We couldn’t do any more for the mortally wounded insurgent. ‘He’s dead, lads’ I said — and then I shot him
In the first extract from his brutally honest memoir – serialised in the Mail all this week — Alexander Blackman recounts in haunting — detail the day that led to his arrest for war crimes
IN SATURDAY’S Mail, Alexander Blackman — ‘Marine A’ — paid tribute to his wife Claire and the readers of the Mail for a relentless campaign to free him after he was wrongfully convicted of murder while fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. Here, we begin the serialisation of his searing account of how it felt to be branded a murderer, jailed and dismissed from the Royal Marines after 16 years’ exemplary service.
THE seven young lads under my command in J Company, 42 Commando, had been on patrol for eight hours that crucial day — a lifetime in the merciless 40-degree heat of Helmand Province.
They were weary and desperate to get back behind our compound walls to recuperate — for good reason, as I, their 38-year-old veteran troop sergeant and a father figure to them, knew only too well.
It was September 2011, and the war in Afghanistan had long since stopped being one of open confrontations with the Taliban. Now the enemy was all around us, hidden in plain sight.
A local chap smiling at you one moment might be your killer a moment later when he activated the bomb expertly buried in the path of your patrol. A man might rake you with gunfire one moment, then abandon his weapon and pick up a farm tool the next.
Troop numbers were constantly being chipped away by deaths and life-changing injuries from booby-traps. In the aftermath of one sudden violent explosion, the body parts of a fellow soldier whose corpse we hadn’t been able to recover were strung up in the trees to taunt us.
All we could do — knowing that every civilian we met was a possible killer and beneath every step we took was a possible mine — was endure.
And though today had been particularly long and gruelling, at least we were nearing the end of our six-month tour.
In a few days we’d be bugging out of this godforsaken command post in the middle of nowhere and en route home. These days of constant watchfulness and dread, the sense that any moment could be your last, would be over.
Then the radio crackled and everything changed. One of our neighbouring compounds was under attack. A Taliban insurgent armed with an automatic rifle had been spotted. We had to heave back on the heavyweight body armour we’d just taken off and go out again into the blazing sun and the danger.
Outside in the open countryside, I ordered the lads — most of them on their first tour and their first experience of war — to take up a defensive position in the undergrowth while we awaited further orders. Then came the familiar thudding and the heavy chopping of rotor blades as an Apache helicopter arced over us and off to the north, searching for the insurgent.
Not long after, we heard a burst of heavy fire from a chain gun as the Apache blasted more than a hundred rounds at the enemy on the ground. In the silence that followed we were told over the radio the insurgent was ‘deceased’ and we were to go to him and recover his Kalashnikov rifle — standard procedure, to stop it falling into other enemy hands.
‘Roger that,’ I said, as I gee-ed up my exhausted troops for our final mission of the day. About a mile away lay the insurgent, cut to ribbons by a heavy-duty chain gun designed to knock out tanks rather than individuals.
We would retrieve his weapon and then, at last, we would be back taking it easy in our compound.
But every time you think you know the way the world is going, you are wrong. A person’s life can turn on an instant and for me — although I didn’t know it then — that instant had come.
What happened next would see me branded a murderer, jailed and dismissed from the Royal Marines in disgrace — after 16 years in which I’d given my whole life, body and soul, to the service of my country. JUST over a year passed. Back in the UK, I’d been promoted to a military training role. It meant a more regular life, and the joy of weekends with Claire, my wife of three years.
Slowly, bit by bit, I was no longer dogged by the incessant fear that somebody out there, just beyond my line of sight, was planning to get me. I stopped checking that the back doors of our house in Taunton were locked and went to sleep not thinking about rockets exploding across our walls.
And Christmas was spent at home, not in the middle of the desert under threat of attack. It was a new beginning, and I was glad of it.
One Saturday morning in October 2012, we were lying in bed, dozing, with no particular plans for the day ahead, when there was a knock at the front door.
In her dressing gown, Claire went down to answer it and I rolled over. I heard male voices, but thought nothing of it until she called out: ‘Al, come down here . . .’ On the door step were four military police officers in plain clothes and two uniformed policemen from the local constabulary. ‘Colour Sgt Alexander Blackman?’ one of them asked. I nodded. ‘ Colour Sgt Blackman, we’re arresting you on suspicion of committing war crimes. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention . . .’
The rest of it faded away as I tried to comprehend what was happening. The idea of being arrested was just unreal. And for war crimes!
I invited them in, one produced a search warrant, and they fanned out into our home, rifling through everything we owned.
All I could think was that this must be some strange mistake, that it would be finished with soon, the whole affair explained as some accident or miscommunication.
I was a Royal Marine. I’d spent the last year training soldiers. I hadn’t, I was certain, done anything that warranted the military police opening every cupboard and drawer, shining a torch into every intimate area. Over the next couple of hours, they assembled all our electronic equipment, every phone, tablet, laptop, every possible storage device in our home.
Finally, they returned to the living
The Taliban hung the limbs of our dead pal in trees to taunt us
room, where Claire and I had been sequestered. ‘Colour Sgt Blackman,’ the lead officer said, ‘you’ll have to come with us.’
I wasn’t handcuffed and I wasn’t grappled on either side as we headed to a waiting car. I think the policemen understood I was not the kind of man who was going to make a scene, or worse still, try and fight his way out of this. But I was feeling knotted inside.
Ever since I was a boy, I had believed in the ‘system’, that laws and government and all our institutions existed to make sure the right thing happened at the right time. My respect for the system had only become stronger during my military career.
Consequently, as they escorted me inside the police station and the desk sergeant took down my details, emptying out my pockets and finally leading me down a whitewashed corridor to a cell, I still believed all of this was about to be straightened out.
Even as the door closed behind me and I heard the dull thud of the lock, I believed it was a waiting game. After several hours I was led to an interview room, accompanied by a duty solicitor who had been found for me.
The military police took their seats across the table and one of them said: ‘You’ve been arrested because evidence has emerged that suggests you committed acts that may amount to war crimes in September 2011.’
It had been some time since I’d dwelt on those months I’d been with 42 Commando in Helmand. I was one of the fortunate ones who had been able to push much of it to the recesses of my mind and get on with my new job. Others were not so lucky: they’d come home missing arms or legs.
Right now, I felt like a different person, my time there a different era. ‘What evidence?’ I ventured.
‘Video footage has emerged of you on patrol in September 2011.’
I froze. The idea that there could have been unofficial video footage of any part of my tour was a revelation to me.
It was not unheard of for young soldiers on their first tours of duty to take illicit footage as mementos, but it was frowned upon, and I’d had no idea that any of my lads in 42 Commando had done this.
I’d always been of the opinion that if a soldier has time to turn on a camera and start shooting surreptitious footage, then they are not doing their job properly.
We took official footage. Our patrols always included a local interpreter, who carried a camera on which we shot high- quality images and video in order to build up a data bank of local figures in the area. The idea that other footage existed unnerved me.
I was told: ‘We’re going to show you this video. It doesn’t last long. And after that, we’d like to go through some of the specifics of what you’ve seen.’
I watched it flicker on the screen, lasting only seconds, perhaps a minute. I recognised the lads instantly. You do not easily forget the people with whom you spent six of the most difficult, testing months of your life.
But, at first, I didn’t know where or when this really was. It could have been any one of a hundred days pacing the lanes and roads of Helmand. In the shaky images on the screen, I saw four of us, diminutive specks in the distance, approaching in a hurry through a cornfield. The overriding noise was the chopping of helicopter blades.
The figures grew bigger with every step. And there I was. My own face, looming up in the frame. Between two of the marines alongside me, there hung the body of a Taliban insurgent.
Then, as the video neared its completion, we dropped the mortally wounded insurgent down into long grass at the edge of the cornfield. Voices fired back and forth, and I recognised my own among the others.
We were uttering oaths. We were calling the man we had been carrying things that, here in the police station, sounded abusive and vile.
The video ended, and my mind was reeling, still trying to place this day and this particular incident out of the hundreds I’d been through in Afghanistan.
Nothing I’d been watching screamed out at me. The questions began. ‘Do you recognise yourself, Colour Sgt Blackman?’ Of course I did. That is to say — I recognised the physicality of the man in the video who had been leading his lads as they carried the insurgent.
What I found more difficult to recognise were the things we were saying. It didn’t sound like me, but there is no doubt it was my voice — so I told the police officers that I did.
The next question stopped me in my tracks: ‘Why were you carrying him [the wounded insurgent] like that? I looked at them quizzically. ‘Carrying him like what?’
‘So roughly, so inattentively. It seems to me, as an impartial observer, that you and your fellow marines are dragging an injured man bodily out of that field.’
At first, I didn’t know what to say. I knew the images were not pretty. They did not capture any of us in our best lights, and the choice language some of us had been using denigrated us further still.
It did not represent us the way Royal Marines always strive to be represented, as the very best of the best.
But though it might have looked as if we were roughly manhandling the insurgent and treating him with complete disregard, we had actually been carrying him in the way we had been trained to do.
With two of my lads grasping the man’s limbs, spreading his weight between them, we were able to support his body as we crossed a distance as swiftly as possible while limiting the risk of compounding his wounds or generating any new ones.
I’d carried my own comrades like that when I had to. It was a technique designed to strike the right balance between getting help for an injured colleague and minimising the risk to yourself.
In times like this, speed matters. An extra second in the field recovering an injured comrade means an extra second exposed to enemy fire. But the things we were saying in the video, the curses and the insults, framed it so badly that I understood the question I was being asked.
I, too, was horrified by the language we were using. It was unacceptable, cruel and crude.
Yet it did not seem so very unusual. Throw a group of men
He’d been shot from the air with an anti-tank gun