Profiles

:: March 2007

Day eight

The Longest Day

Bastion – Lashkah Gah – Bastion – Bagram – Kabul - Bastion.

Toby doesn't look like he wants to go faster

Well, what a day. I wake up not feeling too well, not really able to breathe properly. We're at altitude here, higher than Ben Nevis, and it's incredibly dusty, so I'm not too surprised, but it's still not pleasant. Me, Terry, the dancers and a couple of crew are off to Lashkah Gah to do a small lunchtime show for the people at the outpost there. They are in the middle of a town, real frontline stuff, and we have to get there by Chinook.

These are amazing bits of kit, but as we sit on the tarmac at Bastion for nearly an hour waiting to take-off all strapped in with the rotors going, I'm beginning to dislike them. We set off eventually, and it's hair-raising stuff as the bloke on the Gimpy at the back scans the ground for baddies as we take off. The landing at Lash is sudden and scary, as we have to just suddenly drop out of the sky to ensure that we are not a good target. We get out and I nip to the medic to tell him I can't breathe. He gives me some co codamol, and I can breathe again, so we do the show to about 200 marines in their canteen.

These guys are real sharp end, we even get going five minutes early so that one group of lads who look about 12 can get out on patrol. Talking to them afterwards, everyone here has seen action, everyone knows someone who has been hurt, and yet there is just an atmosphere of extreme professionalism and a desire to get the job done. What surprises me is how little animosity there is towards the locals. Obviously no one likes the Taliban, but the view is that the locals are just innocents who have been caught up in the Taliban's desire to produce drugs and terrorists, and there is a great deal of sympathy for them. There is a feeling that we are genuinely there for the people of Afghanistan, and that to get the job right, we'll be there for quite a while.

At 6pm, we head to the departure lounge at Camp Bastion. A big tent with newspapers and a telly, we sit there for a couple of hours waiting for our Hercules to Kabul. Will, the Colonel in charge of Bastion comes to say goodbye, and he's a very nice bloke with time for everybody. It's such a massive job running a place like this but he tells us that after 28 years in the Marines he feels up to it, and I'm sure he's right.

Then, we're on the Herc. It's noisy, bouncy, hot and horrible so when we land an hour and a half later, we're all ready to jump off the plane. Unfortunately, we're not at Kabul, we're at Bagram, a US airbase where a couple of soldiers are getting off. We then wait for an hour on the side of the runway whilst the Herc refuels, only to be told that it is now too snowy to land at Kabul, and that we'll have to return to Kandahar. We can't believe it, as this means that we'll miss at least one gig in Kabul, and may well not be able to get there at all. It also means that by the time we get back to Kandahar, we'll have been in the Hercules for about six hours, which isn't funny at all.

We land at about 2 in the morning and are put into transit accommodation, a big cow shed of a building that we share with 300 marines. It's hot, dusty, and horrible. The bloke in the top bunk above me tells me off for snoring, and I lay there all night feeling very homesick.

Today is Annabel Marie Foster's first birthday, and I'm 3000 miles away. Superdad.

The crew for Saxon armoured vehicles

Day nine

Kandahar

There is nothing to do today but wait until 8pm for our flight to Kabul. We have no room, so can't sit in it, so we wander around the base like lost sheep. As we are sitting with a coffee outside the EFI we here about our near misses. The day after we left Kandahar for Bastion, the compound next to the Cookhouse was hit by rocket fire, and even worse, shortly after we left Bagram airfield last night, it was hit by a suicide bomber, killing seven people. We sit and listen to the shots and bombs and planes all day, really feeling as if we are in the middle of a war. It's going to get worse though.

Our 8pm flight turns up at half past midnight, and we pile on to head for Kabul. We're promised we'll get there, and to be fair we do. We are herded off our Herc, which turns around and takes off again as quickly as possible, and we jump into Saxon armoured vehicles for the 1km journey to Camp Souter. When we get there we are told that due to recent rocket attacks and a major RPG find in a house that backs on to the base, the alert level is raised and we must wear body armour at all times. Souter is cold an dank and looks just like a base should, very scary. We go to bed at 3 am, looking forward to a couple of days on the frontline.