Nick Meo hits back at Afghanistan battle report slurs

I had described what happened after Easyrider company ran over a massive bomb on a road convoy to Helmand Province. The vehicle I was in was hurled into the air and landed on its roof, killing the top gunner and injuring two soldiers. The small unit then fired thousands of rounds blindly into the night – from automatic rifles, grenade launchers and heavy machine guns — in an area where there are many villages, as well as Taliban guerrillas.

For writing about this, the bloggers have called me a coward, a liar, a fantasist, anti-American, and a cheap Brit journalist. One urged the Telegraph to demote me to covering dog shows, not wars. Another blog described what the Taliban would have done to me if I had been taken captive. He was clearly disappointed that it hadn’t happened.

There was also reaction from family members of soldiers involved in the attack – they knew, for instance, that I had been told to stop filming and were angry that I hadn’t, although as an embedded journalist I was entitled to do so and was not hampering operations.

One message purported to come from a soldier who was there. He wrote: 'You Coward piece of S---’. He advises me never to step inside a US base again, or on US soil, for my own good.

The US military has not challenged my reporting and the bloggers’ criticism is vague. Perhaps they were disappointed that I didn’t produce a straightforward tale of stirring heroism on a bad night in Kandahar.

Things got nasty even during the incident because the soldiers, clearly badly shaken, didn’t want to be filmed and demanded my camera. I didn’t hand it over because such footage of what happens in the aftermath of a bomb attack is rare.

Following an ambush it is standard US military procedure to switch weapons to fully automatic and pour out rounds. This is called suppressive fire and does not involve careful aiming. It kills attackers, saves soldiers’ lives and keeps the heads of ambushers down.

But such devastating gunfire also kills and wounds civilians. Hundreds of Afghans have been hit in the past two years in such incidents.

When civilians are killed Nato spokesmen usually blame the Taliban for attacks that force soldiers to defend themselves, killing non-military personnel in the process. The Taliban, knowing that US or British forces will be held responsible for the carnage, often explode bombs in markets and towns.

I don’t know whether Easyrider killed any civilians that night but I suspect the bloggers were angry because I pointed out that there may have been peace-loving Afghans out there in the dark.

Not unnaturally, the US military prefers to highlight the courage of their soldiers — men such as Scott Dimond, the father of four who died because, like all Easyrider volunteers, he wanted to stop terrorism. I certainly did not want my story to dishonour his death.

What happened that night on the Kandahar road was not part of a struggle between square-jawed good guys and bad guys wearing black turbans, as the bloggers perhaps imagine the war

to be. It was a horribly everyday incident in a deadly conflict in which men kill each other in terrifying and sometimes chaotic conditions.
Telegraph

A tour of their dungeons?