MB Civic

Ignominious withdrawal from Helmand

British adventures in Afghanistan usually end in massacre, harrowing retreat and humiliation. My own Afghan foray culminated in an ignominious withdrawal last week.

I was “cas-evaced” – or urgently evacuated – from Camp Bastion, the British desert base in Helmand in southern Afghanistan.

The last Daily Telegraph correspondent to be removed from the field in such a way was airlifted out of the Balkans after being peppered by a Claymore mine. I had a bad dose of the runs.

Not that I went without fuss. Delirious with heatstroke and gastroenteritis, I invoked the spirit of Captain Souter, after whom a coalition HQ in Kabul is named and who was one of six soldiers taken prisoner after the 1842 massacre at Gandamak.

He wrapped his regimental colours around his waist as he was assailed by tribesmen wielding long-barrelled jezails. I gripped my laptop as I sank, shaking feverishly, on to a camp bed.

After three days of being expertly patched up by a team of military healers at Bastion’s tented hospital, I was escorted on to a Hercules and flown to Kandahar, where we picked up a wounded soldier before going on to Kabul.

The young soldier looked as if his thumb had been blown off. I sheepishly explained my difficulties and asked him about his injury. “I fell over,” he replied with a grin.

Watching Nato soldiers decked out with side-arms and sunglasses swagger about shops peddling lewd keyrings and furry handcuffs on the military side of Kabul airport led me to contemplate the mission in Afghanistan.

One thought was uppermost: Italy is in charge of reforming the country’s judiciary. Perhaps only they can understand.

Having stopped off in Cyprus, we finally disembarked at Brize Norton. A nurse then accompanied me on a flight from London back home to Ireland. “I find things go much smoother if we use a wheelchair,” she said by way of introduction.

She was clad in a white uniform with a blue cardigan while I sported a de rigueur Afghan beard and a wild “psychiatric” look.

We had an entire corner of a busy Heathrow sub-terminal to ourselves. I cursed my bowels.

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An e-mail from a colleague restored my spirits: “Remember that great line in, of all films, Gone With The Wind, where a southern gent dies in the Civil War and his widow gets a message: ‘While he did not die in battle, nevertheless his death of measles was a gallant one’.”

Camp Bastion, home to 3,300 British troops, which has been plonked on about the most inhospitable terrain in southern Afghanistan, is a six miles by three miles hell-hole surrounded by barbed wire and blast walls.

Soldiers’ drinking and washing water intermittently runs out and temperatures have soared to a body- and soul-destroying 56C.

A scarcity of transport helicopters has led to operations being postponed or cancelled. There are also no commodes. Calls are growing for Tony Blair to visit this desert paradise.

Despite the hardships, morale has been greatly boosted by the performance of British Apache helicopters, which have gone into action for the first time in Afghanistan.

The clincher, according to one officer, was that the first British Hellfire missile fired from an Apache in a battlefield targeted a foe far older than the Afghan.

It destroyed a French military vehicle that had been abandoned after being caught in a Taliban ambush.

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At home and my octogenarian grandma interrupts a gripping account of my travels to Helmand by reminiscing about when she drove through on her way to Pakistan in the 1970s.

She treated scorpion bites with crushed 78rmp records and, having no Afghanis, paid an angry, gun-toting petrol pump attendant in tea leaves.