The Times Magazine 19Some said it directly.
“I had a love for that man,” a 2 Rifles
veteran told me last November as he recalled
recognising the body of a bomb-torn rifleman,
killed in Sangin that savage summer of 2009,
by his jawline. He said it so matter-of-factly
during an account of such horror that I was
caught unawares and spun from a desert to
an ocean in the space of seven words.
In others, it fell as tears.
“We were among friends,” remembered
Major General Robert Thomson, who had
commanded 2 Rifles that most bloody of
years. “We felt we were a tight gang. We
had had ten operations in ten years. We knew
we were going into an area that would be
really hard.”
His voice caught three times in grief as he
recalled all that his battalion had endured, and
the emotion in what he said – “Tears will fall,”
he acknowledged at one point, pushing on
regardless after I had offered to stop the tape- together with the sincerity of the way he
addressed his riflemen across the passage of
years filled the austere space of the room in
the Ministry of Defence where we met in
such a way that, later, after I walked out
of the building’s grey looming doors into
the autumnal bleakness of the Embankment,
it was not until Baker Street more than two
miles away that I could collect myself.
“You can never undo the fact that we
fought well together,” his words echoed with
me as if in epitaph to the Afghan war. “And
we were friends alongside each other. You
can’t undo that.”
At the beginning of this journey, speaking
to veterans of the campaign after reporting on
the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August last
year, I thought I was at the start of a story
about a scourge of suicide and post-traumatic
stress disorder – PTSD – among them; about
what happens to those who served in the
war in the echoes of strategic loss as Britain’s
attention moves elsewhere; about government
carelessness over veterans’ mental health; and
about the fightback by serving and former
soldiers to look after their own within the
veterans’ community.
In some ways, suicide and trauma and
veterans’ outreach were at the start of it all.
Yet as I travelled through the autumn across the
Rifles’ recruiting grounds in London, Liverpool
and Mansfield, talking with veterans of the
Afghan campaign about war and death and
trauma and memory, I ended up elsewhere.
As much as war, the stories they told me
were about something so deeply shared amid
the best and worst of times – I cannot think of
a better word than love – that it seemed as if
some soldiers were broken not just by war, but
by its farewell.“It’s OK when you are sighted, because you can
take your mind away from whatever is going on
in your head: you can look at flowers, you cansee your children, your wife. For me, whenever
I am in a dark space, the last thing I see is
Private Young stepping in front of me, as close
as you are sitting to me now, triggering an IED
[improvised explosive device]... I just thought,
‘Oh f***, here we go,’ and it was down to me
to get a claw around what was left of his body
and find his rifle. But then I saw the second
device. And the sun is beating down, I’ve
got an earpiece in and I am covered in claret- Young is all over me, I mean all over me –
and at that moment, unfortunately Serjeant
McAleese stepped over me and triggered the
second device. It took him. I never saw again.”
In this way Paul Jacobs, George Medal, told
me of his patrol of August 20, 2009. Blinded,
the two soldiers in front of him dead, the
rifleman staggered back out of the kill zone,
severe shrapnel wounds to both thighs, his
groin, arm and face and eyes. His last recall
of vision is of horror. He was 20 years old.
I happened to be in Sangin with Rob
Thomson, who was then a lieutenant colonel,
that August day, embedded with 2 Rifles.
Jacobs was one of his soldiers.
It was an Afghan presidential election. In
the sandbagged operations room in Sangin
district centre, Thomson and his headquarters
staff wore body armour and helmets as
Taliban rocket fire and mortars detonated
about the base, while along the gun
emplacements on the flat roof above them
riflemen blazed away at the Taliban in the
tree line beside the Helmand River to the
north. I recall the air of feverish payback as
those guns ripped away and the brass bullet
cases jangled at the soldiers’ feet: rage and pain,
pent-up frustration and vengeance ploughing
the river reed lines with every burst of fire.
A sudden chatter of radio traffic announced
an IED incident. It was Jacobs’ patrol. Serjeant
Paul McAleese and Private Johnathon Young
were dead; Paul Jacobs seriously injured.
“Beneath the lip of his helmet the colonel’s
face had the grey luminosity and glowing eyes of
intense grief,” I wrote of Thomson at the time.
“I’ve just lost one of my best soldiers,” he
said. His words, so quiet that they were nearly
a whisper, could almost have been a question.
The same grief was still there when I saw
him as a general a few weeks ago, yet pity had
no place among the silent tramp of patrolling
ghosts through the ministry room.
“We don’t want sympathy,” the general
said. “We want empathy. We want people to
understand what we have been through and
recognise that we dug deep.”
The six-month operational tour undertaken
by 2 Rifles that year, known as Herrick 10,
was among the bloodiest of any during the
entire 20-year Afghan campaign. Their battle
group suffered 111 casualties, including 24 men
killed, in Sangin district over the summer
months in which they fought there.
here is a kind of love that only those at war have known.
It is the kind of love that makes soldiers brave when they
are together but smashes some apart when they are alone.
I encountered its thrall again and again as I began to journey
through the reflections of the riflemen who had fought in
Helmand: a voyage so intimate in the footsteps of a lost war
that, were it not for the recall of the horror, I might have been
walking through the glowing embers of an impassioned affair.T
EROS HOAGLAND
Anthony Loyd, far left, in
Sangin in 2009 with 2 Rifles