Helmand to the Himalayas by David Wiseman

Author:David Wiseman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Helmand to the Himalayas: One Soldier’s Inspirational Journey
ISBN: 9781472809155
Publisher: Osprey Publishing Ltd

CHAPTER 11

MAN DOWN

15 November 2009, 12 days after the police station. Coops was back in Bastion. He still wasn’t himself and he needed to get away from it for a while. He was having trust issues working so closely with the Afghans because of what he had seen ‘one of them’ do to ‘us’. I couldn’t shake the foreboding sense of unease I felt each time we went outside the compound on patrol.

With Coops away, Barney took over as my right hand man. He was a character, a good guy in a tight spot and had a great sense of humour. He was more than capable of filling the role as he was a real grafter with years of valuable experience. He’d been in Afghanistan on previous tours and had picked up plenty of choice Pashto phrases he could banter back and forth with the warriors, which meant they loved him.

I’d been in theatre for two months but it felt longer. The one link to home was E-blueys: our letters. They were vital for everyone. It was important to have something physical from home, something that could be touched and reread and looked at. Lucy was five months pregnant. I’d missed scans, but she had sent me the pictures which were dotted around my pit back at Shawqat. When I showed them to my Afghans and told them I was having a son they were ecstatic for me. They sang and danced and waved their weapons in the air, sharing the joy that my first born was to be a boy.

We also had a satellite phone and I spoke to Lucy once a week. We couldn’t talk about details, but I didn’t want her to worry, so probably would have glossed over things anyway. However, there’s no avoiding some high profile incidents, so I called her after the police station; she knew I was in Nad-e Ali, and I knew she would have heard about it on the news. I got the answer machine and explained that I was okay, I had been there and that she would have been proud of what I did, leaving it at that.

Hearing about stuff going on back home felt strange. I knew things like going to the supermarket and getting the car MOT’d were normal, but to me they also sounded alien and very far away.

We were in Shawqat, kitting up for a patrol with another company of warriors. They were the Heavy Weapons Company, even though they didn’t have any heavy weapons. They were stationed in a PB called Blue 17 further north with a small team from The Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment. These Brits weren’t OMLT and therefore felt they needed some support from guys that were used to working alongside our ANA allies.

This was a raw area, recently won during the extensive fighting that had pushed the FLET north to its current position just a small number of weeks before, the same action in which my callsign extracted the casualty who had been shot in the helmet.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.