3 Para. Patrick Bishop
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Название: 3 Para
Автор: Patrick Bishop
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007280087
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Each company was commanded by a major. At thirty-six, Will Pike, the OC (Officer Commanding) ‘A’ Company, was the most senior. He was the son of Hew Pike, who led 3 Para in their days of glory in the Falkands, and had his father’s strong, square features and thick, blond hair. He had long ago given up worrying whether this connection was an advantage or a burden. ‘In the end I don’t think it makes a blind bit of difference,’ he said. ‘I don’t think that anyone else thinks that either.’ Those under him sometimes felt he was hard to please, but noted he was as tough on himself as he was on others.
‘B’ Company was commanded by Giles Timms, a blunt, cheerful fitness fanatic, who had been destined since adolescence for military life. He joined the Combined Cadet Force of his public school. After learning of the army sholarship scheme, ‘everything I lived and breathed from then on was geared to getting into the army’. He joined 4 Para, the reserves, as a private soldier while at university. The artillery sponsored him through Sandhurst, ‘but my allegiance was really to the Parachute Regiment’. It was only at the last minute that he told his sponsors that he would not be joining them. ‘I got quite a hard time for that, for disloyalty. [But] you have got to be true to your own ambitions and I wouldn’t have been happy in the Gunners.’
‘C’ Company’s OC, Paul Blair, known as Paddy, was a soft-spoken, good-looking Ulsterman with a gentle, courteous manner. He did a four-year business course before deciding that office life was not for him and set off for Sandhurst in July 1995. Cadets are required to put down a first and second choice of regiment they want to join when they pass out. ‘I was very much, it’s the Parachute Regiment or nothing,’ he remembered.
Adam Jowett, who commanded Support Company, joined the Paras from the Grenadier Guards and served with them in Kosovo and Sierra Leone. He was working in a staff job when the word came through that 3 Para were likely to be sent to Afghanistan but wangled his way out of it to go with them. Jowett was the most reserved of the company commanders, but a robust soldier when the time came.
For all their combined experience, in the spring of 2006 there were only three men in 3 Para who could claim to have had real experience of a proper war. These were the last remaining members of the battalion who had served in the Falkands campaign. The intervening years had been spent in worthy but uninspiring deployments that hardly matched the expectations of 3 Para’s members when they joined up. As they prepared to leave their drab headquarters in Colchester for the burning plains, soaring mountains and lush river valleys of Helmand province, the atmosphere was charged with the premonition that things were changing. 3 Para were about to get what they wished for.
‘The Lawless Province of Helmand’
On 26 January 2006 Defence Secretary John Reid announced to the House of Commons that British troops would be sent to Helmand province in the spring. The decision caused immediate controversy. Britain was already deeply committed in Iraq. Pessimists recalled the history of British military interventions in Afghanistan. They raised the grim precedents of the First and Second Afghan Wars and retold the story of the retreat from Kabul in January 1842. Of the 16,500 soldiers and camp followers who set off, only a handful stumbled into the safety of Jalalabad. The rest had been killed by the freezing weather and the relentless attacks of Ghilzai tribesmen.
It was not just the British who had come unstuck there. All the might and brutality of the Soviet military had been unable to crush the spirit of a people who, however incapable they might be of living together harmoniously, were united in their hatred of outsiders.
The Paras had known about the deployment for months. Rumours had been circulating since the previous summer and they had been officially ‘warned off’ to prepare to go in August 2005. They were used to false alarms. But this one sounded genuine. For many in the battalion this was the news they had been waiting for all their military careers.
Sergeant Craig Mountford was coming up for thirty-five when the buzz started gathering volume. He had started his working life as an apprentice welder in Stoke-on-Trent but had always liked the idea of army life. He had first heard about the Parachute Regiment through their exploits in the Falklands. He was attracted to them by an early reality TV show, The Paras, which followed a group of recruits from day one of basic training to acceptance or rejection. In 1989, aged nineteen, he joined up. So far, though, his operational experiences had been disappointing. ‘It was really frustrating,’ he said. ‘We weren’t getting a look-in. We were constantly being told – “Right, you are being stood by, you are going to go.” And we never went. This isn’t warmongering. You just want to do your job – go away on operations, to see what it is like, to experience it.’
In the spring of 2003 the second Gulf War seemed to offer great possibilities. In the end ‘it was just a case of securing a couple of oilfields, patrolling in Basra and that was it. We didn’t do any war fighting as such’.
With the news of the Afghanistan deployment, Mountford began to think again that he might finally see some serious action. ‘It was in all the papers. Mad Max country. The lawless Helmand province.’ But by now he was inclined to be sceptical of media prophecies. ‘They said the same about Iraq. Fighting through to Baghdad. Millions were going to be killed. Initially everyone thought it was going to be good, but then it began to die away. We started thinking, “It probably won’t come to anything. It probably won’t happen.”’
Iraq had been an anticlimax for most of those who had been there. Hugo Farmer went to Basra on his first deployment with the Paras in December 2005. He was unlikely to be satisfied with the sort of duties that awaited him. Farmer was twenty-six. He had had a stellar university career, graduating from Bristol with a double first in Chemistry and Law. His first ambition had been ‘to make as much money as possible’. The City snapped him up. It did not take long for him to decide that a career in corporate finance was not for him.
My life was pretty rubbish. There was very little satisfaction and lots of work that seemingly went nowhere, lots of people above me justfying their existence by creating heat and light but not actually doing anything substantial or proper. I would be in the office by eight a.m. Initially it wasn’t too bad. I would be gone by seven p.m. But then I switched teams and it was eleven p.m. You go home, shower, go to bed and you get up and it all happens all over again. You couldn’t guarantee you weren’t going to be in the office at the weekend.
Farmer felt he was ‘becoming a grey man’. He was haunted by the example of one of his colleagues, only a few years older, who had a wife and child and was saddled with the huge mortgage needed to buy the sort of house his status demanded. ‘He was a beaten man,’ he said. ‘He was resigned to the facts.’ There were lots like him, ‘treading the same old boardwalk, just getting richer and fatter and older. I thought to myself, “I need to change tack here. I need to do something interesting.”’
Farmer had no soldiers in his immediate family but knew some from university and thought they were ‘fun-loving, always doing interesting things’. There was a friend of the family who had joined the SAS. He thought to himself, ‘If he can do it then I can.’ A little research told him that 50 per cent of the SAS had started off in the Paras (the figure now is 58 per cent). He left his job even before he had been accepted at Sandhurst. He went there in January 2004, sponsored by the Paras, and arrived at ‘A’ Company under Will Pike in the early СКАЧАТЬ