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the shared beliefs and characteristics, the men who went to Helmand were a diverse bunch. Membership of an elite also implies tolerance towards fellow members of the club. Individualism, the courage to be yourself, was regarded as a Para virtue.
All military units are shaped to some degree by the personality of their commanders. In Stuart Tootal, 3 Para had a leader who was complex and reflective, but also assured and determined to succeed. He took over command in October 2005 from Lieutenant Colonel Matt Lowe, described by one of his officers as a ‘good old-fashioned CO … rather aloof’. Another regarded the two men as ‘two different beasts. Matt Lowe was more considered in his outlook. Stuart is probably a bit more intuitive, instinctive, more aggressive.’
Tootal was forty-one at the time of the Helmand deployment. He arrived relatively late to the Parachute Regiment, and adopted its ways with all the zeal of the convert. He came from a strong military background. His grandfather was in Bomber Command and was killed over Germany. His father, Patrick, was a career RAF officer who ended his service as a group captain. Tootal went through a statutory rebel phase as a teenager. His father remembers him turning up to meet him at the Ministry of Defence building in Whitehall wearing a Greenpeace T-shirt. But he had taken to heart Samuel Johnson’s maxim that every man thinks less of himself for not having been a soldier. He joined his school’s Combined Cadet Force and after studying history and politics at London University went to Sandhurst. He was commissioned in 1988 and joined the Queen’s Own Highlanders. He served in Northern Ireland and was in the desert for the first and second Gulf Wars. On the way to his command he studied for a master’s degree in international relations at St John’s College, Cambridge, and an MA in war studies at King’s College London, where he later spent six months on a visiting defence research fellowship. This made him a very well-educated officer, even in the modern British military, where academic achievement is admired. His main area of expertise was counterinsurgency. He had had a chance to study it first-hand when he went to southern Iraq in 2003 as second-in-command of 1 Para.
At the time of the Helmand deployment Tootal was a bachelor with no family distractions to blunt his appetite for work. He expected the same degree of dedication from his men and worked those under him hard. Yet no one doubted his commitment to his men. ‘When Colonel Tootal came in it was quite clear that he had a human side,’ said one of his platoon commanders. ‘His heart was very much in the right place. He cares a lot about the blokes and their welfare and he wants to look after them. We instantly respected him because he had the right priorities. He didn’t treat the blokes like assets.’
Tootal was supported by a second-in-command who was not afraid to challenge his boss’s thinking. The phlegmatic approach of Major Huw Williams was much appreciated in the many moments of crisis. ‘Huw was a great foil to Stuart,’ said one officer. ‘When he came up with a proposal he would say to him, “Yes, this is plausible, no, that is not.”’ They made a good team and won the confidence of those who had to execute their orders ‘We were all happy with what was coming down from above,’ said one platoon commander. ‘I never heard anyone say, “This is fucking stupid, this is madness.” [They] just came up with good sensible plans … you can’t ask for more than that.’
During the Helmand campaign Tootal would come to rely greatly on the support of his regimental sergeant majors. Nigel Bishop was his RSM for the first three months until he moved on to another posting. He was replaced by John Hardy, a twenty-year veteran known as ‘the Razman’ to the troops, who regarded him as a surrogate father. His relationship with Tootal was a vital element in the battalion’s human chemistry. Tootal was the senior officer. Hardy was the senior soldier. As such, they had a bond that transcended the vertical hierarchy. ‘I bark to one man and that is the CO,’ Hardy said. ‘I don’t wag my tail for anyone else.’ Hardy had many responsibilities. The most important, though, was to act as a conduit between the blokes and the boss – ‘telling the CO how it was’.
3 Para, like all infantry battalions, is configured in tiers. At the top is the CO (commanding officer) and his headquarters staff, who manage and direct the battalion. The fighting soldiers are formed into companies. Each company is divided into two or three platoons and each platoon into sections. The number of men in a company varies, but it can be as many as a hundred or as few as sixty. In 3 Para ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ Companies were the rifle companies, the basic fighting unit. They were sustained and augmented by Support Company, which provided additional firepower in the shape of machine guns, mortars and anti-tank weapons. ‘D’ Company was the ISTAR company providing specialised Intelligence, Signals, Target Acquisition (snipers) and Reconnaissance expertise.
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