By TOBY HARNDEN
November 29, 2014
He was one of Britain’s greatest young warriors. And he was likely killed by British guns.
The fort at Haji Alem was Lt. Mark Evison’s very own outpost of empire. Situated beside an irrigation canal and surrounded by poppy and maize fields and a scattering of baked-mud compounds in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province, it looked toward the badlands of Taliban-controlled Marjah to the southwest.
Evison, brought up in the comfortable London suburb of Dulwich, where Margaret Thatcher lived after she left office, was entranced by Afghanistan. He was immediately struck by the romance of the dusty base he arrived to command in April 2009. Its only drawback, he felt, was that the walls were so high that from inside he was unable to see the beauty of the landscape.
He called it “Flashman’s Fort,” a reference to the beleaguered Afghan garrison defended by Lt. Harry Flashman, the swashbuckling cad immortalized in the satirical novels of George MacDonald Fraser. That siege took place in 1842 during the First Anglo-Afghan War, when Britain invaded Afghanistan to check the influence of Russia during the era of the Great Game. Evison, a British Army platoon commander in the Welsh Guards, was to be fighting in what amounted to the fourth.
The Union Jack flying over Camp Bastion was hauled down for the final time last month. First established in 2006, it had grown to be a vast cantonment that served as a hub for coalition forces in the Taliban stronghold of Helmand. By the time combat operations ended there in September, the Fourth Anglo-Afghan War had claimed the lives of 453 British troops, including Evison’s. Helmand was responsible for the vast majority of those deaths. In total, 952 coalition troops have been killed in the southern province alone, well over a quarter of the 3,481 coalition fatalities in Afghanistan, according to iCasualties.org. Since American forces arrived in strength in Helmand a few weeks after Evison's death, places like Sangin, Nawa and Marjah have joined Guadalcanal, Khe Sanh and Fallujah in U.S. Marine Corps lore, with more than 400 of its men perishing there.
Today, as the Taliban threatens to seize back much of the territory it lost in Helmand, quite what the West achieved in return for its 13 years of blood and treasure remains elusive. Camp Bastion and Camp Leatherneck, the adjoining U.S. Marine base, are now in the hands of the Afghan security forces. In due course, these sprawling military towns, built in the wasteland known as Dasht-e Margo, or Desert of Death, will likely be abandoned to the desert like the statue of Ozymandias—a remnant of a once-great empire that, in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet, lies ruined, surrounded by nothing but “lone and level sands.”
In death, Lt. Mark Evison came to be lauded as a British hero in the Churchillian mold—a Guards officer to the manner born (he was educated at the elite boarding school Charterhouse), whose bravery harked back to the era of empire. When I interviewed Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who took over as NATO commander in Afghanistan shortly after Evison was killed, in Kabul he compared the young officer’s demise to that of Admiral Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
But in what has become a haunting coda to Britain’s latest Afghan adventure, new evidence emerged this month that Evison was killed not by the Taliban but by “friendly fire” from one of his own men. Just like Spc. Pat Tillman, the former NFL player who was accidentally killed by men in his own platoon in Afghanistan in 2004, Evison seemed the embodiment of a national ideal. And, as in the case of Tillman, information about how Evison died was either covered up or ignored, perhaps conveniently in order to protect the image of the military. To fully come to terms with the price it paid in Afghanistan, Britain will also have to confront the truth about the death of one of its most celebrated military sons.
Lt. Mark Evison at Haji Alem. His diary is on the bottom shelf to the right. | Welsh Guards
Haji Alem was modeled on the small British forts established in Afghanistan during Flashman’s time. It was square and topped by battlements, with each wall over a meter thick and 50 meters long. Evison noted in his leather-bound diary that Check Point (CP) Haji Alem was “very defendable—four turrets on each corner give excellent views to all compass points.”
The turrets were seven meters high and could be reached only by rickety wooden ladders. They provided ideal firing arcs in all directions, and whenever a patrol went out there was to be a soldier with a General Purpose Machine Gun (GPMG) posted on each one, ready to rain down fire on the enemy. Around the inner perimeter were 15 roofless rooms that made ideal sleeping quarters when covered in camouflage canopies. “The loos are fairly basic with just a hole in the ground for pissing and an ammo tin for turds,” Evison wrote on April 26.
CP Haji Alem from the air. | Photo courtesy of the author
Commanding such a place was everything a young platoon leader could dream about. Evison, aged 26, was the kind of young officer who seemed to have it all. Blond, hazel-eyed and a talented cellist and pianist, before the Army he had been a jackaroo in Australia, trekked through Spain and the Middle East and lived in an igloo in Norway. He had a powerful rapport with his soldiers, and they were in awe of the way he carried himself. One of his nicknames in the platoon was “007.”
Just as Evison reached CP Haji Alem in April 2009, there were reports of Taliban and even al Qaeda fighters traveling from Pakistan to Helmand to help with the poppy harvest. The fighters were paid up to $30 per day or a group share of a quarter of the harvest. Iran, as well as al Qaeda, was helping the Taliban bolster their presence in the area. Taliban commander Mullah Ismael Akhund had arranged for a large shipment of weapons and explosives to be delivered from Iran to support the insurgency. The Iranian Security Service offered a reward of $800 for any fighter who killed a Nato soldier.
In his diary, Evison complained that he lacked sufficient manpower and resources. The area around CP Haji Alem was sparsely populated, so any hope of winning over the people seemed futile. “There is a definite lack of steer from above as to how to play this one,” he wrote on April 30. “I am yet to be given a definite mission and clarity as to my role out here.” His platoon of 28 men was already down to 22.
“As it stands I have a lack of radios, water, food and medical equipment,” he wrote. “This with manpower is what these missions lack. It is disgraceful to send a platoon into a very dangerous area with two weeks’ water and food and one team medic’s pack.” He suspected that his platoon would be “walking on a tightrope.”
On May 1, Evison described in his diary his first experience of being shot at. He outlined how his patrol came under fire, fought back and then searched two compounds that had been used as firing points by the Taliban before heading back to CP Haji Alem. The “radios were down and so I had no comms,” and he and seven of his men were stranded on the wrong side of the canal. “We had to make the decision just to go for it. With a rapid fire from the Platoon we sprinted down the bank, through the canal, back up the friendly bank.”
Soon they were “safely back behind sturdy walls, laughing at the contact we had just been in.” But he added: “For me it is still the fear of making a wrong decision which sits heavily on my mind … I fear that we will not always be as lucky as we were today. At least today I proved to myself that I will not freeze the next time I get shot at. I do not expect this to be in the distant future.”
Guardsman Jon Caswell, in Evison’s platoon, later told me: “The patrols were basically to go and have a look at compounds. To me, I couldn’t understand why we were going. We’d get spanked every time. It seemed to us the main objective was to go out and get shot at.” But, despite his private venting, Evison remained stoic and was even ebullient at times. At the end of one diary entry, he wrote: “Life here is great.”
Just after 8 a.m. on May 9, Evison led 15 of his men plus four Afghan soldiers and an interpreter out of CP Haji Alem. He had briefed the patrol that he wanted to investigate three compounds less than half a kilometer to the west that the Taliban had been using to attack the base. Half an hour later, Evison reported over the platoon radio what the interpreter had heard on the Taliban walkie-talkies: “The enemy are making their weapons ready.” Three minutes after that, it was bedlam as the Taliban opened fire. “They’re firing in that direction over there,” shouted one soldier, recorded by a helmet camera. “That fucking wall. Where’s that coming from? Are they in that compound?”
Evison, dangerously exposed, pushed forward along an irrigation ditch into compound 1—all compounds were assigned numbers by British forces—with half the patrol. From CP Haji Alem, two GPMG gunners began blazing away at Taliban firing positions. One gunner, in the turret on the northwest corner of the fort, was to fire 7,000 rounds during the next 45 minutes, using three different GPMGs, as the barrels of a first and then a second gun overheated. His platoon radio wasn’t working, so a corporal standing below the turret had to shout the compound numbers from which the Taliban were firing up to him. The gunners used annotated diagrams and aimed through the GPMG’s iron sight.
The body armor worn by a Welsh Guardsmen in Helmand. | Toby Harnden
The Taliban were mounting a coordinated attack from three sides with multiple firing points between 200 and 500 meters away. The enemy was closing in. Meanwhile, CP Haji Alem fort was also under attack. This was not going to be easy. In compound 1, Evison struggled to get a proper signal on his radio. (British radios were notoriously unreliable and were also affected by the electronic jamming equipment carried on all patrols.) After a few minutes of frustration, he ran over to the doorway to get better reception. The doorway was on the east side of the compound—directly opposite CP Haji Alem, about 400 meters away.
One soldier saw that Evison was exposed through the doorway and shouted: “Sir, push into the compound!” Seconds later, at 8:40 a.m., Evison stepped back and turned around. As he did so, a volley of five bullets came through the doorway, almost certainly from a machine gun. One of them hit the back plate of his body armor. Another missed the plate by half an inch, ripping into his back just below the right shoulder and exiting underneath his right collarbone. “I’ve been shot,” Evison said, staggering sideways.
More than 50 Taliban fighters were now arrayed against the wounded Evison and his 19 men, who were in danger of getting surrounded. Evison’s men initially thought he had been shot in the hand, but he soon began getting pale and it was clear he was losing a lot of blood. They had to get him back to Haji Alem quickly, so he could be evacuated by helicopter back to the hospital at Camp Bastion.
An Apache helicopter—codenamed Ugly 51— arrived from Bastion to push back the Taliban fighters, but the pilot would not open fire because it was unclear exactly where the enemy positions were. With communications failing and the patrol split, there was a danger of hitting friendly forces. In the confusion, at one point the company operations room in nearby Patrol Base Silab had marked compound 1 as an enemy firing point.
Evison was still conscious as he was carried back to the fort through a waist-deep irrigation ditch. “I can feel blood running down my back,” he said. His men tried to buoy his spirits. “You lucky sod, sir,” one said. “You’ve only been here a month and you’re getting to go home already.” The stretcher proved useless so the men, still under withering fire, took turns carrying Evison in a fireman’s lift. Rather than take the safer route of jumping down into the canal, Gunner Steve Gadsby opted to run straight across the small footbridge next to the fort. It would be quicker, he decided, and if he were hit crossing the canal then Evison might drown.
Gadsby took it at a sprint, landing on the bridge and then bouncing forward as if he’d hit a diving board. Bullets whistled past his head, dinged off the bridge, and kicked up mud from the canal bank as he carried Evison the final 50 meters. It was 9:14 a.m. The rest of the patrol made it back safely, though one guardsman was shot through both legs as he clambered out of the canal.
Meanwhile, there was confusion at Camp Bastion, 18 miles away. A Chinook had been tasked to pick up Evison, but the orders were canceled after someone realized it would be too big to land inside CP Haji Alem. A pair of American Black Hawks were then dispatched from Bastion at 9:30 a.m.—already almost at the “golden hour” within which casualties are supposed to be back at the hospital.
“Cas, what the fuck’s going on with that bleeding?” Evison asked Caswell, who was trying to staunch the bleeding. “You can go fishing when you go home, Sir,” said another soldier. Evison mumbled: “Yeah, I like fishing.” As Caswell cradled Evison’s head and comforted him, the officer, slipping into unconsciousness, rasped: “I’m going down.”
The soldiers screamed and swore at a radio operator, demanding to know why the medical helicopter hadn’t arrived. “Cas, Cas, is that you?” Evison asked Caswell, who slapped him to keep him awake. But life seemed to be ebbing out of him. His lips were chapped, and there was white foam coming from his mouth. He was given water from a bottle top and lapped it up but then regurgitated it seconds later. Then he stopped breathing. A medic started chest compressions while another soldier gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
At 9.47 a.m. a Black Hawk made a “hot landing”—under Taliban fire—at the fort. It lifted off with Evison inside after just 33 seconds on the ground. It took another 14 minutes to get back to Bastion, and by the time Evison was inside the operating theater it was 10:03 a.m.—an hour and 23 minutes after he had been shot.
Evison went into cardiac arrest soon after he arrived at Bastion. The bullet that went through his back had severed his subclavian artery, causing massive blood loss. His heart was restarted, a clamp placed on the artery and he was given a blood transfusion. By 7 p.m. he was out of the operating theater and in the intensive care unit.
At 11 p.m. local time, Evison’s blood pressure dropped and he suffered seizures. At 3:55 a.m. local time, shortly after Evison’s mother Margaret had gone to bed in London after being informed that her son was wounded, his pupils became fixed and dilated. He had lost half his blood before he even reached Bastion. The blood loss had led to brain swelling, starving the stem of oxygen. A CT scan indicated that he was effectively brain-dead.
Evison was flown home to Britain so he could die with his family. Army nurses had washed his hair and shaved his face in preparation for his family’s arrival at Birmingham’s Selly Oak Hospital. His mother noticed the suntan marks on her son’s feet where he had been wearing flip-flops inside the base. On May 12, his parents turned off their son’s life-support machine.
7 Platoon at Haji Alem. Evison is in the front in the center. Caswell is to his right. | Guardsman Richard Hill
For Evison’s men, the death of their platoon commander was a hammer blow. They vowed revenge. Two weeks later, what was thought to be a Taliban bomb-laying team was spotted through thermal night sights digging at a junction close to CP Haji Alem. A Javelin missile was fired from Haji Alem, scoring a direct hit. But it turned out the target was not a Taliban team but a local farmer called Zahir Khan who had been irrigating his fields at night because working in the daytime often meant incurring a tax from the Taliban.
The British issued a press release stating that an “investigation has commenced into claims that an Afghan civilian was killed” near Haji Alem, even though it was already known what had happened. Zahir Khan’s family was quietly paid $7,000 in compensation. Lt. Rupert Thorneloe, the Welsh Guards commanding officer, who was himself to be killed in action weeks later, commented: “A man from a good family is now dead as a result of our being gung-ho.”
At the July 2010 coroner’s inquest into Evison’s death, a military surgeon insisted that it was “unproven and conjecture” that the young officer might have survived had he been evacuated earlier. The coroner ruled that the Army had been unable to explain the helicopter delay satisfactorily but this was moot because he would have died anyway. I was among those who remained unconvinced.
An Afghan elder as a Welsh Guards foot patrol passes through his village. | Toby Harnden
Over the last five and a half years, Evison has become one of the most revered of the nearly 500 British troops to be killed in Afghanistan. His diaries were published in the Daily Telegraph, raising questions about the shortage of helicopters and manpower, the inadequacy of communications and the wisdom of troops patrolling from a small outpost inside Taliban-held territory. Margaret Evison, a consultant clinical psychologist, gave helmet camera footage of her son lying mortally wounded at Haji Alem to Channel 4 News for broadcast.
My book Dead Men Risen, about the Welsh Guards in Helmand, first published in March 2011, includes two chapters on Evison. A BBC documentary called The Lost Platoon about Evison and his men that aired in September 2012. A month later, Margaret Evison published a book Death of a Soldier about her son. Gunner Gadsby was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross, Britain’s second highest decoration for bravery, by Queen Elizabeth II at a Buckingham Palace ceremony. Britain’s former poet laureate, Sir Andrew Motion, recently penned a poem entitled In Memory of Lieutenant Mark Evison.
And just this month, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a play about Evison—described as having been “killed by a Taliban sniper” —using words adapted from interviews with Evison’s platoon interwoven with his mother’s story.
By then, however, a source had passed me a copy of an August 2009 report written by a Ministry of Defence ballistics expert. In it, the expert, Andre Botha, stated that a copper jacket and bullet fragments found embedded in Evison’s body armor showed that a round “consistent with a 7.62 x 51mm calibre rifle” killed him.
The 7.62 x 51mm round is better known as the 7.62 NATO. It is fired, as Botha notes in his report, by weapons including an “FN MAG General Purpose Machine Gun, US M14 Assault Rifle and H&K G3 SG1 Snipers Rifle amongst others.” It is not fired by any weapons generally used by the Taliban. While a remote possibility exists that the Taliban fired a captured machine gun that day, the report indicates that in all probability Evison was killed by a GPMG gunner firing from Haji Alem. The coroner, who ruled Evison had been killed by the enemy, either failed to grasp the significance of the report—or never even saw it.
Earlier this year, I went to see the gunner who fired the 7,000 rounds from the base. He told me he had been aiming at compounds 4 and 6, just to the north of compound 1, where Evison was. He had not been called to testify at the inquest. He appeared stunned when I told him about the ballistics report and asked him whether it was possible Evison had been killed by friendly fire. “No,” he responded. “No way.” I also spoke to the other GPMG gunner, in the southwest turret, who had concentrated his fire on compounds 17, 19 and 22 to the south. “I’d like to think we’re professional enough,” he told me. “I never even thought that.”
With less than 100 meters between compounds 4 and 1, it would have taken a tiny miscalculation on the part of the first gunner for the wrong compound to have been hit. There is also a strong possibility that the gunner misheard the compound number—shouted up amid the chaos from seven meters below—or was even given the wrong compound number to fire at. After all, the company operations room had briefly identified compound 1 as an enemy position.
I have spent years investigating the Evison incident. I’ve had access to secret Army documents and military police interviews with everyone at Haji Alem and have myself interviewed nearly all the soldiers involved. My conclusion is that it is highly probable that friendly fire was responsible. Eyewitness accounts strongly indicate that a machine gun fired the two shots—part of a burst of five—that hit Evison. The doorway was directly opposite CP Haji Alem but at an oblique angle to Taliban firing points.
It can probably never be known for certain how Evison died. The British army normally tests all weapons used during a fatal incident to match individual weapons to any bullet fragment recovered. In this case, perhaps because Haji Alem was so remote and firefights were taking place daily, this was apparently not done.
Welsh Guardsmen on patrol in Helmand. | Photo courtesy of the author
Quite why the coroner overlooked the ballistics report—or why it was not given to him—is also unclear. After I told him about the contents of the ballistics report this month, Evison’s father David, a sculptor based in Berlin, called for a fresh inquest, which would have to be ordered by Britain’s attorney general. Some find it hard to believe that the military simply did not contemplate the possibility of fratricide and suggest that a cover-up is more likely.
In the case of Pat Tillman, it took a month for the U.S. Army to acknowledge that he was probably killed by friendly fire. It took more than five years—when I broke the story in the Sunday Times this month—for the likelihood of Evison’s fratricide to emerge. Even then, the Ministry of Defense’s response was dismissive: “There has been a full and thorough inquest and we support the findings of the coroner, who concluded that Lieutenant Evison was killed by the enemy whilst on active service for our country.”
I also spoke recently to Caswell, who has suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder PTSD) and is currently in hiding after going Absent Without Leave (AWOL). He recounted to me how, two months after Evison’s death and suffering from battle shock, he had scrawled a suicide note on a piece of cardboard ripped from a ration pack, fired a shot into a wall and broke down weeping. His new platoon commander—Evison’s successor—had held Caswell’s head in his arms as he rocked back and forth. Shortly afterwards, Caswell was evacuated from the combat zone.
Guardsman Jon Caswell at Camp Bastion. | Sergeant Dan Bardsley, MoD
When I spoke to him recently, Caswell had weaned himself off cocaine and alcohol but was still struggling with nightmares. His AWOL status meant that he was unable to be treated for PTSD.
“Fucking hell, no,” Caswell said when I told him about the ballistics report. “It couldn’t have been, could it? It never even occurred to me. I was content in the knowledge that some smelly fucking raghead took him out. That’s too much.”
For Caswell, the prospect that Evison might well have been killed by one of his own men underlined the futility of Helmand. His beloved platoon commander, whose grave at Brookwood military cemetery in Sussex he still visits each year, had been leading a patrol that had no discernible purpose. The platoon was ill equipped, CP Haji Alem undermanned and both too far into Taliban territory to be of use either against the enemy or to win over the local population. The radios did not work, medical equipment was inadequate and the helicopter had taken well over an hour to arrive.
The fort at Haji Alem was evacuated in late 2009, and then bombed by NATO forces to prevent it being used by the Taliban. If history is any guide, the rubble will likely greet some future invading Great Power seeking to tame the wild lands of Afghanistan. Perhaps, someday, if there’s a Fifth Anglo-Afghan War, even British troops might once again occupy its ground.
Toby Harnden is the author of Dead Men Risen: An Epic Story of War and Heroism in Afghanistan. He is also the Washington bureau chief for the Sunday Times of London, and has been embedded numerous times with American and British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade.
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