Fergusson - A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan

The war had been running for more than a month before thepublic properly woke up to it. It was not until early July 2006 thatthe first images of the fighting in Helmand began to filter on to ourtelevision screens. In retrospect it is clear that the news had someserious competition that summer, the hottest in Britain sincerecords began in 1772. Those still indoors were mostly tuned eitherto Big Brother, the seventh series of which had begun in May (thecompetition was eventually won by Pete Bennett, a ketamineaddict from Camberwell who suffered from Tourette's Syndrome),or, more likely, the closing stages of the World Cup in Germany.(England was knocked out by Portugal on 1 July after a penaltyshoot-out. The final eight days later, won by Italy, attracted anestimated global audience of 715 million people the mostwatchedevent in television history.)

Yet even for those paying attention it was hard to make out whatwas going on in Helmand or 'Hell Manned' as the BBCpersistently called it. Chinook helicopters touched down in violentsandstorms of their own making. Hoarse squaddies, their tattooedarms and chests exposed to the burning desert sun, droppedmortars into firing tubes with the speed and precision of robots ona production line. They crouched behind sandbagged machinegunsthat spat torrents of tracer fire, or zig-zagged towards mudbuildings and an unseen enemy to a soundtrack of explosions,curses and heavy breathing.

Our senses were tantalized. As the news anchors solemnlyexplained, most of the 'unique footage' on our screens had beenfilmed by the troops themselves. This sounded almost like a codedapology for the poor quality of the clips, which tended to be short,jerky and badly pixelated. And though the names of the battlefieldschanged Now Zad, Sangin, Musa Qala, Kajaki the crash-bangfootage soon took on a disturbing sameness. As viewers we reliedon the presenters to impose any sense of continuity or rationality.We could see that a military crisis was unfolding on the other sideof the world, yet the more we watched, the less the pictures seemedto offer an explanation of how or why this was happening.

One thing, at least, was clear: there were many members of theArmed Forces who would be missing the World Cup Final. Thiswas not some blip in a benign peace-keeping campaign that wewere watching, but a full-blown battle. The British, it seemed,were cut off and under siege in at least three southern Afghanmarket towns, manning the sangars of fort-like local governmentdistrict centres or 'platoon-houses' as they were sometimesknown against a well-armed enemy determined to throw themout. Rorke's Drift came to mind. It was as though a whole newfront in the War on Terror had opened up while we were lookingthe other way. General David Richards, the British commander ofISAF, Nato's International Security Assistance Force in Kabul,later appeared to confirm our groggy impression. The military, hesaid, was engaged in the most 'persistent, low-level dirty fighting'undertaken by the British since the Korean War, half a century ago.A professor at the Royal Statistical Society declared that Britishsoldiers in Afghanistan were precisely six times more likely to bekilled than their comrades in Iraq.

My concern was personal. As a journalist I had been reportingon Afghanistan for over a decade. My first book, KandaharCockney, documented the travails of Mir, a Pashtun interpreterwith whom I once worked, and whose family I helped to gainpolitical asylum in London in 1998. We are still close friends. Yet itnow looked, dispiritingly, as though our two countries were at waragain for the first time since 1919. The potential consequences ofthis renewed fighting, both for our friendship and for the peaceand security of the country he loved and to which he and his familyfervently hoped one day to return, were serious.