He joined the Para reserves before going to Edinburgh University to study commerce. ‘I had asked originally to join as an officer and was advised to spend a year as a private,’ he said. ‘At the end of that year I was offered promotion to lance corporal, which I took, and spent the next three years as a junior NCO. I absolutely loved it.’
At the end of the course he decided against a business career and that it was ‘definitely army all the way, or rather more specifically the Parachute Regiment’. He went through Sandhurst then joined 1 Para. Over the next dozen years he moved around the regiment, serving in Northern Ireland, Macedonia and Iraq. There had been moments of excitement and satisfaction but no real exposure to full-on fighting. He regarded his command of ‘B’ Company as the high point of his career and the opportunity to get his ‘first experience of the sharp end’.
The battalion started the tour with the same regimental sergeant major who had shepherded it through some of its darkest hours in 2006. John Hardy was everything an RSM was supposed to be. He was tough but just, and the sternness that went with the job overlaid a paternal temperament. Hardy had the unusual distinction of serving in two successive operational tours with 3 Para in the post but was commissioned halfway through the tour, which obliged him to return home. He was replaced by Morgan ‘Moggy’ Bridge, who was good-natured, shrewd and funny.
The old and bold of 2006 were well represented throughout the battalion. Several of the senior NCOs had added a stripe to their sleeves and were now staff and colour sergeants and company sergeant majors, and the Toms of Herrick 4 had also moved up the ladder to become lance corporals and corporals.
There were many new faces among the CO’s staff. Williams was lucky in having as his operations officer one of the stars of the last show, Captain Mark Swann, who had led the Patrols Platoon through many alarms and adventures with skill and good humour. Among the staff officers was a man who had been a background presence in the ops room in 2006. In this tour, though, he was to play a far more significant role, and his opinion would be sought on virtually everything the battalion was engaged in.
Captain Steve Boardman did not fit the popular image of a soldier. He wore glasses, seemed shy and spoke with a soft Northern accent. At forty-nine years of age he was, in military terms, almost a geriatric. Boardman had been involved in civil-military cooperation (CIMIC) affairs in 2006, charged with coordinating reconstruction efforts. As it had turned out, there was very little of this work for him to do. The Paras were more engaged in smashing things down than building them up, and after the first few weeks there was no call for his expertise. Instead Boardman took the drudge job of head watchkeeper, spending long hours on duty in the ops room, overseeing all the incoming and outgoing communications.
He had begun his military career in the Royal Artillery, then left the army but maintained strong links by joining 4 Para, the regiment’s territorial unit. He founded a business specialising in print, design and reprographics. His work had taken him to India and the Far East and he had set up a joint venture in Sri Lanka. Visiting these places, he felt, ‘gave me a good insight into the process of how people operate in this part of the world, how they think, what their values are. It exposed me to massive cultural differences from what we are used to in the UK.’
Boardman managed to keep his business running while spending long periods in Iraq and Afghanistan attached to 3 Para. Stuart Tootal had asked him to stay on after the previous Afghan tour. His CIMIC background and his regional knowledge made him the obvious candidate for the role of ‘influence officer’ when the Paras went back. It was, he said with characteristic self-deprecation, ‘better for me to be doing the job than forcing a young captain in his mid to late twenties to do it, who would rather be out on the front line’. In fact Boardman spent as much time on the front line as anyone, taking part in almost every operation of the tour and tabbing out on scores of tense, dangerous and exhausting patrols, alongside men who were less than half his age.
Steve and his assistants formed the NKET, the non-kinetic effects team, or ‘Team Pink’ as they were known. They acted essentially as diplomats, representing the Paras to the tricky tribal leaders and mistrustful peasants of Helmand, explaining their mission and reassuring them of their good intentions. It was a task that required patience, fortitude and an underlying faith in the fundamental goodness of human beings. The last quality was hard to sustain in Afghanistan, especially when dealing with those who were supposed to represent authority. Boardman’s belief, however, never seemed to corrode in the ground mist of nihilism that sometimes appeared to hang over the place.
The essential purpose of the Paras’ existence, though, was fighting, and at all levels of the battalion there were men who were among the most experienced soldiers in the British Army. Their knowledge and skills would be passed on to the new boys, the young, green Toms who had been in training when the battles of 2006 were being fought. The tales that they heard from the veterans had only increased their thirst for action. Darren Little, from Lockerbie in Scotland, was only sixteen during Herrick 4. He had turned down a place in his father’s building company to enlist in the Paras and was now a private soldier in 4 Platoon, ‘B’ Company. Like all the newcomers he was going to southern Afghanistan ‘with big expectations because what the lads did last time was tremendous’.
As they settled in to Camp Roberts in the first weeks of March, it was unclear whether those high hopes would be fulfilled. It had taken some time for 3 Para’s precise role in the new deployment to be defined. Initially it appeared the battalion was going to be split in two. One half would go to Kabul for the unglamorous and boring job of guarding the airport while the other went to Kandahar to provide a rapid reaction force. By the end of 2007 their mission had been changed. They were designated the Regional Battlegroup for southern Afghanistan.
The task would give them many opportunities to demonstrate their versatility. Their duties meant they would be expected to roam all the provinces that fell under the control of Regional Command South of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. ISAF was the multinational military coalition that had evolved following the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. The ‘assistance’ part of its name was a diplomatic nicety. ISAF troops in the spring of 2008 were doing most of the fighting, though Afghan units that had passed through training camps set up by the Allies increasingly accompanied them on operations. In the seven years since they had invaded, America and its allies had talked much about the need to create Afghan forces that were capable of guaranteeing their own nation’s security. Progress had been made but it was slow, and the Afghan army was still a long way from being able to plan and conduct major operations on its own.
ISAF had been set up under a UN Security Council mandate in December 2001 following a meeting with Afghan opposition leaders under UN auspices in Bonn which began the process of reconstituting the country post-Taliban. Britain led the negotiations to create the force, which initially operated with soldiers and assets from the UK and eighteen other countries, under the command of a British lieutenant general, John McColl. The coalition of nations willing to commit assets to the mission was to expand over the years so that by 2008 there were forty-one countries contributing about 50,000 troops. In August 2003 NATO took over the command and coordination of ISAF, and two months later the UN authorised it to operate everywhere in Afghanistan. The initial task had been to provide security in and around Kabul. There was a gradual expansion outwards into the more benign and pacified regions of Afghanistan where Taliban support had been lightest. In December 2005, a few months after the country held its first parliamentary elections in thirty years, the Afghan government and its foreign supporters agreed to extend ISAF’s operations to six provinces in the troublesome south.
Despite the terminology emphasising the collective nature of the international military presence in Afghanistan, it was the Americans who dominated. They contributed nearly half the ISAF troops spread around the country, leaving Britain trailing a distant second. In the spring of 2008, ISAF was under the command of one American general who a few months later handed over to another.
Apart from dominating ISAF, America was conducting its own separate war in Afghanistan under the aegis of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), the anti-terrorism campaign established after