I spent six months with Nato troops in Afghanistan – Trump’s wrong, they were the front line

Donald Trump doesn’t like heroes. Not real men and women who have made the kind of sacrifice he avoided when he swerved the Vietnam draft on medical grounds. For he cannot stand to be seen as less of a global superstar than Volodymyr Zelensky.

In February 2022, the Ukrainian president stayed on with his wife and young family in Kyiv, certain in the knowledge that Vladimir Putin had sent his finest assassins to kill them all. Whether Trump would have hung around is harder to tell.

And there should be no surprise when he disparages the war dead from the UK and other Nato countries who were killed as a result of the ill-fated “war on terror” that was prompted by an American call to arms answered by Nato.

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Trump, after all, has scorned America’s own war dead on numerous occasions and openly sneered at its most celebrated heroes of combat.

I saw US marines race over notoriously dangerous roads and choke points, riddled with hidden bombs, without a moment’s hesitation to aid British troops in Musa Qala, Helmand – a front line Nato operation.

They were there because Afghanistan had harboured al-Qaeda, which had plotted the 9/11 atrocities. From day one of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan and later of Iraq, British troops were there.

Men like Sergeant Major Gaz O’Donnell, who won a George Medal for diffusing bombs in Iraq. He shuttled around Helmand, painting the sand with a household brush to expose trip wires and hidden weapons rigged to kill.

He was good-looking, a former musician, a gym fanatic and an iconic member of the bomb disposal teams in Britain who sported a Felix the Cat badge. I saw him crunching mountains of salad in Camp Bastion between helicopter trips into the front lines and dust of Helmand to clear paths and roads for Nato’s troops.

Then he was dead. A bomb-disposal expert has to score 100 per cent 100 per cent of the time. His friend, Mike Webb, had to crawl to his remains in full view of the Taliban to retrieve Gaz’s body in the dusty river valley close to Musa Qala.

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So much for Trump’s remarks that Nato troops “stayed a little back, a little off the front lines”.

In Helmand in 2008, the Nato mission to close down the ungoverned spaces in Afghanistan being used by militant groups had mutated into a war that no Nato officers could accurately explain.

Were they there, having toppled the Taliban in 2001, to protect the new government, get female children into schools, eradicate opium poppies? Maybe all of the above – but they were not there because any Nato country was still in any danger from whoever remained in Afghanistan.

But Nato stayed alongside America.

Its members also fought alongside the US in the ill-fated and stupid mission to invade Iraq in 2003 on the falsified premise that Saddam Hussein was building a nuclear weapon.

British intelligence, foreign office and military officials argued against the mission because they knew it would end in disaster, but they followed orders and went anyway.

Those who did not come back were, in Trump’s view, obviously “losers”.

In 2018, that’s how he described American war dead buried near Paris when he shrugged off a trip there because of the rain.

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“Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s full of losers,” he was reported to have said.

He also called the 1,800 US marines killed at Belleau Wood during the First World War “suckers”.

According to The Atlantic magazine, on the same trip to France, he asked aides: “Who were the good guys in this war?” He also said that he didn’t understand why the United States would intervene on the side of the Allies.

Trump avoided the Vietnam draft due to “bone spurs” in his feet. In contrast, senator John McCain served his country. He was shot down there in 1967, held as a prisoner and tortured until 1973.

McCain won the Silver Star, three Bronze Stars, the Distinguished Flying Cross, two Legions of Merit for valour in combat, and was awarded two Purple Hearts for wounds he sustained, which left him with lifelong pain to manage.

In 2015, Trump said: “He’s not a war hero. I like people who weren’t captured.”

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He would never have heard of Jay Bateman and Jeff Doherty. They were killed when Taliban snipers triggered an ambush against them in the Helmand Valley as they were patrolling back to a British fort known as Forward Operating Base (FOB) Gibraltar in June 2008.

The rest of their platoon fought off the ambush, dragging the bodies of their dead comrades while several others were wounded. They carried Jeff and Jay in wheelbarrows and heaved them into the back of a stolen station wagon to get them home to the base.

For C Bruneval Company of the 2nd Parachute Regiment in FOB Gibraltar, the fighting and dying went on for six months and a third of the men and women there were killed or injured.

When they were not fighting, they played like puppies in the sand in the base, scavenging joy wherever they could – bombarding their officers with flour-soaked water bombs fired from catapults made of jock-straps and surgical tube.

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They fought alongside Danish artillery experts and Nato forces from all over the alliance. One senior British officer, who has seen an Estonian platoon in action, said they were such ferocious warriors in assault that “once they were unleashed I thought we might never be able to call them back”.

It would be naive to say these men and women fought with such ferocity simply for Nato. And British troops have long been celebrated as the attack dogs of the alliance, even if the armed forces are much diminished.

Trump’s contempt for their efforts, though, now means that the US president should avoid British garrison towns.

British soldiers won’t hurt the US president, but they’re good with catapults and he’d be lucky if they’re loaded with only flour.