"It broke me"
Ten years after British troops left Afghanistan, a new documentary tells the real stories of those who fought and died in Helmand
BBC
- Kathryn Knight
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Of the many horrors he witnessed during his six-month tour of Afghanistan’s Helmand Province in 2009, one in particular brought Steven Peters to his knees. Peters, a sergeant in the Welsh Guards, saw his unit’s interpreter blown to pieces in front of him. The man, an Afghan who was seconded to Peters’ team, had been due to go on leave less than 24 hours later, to visit his young family. Instead he became another casualty of this most brutal of wars. “It broke me,” Peters recalls. ‘‘It was like when you’re a child and you start to cry and you can’t stop.”
Yet this terrible tragedy was far from an isolated incident. History would later judge that the ferociously demanding six-month tour by the Welsh Guards – with its extraordinary number of casualties, including 72 fatalities – was the bloodiest period for British forces in the entire Afghan conflict.
Now, to mark the ten-year anniversary of the withdrawal of frontline British troops from Afghanistan in 2014, a compelling new BBC documentary, Helmand: Tour of Duty allows survivors – and their loved ones – to tell their stories. Unsparing in its depiction of the realities of day-to-day warfare, it also examines, unflinchingly, the impact of the conflict on both soldiers and their families.
“I don’t think the public really had an idea of what was going on there on a daily basis,” says Peters, now 42. ‘‘Mortars going off, missiles – there was something happening on an hourly basis. It was constant.”
A career soldier, Peters joined the Army in 1988 as a 16-year-old, retiring only last year. ‘‘Until then, the Army was all I’d known,” he reflects. When he arrived in Helmand in March 2009 he was sergeant of a recce platoon and a veteran of several overseas tours, including the Balkans, Northern Ireland and Iraq. “They were nothing compared to what we walked into in Afghanistan,” he says.
Steven Peters. BBC
This is an assessment made chillingly clear by the documentary and shared by fellow veteran Jonathan Jenkinson, who describes the province as a “relentless 360-degree battleground”.
Jenkinson, who like Peters had joined the Army straight from school, was soon made aware of the stark realities of Helmand. Working as a colour sergeant leading a fire support group, he recalls how a young lance corporal was killed by an IED (improvised explosive device) less than a month after their tour of duty began.
‘‘I think what the Taliban were doing was just sussing us out initially, so for the first couple of weeks, we didn’t really understand what was going to come forth,” he explains.
Working in searing heat and dust, with the risk of landmines all around, the soldiers were also hampered by equipment they didn’t always think was up to the job, among them the “all terrain” Viking vehicle in which they were regularly deployed. “If you hit an IED it wouldn’t take the blast,” says Jenkinson, now 50. “Whenever we were in them I was worried. You’re thinking, ‘Please God, let’s not go over the IEDs.’”
For Peters, the Viking was at the centre of another horrifying incident during which an attempt to secure a canal used by the Taliban to transport troops and weapons nearly ended in tragedy when one vehicle rolled into the water.
It’s like when you’re a child. You cry... and you can’t stop
Steven Peters
Amid the threat of enemy fire, he describes the frantic attempts to open the sealed door of what was fast becoming a watery coffin for those trapped inside. “All I’m thinking is that the Taliban are 100 metres away and they’re going to ambush us, but also knowing that all my soldiers, friends, brothers are drowning.
“Then after about five minutes, we managed to get the door open and bodies were coming out. Some were injured, a couple floated out with no life in them. We got them back, but if we had had two more minutes without any doors opening, we would have lost eight soldiers.”
The memory remains traumatic. “But at the time, we were commanders, and you have to be almost robotic in some sense; everything needs to be filed away somewhere else,” Peters says. “You can’t show weakness. You can’t show that you’re flapping, because it flows down to your soldiers. And there’s no time – you’d have an incident like that, and then six hours later, the next mission comes in. It’s relentless.”
Both men were also mindful of the ongoing anguish of loved ones back home. Peters, then married to first wife Leanne, had left her behind along with three young children aged between one and five, while Jenkinson had a stepdaughter at primary school and young sons with wife Jess.
“Obviously you do think about your family all the time, especially when you’re out on patrol, but you have to compartmentalise,” Jenkinson explains. ‘‘You’ve got your family, and then you’ve got your other family – in the Army.”
Jonathan Jenkinson BBC
This feeling of responsibility towards his men was reinforced after he was injured, struck in the back by an artillery drone, a few months into the tour. Flown back to the UK for intensive treatment, Jenkinson opted to return to Helmand the minute he was declared medically fit. “It was very difficult for my wife to understand,” he acknowledges. “It was upsetting for her and the family, but I needed to get back and do my part and make sure my soldiers were looked after.”
When he finally returned home, suffering flashbacks and nightmares, he chose to undergo private counselling. “I was lucky I didn’t go off the rails,” he says. “Although my wife says, since Afghanistan, I have never really slept properly.” He retired in December 2013 after 23 years of service and went on to work as a hostile environment consultant, which involves visiting dangerous countries. “I must be a glutton for punishment,” he says wryly.
Meanwhile, Peters confides that when he returned home he chose to lock away the traumas he had endured “to be dealt with at a later date”. That came in 2019 when, still a serving soldier, he suffered a breakdown that he only survived through intensive therapy. “I had to embrace the vulnerability and totally open up and it made all the difference,” he says. Today, he lives a quiet life in a Northumberland village, where he works part time as a gamekeeper and for a family security business.
Both men struggled with the news of the withdrawal of the last American troops in August 2021. “When I saw it on the news it left me reeling,” Peters admits. “I had close friends and colleagues who were killed, injured, suffering mental trauma and you ask yourself, ‘Was it all for nothing?’”
Jenkinson found it similarly tough. “At the same time, politicians are paid to make those decisions. You sign on the dotted line, you go where they tell you to go and you do the best job you can while you’re there. If you think about it too much, you could drive yourself crazy.”
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Both hope that the documentary will help viewers to understand more about the realities of war. “Ultimately we are normal people, but there is a lot of suffering that does get left behind and forgotten about,” says Peters, “so it felt good for us to tell our story.”
Authors
Kathryn Knight
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