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
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.
Through April and May 2008 the dogs and handlers had to get used to moving around. The demand was constant and came from all bases: Kabul, Kandahar, Sangin, Inkerman, Kajaki, Musa Qala, Lashkar Ghar, Combat Logistic Patrols and Camp Bastion. It was a huge operation to manage, as R and R (Rest and Recuperation) was as important to factor into the mix as deployments if combat fatigue and the stress of being constantly posted from one situation to another were to be kept at bay.
While Kenneth had been at Kandahar and then FOB Inkerman, Sasha had been fighting her own war against the Taliban at Musa Qala. Lance Corporal Marianne Hay had trained her well and with Sergeant Andy Dodds Sasha had become the RAVC’s most capable search dog at the time. She was hot property, but no one would have grasped that from just looking at her.
Small, slight, fine-boned and pretty – that was Sasha. A lovely creamy-toned yellow Labrador with the sweetest nature but with high drive and nerves of steel. Dog soldier Marianne Hay had trained Sasha as a bomb dog in Northern Ireland. The pair had been the last Army dog team to leave the Province when the Army Dog Unit relocated to North Luffenham in 2007, but Marianne had used their time there to add a few skills to Sasha’s CV. While the girl and dog team had successfully supported the police and the engineers there, Marianne had also worked hard on preparing Sasha for ops in Afghanistan. Sooner or later she knew her dog would need it.
It’s an Army dog’s life and a dog soldier’s one to bear that the team that works together does not always stay together, and this was a hard truth for Marianne. She had formed a strong bond with Sasha but she had also prepared her well for theatre (action on the front line) and brought her on to the point where she could hit the ground running. And run she did.
Sasha was deployed to one of the most dangerous places in the world at the time; Musa Qala was known to be a hotbed of insurgent activity, and fighting was desperate and fierce. The Taliban considered the town to be their spiritual home and they wanted to take it back. Danger lurked on every corner, in every house, and on every street. Its labyrinth of underground tunnels that ran beneath the community hid a multitude of sins and sinister activities. It was the place where any arms and explosives search dog, even one of Sasha’s calibre, was going to be challenged.
In no time at all Sasha was notching up ‘find’ after ‘find’. It had been designated a ‘high-activity’ area and Sasha’s skills were proving that classification was justified.