Results tagged “army” from Birmingham Mail - Band of Brothers

The other vehicle based tasks involve local patrols to the North (past Highway 1, the M6 of Afghanistan) and South visiting compounds, gathering intelligence off the local population. As well as these patrols we provide ground cover for most incoming flights into Bastion.

Because most flights come in at night, we are usually tasked for 12 hours a night to provide over-watch on the flight-path, ensuring that no opportunist enemy forces try and take a pop at one of our Herc's laden with troops.

In the main these patrols are generally not very eventful, more as provision of a deterrent than actually combating enemy ground forces on a day-to-day basis.

As briefed by the RAF Regiment (who have recently been attached to Normandy Company and integrated into our rotations as a 4th platoon), these patrols, although generally quiet, need maximum attention of every soldier as it's "sods law" that the time you switch off is the time that a lucky Taliban opportunist gets the chance to fire of an RPG into the direct flight-path of an incoming C-17.

One such night time TLZ patrol stands out in my mind as being more memorable from the rest.

We had patrolled the local area for a few hours and had just picked a spot by the flight-path on some high ground south of Bastion, ready to sit and observe our arc's.

Whilst observing the terrain through the green glare of our night vision glasses, to the south east, in the notorious Taliban controlled area of Nad-e-Ali we all watched in amazement as a spectacular firefight broke out.

Often before we had seen Illume most probably fired from forward operating bases but on this occasion the sky directly above the horizon was ablaze with tracer fire, darting backwards and forwards in bursts for several hours.

Exchanges of gunfire were met by gasps of awe and shouts of "did you see that" resonating from vehicle to vehicle as we sat back and took in the spectacle of the real life battle unfolding before our eyes, albeit a good few miles in the distance.

Instead of taking our turn in "stagging on" (providing cover while the rest of the team rested) as usual, the whole section stayed awake to watch the display for several hours before it finally subsided as dawn broke.

Although several miles away, the battle reminded us all of how close to the fighting we actually are and our thoughts were with our boys who were down there. Some of the lads in the section were excited.

"Let's get down there and smash em!" someone said, even though it's miles out of our area of operations, but although I myself have a yearning to get down to the green zone and do some of the good infantry stuff, I think that night we were all glad to be taking a rear seat and only observing the show rather that being active participant.