BE in no doubt that there’s a full-on war going on in Helmand Province.
British troops are engaged every single day in some sort of action.
In a recent attack on the small town of Musa Qala they encountered the Taliban in battalion strength. And that’s the first time Our Boys have faced such numbers since the Second World War.
At Camp Bastion I watched the Apache gunships lifting off with Hellfire missiles and rockets slung under their bellies. And half an hour later, they’d be back — empty.
More worryingly, you occasionally see a Chinook med-evac chopper lumbering into the sky and you know that somewhere out there, in the desert, some poor bastard has had his legs blown off.
Meanwhile, the Gurkhas are getting so close to the enemy that they are actually using their fearsome kukri knives. You hear tales that boggle the mind. Of Apache pilots using the rear wheel of their chopper to knock Taliban spotters from their motorcycles.
Of how an alarming number of the enemy were born and bred in Birmingham and of machine gun barrels getting so hot they become see-through.
The numbers are astonishing. Our troops have fired 12,000 artillery shells since June. And to put that in perspective, only 6,000 were used in the shock-and-awe invasion of Iraq.
What’s more, in the last 15 months, infantry troops have got through 2.7million rounds of ammunition. That is 6,000 — a day. And it’s not a one-way street either.
Camp Bastion is littered with smashed and broken tank transporters, blown to pieces by roadside bombs. The new Mastiff trucks are proving to be more resilient.
So the Taliban are now using SIX land mines piled on top of one another to take them out.
The REME are working flat out, seven days a week, to keep the frontline troops mobile in the face of heavy losses.
Weirdly, however, it’s a war that’s being fought behind closed doors.
If this was any other time, or any other conflict, we’d all be glued to our radios and our televisions and our internets, desperate to hear how our lads are doing over there. Names like Musa Qala and Mandi Sar would be as well known as Arnhem and Dunkirk.
But this isn’t happening. When I came home, I checked the BBC news website to see what was going on. And there was nothing. They had lots on the plight of the polar bear, and global warming in general. There were some amusing clips of small animals falling over and a story about whether David Tennant would stay on as Doctor Who.
But the 7,800 British men and women fighting a war didn’t warrant a mention.
I’m afraid it’s the same story in many of the newspapers. There’s lots on who’s going out with the president of France, and even more on Katherine Jenkins’ latest squeeze.
But nothing on the big push in Northern Helmand.
This, I suspect, is the main reason why troops coming home are still not being given the respect and honours they deserve.
No one knows what they’re coming home from. Well let me enlighten you.
They are coming home from fighting a bloody, horrible and pointless war, in hell.
British troops are engaged every single day in some sort of action.
In a recent attack on the small town of Musa Qala they encountered the Taliban in battalion strength. And that’s the first time Our Boys have faced such numbers since the Second World War.
At Camp Bastion I watched the Apache gunships lifting off with Hellfire missiles and rockets slung under their bellies. And half an hour later, they’d be back — empty.
More worryingly, you occasionally see a Chinook med-evac chopper lumbering into the sky and you know that somewhere out there, in the desert, some poor bastard has had his legs blown off.
Meanwhile, the Gurkhas are getting so close to the enemy that they are actually using their fearsome kukri knives. You hear tales that boggle the mind. Of Apache pilots using the rear wheel of their chopper to knock Taliban spotters from their motorcycles.
Of how an alarming number of the enemy were born and bred in Birmingham and of machine gun barrels getting so hot they become see-through.
The numbers are astonishing. Our troops have fired 12,000 artillery shells since June. And to put that in perspective, only 6,000 were used in the shock-and-awe invasion of Iraq.
What’s more, in the last 15 months, infantry troops have got through 2.7million rounds of ammunition. That is 6,000 — a day. And it’s not a one-way street either.
Camp Bastion is littered with smashed and broken tank transporters, blown to pieces by roadside bombs. The new Mastiff trucks are proving to be more resilient.
So the Taliban are now using SIX land mines piled on top of one another to take them out.
The REME are working flat out, seven days a week, to keep the frontline troops mobile in the face of heavy losses.
Weirdly, however, it’s a war that’s being fought behind closed doors.
If this was any other time, or any other conflict, we’d all be glued to our radios and our televisions and our internets, desperate to hear how our lads are doing over there. Names like Musa Qala and Mandi Sar would be as well known as Arnhem and Dunkirk.
But this isn’t happening. When I came home, I checked the BBC news website to see what was going on. And there was nothing. They had lots on the plight of the polar bear, and global warming in general. There were some amusing clips of small animals falling over and a story about whether David Tennant would stay on as Doctor Who.
But the 7,800 British men and women fighting a war didn’t warrant a mention.
I’m afraid it’s the same story in many of the newspapers. There’s lots on who’s going out with the president of France, and even more on Katherine Jenkins’ latest squeeze.
But nothing on the big push in Northern Helmand.
This, I suspect, is the main reason why troops coming home are still not being given the respect and honours they deserve.
No one knows what they’re coming home from. Well let me enlighten you.
They are coming home from fighting a bloody, horrible and pointless war, in hell.
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