The Accidental Soldier: From Civvy Street To Afghanistan by Stephen Paul Stewart

Author:Stephen Paul Stewart [Stewart, Stephen Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Afghanistan, Royal Regiment of Scotland, british army, Taliban, War
Publisher: Trinity Mirror Media
Published: 2014-09-03T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

The One That

Got Away

“It is vain for the coward to flee. Death

follows close behind. It is only by defying

it that the brave escape”

– Voltaire

A HIGH-ranking Taliban leader is our Scarlet Pimpernel. He is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. We huddle together at night, illuminated by the glow of a shared fag, talking about him in hushed tones. No-one even knows what he looks like.

Apart from our manic, collective obsession with this faceless Taliban guru, our lives quickly become routine, humdrum, pre-occupied with cleaning our weapons, our clothes and ourselves in that order.

We are sitting around one morning eating porridge with the consistency of glue, discussing why we haven’t been given a full physical description of what the Army calls a High Value Target. All we know is his codename: ‘Objective Run Amok’.

Our hunt for Run Amok and his minions carries on 24 hours a day, occupying our every waking minute as we slog through hour after hour of ‘overwatch’, staring into the Green Zone, the poppy fields and the encroaching desert which nips at their borders.

Gary is holding court. He is a wind-up merchant, usually breaking into a wide grin that forms deep dimples in his cheeks, as he slates another soldier’s feeble cooking attempts or boasts of winning the ‘yummy daddy’ contest at his boys’ nursery. As the days go by, his jokes seem to dwindle. “What’s the point of being here?” he asks no-one in particular. “They won’t even tell us what this Run Amok looks like! He could be walking about out there wi’ us watching him every day and we wouldny even know.”

“IDF!!! IDF!!!” a piercing cry from the sangar, just a few feet from where we are eating. We drop our spoons, grab our body armour and helmets and sprint towards the safety of the bunker-cum TV room. IDF stands for Indirect Fire. In this case, it was a mortar attack or a rocket fired at us. This is one of the biggest threats to us, a mortar round landing in this camp could possibly kill or maim half-a-dozen men.

Every soldier, apart from the guys in the sangars, crams into this bunker to take shelter from the mortar currently looping through the air in our direction. Sometimes we hear the metallic crump of the projectile landing, sometimes we don’t. After a stifling 15 minutes in the bunker, fighting the urge to slump onto a neighbour’s shoulder for a nap, we get the shout of: “All clear!” We duly troop back out to finish our cold porridge.

Life here in the killing fields of Afghanistan is 95 percent mind-numbing boredom and five percent heart-stopping terror. Another deadly mortar round flies over my head – landing a few hundred metres from my position as I come to this startling revelation. This mortar attack rips apart the sleepy mid-afternoon peace as off-duty soldiers doze in the slowly fading sunshine, hand wash their trousers and shirts in small metal basins or lie around in the shade watching the latest instalment of Prison Break.

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