Over and Out: Former Para on why he quit the Army

[SO19]

Over and out: former para on why he quit the Army after Afghanistan

In his first newspaper interview, ex-para commander Stuart Tootal tells Christina Lamb why his Afghan experience made him quit

It was supposed to be a straightforward operation. A Taliban commander was apparently holed up in a mudwalled compound just outside Naw Zad in northern Helmand province, and about 100 paras and Gurkhas were sent in to cordon it off and seize him. The plan was for the Gurkhas and Patrols Platoon to drive in from opposite sides and secure the outer perimeter, then A Company would be dropped in by helicopter, search the compound, grab him and get away.

Supervising from the air was Lieutenant-Colonel Stuart Tootal, commander of 3 Para, the first British battle group to go into Helmand in southwest Afghanistan. As he peered from his helicopter to see the three Chinooks bringing in A Company, he felt a glow of satisfaction.

“I thought, it’s all going like clockwork,” he recalled. “We’re going to move in, surprise the guy, might even catch him. Then I heard, ‘Contact, contact, contact!’”

The Gurkhas had been ambushed in a wadi, or desert valley, as they drove in from the north. At the same time Patrols Platoon had come under attack in the south. Vicious firefights were under way.

“The plan had all gone to rats,” said Tootal. “We thought there might be one or two Taliban. In fact there were 70. We were being attacked on three sides and all my vehicles had been ambushed.”

The supposedly simple Operation Mutay turned into a six-hour running battle. “I was circling round in my helicopter and all I could hear was ‘Contact, contact, contact’ and it was ‘what do I do, land in this confused situation and get my helicopter shot up or go back to Bastion [headquarters] and get reinforcements?’”

“Then my pilot said, ‘Colonel, we’re five minutes to bingo on fuel’, which means just five minutes flying time left, so I followed my intuition to land.”

Before deploying to Helmand, the soldiers had been trained to operate in the desert. “But this was close country with patches of orchards, irrigation ditches, high compound walls so you couldn’t see more than 50m, and there were Taliban popping up all over the place. I did think, we’re not going to get out of this.”

It was evening by the time Tootal and his paras got air support from an American A-10, which flattened a line of trees with cannon fire, enabling them to get out. They had killed more than 20 Taliban and taken no casualties, but it had been close.

Tootal identifies that moment on June 4, 2006 as the time he realised that his masters in the Ministry of Defence had underestimated what British forces would face in Helmand. “I always knew it would be a challenge, but this was the real deal,” he said. “Everything changed after Mutay. Every time we went out was potentially going to be like that and it often was.”

By the time 3 Para left Helmand four months later, 15 of his men would be dead and 46 badly wounded. Far from the hope of John Reid, then the defence secretary, that “not a single shot” would be fired, Tootal’s men fired 479,236 rounds in their six months in Helmand. That figure does not include rockets, cannon rounds, missiles or bombs from supporting aircraft.

This week Tootal starts a new life as a civilian after 20 years in the army. A wiry 42-year-old with grey hair and piercing blue eyes, he spoke to The Sunday Times in his first newspaper interview since dramatically resigning from the service.

Last month Sir Jock Stirrup, the chief of defence staff, warned that British armed forces were “very stretched” by fighting on two fronts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tootal, a high-flyer who had been told he was in line to be made a general, reveals the mounting frustration of commanders on the ground about lack of equipment, poor pay and conditions for his men and their families, and “shocking” treatment of the wounded.

Looking back, Tootal is angry at what he describes as “wishful thinking” about the Afghan mission by senior military and politicians. “They weren’t really thinking it through,” he said. “If you read about the battles faced by the Russians in Helmand only 20 years ago, we should have been ready to face that level of opposition. Yes, they were different conflicts, different rationales, but . . . there’s this pattern of tenacious resistance. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be there, but we should have thought more about what we were getting into.

“We confused ourselves – and the public – that this was a peace support mission but that presupposes parties signing up to a peace deal. The Taliban had signed up to nothing. This was counterinsurgency.”

As fighting intensified in Helmand, with the controversial strategy of sending soldiers to hold district centres such as Sangin, Naw Zad and Musa Qala, Tootal says his forces were “stretched almost to breaking point”. Something else was becoming clear. “I always knew we didn’t have enough helicopters.”

There were just seven Chinooks for his 1,200-strong battle group in a theatre where it was highly risky to move by road.

“The lack of helicopters meant I had to make some very hard decisions,” said Tootal. At times he was left playing God, particularly during heavy fighting in Musa Qala when he had to organise eight casualty evacuations in just six days. Musa Qala was the most dangerous place to land, and each time Chinooks approached to collect wounded, they would almost be shot down and would have to abort.

“I would then get my doctor in Bastion to talk to the medic in Musa Qala and get advice on how long the casualty had to live,” said Tootal. “If the doctor said four hours, I’d say he has to wait four hours because I needed time to plan, and arrange supporting fire-power to create a safer window.

“My biggest fear was we’d lose a helicopter – I thought it was a question of when not if. One of my men was left for nearly seven hours with his throat ripped out, but the doctor was telling me I had that long. I had no choice – I was balancing 16 lives against one life.”

Tootal believes that kit has improved and progress has been made in places such as Sangin and Musa Qala. However, despite the addition of a few more aircraft, he points out there are now far more troops, making the lack of helicopters even worse, and the Taliban are taking advantage by increasingly using roadside bombs. “We had seven Chinooks for a battle group of 1,200; now there are only eight Chinooks for four battle groups. If you’re not flying you’re driving, and if you’re driving when you should be flying you’re vulnerable to roadside bombs. That’s one of the reasons the Taliban are doing that; they know we don’t have enough helicopters.”

Figures released by the government this year suggest that only 17 of the 26 Chinooks that comprise the total “forward fleet” of operational aircraft are “fit for purpose”. Eight new Chinooks bought from Boeing in 2001 will not be ready to fly for a year or more because of software problems.

Equipment shortages aside, Tootal thinks the greatest mistake in Helmand was the failure of government agencies – particularly the Department for International Development – to carry out reconstruction. He says he could have achieved far more with money than weapons.“I was allowed to spend just $250 a month [on reconstruction], then I even lost that, but I could expend millions of pounds’ worth of ammunition in a single day. Just one Javelin missile cost £60,000-70,000,” he said.

“While I think there was a need to do some fighting, had I been empowered to have that money in bags of gold to put on the table and known who to talk to, we could have brought over some of the guys who ended up fighting against us.”

The task of motivating his troops became difficult for him after he visited wounded men in Selly Oak hospital, Birmingham, while home on leave. “I was shocked to my core by what I saw,” he said. “I’d expected to see a military ward with military staff and patients, but instead they were mixed with all sorts of civilian patients, young paras next to 80-year-old geriatric women.”

One para sergeant major had been shot through the arm leaving it shattered in 14 places. When Tootal asked how he was, he replied: “Pretty shit, sir.”

“He motioned to a civilian patient next to him who couldn’t control his bowels, he was urinating and defecating, no one was clearing it up,” said Tootal. “It got so bad my warrant officer would get out of bed and clean it up with his hands.” A para with a damaged back had been waiting days for a CT scan, and nobody had told him that the machine was broken. Another soldier whose lower leg had been amputated was left, unattended, in agony.

Tootal was horrified. “It was those stories that I had to carry back to theatre with me, knowing I was about to lead people back into combat. It filled me with foreboding every time we flew on a helicopter, thinking if one of my guys gets hit they’re going to go back to that.”

Since returning from Helmand, Tootal has created a charity, the Afghanistan Trust, to look after the more seriously wounded and next of kin. “I’ve heard other regiments are doing the same, which is really disturbing – we shouldn’t be having to set up charities to look after our people.”

He also found he was losing a number of promising soldiers because of the poor pay and conditions, particularly the accommodation for families. “We definitely lost some good soldiers who said, ‘I love the regiment but I don’t want to be divorced.’”

His personal experience confirms a Ministry of Defence survey this month which found that 47% of servicemen regularly think of resigning. Tootal recently lost a good man to the Post Office because his take-home pay would be £1,000 a month more. “We can’t ignore the fact that for the risks they take and return we get, our soldiers are not paid enough,” he said.

Despite a recent 9% rise for the 13,000 most poorly paid, the basic wage for a trained soldier is only £16,000. Operational allowances can push pay up to £20,000. “For that he’s on call 24 hours a day, being shot at, living in a hole, not washing clothes for weeks on end. Compare that to a fuel-tanker driver who earns £32,000 and no one shoots at him.”

Afghanistan left Tootal with great pride in his men, as well as disturbing memories such as having to cut the burnt-out bodies of some of his soldiers from a vehicle after an ambush. This makes him infuriated by reports from the Foreign Office that it was a mistake to send an aggressive force such as the paras first into Helmand.

“[We] did not go looking for trouble and anyone who thinks we did has never been in sustained combat, never risked life on a daily basis, never had to make possibly the last phone call home to loved ones, never had to pick up the body parts of one of your friends, never spent the day covered in the blood of one of their men. You don’t go looking for trouble when you know.”

Last November after long discussions with his girlfriend and with no job to go to, he decided to put his concerns in a letter to the army chief and resign. “I had been promoted and told if I stayed I had every chance of making general and commanding a division and going further. But I felt being a good soldier was not just about rank but about how you treat people and look after them.”

For all that, he insists, “commanding 3 Para was awesome – if I was 18 I’d do it all over again”. He firmly believes Britain should be in Afghanistan, though with more troops – and more helicopters, but he warns we need to be prepared to be there for decades. “Ten years, 20 years, 30 years . . . Northern Ireland took 30 years. But it’s an investment that’s worth making.”

www.afghanistantrust.org

Dirty laundry

“My biggest regret about Afghanistan is over a washing machine,” says Stuart Tootal. The machine in question was in a hospital in Gereshk in the south of Helmand and was discovered by Tootal’s men on their first patrol in May 2006.

“The hospital sheets were filthy and the doctor said they couldn’t wash them,” he explained. “But we said, ‘You have an industrial washing machine sitting there in cellophane.’”

The US aid agency that had donated it withdrew when the British arrived so it had never been installed.An engineer with Tootal said that could be rectified, but they had not reckoned with the Department for International Development. It saw aid as its area and disliked “quick impact” projects.

“They didn’t want the military going into hospitals and they said we would tread on the toes of an aid agency even though it wasn’t doing anything,” said Tootal. “I said, ‘It doesn’t have to be done under the cloak of 3 Para. We can dress ourselves up as Afghans, do it at night. We just need to fix it.’”

The government officials refused, so for the whole of 3 Para’s six months in Helmand, the machine sat there in its plastic wrapping.

Tootal believes failure to carry out such “hearts and minds” operations has cost Britain in the long run. “It would have made us stand apart from the usual Afghan experience of foreigners constantly promising and not delivering,” he said.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/u ... 364115.ece

[Greenronnie]

Lt Col Tootal is spot on with what he's saying here. The whole attitude of the army headshed was completely wrong when we were training for Afghanistan. The catchprase of the OPTAG training teams was, "Think Northern Ireland in the Desert". All the lads knew that it was horsecrap, but the politicians didn't think so.

The lack of helicopters was, and is, the main problem with operations on Herrick. We are still trying to fight on a shoestring, and it's not right to send guys to war without the support they need. Ref what he said about casevac'ing people, we had a P1 casualty at Musa Qala who had been shot in the head. When we called for casevac, the question asked was, "Is he going to survive anyway?" A foreign helicopter had to come and get him, as a Brit one wouldn't come.

And the mixing of military wounded with civilian patients is disgraceful. The Sergeant Major he mentioned was from my unit. I went to Selly Oak last week, to see a mate who was casevac'd from Afghanistan recently, and things haven't changed.