The Tim Heale Podcasts S1 E15 Afghanistan 2006

In this episode I finish my second tour of Helmand Provance in Afghanistan, get into internet dating, do a lot of skiing and qualifying as a Nordic ski instructor before preparing to and returning back to Helmand Provance in Afghanistan on my third tour.

Discover The Parallel Six series, Letters from Afghanistan and The Empty Return at https://timheale.uk.

Discover Tim Heale’s books—including The Parallel Six series, Letters from Afghanistan and The Empty Return—along with his films and broadcasts. Visit https://timheale.uk and join Tim’s Despatch to keep in touch.https://timheale.uk

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1 (10s):
Welcome to this podcast. This shouldn't be about the life. And times of Tim Heale in this series of podcasts, I'm going to take you through my life from birth to retirement recovery, some of the major events in my life, and some of the successes and failures that I've had during my lifetime. So shit back stretch selfie. It's going to be a bit of a bumpy ride. Welcome to episode 15 of the Tim Heale podcasts. In the last two episodes, I tried to taste Stripe my life. I lost my best mate and I lost my soulmate. It was very, very difficult to deal with, but in this one, I'm still in Afghanistan and we'll take it from there and see where this one takes us.

1 (59s):
Thank you for listening now, before we go any further, I'd just like to apologize for the sound quality of this. I'm not in my usual studio where I've got a clinical sound. I'm on the boat and we're anchor and it's raining and the winds blowing. So if you get some rain and wind noise, please ignore it. I've been out enough Gannett stand for some time now. And it was coming towards the end of the tour. It was about three weeks prior to coming back. I'd made the decision that I was going to have my bed taken off. So I didn't go back with a white face. This was an era.

1 (1m 40s):
What it should have done was kept you on until I left the respect I lost from the local boys was immeasurable. They treated me like a leper. I've been all Pally all the way through. And then as soon as I took my beard off, I lost all that respect, which was a shame cause he ended on a slight downer. The Baba in camp in Alaska Gol was a local guy, came in and cut hair. He was brilliant. You had Eva an Afghan haircut or you had an army haircut. If you had an army haircut, it was just done with the Clippers. I think it was almost just a cookout straight over the top. If you had an Afghan haircut, it was done with scissors and done with care.

1 (2m 23s):
You got absolutely fabulous, fabulous headmaster knowledge. And this was the guy that also took off my bed. I wish it had me and I wouldn't have had it done because of Afghan culture. It meant the elders like myself carried great respect when I had a full bid about a week or so before I was due to go home, I went out one last one last operation. After a time I paid off and we went out to Natalie where we'd had the firefight earlier in the tour. I was a little bit apprehensive. I didn't fancy going out at all this close to going home, but we did it. And I was sat in the back of a Dutch G wagon.

1 (3m 5s):
And we went out, we went to this particular village. We went to say they, the local police don't run into the shout out. And it was a, it was just like our Western fault displace, but it all went off without incident. So thankfully I got away with that one and a few days later, I was on a plane back to good old Blighty on the white bag. I should have stopped off at Cyprus to take compress, but for one reason or another, we missed out Cypress altogether would just flow straight back to blind. When we got back to Brice Norton, we had a new normal FAFSA around. We had a driver make us from chicks hands and take us back with our weapons systems and all the rest of it.

1 (3m 49s):
Yeah. And all that care. When I got back had a few days to sort it out in a debrief, boss wrote up all our notes from that. That's all of what we've done. And in all the product that we accumulated need, hand it in our weapons, they go cleaned and everything in the armory I knew. And that was us. We will, several weeks later, I think I had about five or six weeks leave. I know where to go. The house had already sold. So I just stung around the camp really and just went off and saw Leticia, but it's a basis and I was spending quite low. Somebody suggested in the mess, why don't I try internet dating.com softball? Why not? I've got nothing else to do.

1 (4m 30s):
So I've gone to the old internet or gone to these, this website, internet dating, putting a profile on one thing and another. And I was here. I started dating, which was quite bizarre and Danny for years. So the first few ladies I'd guy went out with was a bit strange. All those lesions would follow a similar pattern. I didn't, I didn't introduce myself on the internet. We'd arrange to go meet a pub somewhere and I'll take him out for a meal. We sat and chatted. And there was one particular lady that I quite fancied and I was Mary or Mary Jane. She was from Luton. So she wasn't too far away. And we met the first time and thought, of course she's a bevel, right?

1 (5m 11s):
And she must have felt the same about me because after that we started going out. So I spend all this internet dating malarkey and settled on just the one any more than that, just to being too much like hard work. But so Mary and I went out together for about 18 months or so before it all sort of went horribly wrong and we weren't off on holiday together. A few times I took on a couple of cruises and I took a skiing. She'd never been skiing before now. People think I was mad introducing her to Telemark straight away when she'd never, ever escaped before. But I figured if you didn't know any different, it should be fine. Yeah. She became fairly good. We had three, three holiday scheme.

1 (5m 53s):
We went to, or in Sweden, we went to Kavala in Italy. And then we went to teen in France and had a really good time that late summer of 2007, I decided I was going to change my motorbike. And I was going to sell what was Sandra's car, which was a Assad nine, three. And she loved that car. It was about trying to get rid of it. So I changed that in and I bought a Lotus Elise S one series, one legislate fabulous little car. I also changed my motorbike, Ida Kawasaki's EDS said our 600. And I changed that for our a Ducati seven four, nine S or still got the catty.

1 (6m 36s):
Unfortunately I got rid of the Lotus in 2011, I was struggling again and out of it. And I'll explain why later the first cruise I went on, where Mary was on Fred Olson's Braemar and we sold out of South Hampton and we went all the way up the Norwegians West coast, all the way out to Hammerfest Colin Oleson. We went into the fjords and went to Alden and then we came out and then we went all the way outside to Hammerfest and term, sir. And then we went off further North then to Spitsbergen or Svalbard. And we went into Longyearbyen.

1 (7m 16s):
If you'd never been that far, North is something incredible out there. We came out of Longyearbyen and we went into neon listened, which is off way up the West coast of Salbaba. And then we were came out of there and we went even further North to Magdalena Fjord. And there was still, this is like August and there was still icebergs up there. Somebody reckoned it. I saw a polar bear. Well, we may have seen a polar bear. It was certainly a white blob in the distance site and it was moving. So it was a fair one. And we also saw lots and lots of wildlife up there, particularly lots of Yo's and stuff like that.

1 (8m 4s):
And we used to have a bit of a giggle with paper when we were up on the deck, which at WYO, everybody would look around. They say, <inaudible> so got a reputation to being funny. Buggers, this mocking about cost noticed by the ship's crew. And we found an envelope and a door one day inviting us to the captain's table for dinner, which we thought was rather special. That was a wonderful evening. We mentioned very different people. The captain was very, very nice and the food was what you'd expect outstanding. And there was free wine, which was a real, real joy.

1 (8m 47s):
Not only that we got front row sinks saved for us in the, in the big lounge and the theater. So we got later in, after everybody else had gone in and we were sat there and we got more free drinks. So gin and tonic handicapped in, when we got back after this trip, we're going to have a bit of a pattern of life. Mary would come over to the mess on a Friday night and we'd have a drink on a Friday evening or Friday, late afternoon when the families came in and then on Saturday morning, we'd go to Eva at a gym, or we go out for a run or both generally both and spend a morning running around the brownie woods, just outside camp.

1 (9m 28s):
And then we'd come back in and we'd have a bit of a session in the gym. I know we're going to have lunch in a mess in the afternoon. And then we'll probably go back to her house for Saturday evening. So that was a pattern of life for quite a while. Or we also planned out our next trip, which was going to be three ski trips. This was a, this was somebody that I really liked to do. So our first trip we planned to go to or in Sweden and it's the largest Alpine ski resort in Sweden. So we planned it out. We got there and we had a fantastic week prior to going on this trip. We took a trip up to see Mary's sister who lived up in hurricane and just around the corner from there.

1 (10m 8s):
Ilkley is the guys from back country, UK, and now the guys to do all the Telemark equipment in the UK. So we went to see those guys and they fitted out Mary with a Pacific pair of boots molded to her feet. Cause she had funny fate, she'd been a ballet dancer in her early life and her feet had pretty much gone to rack and ruin. So she had special insults put special foot beds that made these birds really, really comfortable. And we bought a set of Skase set of bondage for her. And then we flew out to, to Sweden and we had, I think we had 10 days there actually we had two weekends and the week and I taught her the very basics of Telemark skiing and she was starting to get a real hang of it towards the end.

1 (10m 56s):
So we did a little bit of touring as well on these boats, which was quite good, fun and star 2009. It was really busy for me. We got back in, off of leave on the 6th of January or actually a 7th of January. We were back early because we were taking the team down to Lydon highs ranges in the seventh today, 24 January to don't arrange package and get them ready for their deployment to Afghanistan. Stan, on the 3rd of February, 2008, I flew out to Norway to do my advance proficiency Nordic. After that I came back, that was a two week course.

1 (11m 39s):
I came back successfully passing it. And that's when we went off to or in Sweden or then went back out to Norway on the 8th of March and did the practical course followed by exercise hard ski to do my naughty ski instructors course, which I passed fortunately. So it was now qualified Nordic ski instructor, which also incorporated downhill Telemark style skiing, which was really useful, particularly when we went off to Kavala in Italy in early April. And we had a fantastic time. Now myriad really got the hang as Telemark skiing.

1 (12m 20s):
I was able to give Mary some really good chips and she came on leaps and bounds and we ended up skiing the, the sell of Rhonda. We did, I think about four times, we also did the hidden Valley, which is quite spectacular. Mary was up to skiing, black runs by the end of the time we were there. So that was great fun. When I got back in the April, we were just setting up a new team to go to Afghanistan in late 2008. I'd just been promoted to color Sergeant in early 2008, for anybody that doesn't know the difference between a color Sergeant and a staff Sergeant a color Sergeant comes from an infantry regiment and escorts.

1 (13m 4s):
The colors colors is what blokes live and die to star sergeants come from cause, and don't do a lot. So this for me was going to be a great opportunity to get out and do some stuff. I was heading up a radio cell. Once again, this time we had added bonuses that we were going out and setting up a radio in a box network across Helmand, which meant that I was traveling around an awful lot on the whole tour. And I'll go for an a in a bit. So we went through the training package. Again, this time we were going to deploy out again with three commando brigade, I really, really enjoy working with the commandos.

1 (13m 44s):
They do get what we're about. They do understand what hearts and minds is all about. So I was looking forward to this immensely. We're pretty much finished the training package by the end of October or just before the end of October. And we had some leave. So Mary and I booked onto an adventure holiday to Egypt and Jordan. It was a bit it's going to be a road trip. So we flew out day or so before they actual adventure was going to start. And we held up in a hotel on the flight out, there was Zoe ball, her husband and son were also on the flight. So there was a few other people that were actually going on this tour with us.

1 (14m 27s):
We sat up in a hotel and we had a couple of days mentioned around Cairo before the actual tour started because there was a few things on the tour that wasn't going to be included in the tour. So we may sit down and say the British museum. And we went in sorta the pyramids, the great pyramids at Giza. And then we met up and arrested the guys on the morning of this adventure holiday and got introduced to everybody. And then we set off and we did a few things around Cairo itself. And then we started heading off and to the desert and it was a fantastic little holiday. We went across the Jordan, we went to Petra, we did a camel ride along the black say, or the red sea.

1 (15m 13s):
Some of the highlights of this trip was the, we spent a night in a bedwin camp in Wadi rum overlooking the seven pillars of wisdom of Lawrence of Arabia. Fine. We also went up some Morgridge Mount in the dead of night to watch the sunrise. And then we went off to Petra of Petraeus. Fantastic. If you knew we'd been to Petra, it's enormous. You see the, the treasury and that in most of our films, but the whole site is humongous. It's massive. And we had a full day wandering around. It was brilliant. And we also, when we've gone to Jordan, we went to a place called Geresh, which is just sort of North of Armaun.

1 (15m 55s):
And that has one of the best kept ancient sites in the world, I think. And they laid on the Romans, laid on a chariot rice and there was all sorts of fighting going on with gladiators and stuff like that. And that was a real highlight of the trip. And then we came back to Armand and then we flew back to took an old Bliley. And when we got back off at this holiday, I only had a week or so to get ready. And I was off again to Afghanistan this time back into Helmand province and back into being based out Alaska Gar. However, I did get to go around an awful lot and that's what I'm going to go through next.

1 (16m 38s):
Unlike on my previous tours this time, we actually flew out as a team, which was quite unique for me. Normally I end up flying out by myself as an individual or men to, to join a team somewhere. But this time we had actually done a full buyout package. The whole chain was ready. We'd done several exercises, we'd all done the team medic core. So we were all like keyed up and ready to go. So we all got down to Bryce Norton and then we flew out, we went fire behind again. We stopped there, swapped aircraft and went into a sea 17 from the VC 10.

1 (17m 22s):
And then we flew into camp bastion and we had a few days in camp bastion and just a, a climatize and, and do the in country briefs and get down in Alaska guard and then start taking over from the other guys and had some bad memories of it. From the last time I was here, especially going up to the hospital for injection, but a guy that's a bastion is just a big sprawling, massive place, far too many people on there that, that shouldn't really be there that didn't have proper jobs to do. As a tour, went on, I got the height, bastion bastion for me was just a horrible place. When we arrived in Alaska Gar, we met all the guys that we were taken over from.

1 (18m 6s):
We knew everybody anyway from back in chick sands because we had help with their preparations for their deployment. So we took them through their training package as did the guys that's going to take from us. They helped out with our training package. So that was fine. Now the thing that I found really, really amusing really funny was that I got the same bed space that I had on the previous tour. Exactly. In the same spot, exactly the same bed with exactly the same mattress, gray art, or this is me. So we only had a few days in which to get ready and take over all the care take over or that they'd been doing.

1 (18m 52s):
And we had a good idea what they were doing. Anyway, the Afghan arches are kind of fallen by the wayside, unfortunately, and I was hoping to maybe resurrect it if I had the time, but my actual job this time was to travel around all the different locations with a radio in a box to install it or where they had installed it to go and service it, to make sure it's all up and working properly. And they'd send out products over to the interweb that I had sat in in the country. And it was little sound, small soundbites. The rest of the stuff that they were playing was pretty much just jingling music that really went down well in the country.

1 (19m 37s):
Basically a radio in a box is a transmitter with some media outlets and we connected up to a laptop. So we had a load of laptops when a half a dozen had A's radio in a boxes. And it's a purpose built flight case as it were with soft mounts. So it didn't jump around too much. It had a, a 50 watt transmitter installed in it that was connected up to a recorder. So they arrived arrive to, to do some stuff. We connected the laptop up to this transmitter through a mixing desk. So now we're able to sort of set up so they can put out the right amount of sound and, and, and then they could take it down and skilled operators could, then what they did was they live to where programming and I taught a lot of guys whilst I was there to do this precise, live to air programming in the morning, they had a morning show.

1 (20m 37s):
Then in the afternoon, they're doing afternoon show and they'd be reading out requests from the locals and stuff like that. But I'll explain it that as I go along and which places we did it. So it had arrived in Afghanistan on the 8th of November, 2008. And we finally got down to Alaska Gar on the 13th of November. It was late in November when we had a BBC news team came out, headed up by none other than George Allah Gaya. So I managed to do a spoof photo of him, of me interviewing him rather than him interviewing me, which was quite amusing.

1 (21m 18s):
And it wasn't until Monday, the 8th of December that I found finally, mainstay leave Laska, Gar and get out on the ground. My first port of call via bastion was Sangin the Sangin Valley offload into the base in Sangin, in a Chinook. And I was met by the guy that was running the radio station there. And he introduced me to these interpreters. And then he took me into the commander of the base and I sat down and I had quite a long chat with him. And he asked for my advice on different things and stuff like that. He also briefed me up on the local situation in Sangin, in Sangin Valley, where they, where the town was, I'd know about four or 500 meters away.

1 (22m 6s):
And they were fairly isolated and they occasionally had rocket attacks and stuff like that. And they also had a river running through the camp or on the edge of the camp that they used to go and swim in and stuff like that. When it got really hot in Sangin, we had the four kilowatt transmitter was located. Unfortunately it wasn't working. It had broken some time before, I don't know how long it had been down for, but I'd pretty much raped him, brought some of the stuff inside into one of the hardened accommodations from the container that it was in. And they also had a radio and a box there.

1 (22m 49s):
So my first job was to services radio in a box. They said that it wasn't working particularly well. They'd gone down into the village and try to pick it up on their little radios. And it wasn't really getting much out of the camp. So I'd look at it and I'll read tuned it and I've got it to work just fine. And it was a, it was booming out some really good power, power wattage. So that was then able to reach the village. I assess what was wrong with the four kilowatt transmitter I was in there for four days and I didn't have an awful lot of time to sort out, but I identified the fact that we needed to relocate the mast.

1 (23m 32s):
And also the transmitter itself, along with the generator that had gone tits, the generator had been back loaded to bastion to get sorted out by the Raimi types there. And they were just waiting for it to come back. So I got them to chase you up while we was there and it was going to come up on the next convoy or then flew out of Sangin back to bastion on the 12th of November. And I had a night in bastion on a 12th of November. I used to stop the RMPs. They had a poor cabin that they weren't using and just had a bed in there. And it was great. I could just leave some kit, they're locked out and it was pretty mine to use whenever I was passing through, which was great.

1 (24m 20s):
The following day, I flew out and went up to a forward operating base called no lie in no lay was run by. There was some boot annex in there and a guide up was actually running. The radio was a guy from 26 regiment, bald artillery. Again, similar to what happened in San glean. This guy introduced me to the interpreters that are using and name. We went off and met the commander of the base. And again, he briefed us up on the local situation and when we had a really good chat and then I got down to work, the radio itself was situated in the highest point in this place. This place was a series of about three or four compounds, some houses, and that that's absent tense and hard accommodation that overlooked a small town or a small cluster of, I don't know, compounds, I suppose.

1 (25m 16s):
So it was like a Hamlet of some sort. I had a really productive week here in no lie. I taught the guys an awful lot. I taught the, the guy that was running the radio, how to produce programs and also taught his interpreters how to operate, live to air. And I practice this and practice this, and I got real hang of it. And then towards the end of the week, they did their first live breakfast show. Within a few days, they'd got some feedback from the locals that liked it, and this is how they went on. At the end of that week, I went back to bastion just long enough to pick up another radio in a box.

1 (25m 58s):
And I flew out again that afternoon to another forward operating base called Gibraltar where I know my mind was there running the radio station. I'd been telling him I'll scheme with Tom on a couple of occasions previously. And it was good to catch up with him. Him and his guys have been working this place for a little while. And I came there and we set this radio up and I showed him at work and everything. And then a guy, these guys working on putting together a news program, first thing in the morning. So they read out a few news items and then do some music and stuff like that.

1 (26m 39s):
And within a couple of days, again, the local population where we're letting them know what thought about a radio station in this fob, Diana, what I called the North wall, which looked out into Sangin Valley, which was real banded country. And occasionally they'd get a rocket attack or that be opened up one with some machine gun fire or something like that. And the whole place just erupted. Everybody run to the door full and the whole place just lit up. They were fine, all sorts. They were fine. Heavy machine guns. I would find GPM Jays and the javelin went out as well. As soon as I located where the shots had come from, it was quite funny to watch everybody tearing up there at all, jumped on whatever I could to have a guard.

1 (27m 24s):
The enemy, just as a note, a heavy machine gun is a 50 cow and they also had a GPMG, which is the general purpose machine gun. And a javelin is an anti-tank rocket. So all in all folk Gibraltar or patrol based Gibraltar, should I say is quite a lively little place to be. And the accommodation there is all hardened to combination. It's all bill I've heard of the old Hasko bastion filled out with a F and they got top cover over the top and everything like that. So mortars or anything there that be safe unless they was outside the buildings. So it was quite tidy, little foot that I got going on there.

1 (28m 6s):
I got lifted out a patrol base. Two brought her on Christmas Eve and I had to go to bastion where I had to wait for a convoy coming in. We've allowed a good hits, were allowed a radios and shovels and blankets and cross those what else coming in on about two or three containers. And I went to meet Wang about, just to say this stuff in soccer, put it into our containers in bastion to be broken down, to be delivered out to order patrol bases and the fobs, or as kids it's to win the hearts and minds of the locals. This I can tell you, it was a pretty miserable Christmas for me.

1 (28m 47s):
I was there all by myself. I didn't know many people at all around the place or was elder up in my little container that the RMPs had given us. I did manage to go and get our Christmas dinner in the main galley. And I finally got back down to lash on Sunday, the 28th of December, 2008 on Monday, the 29th of December, or flew down to Garcia, which is in the South of Helmand. And then I'm just managed to get back to let go on Wednesday, the 31st of December to Fasten a night, ready to celebrate the new year with the guys.

1 (29m 26s):
Fortunately, we'd managed to smuggle out a small bottle of Paul. So we opened a toast in the new year. So having seen in the new year on Friday, the 2nd of January, 2009, I left Laska Gar via bastion and flew to calf, which is in the next province to fly out to the UK on a weLearn R and R thus wrong, a latest episode. Next time, I'll take you through what happened on the rest of the tour. If you've enjoyed it, please share it with your friends and thank you for listening.

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