land appeared, even at the start of the summer. Before the helicopter’s wheels had even touched the tarmac in Lashkar Gah its passengers were tearing off their seatbelts and standing up; everybody ready in case something goes wrong but also minimizing the amount of time the aircraft spends on the ground. If only commercial flying were this efficient! There were some pretty decent suntans that passed us in the other direction; their six-month tours complete. Our bedroom for the next six months was in a building known as the ‘Crack House’ and we were lucky not to be accommodated in one of the pod tents in ‘Grenade Alley’, so called because of the single wall that separates it from downtown Lash. The Crack House is a Soviet relic, a long rectangular building made up of a single corridor with rooms either side, formally housing an agricultural college. Our box room was a muddle of military issue camp beds, old rusty bed frames with real mattresses, wardrobes with the doors missing and a self-carpentered table. With our Hooters calendar on the wall, the small worn Persian rugs on the floor were the only clue that we were not in an American high school movie. Lash is the home of Task Force Helmand (TFH) HQ, the engine room behind the British presence in Afghanistan. On the map Helmand province is just a small corner of Afghanistan but it’s also where a lot of badness exists, which is why the majority of British efforts are focussed here. Lash houses both the HQ that control the British operations in the country, as well as a regiments worth of soldiers that are responsible for the surrounding area. There were also civilians; contracted to help with provincial reconstruction and some Danish Special Forces. HQ TFH sits in a standalone compound within the one-mile perimeter of Forward Operating Base Lashkar Gah (FOB LKG). Inside the main warehouse there are about a hundred desks where staff officers deliver their expertise to the wider battle picture, be it engineering; artillery; intelligence or signals. There are TVs dotted around with everything from SKY news to the Southern Hemisphere’s Super Rugby tournament playing in the background. We were lucky, as our small ops room was an independent space off the main floor plan. Out of the way, we were unlikely to be bothered by the frenzy behind us. Outside, the Queen’s Royal Lancers had built the ISTAR Mess; some benches made out of scrap wood sitting within an open ISO container. It was good to see that our predecessors had made this little corner of the desert feel as familiar and homely
34 ■ Household Cavalry Regiment
as possible. Since February 2013 there had been very little activity by British troops in Helmand after a soldier was shot through the hand on an operation. The politicians in Westminster, rightly or wrongly, were not willing to have any more serious injuries or deaths as we prepared for our withdrawal from Afghanistan. Part of me felt disappointed that we wouldn’t be as active as I had hoped. However, perhaps this meant that Britain has succeeded in Afghanistan. Or perhaps this is just the picture that parliament wants to portray; the reality being that Helmand is still a very dangerous place. After a lengthy build up, the remainder of the Regiment, focussed around B Squadron, arrived in Afghanistan back to old hunting grounds, but to a campaign that has changed enormously since the Regiment first deployment to Afghanistan in 2006. We were taking over in Helmand during the relatively calmer and cooler Spring ready for the much warmer, and decidedly busier, Summer season. The Household Cavalry would be leading the Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition & Reconnaissance Group (ISTAR Gp). ISTAR Gp HQ, led by the Commanding Officer, Lt Col Jim Eyre, has overall responsibility for intelligence; technical ISTAR (cameras that fly), the domain of Capt Tom Whiting; and ground manoeuvre (troops deploying on the ground), led by Capt Tom Long. To keep our colleagues in 1 Mech Bde HQ on their toes, the Chief of Staff for the latter half of the tour was also called Tom! The rest of the team was made up of a number of officers, ably supported by CoH Graham-Green as the Information Manager. Maj James Howell took the post of Chief of Staff, later to be replaced by Maj Tom Giffard. Capt Tom Long led the ground manoeuvre team, with the author as his 2IC. The intelligence team consisted of our very own Capt Henry Jordan, with support from Lt Joe Chmiel of the Intelligence Corps and Capt Louis du Plessis led the Battle Captains, controlling the movement of our troops whilst on the ground. In this role he saw a number of junior officers from a range of cap badges support him over the tour, from the RTR to the RDG. Our job in the ground manoeuvre cell started with Capt Jordan and Lt Chmiel who trawled bottomless pits of intelligence for credible targets. Once a target, or some immediately actionable intelligence, had been confirmed, Capt Long would take over the planning and, ably supported by his assistant, we would
Chief ISTAR looks on as soldiers from the Brigade Ops Company conduct a training exercise at Camp JUNO
resource each operation - from Chinook helicopters that would take troops to target; to sniffer dogs; Royal Engineer Search Teams; US Army Paladin teams, who not only find but also destroy explosives found on the ground; and Afghan Security Forces Tiger Teams. On the day of the operation, Capt du Plessis would man the ops room in LKG, providing real time information to any oncall supporting assets such as Apache helicopters and medical support helicopters. His calm and confident tones were a consistent boon for all of our subunits throughout the tour. Beyond the BRF, the ISTAR Gp had ground tps from the Irish Guards, in the form of the Brigade Ops Company (BOC); the RTR, who made up the Warthog Group; the Estonian Protective Mobility Company; Armoured Infantry from the Fusiliers; and towards the end of the tour a Troop of Danish Tanks. This multinational band of warriors made for a ferocious force - and as the tour went on we saw just how effective deploying our troops was in disrupting the insurgency and protecting the force. Brigadier Rupert Jones, in Command of 1 Mech Bde, was much more willing to utilise our sub-units than the tour before us, and in April the drought of operations was over. By May we had boots on the ground almost every other day; and conducted nearly double the number of operations that we did in April. Whilst this kept us busy up in LKG, it is nothing to the hard work that the soldiers were doing on the ground, often in temperatures of over 50C with over 50kg of weight. The routine of life in Lash came pretty