Apache

They headed in staggered file down a track, a few metres apart, turned slightly outwards with the rear marker checking back, like a well-trained military patrol. The Apache’s thirty-six-times-magnification FLIR thermal imaging camera was so powerful we could pick up a heat source in an open field miles away. Just a short distance closer we could identify a human shape, so we had a grand-stand view of whatever they were about to do. It was like watching a black and white TV show. About fifty metres up the track, the men peeled off right, one by one, into the field alongside it. They moved a safe distance and crouched down, now about ten metres apart.

‘Fuck me,’ Billy said. ‘They’re in extended line; infantry tactics. They’re practising battle drills.’

We couldn’t engage them because they weren’t armed, but 42 Commando’s Int Cell needed to take a look at this.

After a few minutes, the first man got up and walked back to the path. The rest followed at roughly thirty second intervals, and once the whole group was back on the path, they patrolled back to the compound. We’d found the notorious Taliban training ground 42 Commando were after.

We projected our footage onto the big screen in the JHF. Our Ops Officer was intrigued, and popped next door to fetch his opposite number from 42 Commando. He in turn fetched his Intelligence Officer, and then the 2i/c and CO. We played the tape a third time, beaming with pride.

‘What do you think of that then? Quite a find, eh? But what does it mean?’

The 42 Commando Int Officer was a wise old bird.

‘Right, take it back. Here they go; they walk down the road then break into an extended line. Now, watch carefully. Zoom in on this man… here…’

He surveyed our blank faces.

‘Look, he is crouching, and then he moves away. Do you see his weapon? Look carefully… there…’ He pointed to the patch of ground the man had just left.

‘See? He’s left a heat source. Look at the size of his foot and look at the size of the heat source. Same length. Now if you zoom in on the other men, a fiver says you’ll find they’ve all left similar length heat sources.’

We began to feel more than a little stupid.

‘Gentlemen, you have captured top secret footage of an Afghan communal shit. It’s a tradition; they do it for mutual protection at night. Now I’m going for one too. But don’t worry, you can stay here.’

9. THE BOBS AND STEVE-O

The Taliban were watching us too.

A company of infantry soldiers was responsible for Camp Bastion’s security, manning the sangers on its perimeter fences, and fanning out to protect the C130 runway when a Hercules came in. The soldiers’ most time-consuming job by far was manning the camp’s most vulnerable point, its front gate.

An almost permanent line of local trucks and lorries queued outside it, delivering a never-ending mountain of supplies to feed and equip the garrison. Most of the vehicles came from Kandahar air base, where the bulk of our supplies arrived in long-range heavy-transport planes like the RAF’s C17s or chartered Russian made Antonovs. The local vehicles were held back 200 metres behind a chicane of Hesco Bastion bollards, the guards’ protection against suicide bombers. They were called forward cautiously, one by one, and searched from tip to toe before being allowed in.

One night, a sharp-eyed sentry spotted a driver climb onto his cab and get on his mobile phone as soon as a pair of Apaches clattered overhead. A covert watch was set up on all the waiting lorries.

We discovered that it wasn’t just one driver. Almost all of them were climbing onto their roofs to get a better mobile phone signal whenever we took off. In Northern Ireland, we used to call it ‘dicking’. At some stage of their journey from Kandahar, the Taliban had got to the drivers and employed – or forced – them to report on our movements.

We’d had a nagging feeling in the weeks prior to the discovery that the enemy seemed to know we were coming. Now we knew why. Once they’d been given the nod from Bastion, they’d set a stopwatch for our reaction times to specific locations, and packed up attacking the marine patrols minutes before we arrived.

Dicking was a threat to both our safety and that of the troops on the ground. Trigger and Billy drew up new drills to try to counter it. From then onwards, Apaches never flew over the main gate, we kept all the lights off at night, and we always set off in a different direction to the one we were really headed. That was a pain too, because flying a few klicks out of our way just to fox the dickers added a minute or two to the time it took us to reach the guys. But it was crucial to try to keep ahead of the Taliban’s learning curve.

They learned, we learned; then we had to learn again. It was known as the caterpillar – one end moved first, the rest caught up. And the Afghan caterpillar never stopped moving. The longer the Helmand campaign went on, the more complex the battlespace became.