Authors: Pen Farthing
‘You wouldn’t run away from food, would you, lofty?’ I said to him as I placed both bowls down slightly apart.
Both were gobbling at the food before my hands had left the rim of the bowls.
I was slightly rushed and needed to be in a briefing with the OC in a few minutes so I decided to leave them to enjoy their pork stew. I would collect the empty bowls later.
‘If you slow down guys you might actually taste that crap,’ I said as I let myself out of the run and headed off towards the ops room.
I had covered no more than ten feet when I heard the frenzied barking from behind me. I turned around expecting the worse.
‘Nowzad!’ I screamed as I charged back towards the run.
I should have known that feeding them both together was a bad idea; I should’ve remembered back to when Beamer
had
arrived with us out of the rescue centre. At meal times he would automatically guard his food and then hunt for more from Fizz’s bowl when he’d finished. He’d soon realised that Fizz was not going to give it up without a fight. Beamer had learnt the hard way.
Nowzad, however, didn’t have that problem. He was the bigger dog and he was still hungry. Unfortunately RPG had been eating a lot slower than him.
As I ran the short distance back I could only watch as Nowzad lunged at RPG. The loud growl he made sounded evil. It made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.
RPG was trying to mount a pathetic defence of his half-eaten bowl of stew–biscuit mix. But obviously he was no match for the more powerfully built frame of Nowzad.
I yanked the gate open. Nowzad was jumping up; his head was a frothing blur of gnashing teeth as he attempted again to grab RPG around the neck. As he did so, the smaller dog was forced into the corner of the run with no way out.
Without a second’s thought my boot connected with Nowzad’s midriff. With a yelp he spun in the air and landed on all fours facing me.
‘Don’t you fucking dare do that again,’ I yelled at him. Nowzad stood defiantly staring me down.
I turned and looked at RPG, who was curled in the corner, clearly shaking. I was breathing in large gulps of air. My heart seemed to be trying to burst out of my chest.
I picked up RPG’s bowl with what remained of the food and placed it down in front of him. ‘Go on buddy. I am watching this time.’
I turned back to Nowzad and walked towards him, trying to remain as dominant as I could. I knew that I had to show Nowzad that I was boss. He had to learn to obey me otherwise his future wasn’t going to be a safe one.
As soon as RPG started to eat the food Nowzad made to move towards him. I held my hand up in what I hoped was a menacing signal; I didn’t have time to mess around.
‘Don’t even think it,’ I said to him. ‘I am about to be late for my meeting and don’t have time for this crap.’
Nowzad stopped and cowered back as I made a pretend move to hit him. I didn’t like doing it but I had no choice. Back home I could spend hours training him slowly, one step at a time, but time was not on my side out in Afghanistan.
As RPG finished licking the bowl clean I collected up both empty dishes. Nowzad immediately moved over to sniff the floor where the bowl had sat seconds earlier, looking for leftovers. RPG shuffled to the other side of the run, his long tail between his legs as soon as Nowzad approached.
The situation was depressing. I had really thought the two of them were going to get on fine. Had I been too optimistic? Was I hoping against hope about getting these two rescued? I looked at the two of them, wanting to knock some sense into Nowzad but knowing it would do no good.
‘Great, now I have to watch you two eat as well. Thanks fellas,’ I said as I kicked the solid mud wall hard with my boot. As if it was going to change anything. All it did was hurt my toes.
I arrived at the briefing out of breath and with two empty silver bowls. As I entered the small operations room the boss looked up at me.
‘Just doing some training with the Afghans, sorry Boss,’ I answered his questioning glance.
It was only a little lie; the dogs were Afghans after all.
Everybody else was seated. I squeezed to my chair at the front as sarcastic comments floated over from the other side of the room. I ignored them all as I struggled to get my notebook and pen from my pocket. The boss stood to start the brief.
‘This isn’t the galley, you need to leave your washing-up outside,’ one of the signallers whispered from behind me.
I turned and gave him the finger, timing it perfectly to coincide with the Boss turning to point to the map of Now Zad.
The joking stopped as we received a warning order for a patrol to the north of Now Zad in two days’ time. Our aim was going to be to make our presence felt and to reassure the locals that we were on their side.
After the meeting I walked around each of the sangars to inform my corporals that we were getting some exercise. The lads were well chuffed as I gave them timings for receiving orders for a brief later that day. It would be a welcome relief from the monotonous routine in the sangars.
I was sitting in the passenger seat of the roofless WMIC Land Rover, refreshed by the blasts of cool, desert air that washed over me. As we drove to our stand-off position in the desert west of Now Zad in a formation of three vehicles, I could also feel every bump and dip in the hard ground travel up my spine.
Steve, the young lad who was driving today, was following the countless old tyre tracks that meandered in every direction across the desert as best he could. Every now and again he would swerve to avoid the white painted rock circles that marked the spot where the locals had detected old Soviet landmines. As we bumped and bounced our way along, I tried to not to think about whether they had missed any.
When we stopped at the appointed spot on the map, a patch of dried desert that looked no different from any other patch of Afghan desert around us, I felt a hand tap me on the shoulder.
I turned to look at Dan, or Dan the Man as we called him, a six-foot monster of a marine who was holding two small yellow pieces of foam out towards me.
‘You might need these, Sergeant,’ he said, dropping the two small foam earplugs into my outstretched hand.
Dan had a valid point.
I looked up at the muzzle of the .5 HMG, or heavy machine gun, that was about 12 inches from my right ear. The noise they made was deafening even when we were in
the
sangars, more than a kilometre from their normal position on the hill. I dreaded to imagine what the noise would be like if I had to give Dan the order to engage the enemy. I stuck one of the soft plugs in my right ear and hoped the Taliban would decide to have a day off.
There was no breeze and the heat was stifling. Within minutes of us coming to a halt I could feel the sweat as it began to trickle down my back. I held my hand up over my eyes to block out the blinding sun as the three of us scanned the outer edges of the town to our east. We munched on a packet of Jelly Tots while we waited and watched.
Along with the other two vehicles accompanying us, our focus was on the remainder of Kilo Company as they patrolled on foot up the slowly rising western edge of the town of Now Zad. If it kicked off today then we were their cavalry.
The lads were making slow progress. I squinted into the sun as they worked their way up the northern side of a faint depression in the ground. As the depression widened and headed westwards into the heart of the desert it formed into a deep-sided
wadi
that seemed to be impassable for most of the local vehicles.
The patrol’s desert camouflage from this distance was working well, blending the lads in against the yellow cracked and dried mud walls of the compounds. The walls were at least 20 feet high and two to three feet thick and looked as if they had been standing for years. We’d been told they were so compact they could resist all types of small-arms fire, which meant they were ideal for us – or the Taliban – to hide behind. In fact, given the size of these walls the whole of the Helmand Taliban could have been on the other side and we wouldn’t have known about it.
There was no hiding, however, from the hordes of Now Zad children who had come out to greet the patrol. It made the lads’ progress painfully slow.
As marines across the Helmand province were finding out
as
they patrolled their local towns or villages, poorly dressed kids would continually move from one marine to the next, attempting to scavenge what they could.
Through the telescopic sights on my rifle I could make out bearded men in long flowing
shalwars
watching quietly from the roof tops a good kilometre further north. Some wore black turbans, some white. Far to the north we could see a white flag flying high by a cluster of three bare trees, the tribal symbol of the Helmand Taliban. I couldn’t see any of the distant figures brandishing weapons and, anyway, I would have had to be the world’s best shot to hit anybody from where I sat.
The dwellings towards the north were still the same simple, dried yellow mud compounds that we had seen everywhere. The large rusting metal gates that stood nearly ten foot high were the only entrance to whatever lay within.
I was surprised to see that several women, dressed from head to toe in black burkhas, had appeared at the gates of a few of the compounds.
I guessed curiosity had drawn them out to witness the strange foreigners patrolling their town. It struck me that they were the first women I had seen in nearly four weeks. Watching them emerge from their sheltered existence on the other side of the closed compound walls I couldn’t help but think it wasn’t much of a life for them, but I guessed they didn’t know any other way. The complexities of religion and culture were far too convoluted for me to grasp or to really want to try and understand anyway.
I suddenly caught movement to the left of the women. A small scruffy black-haired child with an enormous smile was playing with an old bicycle tyre and a stick, beating the tyre as it rolled over the bumpy desert floor to keep it moving. The only other time I had seen anybody do that was in a Hovis ad on TV when I was a child. I watched the young child in his light brown long trousers and loose faded shirt play for a few more seconds, totally captivated by the joy he
was
getting from keeping the tyre upright. I wondered what he would make of an X-box or an iPod, the ‘can’t do without’ gadgets of our generation of Western youngsters.
Every now and again my headset would burst to life with a progress report. I followed the chatter on the map strapped to my leg by mentally ticking off the various report points that we had pre-planned.
‘20C A5 out.’
‘21A B6 out.’
‘0A this is 0, Hill confirms clear, over.’
‘0A, roger, out.’
‘20C pax on roof in vicinity of K7, over,’ I informed all the call signs listening on the radio net.
‘Roger 20C keep eyes on, out.’
‘22B approaching Exeter now, over.’
‘That’s us,’ I shouted to Steve as I heard our release point being signalled, repeating the order to move to the other two vehicles on the radio.
Steve gunned the engine and we shot forward. The other two vehicles fell into line behind us as we sped across the desert to our next point. As the vehicle juddered across the uneven desert floor, Dan had to ride the bumps like he was a chariot driver at a Roman gladiator fight at the Coliseum. He was straddled across the gun platform in the back of the wagon, constantly turning the big machine gun on its swivel mount so that he could cover the direction of the most likely threat, in this case the part of town that we hadn’t explored.
In reality the Taliban could fire at us from any of a dozen nooks and crannies that formed the line of outer walls that jutted out from the main compounds of the northern outskirts of the town.
I looked across to the lads plodding it out as they moved along the patrol line. I was secretly glad that I was the cavalry today; it looked hard work in the morning heat with all the gear they carried.
The plan was for the patrol to cover a large square chunk
of
the northern town before heading back to the relative safety of the compound. To get to the eastern side of the town we had to enter the steep claustrophobic walls of the town proper as we cut through the narrowest part of the inhabited areas.
‘Keep focused,’ I yelled above the noise of the engine, although I didn’t have to remind the lads; they knew what they were doing.
Steve gave the thumbs-up signal, never for one second taking his eyes from the road.
This was the danger time. Ambushes in the escape-proof alleys were a real possibility. An AK-47 magazine unloaded on automatic through a crack in a compound wall would seriously ruin our day.
We drove at speed, passing deserted open-plan shops and wooden stalls with their canvas roofs tattered and torn, flapping in the morning breeze.
At one time this looked like it had been a small bazaar, but now it was just a deserted street of broken wood and empty promises. Oil stained the desert floor outside a simple three-sided building that stood on its own. Motorbike parts lay rusting on the ground. As we passed a collapsed table underneath a dried reed roof I wondered what had been sold there. Some large clay pots lay overturned and empty around the broken table.
A few years back I had travelled to Morocco to climb Jebel Toubkal, the highest mountain in North Africa. We had travelled through the old market in downtown Marrakech in the Medina Square. Its hundreds if not thousands of narrow alleys and covered stalls housed traders selling everything from fragrant herbs and multicoloured fruit to caged lizards and tortoises. Row after row of rich-smelling leather goods and finely hand-painted crockery adorned the walls and tables of each stall.
The contrast with this scene was total. Nobody sold anything along here and probably wouldn’t for a long time
after
I had gone home. The only smell in the air here was the stench of rotting waste that was carried by the odd gusts of faint breeze. I felt sorry for the people of Now Zad; it was always the innocent who suffered.