Pulling Up Trees: February 2017

The armoured Land Rover rocked and lurched with all the violence of a fishing boat being tossed by the sea as it crashed through the craters in the dirt road. In the windowless back of the military vehicle, Sam White clung on to whatever he could find with the strength of ten terrified men, while he was thrown about with each lunge and drop. At the same he was trying to exude complete calm and professionalism, while his stomach threatened to eject that morning’s hearty breakfast. And not for the first time he wondered what had possessed him to volunteer for this assignment.

On the bench seat opposite a fully armoured Royal Marine sergeant sat and grinned from behind tinted sand goggles and leaned forward to offer some reassuring words. “Don’t worry mate,” he said. “It’ll get better shortly, the road evens out. We have to take these potholes at a bit of a pace so we don’t get stuck in the mud and make ourselves a target for the Talitubbies.”

As if to confirm this Sam was again thrown sideways as the vehicle crashed heavily over another crater. He looked up through the hatch in the roof, and caught sight of the crystal blue Afghan sky above, but the view was partially obscured by the bulk of Captain Tom Sharp. The captain was standing on a platform, half out of the hatch, rifle at the ready as he scoped the landscape for any potential threats.

“I guess you get used to it,” Sam shouted back to the marine opposite. At that moment he felt a tap on his shoulder and looked up to see Captain Sharp beckoning to join him.

A little unsteadily Sam got to his feet and with his body armour hanging heavy on him, squeezed through the small hatch to stand shoulder to shoulder with the captain. He found his feet and secured his blast helmet while he looked around for the first time at Afghanistan, the real country, a country so ancient to his western eyes.

Sam had arrived in Afghanistan 24 hours previously, after a long and uncomfortable flight on an RAF Hercules transporter. He had flown into the sprawling international military base at Kandahar with a small group of regional journalists, invited to the country to report on the job being done by ‘our brave servicemen and women’ and deliver Christmas messages back to the folks at home. As a young, ambitious reporter at the Bristol Evening Post newspaper, he had long held a desire to visit a war zone, having spent his teens and student years poring over the memoirs of the giants of his chosen trade. However, now that he had made it to the front line, in the midst of a very real war, that desire to be at the heart of the action had evaporated as quickly as water on hot coals.

Following a restless night at Kandahar, the regional press corps of five reporters and a photographer was transported by Chinook helicopter at first light to the smaller British base at Lashkar Gah, the administrative capital of Helmand Province.

Sam had been informed jovially by more than one soldier that Lashkar Gah was ‘the place where the Taliban go on R&R’, and it was with this in mind that he cautiously took his place next to Captain Sharp and started to take in the surroundings.

They were on the outskirts of the town, in a convoy of three vehicles with Sam and the captain at the back. He looked at the buildings lining the street, as the track started to resemble something closer to a road now, and saw they were little more than sheets of corrugated iron held together by rope, or small single-storey compounds built with mud bricks. It was mid-December and, although it was still warm when the sun was at its height, winter had arrived in Helmand and the rains had turned the dusty roads to muddy bogs, not helped by the tonnes of armoured vehicles churning everything up.

The presence of British military convoys was clearly no longer a novelty for the population of Lashkar Gah as people went about their business with barely a glance in their direction. Young men sped past on motorbikes that looked to be held together by faith and gaffer tape. Their faces were almost completely covered by shemagh scarves and, Sam thought, they could easily be Taliban, or their informants. Ancient pick-up trucks and cars passed by and seemed to do a better job of getting through the mud than the Land Rovers. Sam tried to look into the faces of the men and women at the roadside but decades of war and the hard life in Helmand seemed to have aged them, destroying the animation in their eyes. They looked blankly back at Sam, with no flicker of interest.

In the distance beyond the town, the captain explained, it was possible to see the remains of one of Alexander the Great’s palaces. A reminder that for thousands of years armies had invaded and left their mark, and this Royal Marines unit and its cargo of war zone tourists was only the latest to pass through.

Sam was trying to take everything in and brought out his small digital camera to take snapshots of this alien landscape. It could not be further from the comforts of the newsroom that sent him, or the civilised street where he lived in the heart of a modern city.

Above the crackle of radio squawk, Captain Sharp said: “We can only do so much, every time we rebuild the market square, the Taliban come back in and offer the farmers more to grow opium, poppies. They get paid next to nothing for it in the first place, but then if they don’t agree, the Taliban will kidnap their family. Or they take their children and send them towards people like us wearing a suicide vest. Happened to one of our unit a couple of months ago.

“Little kid with a handful of sweets walks up to one of our foot patrols. As soon as he was close enough the bastards hit the remote detonation device, took out the kid of course, as well as one of ours and injured dozens around him. It’s what they do.”

Sam looked at the captain in shock, and started to understand for the first time what exactly was happening out here. “I can’t believe it,” is all he could say in response.

Then, without explanation, the other two vehicles stopped and the radio chatter suddenly intensified as the captain was being buzzed by one of the forward vehicles. He replied and signalled for Sam to get down below. Quickly.

They sat for a minute or more, with only the sound of the chugging diesel engine to fill the silence. Sam was making a show of scribbling some notes on a small pad, as if composing some great dispatch from the front. But he was really just thinking about every news report he’d ever seen from Afghanistan and the number of convoys attacked by suicide bombers every week and the fact that they were still not moving and that possibly that kid on the motorbike he saw may have had a gun, and was that the sound of an engine coming up the side of the Land Rover?

“There’s a lot of waiting around in this job,” the sergeant opposite said. “I’d say about 90 per cent of the time is waiting around, then a burst of activity, and that’s it.”

Sam felt the waiting around was preferable to the kind of burst of activity the sergeant was referring to.

“How long have you been out here?” Sam said, remembering for a moment that it was his job to be here interviewing servicemen and women to reassure the readers back home that they were doing them proud.

“Just over six months, it’s my third tour, hopefully the last one.” The two men sat in silence again, Sam’s usual mastery of the English language and his ability to open up his interview subjects like a clam had deserted him. Random thoughts started to fill the void in his brain. He was thinking about Sarah, the possible new love in his life, whether she really was as keen as he hoped, and whether it really was a good idea to be dating somebody from the paper. She was a features writer, so worked in another part of the office, but even so, it was a small newsroom and journalists did love a gossip.

Suddenly Captain Sharp was shouting into his radio: “What the fuck’s happening? We’re sitting on our arses here with a load of civvies and our trousers down.” Just as he was listening back to the garbled message there came the distinct sound of two mortar rounds landing nearby, thunk! thunk! - galvanising the convoy into action. The sergeant immediately took a position near the back of the vehicle where one of the doors was pinned open to give cover at the rear. The captain shouted into the radio, “Contact, contact, that was aimed at us, we’re going back in now, we’ve got civilians onboard. Move, move, move!”

Sam’s heart was in his mouth now as the lurching movement of the Land Rover threw him to the floor, where he decided it was easier to stay, and braced himself against the seats. He could hear the captain and the marines from the two front vehicles intermittently shouting at pedestrians and motorists to stop and clear a pathway through, brandishing rifles to make it clear force would be used if necessary. It was about ten minutes back to the safety of the base and Sam spent that whole time on the floor, feeling every bump and boulder as they pushed the struggling engine to its limit. He watched breathless as the sergeant aimed his weapon at possible moving targets while they sped back to base, but kept his finger off the trigger.

“Any sign of them coming up behind sergeant?” shouted the captain.

“No we’re clear so far as I can see, a couple of motorbikes, possibly wearing vests, but too far to confirm.” Vests, meaning suicide vests, bombers chasing them.

“Keep eyes on, we’re about 200 metres and closing in on home”, said the captain. Sam counted every metre until they got to the perimeter, through the gate and to safety, stopping hard. The driver killed the engine as the sergeant put down his weapon, turned to look at Sam and said: “See what I mean?”

Sam picked himself up off the floor and as soon as the doors were opened jumped out and went around the side of the vehicle to throw up. The rest of the press corps had started to gather now, with a look of amusement on their faces at the sight of Sam, white faced and sweating. Captain Sharp came round the side of the Land Rover and put a hand on Sam’s shoulder, steadying him as tried to get his bearings.

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“A bit more lively than we thought that was going to be, but at least it’ll give you something to write about,” he said. With that he turned and headed into a large canvas tent to speak to his senior officers, while Sam held up his notebook as if to prove he’d captured every last detail, ready for the story he would file later that day. He could see the headline now, ‘Evening Post man’s brush with the Taliban’ - a first hand report of contact with the enemy and a race against time to outrun the suicide bomber. What it wouldn’t relate was how the correspondent spent the whole time curled up on the floor, close to tears, scared half to death and wishing he was back home in Bristol. If they gave medals for cowardice under fire, thought Sam, he’d return a hero.