Danger Close

by Colonel Stuart Tootal

  The significance of the threat to the helicopters had been brought home to us two nights previously when an American Chinook was shot down by the Taliban. It had been lifting out a party of US Rangers from a target they had raided close to our own planned objective when it came under withering fire from the surrounding compounds. RPGs and heavy automatic fire sliced through the fuselage, killing the power to the rotors as it began its climb from the LZ. The pilots managed a forced landing, allowing the Rangers and crew to scramble to safety from the severely shot-up aircraft, but it was a sobering reminder of the risks we would be taking.

  The assault troops had spent the previous few days rehearsing the drills of how they would break into and clear the compounds. They had been fed intelligence updates on likely dug-in enemy positions identified by satellite photographs and the conditions of the ground that they would be expected to fight across. There had also been numerous postponements, leading many to expect that the op would be cancelled, as we wrangled with the Americans over whether the necessary surveillance aircraft and Predator UAVs would be available. The tension mounted as 13 July dawned, another clear and incredibly hot day; then word came through that the necessary assets would be in place. We were ordered to be ready to launch the next morning; the op was on. Risk was on everyone’s mind on the eve of the operation as last-minute refinements were made to the plan and final briefings were given.

  With the final components in place I went to my accommodation. I checked, packed and repacked my webbing like hundreds of other men that night in the tents of Bastion as we prepared for battle. Weapons were stripped, cleaned and oiled, grenades were primed ready for use and placed in pouches where they could be easily reached. Extra linked belts of machine-gun ammunition were redistributed and the contents of medical packs inspected. Each man verified the location of his morphine injectors, hoping that he would not have to use them. Men talked among themselves about whether we really would be going and what we were likely to face when we landed. Some took the opportunity to make a call home; sons spoke to mothers, wondering whether they would ever speak to them again. Unable to tell them what they were about to do, many recognized a tone in a voice that indicated that maternal instinct had detected that something was up. Others wrote a last letter home and pressed it on mates asking them to ensure that it was delivered if they didn’t make it back. The more experienced soldiers reassured younger ones that they would be all right, half doubting the sincerity of their own words.

  I believe that every soldier in my Battle Group experienced fear at some point during the tour and most felt it that night before Augustus. It manifested itself in numerous ways and people dealt with it differently. Most felt it as a mixture of both eagerness and anxiety, especially prior to deliberate Battle Group operations. For me a sense of ‘apprehensive enthusiasm’ would begin to build the day before a planned operation. I often went to bed to snatch a few hours’ sleep, reflecting on the problems that might arise on the morrow. My apprehension would mount as the hours ticked by until my alarm clock went off on the morning of an operation. It would accompany me on the drive to the helipad where the aircraft waited for us in the darkness. It would knot in my belly as the turbines began to whine and the twin rotors of the Chinook started to turn. It would tighten as we walked up the ramp under the heat blast from the engines, tightening once more as they changed pitch and we lifted off In the back of the aircraft it would mix with a dual sensation of heavier limbs and a dryness of mouth as we approached the last few minutes of the flight to the target area. It was similar to the sensation of being in the back of a Hercules waiting to make a difficult parachute jump when you knew the wind was against you and the back and leg breaking hazards on the DZ were numerous. The difference was that there would be a real enemy at the other end intent on doing his best to kill you.

  Like most soldiers going into combat, my overriding concern was the fear of failure. Threat to life and limb had its place, but a man’s biggest fear about going into battle is concern as to how he is going to behave in front of the group when the lead starts flying. No one wants to let their mates down or be found wanting when it counts. However, what all soldiers hate most is the anticipation of waiting for the unknown. The maxim of ‘taking it is not as bad as waiting for it’ is absolutely true. As soon as I exited the tailgate on the ground, regardless of what we faced when we got off, the pre-action tension would lift. Suddenly I was busy, I had a job to do and activity would banish the anxiety of waiting. But that night we waited and the dread of an approaching dawn mounted.

  As I lay in my camp cot I kept half an eye on the clock by my bedside. Sometimes before an operation, sheer fatigue would not allow anxiety to deny me sleep. But Operation Augustus was different; it had been building for the past few weeks and we knew that it was going to be a big event. Like most of the men in the tents around me, I slept badly and the hand that shook me awake from a fitful doze came all too quickly. Few spoke as they got up, collected their kit together and made their way to the helicopter landing strip. The aircrafts’ engines were already burning when we arrived. A and C companies were lined up in their ‘chalk sticks’. Lines of men behind each of the waiting helicopters; some men slept and others focused on what was coming. It was the beginning of what we had spent days preparing for and we were pumped up; now all we wanted was to be done with the waiting and get it on. It was a strange relief to be airborne, as I sat in the back of one of the Black Hawks that tucked into station behind the two waves of Chinooks that had already lifted. We flew south for twenty minutes in the opposite direction from the target which was to the north. It was a deliberate part of the deception plan in an attempt to confuse any dickers who might have seen the nine-ship formation of Apaches, Chinooks and Black Hawks take off from Bastion. The other aircraft were unseen in the blackness ahead of me. I felt the turn of the Black Hawk and saw the luminous glow of my compass needle swing north: we were heading towards the target area.

  As we got closer, the radio nets in the back of the Black Hawk were alive with air controllers talking the A-10 and AC-130 Spectre gunship pilots on to positions over the target area. Through the headset I could also hear my own headquarters in Bastion relaying information to me. The Predator UAV was picking up movement through its thermal imaging camera. I didn’t like what I was hearing. Landing deliberately close to the target compounds where we expected the Taliban commander to be would provide the element of surprise if we arrived undetected. On the other hand, if our presence was detected on the way in we were bound to come under fire as we landed. Bastion was telling me that they were picking up reports of people moving on the LZ; had our impending presence been detected? Ahead of me five Chinooks carrying the assault force of A and C companies were holding off, waiting for me to give them the signal to land.

  Minutes ticked by as I tried to get more information from Bastion; the situation was confusing and I desperately wished that I could see the images on the Predator’s screen. Loaded in excess of their normal number of passengers, each carrying forty-four heavily laden paratroopers, the Chinooks were operating at the limit of their capacity and burning precious fuel. Mike Woods was watching the dimly lit fuel gauges in the cockpit of his lead aircraft as he waited for my call. He had eight and a half minutes of fuel left; if they dropped below eight minutes they would not have enough fuel to make it back to Bastion and they would have to abort the mission. I needed to make a decision: Do I abort on the assumption that the vital element of surprise has been lost, or do I order the formation to leave its holding pattern and land?

  I was conscious of the pressure from the Americans to get this one in. I pressed Bastion for more information. But they didn’t have access to the Predator screens that were based in Kandahar and couldn’t give me any more clarity on what the UAV was picking up from the ground. I mentally ran through the criteria checklist for making the ‘go, no go call’ that we had worked up in the planning. If I was uncertain about the security of the LZ, I should eith
er abort or call for suppressive fire to cover us in. But the Rules of Engagement didn’t allow for us to start dropping artillery and bombs unless we had positively identified the presence of the enemy. I ordered Major Andy Cash, who was commanding the supporting Apaches, to make a final sweep of the LZ with his own thermal night sight. I heard him confirm the LZ was clear and quiet. He could see nothing and declared the site `Cold’, as fuel gauge needles dipped dangerously close to the abort line. The information I had available to me was far from perfect and I searched my intuition as I made my decision.

  With my heart in my mouth, I ordered Mike Woods to lead the rest of the formation in. As my own aircraft banked away to make its run in behind the Chinooks, Matt Taylor thumped my arm and pointed frantically out of the helicopter’s starboard window. Streams of red and green tracer fire were arcing through the night sky to where the first of the troop-carrying aircraft was landing on the LZ. It looked like an exercise we might conduct in the UK using live ammunition. But this was no exercise and my troops were being shot at for real as they landed in the back of the tightly packed helicopters. As my American pilot aborted his own run in and banked away, I heard frantic cries over the net: ‘Abort, abort! Hot LZ! Hot LZ!’ But it was too late. I told my pilot to get us in. `No way, sir, that is a hot LZ.’ No shit. As we circled in the safety of an offset position out in the desert I thought of my men landing in the back of the helicopters and what I had committed them to.

  Machine-gun bullets and RPG rockets whipped across the LZ as the first three Chinooks made their landing. The other two aircraft of the second wave were only 30 feet from the ground when they banked away at the last minute. Once one aircraft had been committed to landing, the other pilots in the first wave had to make it in to ensure that a minimum of ninety paratroopers were put on the deck. Any fewer and those who got out would have been outnumbered by the Taliban. However, there was less need to take a risk with the second wave and Mike Woods ordered it to abort as he took his own aircraft into the red-hot LZ. Corporal Graham Groves was standing on the tailgate of one of the second-wave helicopters. He could see the fire coming up to meet his aircraft when he was suddenly thrown violently on to his back as the pilot heaved on his collective to pull the Chinook away from the danger. As Groves scrambled to his feet he looked down at the LZ they had just left. He could see A Company getting out of their cabs into a circle of incoming fire that had opened up all around them. Like the rest of the men in C Company, he was snapping because their aircraft had aborted, and as he flew away he knew that his comrades in A Company would be taking hits.

  Nichol Benzie was flying one of the lead Chinooks that had managed to land. As the front wheels of his aircraft went down tracer rounds streamed towards his helicopter. There were four or five firing points to his left and another six or seven opened up from the right. All three of the aircraft’s M60 machine guns hammered back in response but they couldn’t suppress all the firing points. It was the worst incoming fire Nichol had seen, but he knew that he had to sit there and take it until all the Paras in the back had got off Mike Woods’s aircraft tucked in behind at the six o’clock position, followed by Flight Lieutenant Chris Hasler’s Chinook a few seconds later. Amazingly, the first aircraft didn’t get hit. Thankfully, the troops in the back were well drilled and cleared the tailgate in under twenty-five seconds, allowing the aircraft to lift off and climb to safety. Had the drills of both the crew and the troops not been so slick there would have been bits of aircraft and Paras spread all across the LZ. As Nichol lifted off an RPG sailed a few feet over the head of his aircraft and another shot underneath its belly. The other aircraft were not so lucky, as the metallic ‘thwack, thwack’ indicated that the bullets were dancing along the sides of their fuselages. In the back of these aircraft there were scenes of chaos.

  In the second Chinook the exit had been equally swift, but not before machine-gun bullets had punched through the fuselage. Sergeant Dan Jarvie had been looking out of the porthole of his aircraft when he saw the fire coming up into the sky towards them as they flew in. He shouted at the blokes: ‘Get down, get down!’ As he took one last look out before pressing himself against the helicopter’s armoured matting he was thinking of his best mate Sergeant `Ginge’ Davis who was aboard one of the other aircraft, hoping that he would be all right. Finding a gap in the, armoured matting, one of the bullets hit Private Jones as he made his way towards the tailgate. It struck his upper left arm and exited with enough force to smash through the small personal radio mounted on his chest. A Company’s second-in-command, Captain Martin Taylor, was in the process of getting off the tailgate when he heard Jones cry out, ‘I’ve been hit!’ In spite of his wound Jones continued to make his way towards the tailgate with the bloodstain spreading on his arm. Taylor told him to stay on board and fly back to Bastion for medical treatment. Jones kept yelling that he was coming with them, he didn’t want to miss the action and wanted to get off with his mates, but Taylor gripped him and ordered him stay put before exiting the aircraft himself.

  Outside the back of the helicopters all hell was breaking loose. Dan Jarvie was yelling at the top of his voice above the noise of the rotors and incoming fire, telling his men to ‘fucking move’ and get into the cover of a ditch as they crawled and sprinted across the muddy ground of the LZ. He knew that Jones wasn’t with them and heard Corporal Charlie Curnow shouting that Jonesie was down. He expected to see him lying in the field until Taylor told him that he had forced him to stay on board the Chinook that had just lifted.

  Recognizing the importance of getting the troops in the back of his helicopter on to the ground, Hasler had pushed on the speed of his aircraft to make it into the LZ. It landed heavily as he pulled up the nose of his overladen Chinook violently to a 25° angle to bleed its forward velocity and drop the rear landing gear on to the ground. For a moment the rear rotor blades spun dangerously close to the mud of the field and one of the back wheels was snapped off by the force of the landing. Inside the aircraft the impact broke the restraining strap along the centre of the fuselage which members of the antitank platoon were holding on to. Heavily laden men were thrown bodily to the floor of the tightly packed aircraft. The dim interior lights had been extinguished long before the run in, and now each man struggled desperately to regain his footing in the darkness. They were pinned down by the weight of 70-plus pounds of their strewn equipment and the frenzy of others’ thrashing limbs. Each man was intent on only one thing: to get out of the cabs that were acting as bullet magnets to every Taliban fighter who was opening up on them. Bullets pinged off the side of the fuselage as the M60 door gunners thumped rounds back at them.

  Even after the main body of troops had cleared the aircraft, Hasler had to keep it on the deck as Colour Sergeant Bell, Sergeant Webb and Flight Lieutenant Matt Carter worked frantically to unload mortar rounds that had been strapped to the tailgate. As the last `greenie’ of mortar bombs was shifted the rear gunner yelled at Hasler to begin lifting. That same instant Bell and Webb spotted two jerry-cans of water further up the cab and raced back to get them. Suddenly aware that the aircraft was lifting, Bell ran down the fuselage and jumped off the tailgate. When he tried to stand up he couldn’t and he had to hobble off the LZ using his rifle as a crutch. Sergeant Webb also jumped and the rear M60 caught him a glancing blow as the helicopter lifted. Eyewitness accounts estimate that the helicopter was at least 15 feet from the ground when both men made their leap into the darkness. Colour Sergeant Bell had broken his leg and Sergeant Webb had fractured his hand.

  As A Company took cover, the Taliban’s positions were being pounded by the Apache and Spectre gunships that were called in by Matt Carter, who had made the jump from the lifting Chinook uninjured. Waiting in a waterlogged ditch, Sergeant Jarvie was getting impatient; he wanted to get cracking and start blowing holes in the compound walls to effect an entry. Fire was still coming into the LZ, but there was now a lot more going out, as aircraft ranged in on the Taliban’s positions and A C
ompany’s GPMGs were brought into action. Hugo Farmer had pushed forward to the first compound and instructed the Engineers to place a mouse-hole charge that would blow the first entry point through the compound wall. Plastic explosive had been fixed to crossed pieces of wood that would direct the blast into the thick mud structure when placed against it. A second later there was an ear-splitting roar as the charge went off Normal safety distances went out of the window as Farmer crouched in an irrigation channel a few metres away with his hands pressed tightly against his ears. Concussed by the blast that took the air out of his lungs, Farmer quickly came to his senses and started pushing along the wall looking for the hole. His ears were still ringing when he found the strike mark, but the charge hadn’t been powerful enough to blast through the thick, concrete-hard mud. He directed a Tom to batter it through with a sledgehammer and left him swinging madly while he went to see if they could get through the main gates of the compound. Hammers and feet were used to kick in the doors and they were in. Teams of men cleared from room to room, but the Taliban had fled and the compound was deserted.

  The LZ was quiet by the time the second wave of Chinooks carrying C Company landed. They had flown to Gereshk to take on board a quick suck of fuel and then returned to clear the second compound. Inside were two dead Taliban who had been firing from the roof when they were hit by an Apache Hellfire missile. There were several rough cotton sacks stuffed with money and sleeping quarters that indicated that the compound had been occupied by a large number of Taliban.