Peter Dunning lives with his parents in Wallasey on the Wirral, in one of those cinematic streets that dip steeply down to the docks. At the bottom of their road is the Mersey, and some days you can see large ships pass by that look, from the Dunnings’s front door, as though they’re cutting right through the city itself as they make their way out into the Irish Sea and beyond to the Atlantic.
It’s easy to see how, growing up in this environment, Dunning (24) dreamed of venturing out into the world. Bored with working in pubs and bars, he did what many Merseyside lads had done before him and joined the navy. In his case, it was the Royal Navy. However, that didn’t mean he was destined for a life on the high seas, out beyond the New Brighton peninsula. Quite the opposite, for he signed up to the Royal Marines and, as he knew, that meant he was heading for the Afghanistan desert. It was here on May 25 2008, the last active day of his second tour to Helmand, that Dunning and his fellow marines, Dale Gostick and Marc Goddard, were travelling in a Viking armoured vehicle along a dry river bed not far from the town of Sangin. As they crossed the river, they hit an IED (improvised explosive device).
”I can’t remember the explosion at all,” Dunning says. Gostick, who was driving the Viking, was dead when the medics arrived. Goddard was badly burned and his legs were broken, and Dunning was bleeding profusely from two severely wounded legs. The scene was captured in an extraordinary ITV documentary series called Doctors and Nurses at War.
Cameras on board showed the rescue helicopter swoop down, as gunners let out protective machine gun fire, and pick up a grey and lifeless-looking Dunning. Back at the Camp Bastion field hospital, a young surgeon tried to save one of Dunning’s shattered legs. But when it seemed as if he was about to die from haemorrhaging, both legs were speedily amputated.
The three paratroopers killed last week brought the number of British fatalities in Afghanistan since 2001 to 195 (as of Friday evening). About 800 military and civilian personnel have been wounded in action, and almost 250 of those were categorised as either ”seriously” or ”very seriously” injured.
If death is the end of a life to come, then amputation is the end of the life that’s been. It requires a massive physical and mental effort to make the adjustment to the changed circumstances of disability. We commemorate the dead with public ceremonies and military funerals but the disabled present a more awkward challenge to the memory. For they are a shockingly visible reminder of the cost of war. And often it’s easier to turn away.
The young man in a green Royal Marine Commando shirt who greets me at the door in Wallasey does not encourage any furtive pity or polite detachment. He looks me straight in the eye, shakes my hand and then walks past me and, balancing on his two metal legs inside a pair of training shoes, bends over, picks up my spectacles, which had fallen out of my pocket, and hands them to me with a smile.
It was a gracious gesture but also a demonstration of Dunning’s sufficiency, the shortened-limbed taking care of the short-sighted. He must know a thing or two about public condescension, both as a disabled victim and as a serviceman. There is, after all, a tendency to view those who join the armed forces as naive cannon (or IED) fodder, tricked into war zones by a combination of limited options and misleading promises of exotic travel.
Dunning is quick to put me straight. ”I knew what was going on,” he says. ”I knew what the consequences could be, like in the state I’m in now, or even worse. But you just seem to think, ‘Oh, it won’t happen to me’.”
Nonetheless, his first tour to Afghanistan, in March 2007, was a shock to the system. ”It was already in the late 30s, early 40s in temperature and it seemed to get even hotter. Obviously for someone like me, with light skin,” he says, looking down at his freckles, ”it was not the best of places.”
This concern for his skin’s sensitivity to heat would be amusing were it not for the fact that, in the explosion, he suffered major burns. There was a long delay in getting a prosthetic right leg because the top of his shin, where it connected to the prosthesis, was burned right down to the bone — ”the whitest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” On his left arm he wears a compression bandage to help flatten a large and livid skin graft.
It was the intensity of fighting, however, that most took him by surprise. ”We were constantly in contacts [engagements with the Taliban],” he says. ”A week in which we didn’t get into contacts was a very special week.”
On one occasion he drove a Viking into an ambush. ”A bloke just jumped out of a big set of gates and fired an RPG [rocket propelled grenade] about 20 yards in front of me. Luckily, it was a bad shot and it went high over our wagon.”
Did he ever think, sod this for a game of soldiers?
”Yeah,” he admits, ”there were times when you thought about leaving. Everyone feels like that, I won’t deny it, but I knew I had a job to do, this was the job, and I needed to get on with it to the best of my abilities.”
The question, of course, that many observers and a majority of the public continue to ask is: what is that job? What are our troops doing in Afghanistan? Back in 2006 the then defence secretary, John Reid, expressed the hope that British troops might leave Helmand province in three years without firing a shot. Three years on and that sentiment now seems not so much a ”hope” as a fantasy straight from the region’s expanding opium fields.
”There can only be one winner,” Gordon Brown recently stated, ”democracy and a strong Afghan state.” But given the endemic corruption of the Karzai government and the tenacity and terrorising capabilities of the Taliban, funded by the increased heroin trade, neither seems particularly plausible at the moment.
As the writer, former soldier and diplomat Rory Stewart has pointed out, the Anglo-American plan for Afghanistan follows a circular logic that seems to have no beginning or end. ”You need to defeat the Taliban to build a state and you need to build a state to defeat the Taliban,” Stewart recently wrote, summarising the allies’ stated policy. ”There cannot be security without development, or development without security.”
And if this seems like chasing your own tail, add to that the fact that al-Qaeda, the original prey, the cause of the intervention, has meanwhile migrated to neighbouring Pakistan.
Soldiers are not politicians, and they can’t be expected to negotiate the complexities of a long-troubled land armed with ambitious hopes and airy aspirations. All the more reason, then, that they have a clear sense of objective. But is that possible in Afghanistan?
”We were told why we were going there,” says Dunning. ”Obviously, to drive out the Taliban and give the Afghans a better standard of living, where, instead of living in a war zone, they live in a peace zone.”
The day we met, the armed forces minister, Bill Rammell, said that British troops were in Afghanistan to prevent attacks like that of 7/7. ”For Britain to be secure,” he said, ”Afghanistan needs to be secure.” Did that aim feature in Dunning’s briefing?
”I can’t say that that was said,” he says. ”I can understand it, though, because obviously if they’re all busy over there, they’re not going to be many over here.” Or to put it in another way, soldiers like Dunning lose their limbs so that civilians like us don’t have to. That may sound crass, but it is the rationale of official policy. Soldiers are losing their limbs in increasing numbers, and they’re doing so, in part, as a consequence of their success in the field.
Dunning returned to Afghanistan for his second tour just six months after the first had ended. ”We’re meant to have 18 months back in this country before we deploy out,” he says, when I ask about military overstretch. He noticed a dramatic change had taken place in the short period he’d been away. They were patrolling territory that had been deemed far too dangerous the year before. ”To be honest, I was shocked to see where we were. It felt like a totally different war zone. It seemed a lot calmer and more peaceful. The Afghanistan people were more friendly, whereas to begin with they didn’t speak, because they knew if they spoke or did anything for you they could be killed by the Taliban. We weren’t getting into many contacts. In fact, the only time we got into a contact was when my incident happened.”
Although it’s seldom mentioned, the Taliban has lost a great number of fighters in skirmishes with British troops. And whatever they say about martyrdom, in practice they aren’t quite as eager for it as they profess themselves to be. So they switched tactics. They backed off and began laying more mines and IEDs. In the six months between Dunning’s tours of duty, the threat from such devices had increased by over 300%.
”And obviously,” says Dunning, with commendable understatement, ”being in a vehicle that was always on your mind.” To lower the risk, the drivers would follow certain strict rules. They’d never go on tracks that had been previously made, because they would attract minelayers. And all vehicles would stick to the path created by the lead vehicle, or ”point man”. ”If you’re point man,” remembers Dunning, ”you say your prayers before you go out.”
Anyone who has ever spent time with the British armed forces will know that expense — on, say, warm showers — is something they like to spare. But making economies on facilities is one thing, making them on equipment is quite different. And ever since the troops arrived in Helmand, there have been suggestions that the Ministry of Defence has cut corners and left soldiers unnecessarily vulnerable.
Nowhere has the controversy been more apparent than with the issue of transport. Last month Gordon Brown was forced to deny that a shortage of helicopters had placed troops at risk. When I asked Dunning if he thought the equipment was up to the job, the MoD official who was sitting in on our interview intervened, saying this was an inappropriate line of questioning. As Dunning is still a marine, he is subject to MoD control. And presumably he would not have been put forward for interview if he held anti-government or anti-war opinions.
Nevertheless, he thinks the importance of helicopters has been overstated. ”Don’t get me wrong,” he says, ”more helicopters would be great, but they’re not going to do the job on the ground. At the end of the day, you still need to walk through, as we call it, the Green Zone and clear out the Taliban. Helicopters can’t give close support, whereas we can. We knew we had to go out, and when we did go out it was always for certain reasons.”
Dunning went out in a Viking, a flexible track-based armoured vehicle that he rates as one of the best in operation in Afghanistan. ”You can go off-road and do things that wheel-based and heavier vehicles can’t do. But unfortunately one of the things the Viking is not good at is mines and IEDs. From underneath, it’s not one of the best protected. We couldn’t take too much of a big blast.”
That, alas, is exactly what Dunning’s Viking was called upon to take. The Viking is currently being replaced in Afghanistan by a larger vehicle called a Warthog, which has better undercarriage protection. Given the nature and length of the conflict, shouldn’t the MoD have had a better suited vehicle in place a long time before now?
Again Dunning resists this line of argument. ”It goes back to Northern Ireland days,” he says. ”We get armour, they get armour piercing. We get more protection, they get bigger bombs. And it’s the same case out there. I mean, the IED I went over just totally and utterly destroyed the wagon. So you can have as much protection as you can have but there’s always going to be one bigger, one better.”
What saved Dunning’s life, kept his body functioning as his blood drained away, was his high fitness level. He used to play semi-pro rugby and regularly worked out in the gym. This is the terrible irony of a disabled soldier — the immobilisation of the most actively mobile. Dunning spent five weeks on his back unable to move due to a fractured spine. That’s a long time in which to develop dark thoughts.
He never felt suicidal, he says, but he did feel defeated, because he thought his career in the marines was over. ”That’s me, a hand shake and see you later.” But he was offered an office job, which he took up after 50 gruelling weeks of recovery. He pays tribute to Headley Court — ”they’re fantastic” — the defence medical rehabilitation centre near Epsom, where he got back up on two legs, and the ”brilliant charity” Help for Heroes.
But here he allows himself one pop at the government. ”It shouldn’t need a charity to raise money. It should be the government doing it. If they’re going to send us to these places, they should know the consequences of what can and will happen.”
”It’s like being a baby,’ he says, ‘learning to walk again.” He’s got running legs now too, like those of the athlete Oscar Pistorious. He’s also been water skiing and scuba-diving and he’s now joined the combined services disabled skiing team. But as adaptable as his new legs are proving, he continues to feel the phantom presence of his old ones.
”I still feel my feet,” he says, an expression of almost pained pleasure animating his face, ”still twitching my toes and bending and flexing my ankles. I still think that I’ve got my legs. I have done that thing of waking up and standing up from my bed and falling flat on my face on the floor. You just think, you stupid idiot.”
There can be few amputees who have adapted so positively to their situation as Dunning. As his mother, Vera, says: ”He accepted a lot quicker and a lot better than we did. His attitude was ‘OK, this is what’s happened, I’m going to get on with it’.”
This staunch pragmatism also extends beyond his own situation to that of Britain’s role in Afghanistan. ”There’s no quick end to it, at all,” he says. ”This is a war. It’s a war that going to be going on for a number of years, and you can see those years going into double figures.”
If that’s the case, then there will be plenty more loss of life and limb. That’s the grim nature and inevitable price of war. Dunning has no doubt that it’s a price worth paying, but with each new fatality the doubts of his countrymen continue to grow.
Blood, sweat and tears: a history of war with Afghanistan
1839 First Anglo-Afghan war begins, one of the most crucial conflicts in the Great Game, the competition between Russia and Britain for influence in central Asia.
1878 Second Anglo-Afghan war. British win final battle, which takes place at Kandahar.
1919 The third Anglo-Afghan war, which results in independence from Britain.
1920s King Amanullah attempts to modernise but is forced to abdicate by conservative tribal leaders.
1978 The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) overthrows Mohamed Daud’s republic, and a socialist government is installed with Nur Mohammad Taraki as president. Taraki allows deployment of the Soviet army at the request of the Afghan government. A conservative backlash turns to armed rebellion in the countryside.
1979-86 While the mujaheddin rebellion in the countryside gains momentum, the PDPA leader Babrak Karmal is made president, backed by Soviet troops. The US supports the rebels.
1988 Afghanistan, the USSR, Pakistan and the US sign a pact agreeing that Soviet troops will withdraw.
1992 A coalition of resistance groups captures Kabul and ousts Soviet-backed president Najibullah. A government is formed with professor Burhanuddin Rabbani at its head, but infighting is rife.
1994 The fundamentalist Taliban movement, led by Mullah Omar, emerges as a serious threat to Rabbani’s government.
1996 The Taliban capture Kabul and impose fundamentalist Islamic law.
2001 After the 11 September attacks, US and British strike against Afghanistan when the Taliban refuse to surrender Osama bin Laden. The Taliban is replaced with an interim power-sharing government, with Hamid Karzai as temporary leader.
2002 Vice-president Haji Abdul Qadir is assassinated. An attempt is made on Karzai’s life.
2004 A new constitution is adopted and Karzai wins the presidential elections with 55% of the vote.
2006 Nato takes over military procedure in the south, where the Taliban influence is strong. Britain deploys 3 000 troops in Helmand province.
2009 US commit another 17,000 troops, while other Nato countries increase aid and military presence. The new US strategy includes a further 4,000 US personnel to train the Afghan army and police force.
August 20 (election day) The Taliban has called for a boycott of the elections. Hamid Karzai remains front-runner, despite his unpopularity. Of 36 candidates there are only two other serious competitors: former foreign minister Dr Abdullah Abdullah and Dr Ashraf Ghani, former World Bank official. Violence is expected to force around 600 or 10% of polling stations to remain closed. Thousands of extra foreign troops, including 700 from Britain, to provide security. – guardian.co.uk