Bloodshed and betrayal: The futility of our soldiers' deaths in Helmand and scandal of their inadequate equipment revealed in the book the MoD tried to censor

By Tony Rennell for MailOnline

Published: 19:34 EST, 1 June 2012 | Updated: 19:34 EST, 1 June 2012

The British officer lay flat on his stomach — down on his belt buckle, in Army parlance — beside the dusty Helmand road and stared intently at the red drum buried in the earth and the ominous white wires protruding from it.

Captain Dan Shepherd was an experienced bomb disposal officer who had dealt with scores of roadside bombs like this, the Taliban’s deadly — and increasingly successful — weapon of choice in the war in Afghanistan.

British soldiers observing him through binoculars from a safe distance saw him rise to his knees . . . and then disappear in the cloud of a massive explosion. ‘He was just atomised,’ recalled one of those watching. ‘There was almost nothing left of him.’

Front line: British soldiers risking death in the battle for Helmand

Not on the ground anyway. But within seconds a terrible shout of horror went up from the platoon of young soldiers. Small pieces of Shepherd’s body were raining down on them from the dust cloud.

This was — and is — Afghanistan, a place of courage, certainly, but also instant death and sights so horrific that those who witness them will never be the same again. As soldiers rushed towards the site of the explosion, a veteran sergeant stood in their way. ‘Go away,’ he told the youngsters under his command. ‘You don’t need to see this.’

But perhaps we do.

As our involvement in Helmand heads towards its seventh year and the number of British troop fatalities in Afghanistan nears 420 with little sign of respite, an award-winning book on the war deliberately pulls no punches in its depiction of the conflict’s gruesome realities.

Written by Daily Mail journalist Toby Harnden, it follows the Welsh Guards in gripping everyday detail through a six-month tour of duty in Helmand in 2009.

Sixteen from the Welsh Guards Battle Group would die, including the charismatic and hugely popular commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Thorneloe. Dozens more would be seriously wounded and many left with mental scars that may never heal.

Within days of going out on the ground, they had lost their first man. Dubai-born Lance Sergeant Tobie Fasfous was returning from a patrol when someone stepped on the pressure pad of an IED (improvised explosive device). The bottom half of his body was devastated while the Afghan interpreter beside him was decapitated.

'He was just atomised': Captain Dan Shepherd, seen defusing an IED in Afghanistan, fell victim to one of the roadside bombs

His death was a dreadful early blow and a bad omen. He had been in the battalion for nearly ten years and had been a big man with a large presence.

He had felt jittery about the whole mission, telling his girlfriend before he left Britain that he wanted the Beach Boys’ song Sloop John B to be played at his funeral and that all the mourners should wear Welsh rugby shirts. He got his wish, and far too soon.

At his funeral, a comrade in arms described him as unflappable. ‘When things start to go into a tailspin, he would stand there, a massive smile and a big grin on his face, and say: “Let the wheels come off and then we’ll see if we can put it back together.” ’

To some it must have seemed that right from the start the wheels were coming off the whole Helmand project.

What the troops experienced on a daily basis was nightmarish. A sergeant recalled a night patrol when an Afghan interpreter stepped on an IED: ‘As the smoke and debris cleared, in the crater, I saw something a human being isn’t supposed to see. From the bottom of his belly, everything was gone...'

As well as his legs, the blast had taken off the interpreter’s right arm. All that was left of his left hand was the little finger, attached to the elbow by skin and muscle.

Full-on descriptions like this make uncomfortable reading, as do the book’s uncompromising assertions about the misconduct of the war — the under-manning, the equipment failings, the absence of clear political focus.

Charismatic: The hugely popular Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe was one of 16 soldiers lost by the Welsh Guards Battle Group

The Ministry of Defence — though, significantly, not the Welsh Guards themselves — tried to block or muzzle Harnden’s book, ostensibly on security grounds. The entire first print run had to be pulped and even the new version includes blocked-out lines and sentences where the MoD censor has been at work.

But for what it still manages to tell us in such hard-hitting and human detail, Harnden’s account — Dead Men Risen — has just won this year’s Orwell Prize for political writing. The judges praised it for its ‘forensic anger’, both with politicians who failed to equip the soldiers properly to do their job but also with the military high command, which made promises to the politicians it could not deliver.

Caught in the middle were the troops. Not heroes or glory-seekers, not always brave, sometimes quite the opposite, but ordinary blokes trying to do their best in extraordinary circumstances and just hoping — vainly, in many cases — to get home in one piece.

War, Harnden jolts us into realising, is messy and frightening. ‘For most troops in Helmand, facing each new day required an act of bravery to function despite the knowledge that it might well be their last.’

Humour helped to get men through, though it was often pretty black. Under their battle smocks, the men who drove the Viking armoured troop carriers wore T-shirts with the words ‘If you can read this, I’ve been blown out of my turret and I’ve lost my body armour.’

It was no laughing matter, because their vehicles were potential death traps — ‘coffins on tracks’, the troops called them. Designed to travel quickly over rough terrain, Vikings were capable of swimming across rivers and crawling over walls and ditches.

They were, however, incapable of protecting the soldiers inside them from landmines and rockets.

While the upper section of the vehicles was well-armoured, the base and underbelly was poorly protected and  vulnerable to attack from the roadside bombs.

Early casualty: Lance Sergeant Tobie Fasfous became the first of the Welsh Guards to fall when he died in an IED explosion

It was in a Viking that Lt Col Thorneloe died, while trying by example to restore his nervy men’s faith in the vulnerable vehicles.

He was an exceptional and much-admired commander, a high-flyer who had been a top military aide in Whitehall but also had a natural gift for leadership. And that leadership, he believed, came from showing he could do whatever he ordered other men to do.

So he did his stint of dangerous donkey work, out in front of a patrol, gingerly prodding the baked earth with a bayonet for buried IEDs, the most terrifying and thankless task in Afghanistan.

And he also insisted on taking his turn at ‘top cover’ on the carriers — standing with his legs inside the Viking and his head and torso exposed as he manned the machine gun.

In the summer of 2009, he was leading a 16-vehicle convoy as part of an operation he felt uneasy about anyway. A high-profile offensive had been ordered to clear Taliban strongholds, but Thorneloe feared he simply didn’t have the manpower or the resources to make the gains stick.

But, a true professional, he was resigned to the fact that he and his Welsh Guards would just have to do the job as best they could.

Progress of this particular patrol to newly established remote outposts was agonisingly slow as they made frequent stops to check for roadside bombs. Thorneloe was among those down on his belt buckle prodding the ground until finally he was satisfied there was no danger and the convoy advanced, with the colonel back on ‘top cover’ in the lead Viking.

They had gone less than a kilometre when there was a massive explosion. A terrible stench rose into the air — of fertiliser-based explosive and diesel mixed with blood and human flesh. 

The bomb planted in the ground had ripped open the floor of the Viking directly underneath Thorneloe and virtually sliced him in half. The top portion of his body was leaning out at an angle. Both his legs had gone.

He tried to mumble something, then lapsed into unconsciousness  and died. There were other casualties. A frantic search of the wrecked vehicle revealed a hand but no one attached to it. An 18-year-old trooper lay dead nearby.

'Coffin on tracks': The Viking all-terrain vehicle, seen here at Camp Bastion, was known among soldiers as a death trap due to its susceptibility to rockets and landmines

Thorneloe’s corpse was brought down, eased into a body bag and taken away. But later there were more body parts to be recovered from the shattered Viking — fingers, two feet, a rib, a right leg.

They were stored in boxes, waiting to be taken back to base, but no helicopter — there were never enough of these — could be spared to do this for four days.

A grieving brother officer, who had known Thorneloe for 15 years, took it on himself to keep the parts from rotting by washing them in the nearby canal.

‘I did it at night, quietly and discreetly with nobody there,’ he recalled, ‘but on the third night I just couldn’t do it any more.’

He still has nightmares about Thorneloe’s death. But what was just as stomach-churning was to hear the Taliban boasting on their walkie-talkies, laughing and congratulating each other on a job well done.

Many of the guardsmen felt they were having to fight with one hand tied behind their backs. They faced an enemy who would stop at nothing to wipe them out, yet they were required to be temperate and proportional in their response so as not to alienate the local population.

The jargon of the day was to exercise ‘courageous restraint’, often to the point of not responding to an attack at all and certainly not by calling in air strikes on enemy positions. It may have been a wise policy but it was hard to psych yourself up to take the fight to the enemy and then have to back off.
Meanwhile, the Taliban was taking its IED campaign to a new level by using devices fitted with graphite rather than metal connectors.

Last goodbye: Sally Thorneloe, widow of Lt Col Thorneloe watches as his coffin is carried out of the Guards Chapel, in London, on July 16, 2009

Increasingly, these were not being picked up by British metal detectors, for all the troops’ meticulous sweeping of suspect ground. The enemy was gaining a powerful advantage.

The carnage continued. Nine days after Thorneloe’s death, a corporal on top cover was blown out of the turret of a Viking by an IED explosion and landed face-down in an irrigation ditch 40 yards away, where he drowned. His driver lay unconscious and horribly mutilated.

A young trooper was so disturbed by the sight that a blank look came over his face and he wandered around in shock, an increasing problem as the tour continued, and had to be evacuated.

Days after treating his mortally wounded platoon commander, a guardsman broke down and refused to go on sentry duty. ‘I pulled my helmet off and booted it across the road. I wanted out.’

He was taken to his room to calm down, but the next day a shot was heard. An officer rushed in, fearing the worst. The soldier had intended to blow his own head off, but had remembered his family at home at the last minute and fired into the wall instead.

Acclaimed: The Mail's Toby Harnden has been highly praised for his account of the Welsh Guards' nightmare

He was weeping uncontrollably, his whole body shaking, and rocking back and forth. ‘I can’t do it any more. I just want to get out of here,’ was all he could say.

The officer recorded in his diary: ‘He is terrified of being killed. I don’t know if he will ever be the same.

‘We may find that he is the  first of many to be demonstrating battle shock.’

He was right. Another soldier resorted to shooting himself in  the thigh to get away from the  front line.

Surprisingly, there was almost universal sympathy for those who broke down. Everyone had all been through bad times in their heads. ‘When you’re on stag [sentry duty] at 2am and it’s pitch-black and you can hear noises, you think all sorts of crazy stuff,’ said one man.

Others spoke of the feeling of impending doom that came over them when the sun rose and they stared at compounds in the distance, wondering if a Taliban sniper had his sights on them.

As the Welsh Guards tour neared its end, not surprisingly there were more and more examples of battle-weary men finding excuses to be excused duties. No one wanted to be the last man to be killed.

And who can blame them? Harnden — whose bare-knuckle and deeply moving book is already rightly being hailed as a classic of war reporting — has nothing but admiration for each and every one of the guardsmen he got to know  so well.

‘They gave their all and did what they thought was right,’ he says.

But no man came back from Afghanistan the same, he concludes. ‘Some left limbs there; all lost friends, comrades and at least one commander. Years from now, some may lose their minds to the horror of that place and time.

‘Death was a fear, a companion and, for the unlucky few, an outcome. For them, what happened in Helmand is over. For the rest, it will remain.’

• Adapted from Dead Men Risen by Toby Harnden, published by Quercus at £8.99. © 2012 Toby Harnden. To order a copy for £7.99 (including p&p) call 0843 382 0000.