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GOOD READS Dead Men Risen: The Welsh Guards and the Real Story of Britain’s War in Afghanistan. (Quercus: October 2011) Toby Harnden Review and author interview by George Gavrilis, Executive Director of the Hollings Center Stories of war oftentimes lend themselves to exaggerated, heroic narratives. This is not the case with Dead Men Risen, a book that tells the story of Britain’s military efforts in Afghanistan through the eyes of the Welsh Guards in Helmand province in 2009, a crucial year when under- resourced and overstretched soldiers from working class backgrounds attempted to stem the tide of a rising Taliban insurgency ahead of Afghanistan’s presidential elections. Dead Men Risen won the prestigious Orwell Prize in May 2012, but readers should take note that the book caused plenty of uproar and political embarrassment in the UK and Europe in the months prior. This is because Harnden’s book is much more than the British soldier’s perspective of the Afghan war. It is at once a story that weaves together the experiences of soldiers on the ground—from the mundane to the harrowing to the deadly—with keen insights on the pitfalls of counterinsurgency and scathing revelations about British political myopia in planning the military campaign. Indeed, the book reveals that British military planners insisted on sending forces to Helmand province and left mountainous Uruzgan to the Dutch, thinking that Helmand’s dusty, horizontal topography would make for easier operations. Although the book shuttles masterfully between government offices in London and the houses of soldiers’ families in Wales and England, its core chapters are set in a small rural triangle above Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province. The Helmand countryside these days is synonymous with insurgents and opium cultivation, but Harnden reveals to the reader that Helmand was once the site of a colossal U.S. development effort that started in the 1940s. Modeled in part after the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Helmand Valley Authority aimed to irrigate 300,000 acres of desert to the west and north of Lashkar Gah and settle 20,000 nomads. Lashkar Gah itself was developed as a model town with networks of dams, sluices, drainage and irrigation canals circumscribing its outskirts in service to agricultural development. Good Reads: Dead Men Risen Page 1 The annual salaries of American advisers and personnel alone cost the equivalent of Afghanistan’s total exports each year. The project would come to an indecisive end in the 1970s, but it unwittingly created conditions that in the 21st century would aid both insurgents and opium farmers. The canals built earlier were shallow enough for Taliban to wade across and set up ambushes but that made it difficult for Afghan National Army and NATO soldiers to patrol. Moreover, the irrigation project created a Map of land use and economic activity in Afghanistan. Source: University of Texas Library near-perfect growing environment for opium. It was in this countryside where British soldiers found themselves fighting an insurgency, mentoring Afghan soldiers and trying to protect a beleaguered civilian population that they rarely saw nor understood. The book takes the reader to places with idyllic names—Haji Alem, Shamalan and Chah-e Anjir—places where soldiers, civilians and insurgents alike suffered tremendous losses at each other’s hands. Harnden vividly tells the tale of Haji Alem, a former drug baron’s haunt that was commandeered by the Welsh Guards as a remote post from which to launch patrols. Inside Haji Alem, soldiers encountered boredom and had the most minimal of provisions. Outside, soldiers faced insurgents masterful at deadly improvisation and ambush. The book is at its most vivid when it portrays the soldiers on patrol and in combat. The fighting and casualties spare the reader no anguish and Harnden’s text is wrenching, bloody and real. The war deaths that rocked the British public in 2009 feature prominently but are no less palpable than Harnden’s matter-of-fact references to inexperienced soldiers, some who vomited from fear before going on patrols, others who reached for their camera phones rather than weapons when encountering insurgent fire for the first time. There are plenty of stories of bravery and sacrifice, but these are conveyed through the unexaggerated words of the soldiers who shy away from any self-proclamations of heroism. The reader will also catch glimpses of soldiers of the Afghan National Army. Harnden explains that Afghan soldiers lacked training but sometimes got results with unorthodox methods. In one instance, the Welsh Guards realized that their attempts to set up an ambush for Taliban were being undermined by an unknown informant in a village. Afghan soldiers solved the problem by detaining villagers and confiscating their phones until the ambush could be set up. Harnden also conveys the great risk that Afghan soldiers faced every time Afghan soldiers in training in Kabul. Photo by George Gavrilis Good Reads: Dead Men Risen Page 2 they assisted UK soldiers; while British military commanders considered NATO soldiers top priority in medical assistance and evacuating the dead, Afghan soldiers were labeled “priority two.” As one British soldier explained to Harnden in Helmand, “We lived, ate and fought together. It was desperate to categorize the dead by nationality.” The book is at once a monumental and brutal read. It is monumental in that it captures the remarkable similarity of soul-searching across governments—from the US to the UK, from Turkey to Estonia—struggling to explain to their citizens that the cost of war is worth what has been achieved in Afghanistan. Brutally, it is a hard-to-forget account of the costs of foreign policy in the trenches. Q&A with author Toby Harnden is U.S. Executive Editor of Mail Online and the Daily Mail’s U.S. Editor. Based in Washington DC, he has reported on U.S. politics for more than a dozen years and is an affiliate of the Hollings Center. George Gavrilis had the opportunity to ask Toby Harnden a few questions about Dead Men Risen (Quercus 2011): Toby Harnden Why did you decide to write this book? The trigger for Dead Men Risen was the death of Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe on July 1st 2009. He was the first British battalion commander to be killed in action since Lieutenant Colonel H Jones VC in the Falklands War in 1982. Rupert was a friend of mine. We had first got to know each other in 1996, when I was a correspondent in Northern Ireland and he was a Captain and Army intelligence officer. In the weeks before Rupert was killed, the Welsh Guards had already lost a platoon commander and a company commander (I later found out that the loss of commanders at these three key levels in a British battalion had not happened since the Korean War) and I, like many, wondered what on earth was going on in Helmand. At a deeper level, I had long been fascinated by the experience of war. As a child, I remember following little dots of men running up the beach in D-Day footage, watching them fall and thinking about who that soldier was and how he had just been snuffed out. I recently came across a little book I wrote when I was about eight. It was called “The Cry of Death: The Adventures of Private Nigel Murphy”. I spent nearly a decade in the Royal Navy but did not see active service. While embedded in Ramadi and Fallujah with the U.S. Marines and U.S. Army I became very interested in how units functioned, the challenges of different levels of command and the way troops react to fear. My previous book Bandit Country, a 30-year history of the IRA’s border heartland, had necessarily been more of an overview – I was keen to do something more granular. At the same time, I was a bit tired of the Boy’s Own genre of military books that Good Reads: Dead Men Risen Page 3 often read like a succession of firefights and in which everyone is a hero. Life – and war – is not like that. I also wanted to place the granular action in a broader context – of the Regiment, of Afghanistan, the home front, of war through the ages. So it ended up being an ambitious book in its scope. That’s a reason why it ended up being 610 pages long, which worried me a lot regarding sales (it’s an intimidating-looking book) and no doubt gave my publishers some heartburn. The title of the book speaks to some of the many different levels on which I tried to make it work. The phrase is taken from the poem Ypres by Robert Laurence Binyon, the famous World War One poet. Coincidentally, it is about one of the first battles the Welsh Guards fought in (they were formed in 1915). The phrase was seized on by Major Sean Birchall, commander of IX Company and later killed in action. Birchall wanted his men to feel they were the reincarnation of the Welsh Guardsmen who had fought in World War Two, the last time IX Company (re-formed for the 2009 Afghan elder and Welsh Guardsman. Photo by Toby Harnden tour) had existed. In the book, Thorneloe, Birchall and Lieutenant Mark Evision, the platoon commander who was killed, are dead men risen in the sense that they speak from beyond the grave about what happened – Thorneloe on flawed strategy, kit shortages, inadequate troops levels; Birchall on the shortcomings of the Afghan police and army; Evison on what it is like to be in a beleaguered outpost of no military value with radios that don’t work, medical supplies unavailable and helicopters that don’t arrive.

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