To: i-node who wrote (532590 ) 11/25/2009 12:21:24 PM From: tejek Respond to A month in Helmand: the soldiers' stories The Times war correspondent revisits his old regiment and reports on the daily ordeal of life on Afghanistan's bloodiest battlefront Beneath the lip of his helmet the colonel’s face had the grey luminosity and glowing eyes of sudden grief. “I’ve just lost one of my best soldiers.” His words, so quiet that they were nearly a whisper, could almost have been a question. The identities of two dead soldiers had come over the radio just minutes earlier. Serjeant Paul McAleese, one of the battalion’s most renowned soldiers, had been so recently alive that his death warranted more than a degree of incredulity. Why is it always the ones with wives and children?” Then, bang, one more of their soldiers is dead – “ragdolled” as the men call it. The patter stops, the mask drops fleetingly, and raw grief stares back into your face. Serjeant McAleese and Private Johnathon Young – an 18-year-old battle casualty replacement who had only been in the country for 18 days – had been killed by bombs in the east of the town. From the gun emplacements on the flat roof of the base’s FSG (Fire Support Group) tower, soldiers blazed away with medium machine-guns, grenade launchers, heavy .50 calibres and Javelin missiles at insurgents in the tree line along the Helmand River to the north. Their delight was almost feverish as those guns ripped away and the brass bullet cases jangled at their feet. For they were hurling much more than lead across those perimeter walls: rage and pain, pent-up frustration and outright vengeance were ploughing the river reed lines with every burst of fire. If there was one single moment in August that most suggested the futility of the loss of life in the province then that was perhaps it: British soldiers running through the hot beaten air and jumping upon the bouncing plastic ballot boxes and the 434 votes that had been fought for at such frightful cost. Like any other believer in the necessity of the war I could load the dice with fear to justify it all: fear of defeat; fear of another civil war, like the one I had already seen in Afghanistan in the late 90s; fear of Nato's collapse, Britain's disempowerment, and the jihadist Spring that would follow it all; fear of a Taleban thrust into Pakistan and, fear of fears, fear of nukes in fundamentalist hands. I could mantra the list just like the next man, and block my ears to the whispers of anyone trying to suggest that I sounded like an American in '69 talking about South East Asian domino theories and the spread of communism. I could do all of that, but I could never quite ignore the words of the burned out spooks and soldiers I had met along the way who told me that British blood was being shed for a lot less than ideology in Sangin, a place with the same reputation for the quality of its heroin as Havana had for cigars; where one cartel just happened to have the support of the Afghan government and the other the Taleban. Ideological conflict? If only it were so pure. timesonline.co.uk
