12th January

Well Shaun’s section left today but we have another full screw from 1 Platoon come to us for a few weeks. Flash is a section commander in 1 Platoon and is a good bloke. Happy that he’s here because me, Greenwood and Beswick are away from 1 platoon, so it will be good for someone to see us out here and just how much we have been doing.

So we took Flash out to W6A on a familiarisation patrol so he can see the ground and where we have been getting contacted from on a regular basis. We pushed out 200m west and here the ANP in contact 200m further on from us. So we went firm as to avoid a blue on blue situation, after a quick shot and scoot from Taliban, we pushed up to the ANP to see what the crack was. As it turned out as they were heading down to another CP they found an IED in the road, a command pull IED, and as they got out to move the thing (and by move I mean detonate it!), they were contacted.

So the boss, Con, Greene and Jim, went up to exploit the situation, the boss was having an argument with the ANP, as they just wanted to blow the thing and be done with it but the boss, well he wanted to leave it in the ground and wait to see if anyone came back to retrieve it and then we could follow them etc etc, bigger picture and all that. So we won that argument and it turned out that CP Karaman had better eye’s on than us so we don’t even have to watch it so we handed the tasking over to them so mega. No contact again which was good I guess, another day closer to getting home in one piece, that’s always a bonus.