Mirror photographer Phil Coburn was embedded with 52 Brigade BRF in Afghanistan in the 2007 re-taking of Musa Qala from the Taliban – JD Vance’s ‘random country’ comments have not gone down well
Try telling the mothers of UK & Commonwealth soldiers, men and women, who died in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s that the UK is ‘some random country’ that ‘has not fought a war’ in 30 or 40 years.
We deployed troops as part of a NATO response to the 9/11 attacks on America, coming to the US’s aid in their hour of need with arms, manpower and money as an honourable ally who keeps our word. I saw at first hand the sacrifice the US Vice President so outrageously ignores – and it often occurred as a direct result of helping American troops.
In 2007 I was embedded with 52 Brigade B.R.F. (Brigade Reconnaissance Force), in Afghanistan during the re-taking of Musa Qala from the Taliban. This specialist unit lived out of their lightly armoured & open wagons in the desert plains of Helmand as they secured a safe route into Musa Qala for U.S. Paratroopers and Special Forces, often spending months at a time in the open. The Taliban called them the ‘warriors whom only God protects’ because of the flimsiness of their vehicles.
On the evening that we joined them, they were subdued: they had lost one of their number to an I.E.D. explosion that very morning. Trooper Jack Sadler was just 19 when the WMIK Landrover he was in was hit by a blast, killing him instantly.
The next morning, I took a photograph of a soldier called Richie Richardson staring blankly into the distance as he was slumped with his back to the wheel arch of his vehicle. It was only later that I found out he used his own body to put out the phosphorous grenades in Jack’s flak jacket, which had been set off in the blast, even as ammunition exploded all around him.
One of the first people to greet me and my Mirror colleague, Rupert Hamer, that evening was Corpl. Darryl Gardiner, with whom I would spend the next 14 days in his Pinzgauer as we hurtled over the rough terrain west of Helmand town dodging bullets & IEDs. It was typical of Darryl’s kind, open nature that after any close call, he’d make a cup of tea and distract us with talk of his fiancé or his love of sky diving.
A few weeks after we left his unit, he was killed as he drove several comrades who had been wounded in a land mine blast to a site where a helicopter could land to evacuate them. After his funeral I remember his brother Paul telling me that he would never forget the sheer primal howl of grief that his mother made when she heard that her youngest child had been killed fighting for his country.
Of course, the Daily Mirror also lost a fine reporter in Afghanistan – Rupert Hamer himself, who was killed in Helmand Province in 2010. On that occasion, we were with the Americans when an IED hit our convoy. That’s also when I sustained my own life-changing injuries – a double amputation below the knee and a fractured back. One US marine was killed in the same incident alongside Rupert and five others seriously injured.
Rupert and I weren’t fighting, of course, but we did see at first hand the bravery of the troops who were. We wouldn’t have been there had Britain – this ‘random country’ – not been engaged in a war. Not 30-40 years ago, but just 15.
I don’t take Vance’s comments as a personal slight – I think he spoke without thinking, which is the hallmark of the new regime in Washington. His casual insults and failure to grasp even recent historical fact display nothing more than his own lack of class.
I’m still in touch with many of the US soldiers with whom Rupert and I were blown up in 2010. Fine, brave men, they put the vice president of their country, and his childish, dismissive attitude towards another nation’s sacrifice, utterly to shame.