Ross Kemp on Afghanistan by Kemp Ross

Author:Kemp, Ross
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141046556
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2009-05-12T16:00:00+00:00

11. Fighting in Somebody's House

The missions and tasks were easily explained.

We were briefed by Dave Robinson, my mouse-crushing partner in crime. The faces in that briefing room were serious, angry and ready for war. In the ten days since the blue on blue, the depleted B Company had been unable to keep the pressure up on the Forward Line of Enemy Troops. All that was about to change. They were to deploy to the southern FLET. Once there, they were to locate the enemy's position and engage them. Once they were engaged, fast air would be called in to destroy their positions. The same fast air, it was lost on nobody, that had been called into Mazdurak with such cataclysmic results.

Our route would take us along the 611 highway. This is little more than a dirt track and most of it can be surveyed from Sparrowhawk East and Sparrowhawk West, the two OPs at Kajaki. Not all of it, however: there are certain blind spots, which meant that the Taliban could easily have planted mines or IEDs – improvised explosive devices – along the way. IEDs were usually constructed from explosives taken from anti-tank mines that have been attached to artillery shells. They have predictably devastating effects. The Taliban have a rich source of material for constructing IEDs, namely the mines littered around the country that were left by the Soviets. It is a horrible irony that during the 1980s it is said the SAS taught the Afghan Mujahideen how to construct IEDs. Now that knowledge is being used against British forces and IEDs can be made by anyone with the bottle to dig up a mine. Talk about being hoist by your own petard.

I was to travel with the Fire Support Group. When we approached the FLET, B Company would split: 6 and 7 Platoon would enter the green zone to flush out the Taliban, and the FSG would move to high ground to provide covering fire. This was going to be a serious contact. B Company were being thrown right back into the deep end and I heard no complaints about that whatsoever. For them, it was payback time.

We made the journey early in the morning while it was still dark. Our convoy travelled slowly, all of us well aware of the danger of this journey: IEDs are difficult enough to see during the daytime; during the hours of darkness practically impossible. The crew and I travelled in a WMIK, an open-top Land Rover. A mine would make very short work of a vehicle like this one. I could sense everybody hoping that the people in the observation posts had been vigilant enough over those areas of the road that they could see to ensure that nobody had dug anything in. When we reached the hidden stretches of road, the convoy would stop and the track ahead was swept with minesweeping machines. These are essentially advanced metal detectors, although metal-detecting an Afghan road isn't quite like looking for Roman coins in a ditch.

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