Spoken from the Front by Andy McNab Read Free Book Online Page B

[aircraft] insert with 3 Para. It
was intended as a dawn raid but it started to slip and all the
timings went out of the window. They couldn't get a definite
on the [main] target: they were still trying to work out
whether this guy [Taliban] was there or not. But the second
objective was to land on the HLS [helicopter landing site] and
start clearing the area anyway, then sweep through these two
compounds where they thought some relatively high-value
targets would be. We were out to the east of Sangin holding
for a good thirty or forty minutes for the Predator [unmanned
aircraft] to clear us in. And everyone was thinking: It'll get
knocked off [postponed]. They [the Taliban] will have
scarpered. Then somebody, somewhere, decided we were
going to go. So we pootled off to the HLS.
    I was in the third cab of the first wave because there was
going to be a three-ship to drop off three platoons. There were
two ships coming behind us to drop off another two platoons.
We must have been a couple of hundred metres from the HLS
on the approach and somebody said: 'There's a group of
people on the HLS.' I was on the left-hand – the port – gun
and I stuck my head out of the window and there was this big
group of [Afghan] civvies just stood in the middle of the HLS
with these three honking-great twenty-ton Chinooks heading
towards them. They got the message and started to leg it. As
we went over the top of them, they were still running under
the aircraft. They were running across the HLS and I thought:
I don't know whether they've got weapons or not but I'm not
going to give them the opportunity to use them if they have.
So as we went across [the HLS], I waited until the aircraft was
about twenty feet beyond them and I put a burst of fire down
as warning shots. And I've never seen so many people cover
a hundred metres so quickly. They got the message and they
got out of there pretty sharpish.
    Just prior to that happening, the number-one cab had got
opened up on quite heavily. It turns out that this HLS was
fairly well defended and it went from being fairly benign to
being like Star Wars in nano-seconds. I was in Has's [Flying
Officer Christopher 'Has' Hasler's] cab. There was tracer
going everywhere – both outgoing and incoming. It turned
into a two-way range fairly rapidly. We had just touched
down by this point and we were being fired at from two
positions. Ginge [Flight Sergeant Dale Folkard] was on the
right-hand side, but he couldn't really fire at anybody
because the number-two cab was in his way. On the left-hand
side, I saw a couple of muzzle flashes from about eleven
o'clock. It was from like a small ditch with a tree-line just
behind it. I never felt any rounds coming in but I certainly
saw the muzzle flashes so they got the good news [fired
upon]. And then I could see silhouettes running from one
compound to another.
    I thought: I've just been opened up on from about fifteen
metres from where they are now. So they got the good news
as well. But we managed to get the guys [the Paras] off and
shortly after that the aircraft departed rather rapidly. We
must have been on the ground for thirty or forty seconds. So
there were two definite firing points there and there must
have been four or five individuals moving from one compound
to another. I was firing an M60 [machine-gun].
Sometimes you can tell if you've hit people and sometimes
you can't. That time I couldn't because it was that dark. We
had all the tracer going off and I was firing a weapon with my
[night-vision] goggles on, which had backed down slightly.
So you really are firing at a muzzle flash. But once I started
firing at the muzzle flashes they stopped firing so, at the end
of the day, I achieved my aim because I either suppressed
them – or killed them.
    That was the first time in my life that I had been in a
contact. It was memorable. Frisky: massively so. You can feel
the adrenalin pumping. The minute you know something's
happening you can almost hear your