Free Spoken from the Front by Andy McNab

away.
    And the rest of the day went just as badly. We were trying
to assess the western side of Garmsir. Every time we stopped,
we'd get mortared. They had us pinpointed every time. A
nightmare. That's why it took so long. The colonel said: 'Stay
there and we will get you some more resupplies.' And the
Chinooks came down and dropped stuff, water and food, and
we carried on. The mortar positions were dug in. They [the
Taliban] would just appear and disappear and that was when
we started to learn about the tunnel complex that they had.
They were hiding vehicles because we were getting reports of
vehicles one minute – we could see brand new Toyota 4x4s –
and they would just disappear. In daytime. They weren't
scared. Some of them had black turbans and red bands
around their turbans. Anything with a black turban and you
knew you were against more of a trained force – rather than
something just thrown together. Anyway, we concluded there
were large pockets of enemy down there. Nowhere near a
thousand. But they were fast and well trained: very movable
from one day to the next.
10 July 2006
    McNab: The government announced that 900 extra troops would
be sent to fight the Taliban. The move came at the request of military
commanders because fighting had intensified in Helmand. The
first of the reinforcements were due to arrive within two days, and
the number of British troops would then be bolstered from 3,600 to
4,500. Senior defence sources denied, however, that the move was
the direct result of the death of six British troops in a month. The
announcement of more troops was made by Des Browne, who
had taken over from John Reid as defence secretary. He denied
that British forces had underestimated the Taliban threat and
said it had been expected that insurgents would put up a 'violent
resistance'.
14 July 2006
    Flight Lieutenant Christopher 'Has' Hasler, DFC, RAF
    It was at night and we were making a five-ship [Chinook
helicopters] assault on two compounds in Sangin. We
thought we had the element of surprise but somehow they
knew we were coming. We were low on fuel too but we had
support: three or four Apaches, Harriers, B1Bs [US B1
bombers], F15s or F18s, a Predator and more [all aircraft or
unmanned aircraft]. We had aircraft stacked up from ground
level to space supporting this one op. But we were holding so
long – the commander was an Apache guy. I was the third
Chinook in to land. But the two aircraft behind me had to peel
off because of [a lack of] fuel. This made the troops very
vulnerable – they did not have quite enough men on the
ground to defend themselves.
    So I was tail-end Charlie going in. By the time the heli in
front of me was about fifteen feet off the ground, I was still at
about a hundred feet and maybe a half K or a K behind him.
The landing site was a dry riverbed. And then suddenly it
opened up. There were three or four firing positions on each
side [of the riverbed]. I saw an RPG go under and over the
heli in front of me. He had landed now so I knew I had to go
on. It was a long approach knowing you had to fly through
this shit. You can't manoeuvre at all otherwise you'll fuck the
landing. So it was just a question of 'slow, straight, steady'.
The amount of fire was such that it backed down our nightvision
goggles. I couldn't see much at all. It was so bright that
the goggles weren't giving much [assistance]. I was mostly
flying in on instruments. The aircraft flares were popping up
as well and they really backed down the goggles too. There
was a second of clearness where my goggles came back in
and I saw we were about to land in some water. I managed to
pitch up and over that but then I got into the dust cloud. I
couldn't see anything. It was a bit of a rough landing and the
guys were knocked off balance. We said before that the max
we wanted to be on the ground was thirty seconds but we
ended up being there for a few minutes while getting
engaged. I was sitting there thinking, Oh, fuck, without