ground, no doubt containing IEDs, towards a murder hole in a compound that was almost definitely going to fire on us. We’d been patrolling out twice a day every day for four months now, trying to create space for peace to take hold, and every day the Taliban had told us to go away, in their own inimitable style – with their AK47s.
I heard retching and saw the young soldier at the front of the patrol bent over his Vallon metal detector, throwing up.
I scrambled along the ditch, winked at the section commander on my way past, and scuttled in next to the lad at the front. His puke was just bile – no food. It was fear.
‘You all right, bud?’ I asked him.
‘Yeah,’ he replied.
He can’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen, but had been patrolling for the last four hours not with his weapon looking for the enemy, but with a metal detector looking for IEDs buried in the ground. We had stopped a few times while he had fingered a suspicious mound of dirt to see what lay beneath. He had risked injury, if not death, every single day of his tour.
We’d had a good patrol, despite being heavily ‘dicked’ – followed around by young men on motorbikes who were reporting our movements back to the Taliban. By being careful, and taking it slowly and methodically, we’d avoided contact thus far. But patrols always got hit in this area eventually – it was a question of when, not if. The Taliban knew you had to return to your PB and they usually left a present for you on your way back in.
I looked back at the patrol; they were all quiet, sucking on CamelBaks. As they gazed at me I thought some of them looked like pandas – the dust on their faces interrupted only by the sweat around their eyes. Salt had crystallized on their cheeks. Yet their eyes were wired; they knew what was coming as well as I did.
‘Give me the Vallon,’ I said to the lead man. I don’t know why. I didn’t even know how to switch it on.
‘No, boss, I’m fine,’ he said.
In his eyes I saw nerves, but also a steely determination. I wasn’t going to get that Vallon off him.
‘We’ll advance together, side by side, and I’ll put shots into that murder hole the moment he opens up,’ I said. We both knew that, being at the front, there was a strong chance we’d be dead before I heard or saw anything.
‘Sounds like a plan,’ he replied, wiping his mouth.
‘Let’s get this done,’ I said quietly to the patrol commander. We all stepped out of the ditch together, advancing on the compound very slowly.
As promised, I kept my weapon up and trained on the murder hole, waiting for it to flash. It was hard to breathe.
I thought I saw the curtain behind the murder hole move and felt bile in the back of my throat. It was just the wind, I decided. Another step, then another.
Whack-whack-whack!
That was incoming 7.62 rifle fire.
I kept scanning. Someone to the right of me returned fire.
I couldn’t see the flash but I could see the curtain moving rhythmically. He was in there. I fired six shots, fast and deliberate, into the murder hole, and then took a knee.
In the sudden quiet I could hear my own breathing. I looked at the Vallon man in the prone position on his front. He stared back at me. I should have been lying on the floor too, but I couldn’t see anything from down there, and in this lethal game of cat and mouse, I smelled blood. I wanted him to take another shot and expose himself. Turning my head to the right, I caught the patrol commander’s eye and gestured to indicate that we should go around the left-hand side of the compound and head straight up to our base. The gesture wasn’t in any manual, and I got a puzzled stare in return.
Giving up, I called over to him.
‘Don’t go in there,’ I said. ‘I reckon it’s riddled.’ The Taliban’s tactics were nothing if not cunning. Entice the Brits in with a shoot and scoot; lace the place with IEDs.
‘You happy to lead us back in?’ The section commander said.
‘Yep. Follow me,’ I replied.
In single file, me and the Vallon man at the front, we moved slowly around the side of the compound. About five minutes later, exhausted and wild-eyed, we entered the patrol base through the rear gate. We gathered around and had a quick wash up. I made sure everyone understood what had just happened.
‘Don’t flap; always think,’ I said. ‘Good work.’
I went back to my camp cot and opened another carton of cigarettes. Drawing the smoke deep into my lungs, I wondered if I’d killed the shooter. Probably not, but I didn’t really care either way. Another patrol chalked off.
I saw the company commander having a piss into the piss tubes that ran through the wall of our compound. Still in his pants and T-shirt, he was up late – I’d actually got the day wrong. It was a Sunday. There would be no morning commute. Instead, my family would be going to chapel. A few years ago, I had been a nervous, confused little boy sat in those pews on a Sunday, trying to understand and live within a very strict set of rules. It almost destroyed my mind.
This Sunday morning, I might have killed someone – the ultimate sin apparently.
I exhaled. I couldn’t give a fuck. One day less. One day more. Not many more months left in this war.
1
I remember little of my childhood. Some say I have chosen to forget which is probably true. I was born on 17 August 1981 in Dartford General Hospital, the sixth of my parents’ eight children. I had four older brothers, Neil (14), Keith (13), Stuart (11) and Sam (6), and just the one sister, Heidi (3). My father worked in the local branch of Lloyds Bank and my mother was a retired paediatric nurse. We were not well-off at all, which was a source of anxiety for my parents.
We lived in a small terraced house in Dartford – two up and two down. It was a tight squeeze, and managing our daily lives meant my mother was run off her feet. A military routine was adopted to ensure baths, showers, mealtimes and bedtimes ran as planned.
This disciplined approach to life was nothing new for my parents; my father in particular came from a harsh home which was anchored by religion. In fact, my family history on both sides is marked for at least three generations by a strong religious devotion. My parents’ Strict Baptist faith governed every minute of every day for them and had done so for their entire lives. It was an impressive – if at times destructive – devotion that defined my very early years and shaped our family relationships.
But there came a moment in time where this traditional religious life and modern British society collided. As the 1970s became the 1980s, and then the 1990s, it became impossible to insulate one’s family from the rest of society, its culture and behaviour. My parents found the encroachment of the outside world very difficult to deal with.
Strict Baptist life was dominated by Sundays, or the Sabbath as my father would call it, greeting it each week like an old friend. And Sunday would be dominated by the chapel. A Strict Baptist chapel is not a church; we did not think much of people who ‘went to church’. It is a ‘brethren’ built around a common, strict and literal interpretation of Biblical texts. Those who worked for the chapel were called ‘deacons’, but the whole set-up was commanded by the Pastor, who was held in almost mystical adoration by some. According to our Pastor, having a late night on a Saturday was the devil’s work because full focus and concentration were required on a Sunday. And he wasn’t wrong: three ninety minute services, plus some Sunday School, needed serious effort.
Most churches in the UK have services spread through the course of a Sunday to enable those with varying commitments, and perhaps children, to attend one at their convenience. My father saw it rather differently. In his eyes, these services simply presented multiple opportunities to plug into some Old Testament truths, and we attended as many as possible, to the extent that we sometimes took a packed lunch so we could remain in our pews between the services. As a very young boy full of pent-up energy, with hairless legs that stuck to the varnished mahogany benches, I felt as if I was spending most of my life in chapel.
The ceremonies, or ‘services’, themselves generally all followed the same format. An opening hymn would be followed by a longish reading of ten or fifteen minutes from the gospels. We would then sing again and that would be followed by a long, single prayer of over twenty minutes in length. This seemingly endless prayer was an opportunity for the Pastor to improvise around a number of topics linked loosely to the reading we had just heard, but could also run to local and world current affairs.
During this eternity, the congregations would be seated, heads bowed and eyes shut. This was of great amusement to us children, who saw it as our opportunity to communicate with each other through glances and perhaps even pictures. But woe betide you if you gave cause for one of the worshippers – in your family or not – to break from their prayer and cast you a killer look.
Strict Baptist chapels can be frightening places; large and cold and usually filled to five or ten per cent capacity. It was rare to meet another family our age; if we did, friendships were either chased desperately in order to seek solace in shared experience, or avoided to miss the awkward conversations about why we were so strange.
Most worshippers wore very sober colours to chapel. As a family we mirrored this; us boys in shorts or trousers (if over the age of eleven) and a plain shirt and tie, while poor Heidi often looked like she’d just stepped off the Mayflower with the Pilgrim Fathers. Whether on the Sabbath or not, Heidi was not allowed to wear trousers, and none of us were permitted to wear jeans. Pop music was ‘rubbish’ that was not to be played in our house and the radio was not to be switched on at all on a Sunday. When I began my short-lived career as a chorister, I did an interview with the local BBC radio station which was broadcast on the Sabbath. I remember very clearly the angst betwixt my very strict father and my ever-so-slightly more relaxed mother, and then the novelty of firing up the wireless on a Sunday, all of us wondering what on earth was played on a Sabbath that prevented us from listening to it. Television was banned, as was a great deal of literature that would sit in the traditional 1980s or 1990s family home. The things children or ‘non-believers’ our age knew about – TV shows, politics, pop music and so on – were totally foreign to us.
My father was and remains a very complex man. He knows that I think he is driven almost exclusively by guilt, be it guilt over spending money or enjoying the odd earthly pleasure. He wrestles with it daily – I can still see the fight in his face. He possessed and demonstrated an iron will and commitment to a literal interpretation of scripture that inevitably revealed itself in a quick temper. He could be extraordinarily attentive – once building me an entire train set for one of my birthdays as I slept – but he was not happy, and our home life suffered for it.
The truth is, he longed to live in a society swept by the evangelical fervour of Charles Wesley or Martin Luther �
� so much so that I was given Luther’s surname as my middle name. He was entirely ill-equipped to deal with modern society in almost any sense. Children, home, women, immigration, work – almost anything outside of chapel – challenged his matrix of views, and he simply could not cope. He was one of those most confusing of men – those who believe that God’s will is unchallengeable, that we are all doomed unless we commit ourselves ever harder to the literal translation of the gospel, but who also draw hard at the ATM of forgiveness for their own contradictory shortcomings.
My mother was slightly (if not enough of) a different person. She was extremely subservient – as she was instructed to be in the scriptures – and always deferred to her husband’s wishes, especially on any matter pertaining to disciplining the children. Her love for her offspring was clear, but she too was commanded by a higher calling – seemingly a ‘hotline’ to God – and that drove her behaviour. But at the same time, she had an uncanny ability to mask any unpleasantness in front of people outside the family – she would have been an extraordinary actress – and cover and excuse my father’s moods. At the time, I could not understand her silence; in later life my view did not change even as her behaviour changed towards me.
Apparently, I was a very naughty child who needed strong discipline, but this may have just been an attempt to excuse the inexcusable. The presence of our parents’ Christian faith seemed to legitimize this ‘discipline’ – God was in control, after all – and because this faith would simultaneously speak of ultimate forgiveness and inability to challenge God’s will, I was left feeling confused, scared and vulnerable. I developed coping mechanisms that still cast shadows to this day. All this before the age of ten was not healthy.
At a young age, I decided that my parents were more concerned with the world’s perception of me than they were about ensuring I was a well-rounded, secure, stable little boy. Understanding their true priorities made things around me easier to understand, but the insight brought its own kind of deep sadness.
We Were Warriors