As if by way of riposte to Birdsong’s ever-so-pensive treatment of late, last night’s Royal Marines: Mission Afghanistan brought warfare back to the 21st century with an uncompromising thump. In Episode 1: Deadly Underfoot, Chris Terrill joined Lima Company, 42 Commando, as they took over from their Marine colleagues at Toki base, in the Nad-e Ali district of Helmand. This was in the tenth year of the war – as the greatest of narratives would have it – and the Taliban, so Terrill assured us, were “on the back foot”. There was, presumably, no pun intended.
For 50-odd minutes we followed the unit as they went about their daily business, sleeping, eating, exercising, and taking regular strolls through fields sown with improvised explosives. There was a certain amount of shouty-shouty/shooty-shooty; but it was punctuated by significant spells of sitting about and reading FHM. Or holding stupid-pants fashion-shows. Or just having one’s down-time interrupted by the camera.
If you get hit, get on the phone, if you’ve got any arms and legs left
Terrill’s obvious familiarity with the squaddies yielded good, honest results; but he seemed, at times, to mistake them for his audience (or vice versa, perhaps). His voice-overs frequently dropped into an oddly dim, Attenborough-school register – “Remember, this is Taliban country: dangerous… lawless…” – with too many blokey Mad Max references dropped in for the benefit, presumably, of itinerant Geordie Shore habitués.
This sat uncomfortably beside the (sincere) straight-talk of the soldiers: “If you get hit, get on the phone, if you’ve got any arms and legs left.” Getting hit, it soon became clear, was a question of “not if, but when”. The viewer who’d made it this far in the belief that modern soldiers are immune from the immediacy of war was quickly disabused. These guys were operating from a mud-walled farm in the middle of nowhere: “a latter-day Rourke’s Drift.”
But patchy narration and B-movie sword-and-sandal music notwithstanding, the film was crystal as to its subject: soldiers going on dangerous patrols in order to maintain sitting-duck outposts the better to protect an abandoned village. Or, in the words of the Marines’ intelligence officer: “This area, in the long run, doesn’t matter at all.”
There was no ambiguity, either, about the priorities of the Marines. Their own briefings, delivered unblinkingly under Terrill’s lens, make it clear that their focus was on killing the enemy. None of them was unaware, of course, that “everyone’s a farmer who looks the same as an insurgent”, and that this causes issues with "hearts-and-minds"; but as political complexity goes, that was about it. These guys were not here for a seminar on Clausewitz. The nearest we got to contextual commentary was the occasional close-up of a poppy.
At the crux of the episode, the Marines went out on patrol for hours, in 50-degree heat, round “one of the most dangerous square kilometres in the world,” for the expressed purpose of getting shot at. But the Taliban won’t fight fair, they don’t come out and shoot: they just drift around on the periphery of your vision, then try to lead you into a minefield. (At one point, early on, the Marines, hamstrung by the need for legitimate "prosecution", watched a known insurgent scout walk casually out of shot because they couldn’t catch him delivering intelligence in plain sight.)
When they were finally pinned down, the Taliban responded by sending out kids in their place. The Marines’ verdict on this was as vociferous as you’d expect. The patrol decided to call it a day, but their frustration was palpable. “If they want to take us on, they should take us on. Don’t be fucking pussies about it.”
Sadly, next week’s instalment suggests the enemy were listening.
- Watch Episode 1: Deadly Underfoot on Demand 5