bobdina
08-31-2009, 12:07 PM
Women are just another frontline weapon when the s*** hits the fan’
Sam Kiley
Corporal Sarah Bryant
Chantelle drops down into the body of the lightly armoured Snatch Land Rover. Bullets are hitting the sides, making a pinging sound. She bounces back up through the roof hatch, exposing her head and shoulders.
“What the f***?”
A Taleban fighter is standing in a field about 40m (130ft) away. He’s got a gun and he’s shooting at her. Chantelle swings her rifle on to him. He’s so close he almost fills the sights of her stubby SA80 rifle.
Snap. Snap. She shoots twice; each time her gun leaps.
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“Contact left! Contact left!” she shouts Mad, bad and dangerous for our Forces
“I can’t f***ing believe it. He’s just standing there, in the field, and he’s shooting at me,” Chantelle thinks.
She pulls off another five shots. The man flops to the ground, out of sight behind an irrigation channel.
Chantelle doesn’t know if she’s killed him or not. Doesn’t care — so long as he’s not shooting at her any more. In the vehicle at the back of the convoy an Argyll soldier has been shot through the abdomen. The commander of the company, Major Harry Clark, is sitting in the front of Chantelle’s Snatch Land Rover.
Clark asks: “What are you lot shooting at? Where is the firing coming from?”
“There’s a dead guy in that field and we’re under fire — sir.”
“Ah. Carry on Chantelle.”
Now 32, she’s been in the Army for ten years. When she joined she’d been working at Topshop. She is blonde and has a no-nonsense walk. Her voice is soft, slightly interrogative.
Charismatic and motherly, she is also feared. The young men under her command want to please and impress her. She’s a fully qualified Urban Operations Instructor, which means that she teaches soldiers how to fight in towns.
“Something is wrong, very wrong,” she thinks. Marjah, 15km (9 miles) south west of Lashkar Gah, is a mixture of town and country. Huge compounds surrounded by high, thick brown mud walls create shoulder-wide alleyways. These open on to fields chopped into quadrangles by irrigation channels. The roads are like tramlines with ditches running either side.Part of a tiny force of about 30 people, she is certain that they are going to get ambushed. She is excited.
She’s done tours in Iraq. She is a highly trained infantry instructor, even though women are not, technically, supposed to serve as combat troops. Like every other soldier in her vehicle, she is anxious to test her skills.
“I’m not going to come over all politically correct and pretend that I’m not first a soldier. When the s*** hits the fan I’m just another weapon on the ground,” she says.
In mid-June Clark is east of Lashkar Gah with his two platoons. They have had a short battle with a large force of Taleban and are following them up. He is with Second Lieutenant Chris Hesketh and an Afghan translator. They approach a building hoping to speak with its occupants. There is no one inside and so they walk farther forward up to an embankment to have a look ahead.
Clark and Hesketh are silent but relaxed. They are farther away from the rest of the platoon than is sensible, they know that, but the slight rise ahead of them gives them the height they need to survey the ground. They find themselves on the edge of a wadi [valley] and 20m (65ft) to their right a group of Taleban are coming the other way.
The two groups immediately fire at each other. Hesketh and Clark fall on to their faces. They are pinned down; their translator runs away. Hesketh pulls out two grenades and tosses them into the ditch. The ground shakes and the air fills with gravel. Hesketh scrambles on to his knees with his rifle ready. The grenades have no effect.
The Taleban are hurrying closer. But they haven’t seen him. He stands up as they get close and fires a long burst into the men below him. One is killed instantly; two or three look like they are badly hit. The two officers run back to the rest of Hesketh’s 5 Platoon.
They return to the site of the ambush with the rest of his men and find the Taleban fighter he has killed.
The body is carried back closer to the road. A small team of four SAS reservists and an Intelligence Corps corporal, Sarah Bryant, are sent to collect it. They turn right off a main route on to a dirt track, crossing a culvert close to Clark’s men, and vanish in a bulge of black smoke and fire. The Land Rover bucks into the air and comes down with a crash.
The Jocks stare as the smoking mess of metal, which is supposed to protect people from bombs and bullets but really just chews them up. Sarah, Corporal Sean Reeve, Lance Corporal Richard Larkin and trooper Paul Stout are killed instantly. One SAS soldier has survived, trapped behind the steering wheel.
Sarah Bryant had been working mainly on psychological operations. She is the first female soldier to die in Afghanistan. Pretty, blonde, recently married and with a movie-star smile, she’d been hard to miss in the claustrophobic camp at Lashkar Gah. The thought of her being torn to pieces by a bomb was somehow indecent, dirty. She was no more, or less, loved than the others who died that day — but she was blonde and pretty.
Now she was a body being zipped into a bag, loaded into a coffin and on to a Hercules aircraft amid bugles and flapping flags.
Her death caused a media sensation in Britain. But given that women are driving convoy trucks, which are attacked and blown up every day; that they are running intelligence and psychological operations, flying aircraft, dismantling bombs and patrolling with infantry every day, most soldiers in Helmand are surprised that more women have not been killed. The sight of a woman on the front line is now routine.
Sam Kiley
Corporal Sarah Bryant
Chantelle drops down into the body of the lightly armoured Snatch Land Rover. Bullets are hitting the sides, making a pinging sound. She bounces back up through the roof hatch, exposing her head and shoulders.
“What the f***?”
A Taleban fighter is standing in a field about 40m (130ft) away. He’s got a gun and he’s shooting at her. Chantelle swings her rifle on to him. He’s so close he almost fills the sights of her stubby SA80 rifle.
Snap. Snap. She shoots twice; each time her gun leaps.
Related Links
“Contact left! Contact left!” she shouts Mad, bad and dangerous for our Forces
“I can’t f***ing believe it. He’s just standing there, in the field, and he’s shooting at me,” Chantelle thinks.
She pulls off another five shots. The man flops to the ground, out of sight behind an irrigation channel.
Chantelle doesn’t know if she’s killed him or not. Doesn’t care — so long as he’s not shooting at her any more. In the vehicle at the back of the convoy an Argyll soldier has been shot through the abdomen. The commander of the company, Major Harry Clark, is sitting in the front of Chantelle’s Snatch Land Rover.
Clark asks: “What are you lot shooting at? Where is the firing coming from?”
“There’s a dead guy in that field and we’re under fire — sir.”
“Ah. Carry on Chantelle.”
Now 32, she’s been in the Army for ten years. When she joined she’d been working at Topshop. She is blonde and has a no-nonsense walk. Her voice is soft, slightly interrogative.
Charismatic and motherly, she is also feared. The young men under her command want to please and impress her. She’s a fully qualified Urban Operations Instructor, which means that she teaches soldiers how to fight in towns.
“Something is wrong, very wrong,” she thinks. Marjah, 15km (9 miles) south west of Lashkar Gah, is a mixture of town and country. Huge compounds surrounded by high, thick brown mud walls create shoulder-wide alleyways. These open on to fields chopped into quadrangles by irrigation channels. The roads are like tramlines with ditches running either side.Part of a tiny force of about 30 people, she is certain that they are going to get ambushed. She is excited.
She’s done tours in Iraq. She is a highly trained infantry instructor, even though women are not, technically, supposed to serve as combat troops. Like every other soldier in her vehicle, she is anxious to test her skills.
“I’m not going to come over all politically correct and pretend that I’m not first a soldier. When the s*** hits the fan I’m just another weapon on the ground,” she says.
In mid-June Clark is east of Lashkar Gah with his two platoons. They have had a short battle with a large force of Taleban and are following them up. He is with Second Lieutenant Chris Hesketh and an Afghan translator. They approach a building hoping to speak with its occupants. There is no one inside and so they walk farther forward up to an embankment to have a look ahead.
Clark and Hesketh are silent but relaxed. They are farther away from the rest of the platoon than is sensible, they know that, but the slight rise ahead of them gives them the height they need to survey the ground. They find themselves on the edge of a wadi [valley] and 20m (65ft) to their right a group of Taleban are coming the other way.
The two groups immediately fire at each other. Hesketh and Clark fall on to their faces. They are pinned down; their translator runs away. Hesketh pulls out two grenades and tosses them into the ditch. The ground shakes and the air fills with gravel. Hesketh scrambles on to his knees with his rifle ready. The grenades have no effect.
The Taleban are hurrying closer. But they haven’t seen him. He stands up as they get close and fires a long burst into the men below him. One is killed instantly; two or three look like they are badly hit. The two officers run back to the rest of Hesketh’s 5 Platoon.
They return to the site of the ambush with the rest of his men and find the Taleban fighter he has killed.
The body is carried back closer to the road. A small team of four SAS reservists and an Intelligence Corps corporal, Sarah Bryant, are sent to collect it. They turn right off a main route on to a dirt track, crossing a culvert close to Clark’s men, and vanish in a bulge of black smoke and fire. The Land Rover bucks into the air and comes down with a crash.
The Jocks stare as the smoking mess of metal, which is supposed to protect people from bombs and bullets but really just chews them up. Sarah, Corporal Sean Reeve, Lance Corporal Richard Larkin and trooper Paul Stout are killed instantly. One SAS soldier has survived, trapped behind the steering wheel.
Sarah Bryant had been working mainly on psychological operations. She is the first female soldier to die in Afghanistan. Pretty, blonde, recently married and with a movie-star smile, she’d been hard to miss in the claustrophobic camp at Lashkar Gah. The thought of her being torn to pieces by a bomb was somehow indecent, dirty. She was no more, or less, loved than the others who died that day — but she was blonde and pretty.
Now she was a body being zipped into a bag, loaded into a coffin and on to a Hercules aircraft amid bugles and flapping flags.
Her death caused a media sensation in Britain. But given that women are driving convoy trucks, which are attacked and blown up every day; that they are running intelligence and psychological operations, flying aircraft, dismantling bombs and patrolling with infantry every day, most soldiers in Helmand are surprised that more women have not been killed. The sight of a woman on the front line is now routine.