One Dog at a Time Read Online Free Page A

accommodation.
    The slowly growing howl of an incoming mortar as it arches across the sky sounds good only in movies. Right now it was scary as hell, not least because it was a complete lottery as to where it would land.
    Luckily for us this mortar crew didn’t seem that competent.
    I heard an explosion behind me, well away from our compound, and looked up once more to survey the damage to the once thriving town. Not that it would’ve mattered had it hit another building near us. There were no people living within 200 metres of our compound; it was just too dangerous. The buildings closest to us along the main bazaar road were just rubble, with nothing but piles of twisted metal and snapped wood where doors and shop fronts once stood, their contents long since ransacked.
    There were people still living in the northern part of the town, but we hadn’t patrolled that far away from the compound yet so we didn’t know how many were there. Given the devastation the constant battles had caused, many of the locals in this southern part of town had done the only sensible thing, packing their bags and moving further south until it was over.
    Their decision seemed even wiser now as the lads on the hill opened up with the heavy machine guns in the direction of the mortar firing point. That one lucky spot of the smoke from the mortar tube had been enough. They had obviously found the enemy.
    In the sangar it was almost impossible to hear anything over the ‘thud thud thud’ of the 50-calibre machine gun firing over our heads.
    ‘Hey fatty, guess we miss breakfast again,’ I yelled over to Hutch.
    This time he turned his head towards me, his eyes alive with adrenalin, and gave me the finger before resuming his fire position.
    We had flown direct from the UK to Camp Bastion, the main British concentration in Afghanistan, just over a month ago. The vast camp, named after the first British soldier to be killed in the conflict, sat in the middle of the Helmand desert surrounded by miles of nothing. There was no tarmac road, only the dusty worn tracks that led there through an unforgiving desert.
    Bastion was the biggest tented camp of its kind. Impressively, it was built by the Royal Engineers in 2006 in about 12 weeks. More than 4,000 British servicemen and women currently called it home.
    Most of the camp was made up of row after row of identical tented walkways. Trying to find the Expeditionary Forces Institute (EFI) shop that sold cans of fizzy drink and chocolate bars was a mission in itself. Quite why the EFI sold swimming goggles when there was no hint of a swimming pool for over one thousand miles was a question I never got answered.
    Temperatures of 100 degrees Fahrenheit were not uncommon in the midday Afghan sun. To quote Robin Williams in the film
Good Morning, Vietnam
, it was ‘hot, damn hot, crotch-pot cooking hot’. Just walking around Bastion meant that sweat stains grew under the armpits of my combat shirt and I couldn’t begin to imagine what it would be like when I had to run around the desert with full kit. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about putting any weight on out here, I’d told myself.
    Apart from the heat, the worst thing about Afghanistan during those first days was the dust: it was everywhere, absolutely everywhere. It was in our sleeping bags, on our hands, under our nails, sometimes in our food or clogging the mouthpieces of our water bottles and, especially annoyingly, lining the inside of our combat helmets.
    During the brief few days we had spent at Bastion the dust had become a really irritating part of our everyday life. I didn’t have to tell the lads to clean their weapons daily, they just did it. But as soon as we ventured outside the accommodation tents, their work was undone. Within moments small gusts of wind deposited fine layers of dust on the newly cleaned metal, which stuck to the rifle oil like superglue.
    It was even worse when we went out on to the open ground where we