I GOT PROMOTED, SORT OF. To a small lookout high above the battlefield. For quite some time the lookout had been driving the Taliban mad. We had
it, they wanted it, and if they couldn’t get it then they were bound to destroy it. They’d attacked the lookout scores of times in the months before I got there.
Hours after my arrival at the lookout, here they came again.
AK-47s rattling, bullets whizzing by. It sounded like someone throwing beehives through our window. There were four Gurkhas with me, and they unleashed a Javelin missile in the direction of the incoming fire.
Then they told me to take a seat behind the 50-cal. Jump on, saab!
I climbed into the gun nest, grabbed the big handles. I shoved in my earplugs, took aim through the mesh hanging from the window. I squeezed the trigger. The feeling was like a train through the middle of my chest. The sound was locomotive-like as well. Chugga chugga chugga. The gun spat bullets across the desert, and shell casings flew around the lookout like popcorn. It was the first time I’d ever fired a 50-cal. I simply couldn’t believe the power.
In my direct line of sight was abandoned farmland, ditches, trees. I lit it all up. There was an old building with two domes that looked like a frog’s eyes. I peppered those domes.
Meanwhile, Dwyer began lobbing its big guns. All was mayhem.
I don’t remember much after that, but I don’t need to—there’s video. The press was there, by my side, filming. I hated them being there, but I’d been ordered to take them on an outing. In return they’d agreed to sit on any images or information they gathered until I was out of the country.
How many did we kill? the press wanted to know. We couldn’t be sure.
Indeterminate, we said.
I thought I’d be in that lookout for a long time. But soon after that day I was summoned up north to FOB Edinburgh. I boarded a Chinook full of mailbags, lay down among them to hide. Forty minutes later I was hopping off, into knee-deep mud. When the hell did it rain? I was shown to my quarters in a sandbag house. A tiny bed.
And a roommate. Estonian signals officer.
We hit it off. He gave me one of his badges as a welcome gift.
Five miles away was Musa Qala, a town that had once been a Taliban fortress. In 2006 we’d seized it, after some of the worst fighting British soldiers had seen in half a century. More than a thousand Taliban had been
subdued. After paying such a price, however, the town was quickly, carelessly, lost again. Now we’d won it a second time, and we aimed to keep it.
And a nasty job it was. One of our lads had just been blown up by an IED.
Plus, we were despised in and around the town. Locals who’d cooperated with us had been tortured, their heads put on spikes along the town walls.
There would be no winning of either hearts or minds.
