Читать книгу: «Dog Soldiers: Part 1 of 3: Love, loyalty and sacrifice on the front line», страница 5
Kenneth had just become a father too, to baby Hannah. He was so happy about the baby and desperate to see the little one, who was born just after he went on tour. It wasn’t an easy situation with Kenneth so far away and I know Hannah was on his mind all the time. From the moment she was born she was in his letters. He was a father and he wanted to get home to see her, but he was also a dedicated dog soldier with a job to do.
For him, that April seemed to involve a lot of waiting and then waiting some more – for the ‘push’, as he described it. He told us the little he could about the scheduled briefings and particularly the training sessions which he loved and kept the dogs at the top of their game. Kenneth was pleased with Diesel and could see his potential, which was why he was eager to get the dog out on the ground. He was desperate to get the camera so he could send us photos of Diesel, his mate, going through his paces. I could sense his restlessness and the boredom in waiting for something to happen, but for us at home there was a greater distraction – the fear that something could happen to him.
From the time the conflict began in 2001 there was always enough on the TV to enable families back home to build a pretty clear picture of the hostility that faced our sons and daughters in Afghanistan. My son was out there, and that brought the war onto our doorstep, and in our own way we were living it, too, but it was no dream. And for Kenneth, home became much more than just where he lived.
Looking back it’s amazing how quickly his being away became part of our daily lives. It was a good job that his sisters understood and were never jealous, because in a sense Kenneth was still with us – making us laugh, making us mad and making us run around him, all the while, unintentionally, being the centre of attention. Through his phone calls home and his letters, Kenneth, the cheeky chap, the joker in the Rowe pack, was as close to us as he could be for a dog soldier in Afghanistan.
He might not have been with me in person, and maybe he was too far away for me to ‘read’ (he always said I was a witch because I could always read his mind – he knew he could never hide anything from me), but his moods and concerns were right there in his blueys. The salutation was usually enough to set the mood – Hello Mam, Hi Parents, Olla Mamma, Howdy Mother – and hinted that he was upbeat and excited about something. I was always wary when I got a Hi Mam or just Hi. When that happened I prepared myself for a letter that was going to be along the lines of one of our late-night chats we had at home – the kind of conversation that started when no one else was around. We’d make a cup of tea and then he would tell me what was making him angry or sad, ask me for advice or just talk and reach conclusions himself. I would hold him and tell him it was all going to be OK and he must not worry.
We could still do that in a letter and my heart would pound when I read his sign-off: ‘Cheers, Mam, you’re a star as always. I couldn’t survive without you by my side every step of the way. All my love as always. Ken xxx and Diesel xxx’
We realised later that after he called and spoke to his dad on Thursday evening his plans to come home must have changed. I was still on my journey back from Carlisle when he called to tell Ken that he would be back at Bastion later. He must still have been at FOB Inkerman at that stage so it must have been after that that he asked to stay the extra day with the men of 2 Para. He found out that his replacement wasn’t due out right away, which would have left the troops without a bomb dog and handler for 24 hours. Kenneth wouldn’t have wanted that, so I understood why he volunteered to stay behind. And, knowing Kenneth as I do, I believe that he would have insisted he stayed.
He was killed just hours later.
I have a lot of ‘blanks’ from that time. I could blame the pills but the result is still the same – I feel ashamed. It’s awful. I have gaps and I want to fill them but the memories are so fragmented: I start to remember and then I hit a blank. Then I feel I know something but then … blank. I want it all back – the lost time. I often wonder, did I take too many pills to block out the pain?
Few people expected to be made welcome over the next couple of days and I’m sure that included visits from the military, but out of everyone we needed to see they were the people who could tell us what happened to Kenneth and what would happen next. I really needed to know.
The next day brought Major Chris Ham (now Lieutenant Colonel retired) and Staff Sergeant Iain Carnegie (now Captain Carnegie with the Australian Army) to the door. I’m sure we were everything they expected us to be, but we couldn’t be anything else. Both knew Kenneth well and had served with him.
I wanted to hear that he was well liked and good at his job. I heard that Kenneth was all of that and more and that he would be sadly missed by everyone he had ever served with. And that he loved his family very, very much.
Iain and Chris were familiar names to me. Kenneth had talked about them since he joined the RAVC in 2005. Major Chris Ham had been his Commanding Officer at the Defence Animal Centre in Melton Mowbray and Iain his Company Quartermaster Sergeant (CQMS) in Northern Ireland, but they were in his world and now they were in our lounge, in full uniform, telling me how my son would be missed by everyone who had the pleasure of serving with him and who had spent time with him as their friend. They were talking about Kenneth. My son. I was in the room but in another way I was in another world. It was someone else’s world. How could it be mine? I was listening to everything that was being said but it had no relevance to me.
As they left I heard them both offer their help to the family and ask Ken if he was all right. My husband, my gentle giant, said it all in a few words: ‘I’m gutted but very, very proud of my son.’
When Ken came back into the room we sat together and cried.
I don’t remember stopping.
It was good of Major Ham and Iain Carnegie to visit us at home. I realised later that they didn’t have to make that drive from North Luffenham, 104 Military Working Dogs Support Unit and Kenneth’s Army base, to Newcastle, but they wanted to. It was their personal choice and it couldn’t have been easy for them either. Kenneth’s death must have been as much of a shock to the other dog handlers and trainers as it was to us. They all seem to know each other, whether Army or RAF, and although we always think the military must take the news of a death in battle in their stride I now know that it’s not like that at all. Kenneth was part of the Army’s family as much as he was part of ours. They had lost one of their boys, one of their own.
Chapter 2
Man down!
Ops Room, Camp Bastion, Afghanistan: 24 July 2008
‘Thomo, you need to get down here now.’ Captain Martyn Thompson (now Major Thompson) had just returned to his room after dinner and was ironing his kit for the next day when the call came in.
‘What’s up?’ The Captain stepped into the Ops Room.
‘It’s Ken.’
‘How bad?’
‘I’m sorry, but all indications are we’ve lost him. The dog, too. We’ve planned for this, Thomo, so we all know what we need to do. We need to get our ducks in a row and do our best for him. Over to you.’
The ZAP number (initials and last three digits of the service number) that spilled out of the messenger in the Ops Room was Kenneth Rowe’s: KR 366. It identified him as a casualty on the ground now on his way back to Bastion. Martyn Thompson saw it and knew what had to be done. First he called Chris Ham. ‘Chris, you can’t repeat this but early reports are that we’ve lost one. It’s the Geordie.’ Rather Chris, who had been Kenneth’s Commanding Officer in the UK, hear it from his friend than anyone else, and it would give him time to get himself together before the news came through officially just a short while later.
On the ground, the Army ‘system’ kicked in. Sergeant Major Frank Holmes had just finished his evening meal when he ran into a colleague heading for Bastion HQ. ‘He’s gone, Frank. The Geordie lad. He’s gone.’
That’s all the person said. Running in to find out more, Frank hoped the message had been mixed and there had been some confusion over the ZAP number, but sadly the information was confirmed. Frank had lost one of his best handlers and his best dogs. Not only had he lost one of the RAVC’s rising stars as a handler and trainer, he had also lost a good soldier.
‘I was devastated and I walked to the rest room where everyone had been ordered to go for the announcement, and with every step I found it impossible to hold back the emotion,’ recalls Frank. The padre accompanied the Ops Commander who announced that the man down was Lance Corporal Kenneth Rowe of the RAVC and that his search dog, Sasha, had fallen with him.
‘Some of the girls burst into tears and some of the men, too. Several of the guys left the room to punch the air outside, swear at God and smoke. The shock was part of it but more the fact that we all knew Ken Rowe. We had lived with him over the past four months at Bastion and shared work time and down time in his company. Some of us had known him longer than that. We had been with him, off and on, since his early days at the Defence Animals Centre (DAC) at Melton Mowbray and his first posting to Northern Ireland. The fact that someone had just told us that the handsome, cheeky Geordie lad was gone and his body was due in from the front line was totally unbelievable.
‘I tried to believe it because the certainty of what had happened meant that we had a job to do and we were only going to do it well.’
A communications lock-down prevented the identity of the man down getting to the media and therefore the family before the Army could reach them in person. But there was still a fallen soldier on the ground.
Only twenty-four hours earlier Kenneth had called for a situation report. As part of the 2 Para battle group deployed from FOB Inkerman he was finally seeing the action he had been hoping for since he landed in Afghanistan on 18 March.
He had been assigned to a regiment that had seen and was still seeing some of fiercest engagements and the highest losses of the conflict so far. Every fighting unit over there wanted a dog and handler team alongside them; this was exactly what Kenneth was out there to do with his dog alongside him.
Never a lover of vehicle searches – although he would always do a stint on the gate – Kenneth was happier away from the patrol and search role at Kandahar Airfield and was soon firmly embedded with 2 Para at FOB Inkerman. The Paras took to his dog partner then, Diesel, too, and maybe too much as Kenneth often had to remind them that he was a working dog, not a playmate! A difficult call when home comforts are in such short supply.
