Read Online A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan by James Fergusson - Free Book Online

poverty, and resentment against the politicians in Kabul who did nothing to alleviate it. And it motivated farmers to maximize profits on farms of diminishing size and faltering efficiency by growing valuable poppies instead of the wheat, maize, okra, onions, turnips, pomegranates, almonds, apples, apricots and tomatoes for which the region was once famous.
    In 2006, according to the UN, Afghanistan produced 92 per cent of the world's opium; Helmand, where poppy production rose by 169 per cent between 2005 and 2006, was responsible for almost half of it. About 380,000 Helmandis, a third of the province's population, are now dependent on poppies for a living. The province is on the way to becoming the world's biggest drugs supplier, cultivating more drugs than entire countries such as Burma, Morocco and even Colombia. Now Zad was a major cog in the new narco-economy, with all the crime, corruption and human misery that the drug trade brought in its wake.
    The British were garrisoned in the town's police headquarters at the southern end of the main bazaar – a square, mud-walled compound, 100 by 120 metres. An office building stood at its centre, with a mosque, a prison and some limited accommodation space ranged around it. There were storerooms and offices in each of the corners whose roofs, now heavily fortified, doubled as sangars. There was a fifth sangar above the main entrance gate to the east, and a sixth in the centre of the wall to the west. The Operations Room was set up in the central office building. During contacts the roof of this building, sandbagged and shaded by camouflage netting, served as a tactical command post, and became known as the Control Tower.
    As a static defence position the compound had two distinct disadvantages. The first was that it was part of a town. The civilian buildings surrounding it, even the ones across the street from the compound walls, offered any number of fire points for determined attackers. The second was a 150-metre hill, just 700 metres to the south-west, which overlooked the compound and was obviously a crucial piece of ground. The Gurkha platoon, twenty-seven strong, manned the corner sangars and the Control Tower, with just enough left over to form a small reserve – the Quick Reaction Force, or QRF – to plug any gaps in an emergency. But there weren't enough of them to occupy the hill as well; the Gurkhas had no choice but to let the local ANP, the Afghan National Police, do that. The hill was topped by and named after an old shrine, although now, in order not to offend local sensibilities, it was renamed 'ANP Hill'.
    Since Operation Mutay a month earlier, a peculiar calm had returned to the town. By day the bazaar and the weekly market remained busy with people and traffic, but it was different at night, when with increasing frequency shots were fired at the compound. There were short bursts of rifle and machine-gun fire, occasional RPGs, well-aimed sniper rounds. It was just enough to keep the garrison on edge – although that was not the purpose of the attacks. 'With hindsight, it's obvious that they were testing us out,' said Rex. 'They were examining our arcs of fire, our fire-times, our close air support response times. It was quite professionally done.'
    The Gurkhas' assailants were seldom seen, even through night vision goggles, while in the daytime they were free to blend in with the populace. In such circumstances, and especially after the close call of Operation Mutay, patrolling into the town in any regular way was out of the question for a garrison so small. 'The Gurkhas are very good at public interface,' Rex told me ruefully. 'They are naturally friendly, and being non-Europeans they are often more easily accepted than we are. They understand the tribal nature of Pashtun society because they come from a tribal society themselves. Many of them speak Urdu, which is widely understood in southern Afghanistan. But in the event, all we got to interface with was