by Ed Macy
You only needed to look at the infamous gun tape of the US Apache slaughtering the ‘Iraqi farmers’. US intelligence intercepted a plan to bring down an aircraft with a surface-to-air missile. The Apache was launched and dispatched every member of the insurgent team. The tape was leaked, cut and restructured to show the brutal servants of the Great Satan routinely wiping out innocent Iraqi farmers. It didn’t show the SAM being drawn from its bag and put in position.
The JHF was the squadron’s nerve centre, right next door to the Joint Operations Cell – a central Ops Room from where the three battlegroups based at Bastion (42 Commando, 45 Commando and the Information Exploitation Battlegroup) were managed.
The JHF and JOC compound consisted of as many tents, flags, masts and antennae as you could cram into fifty square metres. It was encircled by razor wire, and Minimi machine-gun-toting guards manned the only entrance twenty-four hours a day. It was the most secure area in the camp, and everyone who went in and out had to state their official purpose. Traffic was frequent between the JHF and JOC – each had to know what the other was up to at all times if operations were to be smoothly dovetailed.
The JHF was a large air-conditioned and sound-insulated khaki tent, five metres wide and fifteen long. A huge map table stood at its centre, with desks for the Boss, squadron ops officers, watchkeepers and signallers lining the four sides. We and the Chinook pilots planned our missions, gave briefings and ran the sorties from here.
There were eight CH47 Chinooks in theatre by then, upped from the original six in an emergency reinforcement over the summer. There were only ever two emergency response choppers in Bastion at any one time, with the rest of the CH47 force at the Coalition’s giant southern air hub, Kandahar Airfield.
The Chinook’s five-man crews – two pilots and three loadmasters – usually only came into the JHF for briefs. If we needed to make detailed plans with them before they left Kandahar, we’d generally do it over a conference call. Kandahar housed our rear echelon elements as well, and it was where we’d take the Apaches for heavy maintenance or repair. There was neither the spare equipment nor the capacity at Bastion. Thankfully, this handover only involved a changeover of personnel. All the equipment and airframes were staying where they were.
The Apache was a very hungry beast: it chomped through ammunition, fuel and spare parts at an alarming rate. A squadron of eight aircraft needed a massive logistics footprint to support it in the field: eighteen four-ton trucks for parts and ammunition, seven articulated lorries, five fuel tankers, three forklift trucks, two motorcycles, five technician vans, one eight-ton engineers’ lorry and a fire engine.
The machine was hugely labour intensive at the best of times, and Afghanistan was the cruellest place on earth to operate helicopters. It cost £20,000 for every hour in the air and needed thirty-two man hours of maintenance on the ground for every hour flown – and that wasn’t just a couple of hairy-arsed blokes in boiler suits sharing a wrench. Our Apaches needed REME avionics and airframe technicians, armourers, arming and loading teams, drivers, refuellers, signallers, IT specialists, Intelligence officers, clerks and storemen – ninety-eight people in total; more than six of them to every one pilot, and every one of them an expert.
The REME split into two tribal groups, depending on their role. There were the Greenies: the brainboxes, the technicians who worked on the avionics (from the TADS to the defensive aide suite). And there were the Blackies: the grease monkeys, who worked on the airframe – blades, rotors, gearboxes and engines. Each camp considered itself the most vital for the machine, so Greenies and Blackies lived in a state of permanent mutual abuse. ‘What’s the definition of a Blackie?’ was the Greenie refrain. ‘A Greenie, with his brains knocked out.’ In response, the Blackies watched the Greenies crouched in front of their computers, and dismissed them as work-shy, tea-glugging, muscle-dodging skivers.
The truth was, each had a healthy respect for the other and they always worked side by side on the airframes in two mixed shifts. They were an excellent and close-knit team, and they needed to be: the aircraft’s maximum flying hours had been upped again, so our second tour was going to be a whole lot harder than the first. We could now spend eleven and a half hours in the air per day; at the start of our first tour, it had only been six. The Chinook and Lynx’s flying hours had also been extended. As an equally limited resource, the pressure on them was also intense.
I only had one question when Billy told me: ‘So who’s agreed to pay for that?’
Aircraft flying hours is a money thing. The more time we spent in the air, the more replacement parts we’d need, and the more our deployment would cost the MoD. And they’d already forked out £4 billion.
‘There’s no new money. They’re cannibalising the aircraft stored at Shawbury for the spares.’
Now it made sense. ‘Excellent.’ I raised an imaginary glass. ‘Here’s to our glorious future.’
‘Tell me about it. The bet is that combat will have decreased in a few years until the spares chain kicks in.’
‘I think I’ll stick with the horses …’
‘What do you care, anyway?’ he grinned. ‘You’ll be raising a real one of those in your local while I’m pulling up the floorboards for rotor blades. Or maybe not …’
Very funny.
It took all five days of the handover to get everyone in and out on the air bridge from Kandahar and Kabul, where the RAF’s Tristars came in from Brize Norton.
The squadron was divided into four flights – 1, 2, 3 and HQ – with two Apaches in each. On Day Three, happy day, Carl caught up with us. He, Billy, the Boss and I made up HQ Flight. A staff sergeant, Carl was the unit’s Electronic Warfare Officer – the resident expert on the aircraft’s self-defence suite.
‘Bloody Tristar broke down, so there was a two-hour delay at Brize. Then I had to wait ages for my Bergen and weapon, then no one came to meet me … And every CrabAir trolley dolly had a spray-on desert flying suit and a spare in her wardrobe, but I can’t get one for love nor money …’
‘Nice to see you too, Carl.’
Carl was an excellent pilot, a very safe pair of hands, and knew the aircraft’s systems better than anyone, but he didn’t half like a moan. He was always bleating on about something or other, and got a fair bit of stick for it. But when it came to how unfair it was that he’d been passed over for promotion – which had happened a few times – I had every sympathy. His front-seater on the last tour had got an MiD whilst Carl got nothing, despite being the Aircraft Captain. He really was Mr Unlucky.
Carl arrived with the four members of 3 Flight, so half our pilots were in and 664’s first two flights could head for home. The Boss shook hands with the outgoing OC on 11 November, Armistice Day, and the handover was complete.
One of the reasons Chris was so popular was his enthusiasm for team bonding. He wanted the squadron to be one big happy family, and did everything he could to make it so.
For starters, he got permission for us to choose our own callsigns. It was what the Americans did, and their aircrew came up with some real screamers: ‘Steel Rain’ and ‘Thumper’ were amongst my favourites, both fittingly employed by AC130 Spectre gunships.
For some reason that I’ve never understood, the British military was far more reserved. Most units took the shockingly dull callsigns they were given, randomly generated by some NATO computer. ‘Opal’ and ‘Torsion’ were two of the worst I’d worked with in Afghanistan.
The Boss put it to the floor. Up until then, the Apaches had been working under the callsign ‘Wildman’ – which wasn’t bad, but a bit of a mouthful if you were in a hurry. After hours of spirited debate over several days, someone came up with ‘Ugly’. It summed up the machine perfectly – how it looked and what it did. From then on, we’d be known as Ugly Five Zero, Ugly Five One, Ugly Five Two, and so on. We’d announce ourselves at contacts over the net with fresh pride.
‘Who are you?’
‘We’re Ugly.’
&n
bsp; ‘Funny guys; who are you?’
‘We really are Ugly. We’re the Apache boys.’
We weren’t the only troops to be changing over in Helmand. After one hell of a tour, the Paras and airborne gunners of 16 Air Assault Brigade were being replaced by Britain’s other elite infantry formation, the Royal Marines of 3 Commando Brigade.
The commandos did their best to keep things quiet for their first few weeks, to find their footing. That worked well for us too, allowing us to ease the squadron’s new pilots gently into the scene. As well as the Boss, there were four more new faces on this tour, and there was a vast amount for the three men – and one woman – to take on board.
Every pilot did an initial familiarisation flight. It was important to learn about – or reacquaint ourselves with – the key locations and the general lie of the land over which we were expected to fight. I flew with the Boss (as Ugly Five One), with Carl flying Billy on our wing (Ugly Five Zero). Apache crews nearly always flew in pairs so they could watch out for each other in the air and share the workload on the ground. Double the birds meant double the fire power for the boys beneath us, though we didn’t always get the option. We were due to lift at 1500, so we got changed straight after lunch.
Strict rules dictated every shred of clothing we wore while flying – right down to our underwear: a pair of special socks, long johns and a long-sleeved T-shirt, all fire retardant. One Apache pilot I knew even used to wear a Formula 1 driver’s facemask. Surrounded by 3,000 lb of aircraft fuel, every one of us knew that we were flying a potential fireball.
Over our underwear went a desert camouflage shirt and trousers. Our uniforms were designed to look just like normal army Disruptive Pattern Material (DPM), but were also fire retardant. The pockets were double-sealing, so nothing would fall out of them and foul the flying controls in flight.
Flying suits were a big no-no, whatever Billy thought. They were fine for training in the UK, but if we got shot down we wanted to look like regular infantry. Our uniforms carried no unit markings, and I didn’t even wear rank slides. The Taliban would have given their eye teeth to get their hands on a ‘mosquito’ pilot.
We wore fire-retardant shammy leather gloves – in white, green or black – thin enough to give you a good feel of the controls, and flying combat boots with a special sole that didn’t pick up debris on our walk to the aircraft. Anything loose in the cockpit could jam the controls and cause the helicopter to crash
Over our shirts, we wore a Life Support Jacket – a camouflage canvas survival waistcoat packed with the kit we might need to evade capture and keep us alive if we went down. The survival LSJ was tailor-made; it had to fit tightly enough to hold in our innards and help preserve circulating body fluid if we got shot. A few more minutes of consciousness might make the difference between getting to the ground safely and dropping out of the sky.
Clipped to the survival jacket was a triangular-shaped bulletproof Kevlar breastplate that would stop a 7.62-mm round at point-blank range. We tucked it up inside the jacket to cover our heart but called it the Ball Cruncher because if you grabbed your kit in a hurry and threw it over your shoulder as you ran, the plate would coming winging down between your legs.
My 9-mm Browning and a couple of ammunition clips – thirteen rounds in each – were strapped to my right thigh in a black holster with Velcro fastening. Every pilot kept his second personal weapon – an SA80 carbine – in a bracket inside the cockpit. It looked like the normal full length assault rifle but had a very short barrel and an additional grip at the front.
Strapped to my left leg was my Black Brain – a filofax-like notepad, knee board and pencil for any crucial information I needed to jot down for or during the sortie. That meant the day’s codewords, the JTAC callsigns we needed to hook up with on the ground, or grids we were heading for.
I also kept a crib sheet in it containing any detail I might have needed to know about the myriad other offensive coalition aircraft that were working around us. There was quite an array: the UK’s Harrier GR7s, the US’s F16s, A10 Thunderbolts, EA6B Prowlers, B1B Lancer bombers, B52 bombers, AC130 Spectre gunships and AH64 Apaches, the Netherlands’ F16s and AH64s, France’s Mirage 2000s, and Belgium and Norway’s F16s. We needed to recognise all the aircraft callsigns the moment they came on the net, their national Rules of Engagement restrictions, what weapons they carried, and the safety distances we needed to hold to avoid catching any of their impact.
‘Ramit Three Seven, launching a GBU38 in three zero seconds, Ugly Five One acknowledge?’ If the shout came in there was no time to play Twenty Questions; we had to know who Ramit was and what he meant by a 38. A few seconds to discover that a Dutch F16 was about to launch a 500-lb JDAM bomb was usually enough for us to skedaddle to the safe distance.
Each pilot also had their own grab bag, a canvas satchel wedged beside their seats. If we went down, we’d grab them and go. What went in them was entirely down to personal preference. Some of the guys put ammo and rations in theirs; others stuffed them with bottles of water too. Apart from my field dressing and spare morphine vial, mine was crammed full of ammunition. I’d asked our storeman for everything he could spare.
As an ex-infantryman, I knew all about ground fighting. The way I saw it, the more bullets I had, the longer I’d stay alive. I’ve never needed to drink very much and I could kip when I was safe. In my ammo-bag I put four additional magazines of 9-mm, four thirty-round magazines of 5.56-mm for the SA80 carbine, and an extra bandolier of 120 5.56-mm rounds – as much as I could carry.
I’d also slipped in two L2 fragmentation grenades I’d stashed from the first tour and two smoke grenades – one green smoke, one red. Grenades were strictly forbidden inside the aircraft in case they went off, but I knew my weapons and was happy to carry them.
We stowed our fighting gear and ‘go-bags’ in the boot of the Apache, just forward of the tail section. Go-bags contained luxury items for long-term evasion in case we went down in the mountains or had a malfunction and needed to land at a distant firebase: sleeping bags, wash kit, warm clothing, waterproofs, a bivvie, spare food, water and the like. I’d also decided to add a full set of army webbing, body armour and a proper combat helmet. It was a lot to run with, but I didn’t want to leave the one item that could save my life.
The flight line was at the most easterly point of Camp Bastion. There were two north–south runways; ours, a 200-metre length of metallic matting surrounded by rocks to suppress the dust, and a kilometre-long dirt strip for the C130 transporters.
Three hangars ran alongside the western edge of our runway: one for aircraft, a second for the technicians’ workshop, and a third for personnel, shared by pilots and Groundies. Our hangar contained a row of weapons crates, camping cots for the on-duty Groundie shift (they worked in twenty-four hour stints), a basketball hoop and a row of lockers. Each of us had our own, where we’d dump anything in our pockets before walking out to the aircraft.
We never went up with any personal possessions on us; that meant no wallet, no family pictures, no wedding rings and certainly no US dollars – the currency used around camp – which would ID you in an instant. It was imperative to sanitise yourself entirely so as not to give the enemy any ammunition to break you during interrogation. A small crack was all they needed, and they’d prise it open until it was as wide as a house.
‘So you’re married are you, soldier? Kids too, I see from the picture in your wallet. You want to see them again? Maybe we’ll pay them a visit. I’ll call my friend at Leeds University to pick them up from school for you. Maybe we’ll slice them up in front of you like fucking salami – unless of course you want to talk to us …’
I carried Emily’s angel everywhere. I thought I might buy time proclaiming my belief in another world beyond our own. No religion at all was scorned by the Taliban. They weren’t to know that it was my family album and every letter I’d received. It was also a symbol of hope that I’d get back alive.
All we carried
in the air was an official ID card with the ‘Big Four’ pieces of information that the Geneva Convention obliged us to reveal – name, rank, army number and date of birth. Our dog tags repeated the Big Four; we hung them around our neck alongside a vial of morphine which we could self-inject.
I kept a photo of Emily and my son and daughter in my locker, along with some spare batteries, a softie jacket, a pair of gloves, a cloth, a bottle of glass cleaner, my flying helmet, night vision goggles, survival jacket and a sleeping bag.
As we left the hangar on the fifty-metre walk to the rearming bays where the Apaches were ready to go, two aircraft were landing – 3 Flight completing their familiarisation.
It’s hard to forget your first sight of an Apache in the flesh. It still made me stop and stare. Its huge menacing shape, bristling with weapons and silhouetted against the deep blue sky, growing ever bigger as it closed on us. No single feature of the machine, from its angular and callus-like front profile to its chunky stabilator tail wing, was designed to please the eye. It was lean, purposeful and businesslike. Nothing was superfluous: every single bolt added to its killing power. Ugly, sure; but to me, a picture of perfection. Beauty and the beast wrapped into one.
‘Hey, Boss … Just because you’ve got the front seat today doesn’t mean you’re going to get it on every sortie.’
‘You’re obviously confusing your position as the Weapons Officer with my position as Boss,’ Chris said. ‘Get in and drive.’
It made sense for him to be in the front today so he could concentrate on what was below us while I gave him the guided tour.
Corporal Hambly, the Arming and Loading Point Commander, was waiting for us. He was in charge of the aircraft on the ground. He supervised an eight-man team whose sole job was to get us airborne. Simon Hambly stood by a wing, with an intercom plugged into it so he could speak to us in the cockpit when we started up. Whilst he was plugged in, he owned the Apache – not the Weapons Officer, or even his boss.
