We are arresting you — for MURDER
He had a spotless, heroic record. But in part two of his haunting memoir, Alexander Blackman tells how months after killing a mortally wounded Taliban fighter, military police handcuffed him and said...
ALL THIS week, the Mail is serialising the searingly honest memoirs of Alexander Blackman — Marine ‘A’ — who was accused of war crimes after a brutal tour of Afghanistan. Yesterday, he described how he shot a mortally wounded insurgent. Here, he reveals how his arrest and being charged with murder sent him into a spiral of torment…
THE truth was out. I had just confessed to my beloved wife, Claire, that, while on patrol with my platoon in Afghanistan, I had shot dead a mortally wounded Taliban prisoner who somehow had been clinging to life despite devastating multiple injuries from which I could see no chance of him recovering.
Over the past 12 hours — ever since I’d been arrested out of the blue on suspicion of a war crime — I’d found myself cast back a year and planted again 4,000 miles away in the hot, danger-filled scrublands surrounding a remote command post in Helmand province.
I had entirely forgotten the incident until, in October 2012, the military police knocked on the door of our house in Taunton and took me away. They showed me a video clip taken in the aftermath of a clash with the enemy, in which I was shown with two of my men allegedly mistreating and verbally abusing a prisoner.
Seeing it had left me unnerved but, most of all, disorientated and confused. It did not represent me or my lads in the best light, nor the light in which I knew we had conducted ourselves across the rest of that hellish six- month period in the autumn of 2011.
As the police interrogated me, I couldn’t remember what had happened and I couldn’t marry the figure on screen with the person that I really am.
After questioning, I had been allowed to go home, and now the memories began to coalesce.
I recalled how my platoon of mainly young recruits was stuck out in the middle of nowhere with a Taliban insurgent who’d been cut to ribbons by a chain gun from an Apache helicopter and was barely alive.
As I had told Claire, faced with the dangerous task of getting him through hostile countryside to a field hospital, I — their veteran sergeant with 16 years’ active service in the Marines — shot him.
A year on, in my head I could make little sense of what I had done and, in many ways, I still can’t. I recalled it as though it were someone else, some other Sgt Alexander Blackman, stranded in a foreign field, scared beyond sense and acting in ways that, for the rest of his days, he would not fully understand.
Was I drawing a line under the events of what had been a hard day under the merciless Afghan sun? At the end of a long, sixmonth tour where friends had died horribly, was I taking out my frustration on this mortally wounded insurgent, whose Taliban comrades — perhaps even the man himself — had killed and maimed so many British soldiers?
I still do not know if there is any one answer that fits. The only way I can fathom it is to say that, for a brief moment, madness took hold of me. And there, in the sitting room at home with Claire, the idea that I did not understand my own actions seemed to push me towards madness again.
It is a strange, unnerving thing hing not to understand your own self. The only thing I do know is that hat I believed, in my head and my heart, eart, that there was no way this insurgent would make it back to a field hospital alive.
Whether I had used my weapon apon on him or not, the outcome would ould have been no different. So why y did I do it? I have no answer to that. at.
I told Claire: ‘I knew I’d done something stupid almost straight ight way. It came over me like a cloud. oud. Something had shifted in me. And I tried to shrug it off. I said something, anything, to get rid d of the moment.
‘I looked at the lads and muttered ered words that would come back k to haunt me. “Shuffle off this mortal ortal coil,” I’d said, quoting Shakespeare akean’t — even though I can’t remember ever seeing or reading ding Shakespeare in my life.
‘It was just something to cut through the tension. I just came out with it. I don’t know why. It was poor judgment, Claire.’
In fact, this was the poorest judgment I’d ever made in either my professional or private life, and I said as much to the lads at the time. The mistake, I told them, was mine.
Afterwards, I got them to take the man’s fingerprints and samples for DNA, which was normal procedure. ‘Then we bugged out,’ I told Claire. ‘Extracted ourselves from the location, got back to base and just collapsed.
‘The next morning, we were back on patrol. The same old fears, the same old dangers. It was another month and more before the tour was over. Claire, I haven’t thought about it until this day.’
There it was. I’d told my wife all of it. I didn’t know how she would react. What might this mean to her? What might it mean for us?
That was when Claire did one of those incredible things that has always made me thank my lucky stars that she’s in my life.
She told me she had my back. That, whatever I’d done in Helmand, it was not her place to judge me. That she trusted me implicitly, that whatever my judgment had been, I was still me.
But neither of us knew what was coming next. I prowled the house, conflicted, bewildered, uncertain of myself and my actions — but confident that whatever happened, I could get through it with Claire by my side. THOUGH I had been interviewed under caution by the military police, I’d been released and was free to get on with my military career. I went back to my training post at Shorncliffe Army Camp in Folkestone. My commanding officers knew a search had been conducted of my accommodation there, but they didn’t know of my interview at the police station, nor of what crimes I was accused.
For my part, I did not yet know what steps the military authorities would take next, nor even if there would be any steps at all.
Six weeks passed before a trio of military policemen came to get me. ‘Colour Sgt Blackman,’ I was told, ‘we are arresting you on suspicion of murder.’
On my first arrest, I’d been thrown and confused by the mention of war crimes, but the word ‘murder’ hit me harder. There was so little ambiguity, so little room for misunderstanding. The shock piled into me with the force of a rocket as they handcuffed me and escorted me away.
I was driven to Bulford Camp on Salisbury Plain for ‘processing and questioning’ at the military court centre there. I was still numb as I was booked in and taken to a stark, concrete cell, with only my reeling thoughts and a strip light to keep me company.
Formal proceedings took place in an interview room. On a flickering computer screen that same video was shown again of me and three of my lads carrying the mortally wounded insurgent between us.
In the background, the lads spat curses and the rotor blades of the Apache helicopter made a maelstrom of the air.
The questions came thick and fast: Why were you holding him like that? Why aren’t you taking more care? What would you have done if it had been one of your guys?
I resisted the urge to tell them
Did I take out my frustration on a dying insurgent? My actions had ruined my life — and Claire’s, too
‘If you want to forget me, I’ll understand’ We determined to be model prisoners
that, if it had been one of my own lads injured in that field, I’d have flung him over my shoulder and pounded across all the miles that lay between us and our compound. I’d have taken every risk to get him to a safe location from where he could be evacuated to a military hospital.
I’d have taken every chance, because he was one of my lads, whereas the man we were carrying had spent five months bent on killing us. Even so, we were carrying him the way we’d been trained to carry casualties, ever since we were new recruits. Instead, as advised by the solicitor I’d been given, I answered the questions with the same, ‘No comment’.
I Im must have watched every frame fram of that video countless times, time but the next day they had something new for me to see — fresh footage from the same sam video, but taken a little later late on.
My stomach sank as I watched wat me shoot the mortally wounded wou insurgent and heard a voice vo that was hardly recognisable nisa as my own uttering curses curs that I cannot believe I truly felt.
Over Ov the next days, the video was shown to me many times as t the interrogation continued. ued I’d be woken from my cell and taken to an interview room, and sometimes I would catch sight of other prisoners getting the same treatment.
It was then that I realised I was not the only Royal Marine to have been arrested in the investigation. I came to understand that five of us had been arrested. Four of the lads I’d brought home safely from that taxing tour were now in cells charged with murder, and all because of something I had done on that one impulsive, tormented afternoon.
It was this that began to weigh on me most of all. As their 38-year-old commanding officer and a father figure to them — some of them were barely half my age and could have been my sons — my sense of having let them down was
overwhelming. After six days of interrogation, the time came when, by
law, I either had to be charged
or released. And so they now MACDIARMID/ formally charged me with ‘the
murder of an unnamed
insurgent in Helmand
Province, Afghanistan’.
As I lay in my cell and contemplated what was happening, a chasm seemed to yawn open and drag me down
into its darkness. I couldn’t sleep. All I had was the deadening knowledge that I’d
ruined my life. And more than that — I’d ruined Claire’s, too.
Everything I’d done throughout Picture: 16 years of exemplary service no longer meant anything. The long years I’d spent representing my country across the world, fighting for democracy and peace in Iraq and Afghanistan, training up countless other Royal Marines to serve their country with the same honour to which I myself had always aspired, were all just dust.
Some time later, I was finally able to speak to Claire on the phone. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. I needed to purge myself of everything I was feeling. The regret, the hopelessness, the terror that I’d squandered not just my life, and the lives of the lads who’d been out with me, but the life of Claire herself.
I told her: ‘If you want to forget about me, to move on and get on with your life, not waste even more years on me, I’ll understand. I wouldn’t hold it against you.’
I told her that she hadn’t asked for this. She hadn’t signed up for life with a man charged with murder, who might be separated from her for yet more years to come. What right did I have to ask her to stay by my side?
If I loved her at all — and I did, with every fibre of my being — I had to be willing to let her walk away. My words had petered out, and I heard Claire’s voice down the phone. ‘Al, I’m not going anywhere. I don’t want to hear you say those things again. I’m here. It’s going to be OK.’
The next day I was on my way to Colchester Military Prison, along with four other marines, also charged with murder. It was the first time I’d seen the lads so close since our return from Helmand.
On the long drive, the Royal Marines who were escorting us pulled into a service station and made a pact with us. We were all going inside to eat and ‘there isn’t going to be any problem with that, is there?’
Afterwards, when our bellies were full and we were back in the van, it wasn’t the food that gave me sustenance. It was the respect we’d been shown.
Our fellow Marines still held us in high enough esteem to know that we wouldn’t try anything funny.
At Colchester, the five of us were housed in one cell. We decided we would not discuss the case, nor the events of the day in Helmand that had tarnished us all. I wanted to play this by the book and avoid any suggestion of collusion.
We would keep our heads down, be compliant, and remember that we were still Royal Marines.
I was determined to be as model a prisoner here as the model soldier I had aspired to be throughout my 16 years of service.
In spite of all of this, it was difficult not to remember that, only a year earlier, I had been the troop sergeant responsible for these lads in Afghanistan.
When I closed my eyes, the thought of what I’d done to these boys, so much younger than me, weighed heavily on my mind.
After a week we were given bail, pending trial — against the wishes of the prosecution, who were insistent that I, in particular, was a flight risk and should not be allowed out. They also argued that I might be a danger to my fellow defendants, which really upset me. It was my first taste of real personal vilification.
Fortunately, the judge disagreed and we were all bailed into the custody of the Royal Marines.
But there were apparently fears that I might self-harm. The wardens at Colchester had detected something in me — some capacity for self-harm, some aspect of depression, that troubled them — and, consequently, one of the conditions of my release was that I should first be appraised and treated in a civilian mental health unit.
I was to be afforded the time and space to decompress from the shock of being arrested and charged with murder. I did everything that I could to be