Spoken from the Front Read Free

3 Battalion The
Parachute Regiment supported by 1 Battalion The Royal
Irish, the Apache attack helicopters of 9 Regiment Army Air
Corp, Chinooks from 27 Squadron RAF, 7 Parachute
Regiment Royal Horse Artillery, a battery of Desert Hawk
unmanned aerial vehicles from 32 Regiment Royal Artillery
and Royal Engineers from 51 Parachute Squadron. Other
support roles were assumed by 13 Air Assault Regiment RLC
(Royal Logistic Corps), 7 Air Assault Battalion REME (Royal
Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) and 16 Air Assault
Medical Regiment. Harriers from the Joint Force Harrier
detachment, which had been operating from Kandahar since
September 2004, provided troops with vital close air
support; 34 Squadron of the RAF Regiment offered Force
Protection.
April 2006
    Colour Sergeant Richie Whitehead, Royal Marines
    Colour Sergeant Richie Whitehead, of 42 Commando The Royal
Marines, is thirty-five. The son of a civil engineer, he was born in
Ipswich, Suffolk, and has a brother. His family moved to
Chatham, Kent, when he was eleven. Whitehead joined the Army
Cadets aged twelve and the Royal Marines at seventeen, a year
after leaving school. He has been on operational tours to
Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan twice, the first in
2002, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the US, and the second
to Helmand province in 2006. Whitehead left the Royal Marines
in September 2008 with a medical discharge to work as a
regional director for a specialist asbestos company. He lives
near Dartmoor, Devon.
    We arrived in Lashkar Gah at the end of March. But it wasn't
my first tour to Afghanistan. I had been one of the few to be
there in 2002 when the Marines were sent there as part of Op
Jacana. On that occasion, we ended up staying for five
months. It was seen as the big search [for Osama bin Laden],
the show of force, and to support the Americans in the hunt
for terrorists. It was all very new for us as a brigade. It was a
steep learning curve, which we took in our stride. There
wasn't anything really in and around Bagram [air base] but
there were a lot of operations going out into numerous cave
complexes and to the far south to places like Khowst. Back
then no one went that far south. It was eventful in that we
met a lot of people.
    There were local villages around us. There were always
incidents. There were two villages near our little perimeter
track that we made through the minefields around the outside
of Bagram: in one village our track went through it and
so, obviously, the Americans gave them a briefcase of money
and said, 'Thank you very much for letting us use your field.'
So, those villagers were happy with us. But the other village,
which was approximately 500 metres away, hated them
because they [the first village] got the money but they themselves
didn't. So they used to mortar each other every night
and set traps for each other's kids and stuff like that. We had
to take charge of that and try to sort it out. But the locals in
Kabul, where the Taliban had fallen the year before, during
Op Anaconda, were generally very pleased to see us. It was
very quick how you saw a Western approach to everything:
the women started wearing jeans under their burkas and
things like that.
    So it was strange being back in Afghanistan four years later.
Before we got out there, the advance party was caught in a
suicide bombing. The first multiple out there had to deal with
it. They got hit by a suicide bombing at the front gate at
Lashkar Gah camp, which shocked them massively. There
were a couple of injuries, nothing serious, just walking
wounded. Of course, the suicide bomber died. And the
vehicle was written off. So we were sat around on our
bergens [rucksacks] delayed, waiting to get out there and
obviously we heard about it.
    It was a weird time because we had a lot of young lads in
the Army, and a lot in my multiple. They had never been
operational. They gave them to me because apparently with
my experience I could take care of them. So the