THE commander of British troops at the outpost of Sangin in southern Afghanistan has described how a shortage of troops forced him to co-opt engineers and military policemen as infantry during a fierce battle with the Taliban in which one of his best soldiers died.

With considerable understatement, Major Jamie Loden of 3 Para described his period in charge of British troops defending Sangin as “fairly intense”. “I have been in the field since July 27 and have only had three days with no contact,” he wrote in a series of leaked e-mails.

While Loden was full of praise for his own men, he was highly critical of air support for his troops — accusing the RAF of being “utterly, utterly useless”.

“A female Harrier pilot ‘couldn’t identify the target’, fired two phosphorus rockets that just missed our own compound so that we thought they were incoming rocket-propelled grenades, and then strafed our perimeter, missing the enemy by 200 metres,” Loden wrote. He also expressed anger at the maverick behaviour of army Apache helicopter pilots, describing them as “egotistical”.

On Loden’s first day at Sangin, the British attacked a group of Taliban, only to discover that two other groups were waiting for them. The hero of that engagement was Corporal Bryan Budd, who had served in the Parachute Regiment’s elite Pathfinder unit on operations in Sierra Leone, Macedonia, Afghanistan and Iraq.

“We initiated a contact with enemy pre-seen,” Loden said. “Unfortunately the pre-seen were only one of the three firing points and two of Budd’s section were quickly wounded. He pushed forward to drive the enemy back, and personally dispatched some enemy taking cover with a couple of grenades and some rifle fire.”

Just over three weeks later, on August 20, one of the platoons, around 20-strong, was using explosives to punch holes in the walls of their base so that it would be easier to patrol.

Budd’s section was to the right of the group, providing cover to the troops using the explosives. To the left, another section with a Land Rover fitted with a heavy machinegun was doing the same.

“Budd saw the enemy 25 metres in front behind a bush line and, using hand signals, organised his section to attack,” Loden said. “As he went forward the Land Rover on the left was ambushed.

“Despite this, he led his section forward with heavy fire, personally accounting for at least two enemy.” But he and three of his section were then hit by Taliban fire.

“As the section pulled back in the face of heavy fire, no one saw Budd was down,” Loden said. “The other two casualties were pulled back, and shortly afterwards Budd was declared missing in action.”

The platoon commander and one of the sections tried to push forward to find him but were driven back by heavy fire.

The company sergeant-major drove forward on a quad bike to recover the casualties while the platoon commander tried to find another route, despite receiving “shrapnel in his backside”. A second section commander was wounded.

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