Joint Force Harrier

by Adrian Orchard

  So what we had were dozens of pilots flying in and out of Kandahar who were not really able to speak English. On top of that, they were probably not brilliantly trained. The aircraft they were flying were not competently maintained, equipped with very basic gear and usually very heavily laden. It’s not surprising that these guys were an absolute law unto themselves and a danger to everything else in the air, birds included.

  The harsh reality of this was demonstrated to me one afternoon at Kandahar. I was sitting on the runway, with Tim Flatman in the Harrier next to me, waiting for an American aircraft to disappear so that we could take off, when I noticed a dot in the sky that seemed to be getting bigger.

  ‘Is that aeroplane coming straight at us?’ I asked Flatters.

  ‘Isn’t that the one that’s just departed?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s way over there to the right.’

  I switched boxes to use tower frequency and called the local, or tower, controller. ‘Tower, Recoil Four One. Is there an aeroplane coming straight at us on the reciprocal?’

  ‘Stand by.’ There was a pause of maybe five seconds, and then the controller was back on the radio, his voice noticeably higher and more excited. ‘Affirmative, Four One, affirmative. Clear the runway immediately.’

  As we complied with this mandatory instruction, the American air traffic controller (ATCO) tried to clarify the situation.

  ‘We think that’s an inbound UN flight, and that the pilot’s misunderstood which runway we’re operating from. The approach controller told him to land on your runway, but he’s supposed to be ten miles behind you, which means you’d be long gone before he touched down. But now he’s actually coming from the other direction. We’ve tried about a dozen times to contact him, on Guard as well, but he’s just not responding.’

  ‘Guard’ is the military emergency frequency of 243.0 megahertz.

  We watched with a kind of cautious fascination as the big transport aircraft approached the airfield. Eventually, at very short range, it turned right, did a monstrously wide circuit and eventually landed on the correct runway, in the correct direction, and taxied in to the dispersal.

  The pilot got an absolute bollocking on the radio from the American ATCO, which wasn’t particularly professional, though both of us could understand his frustration. But these guys are a law unto themselves, and they just go off and do their own thing. Most of the time you have no clue what they’re planning to do next, but they do it anyway. I saw a couple of them on the base. They were like something out of Air America – two weird blokes who looked as though they had just walked away from a nuclear disaster. Tatty, dishevelled and clearly knackered. These two pilots stumbled out of their aircraft and headed straight for one of the cafés on the base for some strong coffee to get themselves going again.

  Realistically, as we’d seen the incoming aircraft while we were still on the runway waiting for take-off clearance, if we had got airborne we would have been easily able to avoid it. But it wouldn’t have been an ideal departure, because the incoming aircraft would have been in a piece of the sky we would be trying to pass through. And we certainly wouldn’t have had the freedom to carry out the tactical departures that we’d briefed and planned.

  Our only other option would have been to abort the take-off on the runway, and that would have been the least favourable course of action, purely because of our full fuel tanks and the heavy weight of ordnance we were carrying.

  The moment we were cleared to take off, I poured on the coals and accelerated down the runway. I was keen to get the Harrier into the sky where it belonged, and where I felt I could exert a little more control over my own destiny.

  By the end of December everyone was beginning to think about home, and particularly about not being home for Christmas. This wasn’t a surprise, of course – we’d known the dates of the detachment well before we left Cottesmore – but the pervious three months had stretched us and we were all physically tired, as well as tired of living in one another’s pockets.

  At an airfield in the UK, squadron personnel would work their shift and then go back to their married quarters or rented accommodation or whatever, and that provided a clear break from their work environment. At Kandahar that simply wasn’t possible. We couldn’t leave the airfield, and we were living and working together in much the same way as we would be on a ship, but without even the possibility of a port visit to break the routine.

  So it was perhaps inevitable that occasionally frustrations and irritations surfaced, and some of the banter between personnel took on a bit of an edge. It was nothing serious, but it served to emphasize the problems that could arise when a large number of people are cooped up together, and especially in a hostile environment like Afghanistan.

  And ever since Neil Bing had first taken the bait when Dunc Mason remarked on the need for a few RAF pilots who knew their way around the Harrier, the two of them had been at it hammer and tongs. As well as being one of our few RAF pilots, Dunc was also our only former Red Arrow, much to the disgust of Bing Bong, who thought the ‘cream of the Royal Air Force’ were a bunch of posers.

  With the battle ensign hoisted high over Kandahar, Dunc had put up with it all in a good-humoured fashion, but just before Christmas he decided it was time to get his own back.

  He telephoned a friend who was serving on the Red Arrows squadron and asked him to send an enormous ‘goody bag’ of publicity material out to Kandahar. When it arrived we decided to decorate the crew room with it, but there was so much stuff – posters, stickers, badges, pens, mugs and all the rest – that there was hardly a vertical or horizontal surface that wasn’t covered with some kind of Red Arrows publicity material.

  Bing Bong was scheduled for night-flying, so Dunc took the opportunity to ‘decorate’ his locker and all of his flying gear while he’d been resting during the day. When Bing Bong appeared in the crew room that night, his face was a picture. But he never mentioned the Red Arrows again.

  With Christmas on the horizon when the squadron deployed, I’d thought forward and tried to get ahead of the game by taking a whole load of decorations with me when we flew out to theatre. Unfortunately, almost everyone else in the squadron had had the same idea, but because the unit had deployed to a war zone, everybody – including me, I’m sorry to say – had all bought the cheapest, most garish crap they could find. We’d all thought the same thing: we were going to have to leave whatever we bought out in Afghanistan, so we decided we’d just nip down to the pound shop or its equivalent and spend about a fiver.

  The result was that the accommodation ended up looking like the worst Christmas grotto any of us had ever seen, full of bobbing Santas, horrible flashing lights and the tackiest of decorations. Apparently, it’s unlucky to have more than one Christmas tree in the same building. We had eight of them positioned all around the Ops room.

  Our efforts to make sure that being stuck in the middle of the GAFA, or Great Afghan Fuck All, as it was affectionately known, wouldn’t disrupt Christmas didn’t stop with the decorations.

  The Royal Navy has always been good at organizing charity events, and just because the squadron was out in the wilds of Afghanistan didn’t seem any reason why they shouldn’t do something. Back at RAF Cottesmore a charity walk around Rutland Water had been organized, and the squadron decided to do a charity run around the Ops area on the same day and at the same time as the event at Cottesmore. The difference was that we made our event a relay race and between us ran the equivalent of the distance from Kandahar to Kabul and back – just over 600 miles.

  As a follow-on from the charity run held on Christmas Eve, the squadron engineers decided that they, too, were going to raise some money for charity. But, being engineers, they weren’t prepared to just don running gear and cover a mile or two. Instead they each pulled on a Santa hat, trainers and one sock, attached by an elastic band that ran round their waist, and into which they inserted their ‘tackle’.

  They ran round the whole base ra
ising money, and finished off doing press-ups on the ground outside the Tim Hortons, a location chosen deliberately because of the large number of females who worked there. Their antics were clearly much appreciated by a very vocal audience, and the money rained down on them. They raised an awful lot of cash and lifted spirits all around the airfield, though I couldn’t help but wonder what the Afghans made of it all: They got rid of the Taliban – for this?

  I’d decided right from the start that the Kandahar det was going to be ‘dry’, because I didn’t relish the idea of people carrying loaded weapons and working on aircraft with alcohol inside them, and we didn’t even relax the rule for Christmas. Fortunately, nobody seemed to mind. And the chefs in the DIFACs did their best to cheer us up with some traditional Christmas fare – we even got some turkey with all the trimmings.

  But, we discovered, turkey with all the trimmings has exactly the same effect on your waistline in Afghanistan as it does back home. As Wedge learnt to his cost. Just after Christmas he was flying over Naw Zad on a very dull and boring sortie when the following conversation took place between him and Widow 84 on the ground:

  Wedge: ‘So, how was Christmas out here for you?’

  Widow 84: ‘Not too bad – I even got some real turkey to eat! How about you?’

  Wedge: ‘It was good, but I had no time for Christmas dinner, sadly. Not that that’s a bad thing. I could do with losing a bit of weight.’

  Widow 84: ‘Are you the one they call Wedge?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ he said to me as he pulled off his g-suit after the flight, ‘quite know what to say to that, but obviously I’m now renowned as some kind of a lard-arse throughout the Regional Command.’

  And throughout all the festivities, the GCAS alert system remained firmly in place. The Taliban’s attacks and ambushes on coalition forces continued exactly as they always had done.

  20

  The new year began the same way that the old one had ended, with long periods waiting for the GCAS scramble bell to ring, then a race to the latest TIC. The pace of operations offered no let up. Every day, no matter how tired we were, we got airborne to storm in and give it everything. Flying a Harrier is extremely demanding at the best of times – it’s not the easiest of aircraft to handle even in peacetime – but when you add the constant pressure of flying in a very active war zone, it’s not surprising that some of the pilots were showing clear signs of fatigue. And when people are tired that’s when they start to make mistakes – mistakes none of us could afford to make.

  But there was very little I could do about it. I was determined we would meet the tasking – that was why we were there in theatre – so about all I could do was keep my eyes open for any tell-tale warning signs and try to make sure that the aircrew and maintainers got as much rest as possible.

  Early in January I was sitting with Nath Gray in one of the coffee houses on the airfield. With less than a month of the det to run, we were talking about home. We chatted enthusiastically about the things we most looked forward to enjoying again. And then the bleepers went off. Our routine was now well established. When a scramble was called, as on-alert pilots we simply stopped what we were doing and got ourselves to the aircraft and into the air as quickly as possible.

  As always, the adrenalin started to flow as we leapt up and ran across to our scramble vehicle. You never knew what was waiting for you at the other end.

  I leapt into the passenger side and slammed the door closed as Nath started the engine and shifted the gearbox into first. I switched on the flashing red light to show we were on our way to a scramble, and Nath really put his foot down, powering away towards the Harrier dispersal as fast as he could. We kept our speed down – this had nothing to do with the maximum speed allowed on the base, but was simply a limit we imposed on ourselves – but still we were travelling at well over the base limit.

  ‘What the hell,’ I muttered, as we drove past one intersection.

  A traffic cop – a Smokey, the Americans called them – was standing there in the road, waving his arms frantically in an effort to get us to stop.

  Nath did what any reasonable person would have done in the circumstances – he swerved to avoid him, but otherwise completely ignored him.

  I turned round in my seat to look behind, and wasn’t entirely surprised to see that the cop had now climbed into his car and was chasing after us, headlights blazing, roof lights flashing away and the siren now just audible.

  ‘Don’t look now,’ I said to Nath, ‘but we’ve picked up a tail.’

  Nath glanced in his mirror to confirm what I’d seen.

  ‘Do you want me to stop?’ he asked.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ I snapped. ‘We’re responding to a scramble. It takes precedence over that idiot. Keep going.’

  At the Harrier dispersal we pulled up, jumped out of the SsangYong and ran over to our aircraft. As I climbed into mine and started getting strapped in, the policeman hauled his car to a halt at the edge of the dispersal and ran towards us. He was actually trying to catch Nath and stop him getting into his aircraft. Fortunately, one of our ground engineers saw what he was doing and managed to grab him, and I could clearly hear the exchange that followed.

  ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?’ the engineer asked, as he dragged the policeman to a halt.

  ‘That guy’s evading arrest,’ the cop spluttered. ‘That’s a felony.’

  ‘Don’t be so fucking stupid. He’s scrambling.’

  ‘But he’s not allowed to speed on the base. I’m giving him a ticket.’

  ‘No, you’re not, you stupid little man. Get real. If you stand there much longer, he’ll start the aeroplane and just run you over. Get a grip and get the hell out of the way.’

  As we started the Harriers and taxied away, the last thing I saw through the canopy glass was a couple of the ground engineers dragging the struggling cop away from the dispersal. The image was captured in the flashing red lights of the Harrier’s anti-collision beacons. Minutes later we were climbing away from Kandahar into darkening skies.

  On the ground behind us they had to take him inside one of the buildings before finally managing to pacify him. And even then the officious fool left a written warning to ‘the pilot of the British Harrier’ for Nath to find on his return.

  21

  ‘Screw them’ was Dunc Mason’s view of the rules so crudely enforced by the Military Police. Especially after dark. And so Dunc drove the big 4x4 across the airfield as he always did: paying no attention to the speed limit whatsoever. The rest of us – the night team – gripped our seats and feigned a lack of concern. Dunc was convinced that, sooner or later, as we drove along the perimeter road less than 500 yards from the GAFA outside, we were going to be attacked by a suicide bomber or hit by an IED somewhere along there. He was more than slightly paranoid about it, but his argument was difficult to refute because that was the logical place for an attack. He pulled up outside the DIFAC, killed the lights and switched off the engine.

  ‘There’s no way I’m sticking to the speed limit along there.’ Dunc grinned as we went inside for ‘Midnight Eggs’.

  Because the night team of pilots, engineers and bomb-heads was much smaller than the day team, we were much more tightly knit. We did everything together, irrespective of rank, and that included Midnight Eggs.

  We arrived at the DIFAC en masse. Behind the counter a tiny Japanese lady of about sixty-five or seventy – the ‘egg chef’ – stood at a big, flat, fast-order griddle, a spatula in each hand, just waiting.

  ‘An omelette with everything, please,’ I said, then watched, mesmerized, as she vanished in a blur of action, arms and spatulas flying in all directions. It looked less like cooking than a display of some obscure Japanese martial art, but at the end of it a large, fluffy omelette duly appeared.

  ‘Weddy,’ she announced proudly. Her presence begged the question: what the hell was an elderly Japanese woman doing cooking eggs in a war zone in the middle of Afghanistan i
n the early hours of the morning, every morning?

  Dunc and I sat down with the rest of the team and tucked in greedily. But not that greedily. We’d been followed in by a group of over-muscled Americans.

  ‘Seven eggs scrambled,’ requested the first of them.

  Christ alive! Not two, or three, but seven. I genuinely began to wonder if these guys ever managed to go to the loo. Forget muscle-bound, these bodybuilders were just egg-bound – walking mountains of protein and cholesterol. But they fitted in perfectly. The whole place had a surreal feel in the middle of the night – like some weird roadhouse bar, or the famous Cantina from Star Wars. We finished our eggs, talked and studied the night-dwellers, as we called them.

  These guys were contractors who worked on the base. Some of the day staff were weird enough, but the specimens that emerged from the woodwork after the sun had gone down were in a completely different league – almost Neanderthal. In fact we doubted if some of them dared venture out in the sunshine. It was a shame the same couldn’t be said for the Taliban. We stacked our plates and jumped in the 4x4 and held tight as Dunc stood on the throttle and pointed in the general direction of the Ops building.

  After briefing the sortie Dunc and I pulled on a layer of thermals underneath our flying gear. Nights in Afghanistan are absolutely freezing, and the last thing we wanted was to be stuck shivering on some mountainside after ejection (although baking on a mountainside during the day didn’t strike me as lot more fun).

  Then we each collected a set of NVGs and a hand-held laser pointer. About the size of a big pen and strapped to your finger, the laser had a range of three or four miles. By pointing it at a target on the ground you directed a beam on to it that could be clearly seen by your wing-man through his NVGs. He then knew exactly what you were looking at without having to rely on a verbal description via the radio. The laser pointer was simple and extremely effective. And, it has to be said, pretty cool too.