One Dog at a Time Read Online Free Page B

practised our drills. There the dust clouds would rip across the desert plain like monster tidal waves gathering speed as they charged towards us. When we got back inside our faces would be caked in the stuff, the dust stuck to our sweat like a beauty parlour-style mudpack that you’d pay a fortune for on the High Street. The only dust-free area was where our combat goggles had protected our eyes.
    On the only free evening we’d had I’d watched the sun go down from the top of the bulletproof HESCO protection blocks that formed the perimeter of the camp. Sitting there with my thoughts I’d seen the final Chinook flight of the night swooping in low from the east, straight across the fading face of the sun. The Chinook flew over the main landing site and headed straight for the emergency landing site by the fully equipped field hospital, which told me somebody was in a bad way. The scene would not have been out of place in an episode of
M*A*S*H
, which I’d watched as a kid.
    Any thoughts we’d had of getting comfortable at Camp Bastion were very quickly knocked on the head. During Kilo Company’s six-month tour we would spend less than four weeks in the tented city. The rest of the time would be in the ‘real’ Afghanistan, a very different place.
    After being given only a few days to acclimatise we had been sent to the small market town of Gereshk where any thoughts of being broken in gently were quickly dispelled. Our first patrol had resulted in a firefight with the Taliban.
    We’d passed through the old town of Gereshk for a rendezvous with the Afghan National Police, or ANP, who guarded the large, Chinese-built dam that gave the town its strategic importance. During our conversations with the ANP they’d pointed to a group of men standing on a nearby hillside. They told us they were Taliban but we couldn’t get involved, and no shots had been fired. But as we’d made our way back up into the town the men on the hillside started firing mortars and small arms fire at the Afghans and us. So we’d had no choice but to engage them.
    For a brief while we’d been caught in the middle of the Taliban engagement, with our rear exposed to a potential attack. It had taken the rockets from a Harrier fighter jet our OC had called in to finish the encounter. It had been a sobering moment for most of us, a realisation that training was well and truly over.
    With two weeks of patrolling under our belts we had then been sent back to Bastion to prepare for deployment to the ‘safe’ house in the town of Now Zad, where we’d be based for at least the next two months. The ‘safe’ house was where I was standing now, looking warily out from behind the sandbags of the sentry post for any sign of another incoming mortar.
    I had just been about to sit down to a tasteless lunch of military brown biscuits accompanied by something that had come out of a tin labelled ‘meat patty’ when the call came over the radio for me to visit the small operations room that we had set up as the headquarters of the compound. After eating the same thing for lunch for the last few days I was grateful for the excuse to slot the biscuits back into their green packet. I trotted over and stuck my head in the door.
    ‘You rang Boss?’ I said as I looked around the corner of the room, which was crammed full, even with just four people stood in there.
    As it turned out the boss, who was the Officer Commanding Kilo Company, was busy on the radio.
    The signaller gave me a wave and I waved back while the boss finished his conversation then replaced the spare headset that was connected to the main sangar and hill radio network.
    ‘Your department I think, Sergeant. The hill is reporting that the Afghan National Police are outside the gate. Firstly I haven’t given them permission to be there and secondly they are abusing a tied-up dog.’ He knew all about my dogs, having stepped over Fizz on numerous occasions to get into the gym back at our base in