Marine’s home for six months: Squalid camp in the most dangerous square mile on Earth
THIS is the exposed and squalid camp which Sergeant Alexander Blackman and his men constantly feared would be overrun by the Taliban.
With no roof, a grenade could be lobbed over at any time and there was not even a lock on the gate.
There was little to stop insurgents sneaking in at night to ‘ slit their throats’, Jonathan Goldberg QC told yesterday’s appeal hearing.
Fly-blown Checkpoint Omar had no running water, no cooking facilities and no refrigerator, despite the suffocating 50C heat. Accommodation and living quarters consisted of broiling hot metal shipping containers.
Absurdly for a supposedly secure British base – deep in Taliban country – the makeshift surrounding wall was so low that anyone passing on a tractor could peer into the camp.
The remote outpost was home to Sgt Blackman and the 15 or so Marines he commanded for six hellish months. They rarely saw their superiors, and it was judged too dangerous for visits from the padre.
They were so undermanned they had to go on gruelling patrols twice daily, instead of once, in countryside littered with Taliban mines known as improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
It was described as the ‘most dangerous square mile on Earth’ and a ‘ breeding ground’ for mental health problems. Documentary maker Chris Terrill, who was embedded with another group of Marines less than three miles away, told the Royal Courts of Justice: ‘ Each step of each man was potentially his last, without exaggeration.’
He said hidden bombs ‘ were everywhere and everyone knew that detonation would mean either death or loss of lower limbs and genitalia – the signature injuries of the Afghan war’.
Mr Terrill said his patrol once found the remains of a Marine killed by the Taliban, who had strung his severed legs in a tree and booby-trapped them.
He said: ‘The Taliban – always trying to goad the Marines – knew that they always searched for all the remains of their comrades to include them in the coffin returning to the United Kingdom. We all knew likewise that the fate of any man captured by the Taliban was to be skinned alive, scalping, castration and crucifixion.’
Mr Goldberg told the court: ‘These patrols are ghastly. Sergeant Blackman is a man who is a loner anyway – and in a lonely situation. He’s on his own in a ghastly place, leading young men under his command.
‘They are undermanned so they are having to do two patrols a day. The terror that one must have, knowing that every step could be your last.’
He added: ‘It hardly needs a psychiatrist to point out that the conditions under which Blackman was serving at Checkpoint Omar were ripe for mental illness or breakdown.
‘Every man has his breaking point – even the toughest, and even the best.’