The Girl I Left Behind Me: The Warriors, #1

Before You Start

On The Structure Of Units In The British Army

To the lay person the British Army is a strange and mysterious place. Its structures and terminology provide a common frame of reference for those inside the organisation, but are a foreign language to those who are unfamiliar with the military way of life. This Appendix and the Glossary below it are aimed at assisting the lay person to understand the jargon and the organisational structures that are used in this book. This explanation is based on current British Army practice and some ex-servicemen may see differences from the time when they served.

The smallest recognised formation in an infantry unit is the section. It’s made up of eight men split into two fire teams of four men each, a Charlie team led by a Corporal and a Delta team led by a Lance Corporal, who is also second in command of the section, or 2IC. Both fire teams are similarly equipped with the Corporal/Lance Corporal plus one rifleman armed with 5.56 mm SA80 rifles, another rifleman armed with a 7.62 mm light machine gun and the fourth rifleman with a 5.56 mm light support weapon.

Three sections combined make up a Platoon of 24 men, which is commanded by a junior officer with a sergeant as his 2IC. Junior Officers are, in ascending order of rank, Second Lieutenant, Lieutenant and Captain. For identification purposes platoons are traditionally numbered 1 to 4.

A Company is made up of four Platoons, with a Major commanding it. He will be assisted by a Company Sergeant Major and may have runners, a driver and a Quartermaster Sgt at his disposal. His second in command is the senior most Platoon commander who is usually a Captain. Across the companies will be a spread of specialist teams such as mortar, machine gun and reconnaissance platoons. In addition there will be individual soldiers trained to carry out specific tasks, such as snipers, first aid and EOD.

A Battalion is made up of four rifle companies, identified as A, B, C and D, and a headquarters company. The commanding officer is a Lieutenant Colonel, assisted by his 2IC who will be a Major, the Regimental Sergeant Major, responsible for discipline and ceremonial, and a wide range of specialist trades such as medical, intelligence, technical, communications, quartermaster and administration. Armoured units are called regiments rather than battalions and their companies are called squadrons.

Confusingly an infantry regiment is one that has one or more battalions. In this story C Company is part of the 2nd Battalion the Middlesex Regiment, which implies that there is also a 1st Battalion Middlesex Regiment. An infantry regiment is commanded by a Colonel, which is an administrative and ceremonial role rather than an operational command and is often combined with another duty, such as Staff Officer or Garrison Commander. A complete regiment will often include battalions made up of reservists, part time soldiers who are members of the Territorial Army.

In operational terms two or more battalions under the same command make up a Brigade, commanded by a Brigadier. To assist him he will have a Chief of Staff, usually a full Colonel who is also the 2IC. The Chief of Staff leads a number of staff officers, designated G1 to G9. G1, for example, is responsible for personnel, G2 for intelligence and security, etc. In some circumstances one officer may combine two or more staff responsibilities. The Brigadier will also have direct command over a number of embedded units such as artillery, logistics, communications and engineers.

Brigades are normally designated mechanised or armoured. A Mechanised Brigade is made up of at least two mechanised infantry battalions and one armoured regiment, while an Armoured Brigade has at least two armoured regiments and one infantry battalion. Mechanised means that the soldiers are equipped with armoured fighting vehicles that transport them to the battlefield, though to win the battle they will inevitably have to put ‘boots on the ground’.

Two or more Brigades under a single command form a Division, commanded by a Major General. The Divisional headquarters is organised in a similar manner to a Brigade though the staff officers will usually be of more senior rank. The Divisional Commander will also have additional resources available to him, including units from the Army Air Corps who will provide aerial reconnaissance and ground attack capability. Divisions are designated as Armoured or Infantry depending on the mix of brigades that make them up.

At the time that the story was set in, the end of 2012, there was one Mechanised Brigade deployed in Afghanistan. It was made up of four infantry battalions plus an armoured regiment operating in an infantry and reconnaissance role. There were also a wide variety of embedded and support units. To enhance its capabilities the Brigade also had command over units normally seen only at divisional level, such as helicopters and the field hospital. The Royal Air Force and Royal Navy also had a considerable presence in the country, bringing the total strength of British forces in theatre to around 9,500.

Communications

In the fog of war it is important that everyone is able to communicate with and identify everyone else, especially over the radio where voices might not be immediately recognisable. In times past a platoon might only have one radio available to communicate with higher authority, but with the advent of more modern communications equipment all soldiers in a unit now carry a personal role radio (PRR), allowing 100% levels of communications. Command vehicles and Headquarters units have the capability to communicate both upwards and downwards along the chain of command using different radio networks.

To reduce confusion over identities there is a call-sign system. For the purposes of this story the C Company call-sign is Shark. The platoon call-signs are: 1 Platoon: Catfish, 2: Dogfish, 3: Swordfish and 4: Angelfish. The three sections within 1 Platoon are designated Catfish 1, 2 and 3. Within the sections the soldiers are each numbered off with the Corporal being 1, the Lance Corporal being 2, and the six privates being 3 to 8. For the purposes of this story the two man crew of the section Mastiff vehicle are designated alpha and bravo. To identify themselves over the radio each soldier will refer to himself by the section call-sign plus his own number, eg Catfish one one, Catfish one two, etc. Call-signs are also sometimes used in everyday conversation as a form of shorthand to indicate which bit of the organisation is being discussed or to identify an individual or group.

Glossary

In memory of my father

Company Sergeant Major Robert (Bob) Cubitt

Middlesex Regiment

21st February 1921- 17th January 2011

"I’m lonesome since I crossed the hill

And over the moor that’s sedgy

Such lonely thoughts my heart do fill

Since parting with my Betsey

I seek for one as fair and gay

But find none to remind me

How sweet the hours I passed away

With the girl I left behind me."

Anonymous popular song of the American Civil War, based on an older European soldiers’ song, possibly originating in Ireland.

1.  Accident Of War

Death crept into Pakistani airspace at the relatively slow speed of 170 knots. From the ground far below it was invisible to the naked eye. So small was it in comparison to its height that it didn’t even cast a shadow on the sides of the mountains.

In the air conditioned control room at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, Captain Cory Duncan of the United States Air Force checked the position of his aircraft.

OK guys, we are now in Pakistan air space. He flicked his radio switch. Achilles One Zero this is Catcher Five. What is the status of hostile aircraft?

Achilles One Zero, we have six PAF aircraft in the air at present. We classify them as two pairs of Chengdu Sevens and one pair of Mirage Threes. All are deployed along the frontiers with Kashmir and India. No hostile aircraft in your sector. The radar operator of the E3 Sentry aircraft, flying high above the Indian Ocean, signed off with a cheery ‘Have a nice day‘.

OK guys, we have 400 miles to target. No hostiles in the area. At the current cruising speed of their aircraft it would take more than two hours to reach the target.

The mission specialist sitting at the next console raised his head. We are under radar surveillance, but no missile signatures at present.

Their General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper RPV would show up brightly on the Pakistani air defence radar systems, and no doubt half a world away a radar operator was tracking their 170 knot progress across his airspace. It was well within the capability of the Pakistani Air Force to locate and destroy a Reaper, but for reasons best known to themselves they had never tried. They raised merry hell every time a mission such as this was carried out, but never raised a finger to stop them. In the meantime mission Catcher Five flew on towards its target at 50,000 feet.

* * *

In the far off city of Abbottabad in North West Pakistan a man settled himself onto a roof to carry out his part of the Catcher Five mission. He was born in Pakistan and regarded himself as a Pakistani patriot, but his wages had been paid by the United States of America ever since he had returned home from his short trip to that country.

In this town the leader of the Al Qaeda terrorist movement had been tracked down and killed by U.S. Navy Seals. Now it was his mission to bring about the end of another enemy of Uncle Sam and, as far as he was concerned, an enemy of his own country.

From his battered rucksack the man pulled out a metal clad attaché case. Opening it he withdrew a rectangular object from its foam rubber packing. It was painted in a camouflaged pattern and had an aperture at one end housing a lens. He laid it gently on the parapet of the roof and took out the other object in the case, a collapsible tripod. The tripod was screwed into the base of the device, the legs were extended then the whole assembly set down carefully behind the waste high wall that surrounded the roof. On hot nights people slept up here and it wouldn’t do for a sleepy child to fall over the edge of the roof.

The man sighted along the device and lined it up carefully on the house that was providing temporary accommodation for the second in command of the Taliban in North West Pakistan.

A check on his watch showed it was still a long time to go before the aircraft would be in range. No point in wasting valuable battery life by switching the device on too early.

* * *

Trying to overcome his boredom Cory remembered back to when he had joined the United States Air Force and had imagined himself screaming across the skies in a jet fighter, dog fighting with whatever enemies Uncle Sam asked him to fight. For a while that is what he had done, flying F17s in Germany and then South Korea, though he had never been engaged in a dog fight. On 20th March 2003, Cory had flown his F17 into Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He was disappointed when the Iraqi air force refused to take to the skies to fight him and his comrades.

Now he was posted to 432nd Fighter Wing at Creech, and wore his flight suit only as a way of distinguishing himself from the ground staff at the base. The aircraft he flew was controlled by signals bounced off satellites while he sat at a console in Nevada and the Reaper was high above the mountains and plains of Afghanistan and Pakistan and, more rarely, Iran.

This mission had started out as a routine tasking to detect the incursion of terrorists along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. It was a search and destroy mission, and they were ‘weapons free’ to engage any hostile targets they encountered. About an hour into the mission they had been re-tasked to this new operation, a missile attack on a house in a city a third of the world away.

OK, target is confirmed at location. The intelligence analyst announced, looking up from his computer screen.

What is our target? Cory asked out of curiosity.

A house. The analyst replied.

No shit Sherlock. That’s so helpful.

Staff Sgt Willy Westheimer blushed in acknowledgement of his gaff. Sorry, Sir. It’s a senior figure in the Taliban, that’s all they’ve told me.

It was the job of the intelligence analyst, the third member of the Reaper flight team, to confirm the nature of the target before they released any weapons. It was his responsibility to decide if they were the enemy or just a bunch of kids on their way to school. In this case, however, he wouldn’t even see the human target, so this time he wouldn’t be responsible for identifying him when the time came. That was the responsibility of a man risking his life on the ground in Pakistan.

Time ticked by and the crew chatted to relieve the boredom. An imaginary line in the sky was finally passed and Lieutenant ‘Ace’ Vincent, the weapons specialist, announced that Catcher Five was within range to begin the attack sequence.

Taking us down to attack height. Cory pushed forward the joystick mounted on the arm of his leather chair. It was hardly any different from that used to control a games console. In the sky above Pakistan the Reaper’s nose dropped and the aircraft began to descend to 20,000 feet.

* * *

On the sweltering roof in Pakistan the man checked his watch again. The mobile phone in his hand vibrated to indicate that a text message had been received. The message contained only one word, the code word for the mission to proceed.

The man flicked a switch on the side of the rectangular object, then sighted along it again. Half a mile away a miniscule green dot appeared on the side wall of a house.

* * *

We have laser lock. ‘Ace’ informed the team. Like Duncan he had joined the Air Force to fly in fast jets, but now flew a technology driven operating console instead. Still, it wasn’t too much of a hard life, playing computer games at Uncle Sam’s expense, and just down the road was the city of Las Vegas. For a gambling man like ‘Ace’ that could only be good news. Meanwhile, the Raytheon sensor systems aboard the Reaper had picked up the electromagnetic signature of laser light being reflected from the target, which was all that ‘Ace’ needed to carry the mission through to its conclusion.

* * *

The man turned as he heard voices approaching up the stairs that led to the roof. The house was supposed to be empty, and he had paid hard American dollars for it to be so. The door at the top of the stairs was jammed shut from the outside, a stout chair wedged under the handle, but if someone wanted to gain access to the roof it wouldn’t take much effort. The voices faded and the man relaxed a little. The tiny nudge of his foot against the tripod that held the laser target designator went unnoticed. Over the half mile space between the roof and