We pulled on our survival kit, grabbed our helmets and goggles and walked out towards the waiting jets.
Night-flying emphasized just how dangerous the skies over Afghanistan really were. As we flew over the Graveyard, the area where the Canadian troops had come under heavy fire, we could see the tracer, mortar flashes, flares and other stuff flying around. By day all that was almost invisible.
Illumination flares were used everywhere in Afghanistan as a matter of routine, so virtually every night the clear skies over the country were ablaze with lights and flares, like a constant fireworks display. Every night was like 5 November. From our cockpits we could easily see which towns and locations were busy, just because of the flares and tracer flying around. We were able to use our vantage point to identify exactly where the action was taking place, almost like watching a constant newsreel.
As we climbed to the north-west we saw, either in blue through the night-vision goggles or in white with our peripheral vision, a sequence of little stars shooting upwards from the ground as yet another cluster of illumination flares was fired and part of another town or area of countryside was briefly illuminated in the distance. The flares had a one-minute burn time, but occasionally we would notice that the troops using them wouldn’t get the burst height quite right. If it was too high, the flares wouldn’t light the target properly, but if they set them too low, they were still burning when they hit the ground. For all the violence revealed by the flash and burn below us, there was still something almost magical about it.
But the other side of the coin is that night-flying can give a pilot a false sense of security simply because it’s dark. You can start to feel that you’re in a kind of cocoon. There’s the reassuring roar of the Pegasus engine behind you, and you’re surrounded by the lights from the switches and controls and the two TV sets. You can hear your own breathing, and the only intrusion from the outside world is whatever’s being said on the RT, the calls from your wing-man or the C2 controlling authority. You’ve no real spatial awareness and you’re totally dependent on your instruments and on ground control.
That might sound like nonsense, but the reality is that by day we can see the ground below us, clouds and so on, and we have a good sense of motion and dynamics. But at night, although the aircraft is travelling at exactly the same speed and performing precisely the same manoeuvres, there’s much less sensation of motion in the cockpit. Somehow everything seems to calm down.
The slightly hypnotic tranquillity didn’t last long. The radio crackled into life, directing us to Naw Zad in the north of Helmand. Royal Marines there were engaged in heavy exchanges with Taliban firing mortars from positions hidden in the woods outside the city limits. We selected our target and positively identified the enemy. Then Dunc brought their contribution to the war in Afghanistan to an abrupt end with a single laser-guided bomb. The British FOB was off the hook for another night. Job done – and with a minimum of drama. But something wasn’t right.
There’s an old expression in the military, ‘There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.’ In other words, pilots who take risks don’t normally survive to make old bones. As well as competence in the cockpit and caution in their actions, the other thing that many pilots seem to possess is a kind of sixth sense, an extra-sensory perception that kicks in on those few occasions when things are about to turn to rat shit.
That night, as Duncan’s laser-guided bomb detonated precisely on target, I suddenly felt the hairs on the back of my neck start to rise. I checked my instruments again – I’d been checking them regularly as a part of my normal cockpit drills – but all the indications were still normal. At night pilots have to rely completely on their instruments, simply because they usually have no visual cues outside the cockpit to let them know what their aircraft is doing.
That night the aircraft seemed to be handling properly. I could see my wing-man clearly, and there was no threat from the insurgents on the ground as far as I knew. I almost felt that I was being watched, that there was someone behind me. It was a ridiculous idea in the circumstances, yet I began to feel very uncomfortable.
My aircraft was at 20,000 feet, with Duncan 1,000 feet below. The firefight had been properly notified, so there should have been no other coalition aircraft anywhere near the area. But I still felt that something was wrong, a kind of horrible prickling sensation that simply wouldn’t go away. I carried out a rapid scan all around my aircraft, starting with the right rear. When I’d finished it I looked up and to my left.
And, to my absolute astonishment, through my night-vision goggles I could see about half the wingspan of a Predator UAV.
My heart rate bolted, and for a long, horrible second I was caught for breath.
Then I acted. I pushed the Harrier into a steep dive to avoid the Predator and transmitted an immediate instruction to my wing-man.
‘Four Eight, Four Seven. Descend 1,000 to one eight zero immediate. There’s a Predator at my level.’
Dunc, thank God, was on the ball. ‘Roger that. In the drop.’
An unmanned aerial vehicle isn’t that big, and if I could see a half-wingspan through the limited vision afforded by a set of NVGs, it had to be pretty bloody close. Too bloody close for safety, certainly.
But that wasn’t the end of the incident. All we knew was that we were sharing the airspace above Naw Zad with a UAV. The problem was that we had no idea if the Predator was in transit through the area, climbing or descending or what. And, though the Harrier is a much larger vehicle than the Predator, a mid-air collision with it would certainly ruin any pilot’s day, and especially mine.
I contacted the C2 guy who was controlling us – predictably, control out in Afghanistan was fairly loose. It was primarily procedural with some limited radar coverage as the aircraft got further north, towards Kabul.
‘Crowbar, Recoil Four Seven. Is there a Predator in my vicinity?’
‘Recoil Four Seven, stand by.’
After a short pause the controller replied: ‘That’s affirmative. There is a Predator in the area, but it’s twenty miles to the east of you.’
‘Negative,’ I said, ‘it’s right here. I just missed it by a whisker.’
One of the main problems in trying to de-conflict UAV activity from aircraft operations is that – as unlikely as it sounds – the Predators are not controlled locally, but from Nellis Air Force base, just outside Las Vegas in Nevada, USA. A further problem is that because the ISAF forces are fighting a war, where and how the coalition aircraft will be deployed can change literally at a moment’s notice in response to a TIC call.
Having UAVs working in the same area as fighter and ground-attack aircraft is potentially a recipe for disaster, but realistically all the controllers can do is ensure that everybody in the air, or controlling aerial vehicles, is aware of what other activity is known about. And then everybody needs to keep a sharp lookout. On this occasion that had been enough.
As I turned my Harrier away from the TIC to head south-east for the transit back to Kandahar, I felt that yet another of my nine lives had been used up that night.
22
If my luck in the air – rarely dropping weapons and nearly having a mid-air collision with a Predator – wasn’t improving, the same couldn’t be said for the rest of the squadron. After about three and a half months in theatre most of the guys were going from strength to strength, and some of 800’s younger pilots, in particular, were fast becoming hardened combat veterans.
It had already been a busy day when the GCAS scramble bell rang again. Hoggy and Flatters were the on-alert crews and got themselves airborne within about fifteen minutes of the call.
As soon as they were at altitude they checked in with Crowbar and were given vectors to a major TIC way up north in support of some Americans who were in hard contact with a big gang of Taliban.
On the ground it was clear that the Taliban had chosen the ambush spot carefully. They were properly dug in and had z
eroed in on the American patrol pretty well, pouring a non-stop barrage of rounds at them. There wasn’t anything the Americans could do to stop them: they were outnumbered and outgunned.
‘Mastiff Zero Two, this is Knife Five One.’
‘Five One, Zero Two, we’re taking heavy incoming fire. RPGs and machine-guns. You’ve fucking got to sort this.’
That wasn’t exactly the response Hoggy had been expecting, but it was already evident that the situation on the ground was chaotic in the extreme, and they were going to have to work at it if they were to get any sensible answers from the JTAC. At first Hoggy thought he was talking to a woman, because Mastiff’s voice was so high-pitched and nervous. It took him a few minutes to work out that the JTAC was actually a terrified Hispanic guy.
‘We’re pinned down behind the trucks. We can’t move. Jesus! We just took another RPG, did you see that?’
‘Zero Two, Five One, confirm the enemy and your positions.’
Hoggy wasn’t prepared to drop anything until he knew exactly where both sets of combatants were located.
‘We’re behind the fucking trucks – can’t you see us? We’re fucking pinned down.’ At that moment Hoggy and Flatters both heard a crashing explosion through the radio. ‘Fuck. That landed twenty feet away. Clear hot! Clear hot!’
But Hoggy’s problem was that he couldn’t go in hot until he was certain that his weapons wouldn’t land anywhere near the American troops, and getting confirmation of that out of the JTAC was looking less and less likely. He guessed that the JTAC was huddled behind his vehicle, like the rest of the patrol members, just trying to stay alive, let alone talk aeroplanes on to any targets. But at the same time Hoggy couldn’t just fly around over the TIC while the coalition forces were cut to bits by the Taliban’s RPGs.
Then a different American voice called him on the radio.
‘Knife Five One, this is Ghost Three Four.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Five One, Three Four is a Predator at 17,000 feet. I have a good lock on the hostile positions, and I can lase them for you.’
‘Understood. Confirm there’s adequate separation between the hostiles and the friendlies?’
‘Confirmed. A minimum of 600 yards.’
‘Good enough,’ Hoggy replied. He was carrying the heavy weapons, the 1,000lb stores, which were too big for collateral damage reasons. ‘Flatters, use the five-forty airburst.’
‘Roger that.’
Flatters left orbit over the TIC and opened out to the west.
‘Zero Two, Five One. We’re dropping a five-forty airburst. Two minutes.’
‘Clear hot, clear hot. Jesus Christ, that was close!’ And over the radio there was the sound of another loud explosion, followed by the steady blatting of a heavy machine-gun.
It was clear that the JTAC wasn’t going to be much help to the Harrier pilots until they’d done something to reduce the amount of incoming fire.
Hoggy set himself up in a wagon-wheel over the wooded area that the Predator pilot had identified as the Taliban position, and waited for Flatters to start his inbound run.
‘Five One, Five Two. One minute.’
‘Roger. Laser fires.’ Hoggy aimed his pod at the spot the Predator’s laser was illuminating, and fired his own.
‘Five Two, good spot,’ Flatters said. ‘In hot.’
‘Clear hot, clear hot,’ the JTAC shouted again, the unmistakable sounds of battle raging all around him.
‘Released,’ Flatters reported, pulling up from the dive as the bomb dropped off his wing.
Hoggy watched the tree-line carefully, and suddenly saw the detonation of the weapon, a soundless explosion of violence far below him.
‘Zero Two, Five One, request SITREP.’
‘This is Zero Two. Jesus, that helped. They’re still firing, but a hell of a lot less. You wanna do that again?’
Flatters was already running outbound, preparing his second five-forty.
‘Roger, Zero Two. We’ll repeat the performance.’
Again Flatters ran in, and again Hoggy fired his laser at the wooded area. The second bomb was set to explode on impact, and tore a massive hole in the undergrowth when it detonated. And that’s when the firing stopped.
‘Knife Five One, Zero Two. That’s stopped them. Thank you, sir.’ The JTAC’s voice, Hoggy noted, now sounded almost normal.
‘Knife Five One, Ghost Three Four. I’m detecting a whole bunch of bad guys running from the tree-line towards a compound in back. They could just be regrouping. You wanna take them as well?’
‘Three Four, Five Two, that’s affirmative.’ Flatters broke out of orbit again, selected his CRV-7s and dived down, flames bursting out from under the wings of his Harrier as he ripple-fired a couple of salvoes.
‘Knife Five One, Ghost Three Four. Earlier in the engagement I saw several groups of Taliban moving towards that compound. It’s the group of buildings bearing approximately one three five from the ambush site. It might be worth taking a look at it. But I have to go now. Thank you for all your help. I know the guys on the ground appreciate what you did.’
‘All part of the service,’ Hoggy replied. ‘Thanks for identifying the target for us.’
‘Five One, Mastiff Zero Two, thanks, guys. That building the Predator driver eyeballed – we saw some of the bad guys heading that way ourselves, and our pre-mission intel brief identified two buildings in that compound as known Taliban safe houses.’
The JTAC passed the Harriers the grid position, and Hoggy tried to identify exactly which building he was talking about, but that was very difficult because his rocket targeting pod uncaged in dead ground among a number of individual buildings.
‘Zero Two, Five One. I’m not happy with this. I still don’t have a proper identification of the target.’
‘Copied. We’ve just started taking fire from those buildings.’
‘Mastiff Zero Two, Knife Five One, this is Bone Two Six.’
‘Bone’ was an American B-1 bomber callsign.
‘Bone Two Six, Zero Two, go ahead.’
‘This is Bone Two Six. We’re up at two nine zero, well above you guys. We’ve copied the grid and we’re tally with the target.’
‘Two Six, Knife Five One. Confirm you’re happy with the target coordinates?’
‘That’s affirmative.’
‘Roger. Break. Mastiff Zero Two, if Bone’s happy to drop, we’ll clear out of his way, because we still don’t have a lock.’
‘Roger, Knife Five One.’
The JTAC and the B-1 crew carried out the usual pre-attack exchange of information while the two Harriers moved a safe distance from the target. Finally both parties were happy with the target’s coordinates, and the JTAC authorized the attack run.
‘Bone Two Six, Mastiff Zero Two. Call wings level with direction.’
While the B-1 set up for his attack run, Hoggy ‘bat and balled’ with the JTAC and Flatters, to try to establish which were the target buildings, and by the time the B-1 ran in Hoggy was happy with the first target and had his pod wrapped around it.
Then the B-1 dropped, but the weapon landed in the dead ground about two hundred metres from the building. Close, but no coconut.
‘Mastiff Zero Two, Knife Five One. I’m happy we’ve now got a good lock on the target. Do you want us to have a go?’
‘Five One, Zero Two, affirmative. We’re now taking heavy fire from that compound.’
The JTAC’s Battle Damage Assessment, or BDA, of the B-1’s drop confirmed that Hoggy was looking at the right target.
Three minutes later Hoggy ran in and dropped a 1,000lb weapon directly on to the first building the JTAC had identified to him, and five minutes after that he landed his second bomb on the other building. Both were direct hits, and all firing from the compound stopped.
We didn’t often get to share the same airspace as the Americans, but in January it seemed to be happening more and more often. Sometimes it highlighted the differences between us – not least
, of course, in the sheer weight of firepower the USAF could bring to bear with an aircraft like the B-1 if the situation demanded it. But I was continually struck by the care with which both nations went about their business. We spent far more time and effort trying to ensure that we avoided killing people and causing unnecessary collateral damage than we did trying to blow them apart.
And one exceptional piece of flying demonstrated this rather well.
23
I was chatting in Ops with some of the squadron maintainers when Lieutenants ‘Buzz’ Jacobs and Ted Williamson, two of the most junior pilots in the squadron, bowled in.
Whenever I could I’d attend the mission debrief just in case there were any issues that needed to be resolved, and I always liked to know exactly what had happened on each sortie. And this one, we already knew, had involved some kind of an action: even if we hadn’t known GCAS had diverted them during the sortie, the two empty wing stations on one of the Harriers said it all.
When these two young officers walked in they were clearly pumped up about something – you could see it in their faces – and the tale they told left us in no doubt why. They pulled off their gear, made coffee and sat down.
‘Come on, then,’ I said. ‘Don’t keep us in suspense any longer. What happened?’
Jacobs took a sip of his drink, and started to explain.
‘Standard patrol, right, around the Naw Zad area, and we were just mooching along, looking for trouble, but everything seemed fairly quiet. Then we got a call from GCAS to go along and help out this Yank patrol near Sangin.’
From his description it was clear that this small American team had been caught in quite a clever trap by the Taliban. They were pinned down and taking heavy machine-gun and small-arms fire from two different locations, and they already had one man injured.
‘When we reached the coordinates we could see it was all really pretty confused. We got good two-way comms with one of the guys on the ground, and you could tell from his voice he was pretty stressed. We could hear through the radio link that he was taking heavy fire – there were a couple of heavy machine-guns blatting away down there.’
Joint Force Harrier Page 20
