by Ed Macy
Just to show the Army Air Corps wasn’t sexist, Apache XZ204 was renamed Ron Jeremy (the fastest dick in Hollywood). We didn’t want the female Groundies to feel left out. It opened up a hundred more elbow-nudging double entendres.
The second of the Boss’s morale boosters was the ordination of every pilot’s tactical callsign. We used the Ugly callsign to talk to each other over a secure military net when we were airborne. To summon each other around the camp, we had insecure personal walkie-talkies. Broadcasting our real names over them was a massive no no, as anyone with a cheap Motorola radio could be listening in.
On the first tour, we just used the acronyms of our official job titles: OC, EWO, QHI, etc. The Boss decided to have some fun. He called a meeting of all the pilots to come up with more amusing tactical callsigns.
It took place one night in the Tactical Planning Facility, a soundproof metal Portakabin round the back of the JHF tent where we went if we needed to discuss something securely. A five-foot-square screen was rigged up in it for viewing the gun tapes during the sortie debriefs. The only problem with the place was temperature control: like our thunderbox rims, its metal shell turned it into a sauna in the summer and a freezer in the winter. But in November it was great.
There were five or six comfy chairs in the TPF – not enough for sixteen bums. There was always a race to get them whenever a pilots’ briefing was called. If you were too slow, you had to sit on a hard chair or just perch. We all made a brew and sat round in a big circle.
‘Right,’ the Boss announced, playing master of ceremonies. ‘These are the rules: the name has to be relevant to something you’ve done or are famous for. It has to be funny, but it can’t be offensive because we can’t go around shouting obscenities over the radio. Most importantly, it has to sound reasonably polite – so I can explain it away to a visiting VIP. I can’t have the general staff thinking we’re all twats. Okay Billy, you’re first. Out you go.’
The pilot being named wasn’t allowed to play any part in the process. Billy’s was quite quick. As soon as someone opened up with the A-Team theme tune – ‘Dur, da, dur, duuurrr, dur duuuuurrr’ – we all got it.
The Boss called Billy back in. ‘Okay Billy. You are “The Face”. Can you work it out?’
Billy just looked puzzled, so Carl helped him out.
‘You’re The Face for two reasons. First, because you always get the face time with the visiting big cheeses.’
‘No, that’s not always true.’
‘Yes it bloody well is,’ the Boss retorted. ‘Do you want me to give you a list?’
Billy grinned. ‘Well, you’ve either got it or you haven’t.’
‘Well said. That’s the polite reason. The real one is because only you think you’re a pretty boy.’
Billy had kippered himself. Carl was ejected next. Billy slipped into the comfy chair he had just vacated, blocking two other pilots. ‘Too slow, gentlemen.’
Carl took longer. Unfortunately for him, there were quite a few suggestions.
‘I’ve got one, but I can’t remember his name,’ the Boss said. ‘Borat’s producer from his Kazakhstan film. You know, the great fat bloke who puts his horrible hairy arse in Borat’s face?’ Despite raucous laughter, it was rejected as too cruel.
‘Okay, what about Cartman from South Park then?’ suggested Geordie, a member of 1 Flight and the squadron’s Combat Search and Rescue Officer. He adopted a cod American accent: ‘Why the fuck not? Fuck, fuckety, fuck, fuck, fuck.’
But Tony had had a bolt of inspiration. He was a back-seater on 3 Flight, the team with whom we worked closest. We sometimes doubled up on missions, and our tents were next door to each other.
‘I’ve got it! Ewok out of Star Wars. He’s small, strange and hairy, and he’s the EWO – the Electronic Warfare Officer.’
It was perfect. Then it was Nick’s turn.
Nick was another very talented young captain, like Charlotte. They were close friends, having gone to university together, and they flew alongside each other as the two front-seaters on 3 Flight.
Devilishly good looking, with blond hair and blue eyes and a mouth full of Hollywood teeth, the Army Air Corps had never had more of a pin-up than Captain Nick. He’d won the Sword of Honour at Sandhurst, went on to become the first pilot ever to go through training directly onto the Apache, and won the Corps’ own highly coveted Sword of Excellence while he was at it. Not a bad CV. He’d become a general one day, if he stayed in the army. He had the talent. More importantly, he had the luck.
Women melted in front of Nick’s charm and old-fashioned chivalry. He left a string of them utterly broken-hearted wherever he went. He was always good humoured, never swore, and didn’t like pornography.
I liked Nick a lot. It was hard not to. We trained on the Apache together – he was another of the sixteen originals and we’d been through the first tour together too. As a newish pilot, Nick was always bursting with enthusiasm and bounding around the place like an overexcited spaniel. He’d take the odd risk in his constant drive to better himself – which landed him in a few scrapes – but he always got away with it.
‘Rover?’
‘Lassie?’
‘How about Bonnie?’ Charlotte piped up. ‘As in Bonnie Tyler. Remember I Need a Hero?’
During the first tour, Nick just happened to be the first pilot that visiting Sun journalist Tom Newton Dunn collared for an interview. An article and photo duly appeared in the next day’s paper under the headline ‘Hero Nick’. He’d got a shed-load of abuse for that. We made sure it lasted weeks, but it didn’t faze Nick for a second.
‘You know, Mr M,’ he told me one day. ‘Some of us have got the looks, and some haven’t. I didn’t see The Sun chasing you too hard …’
Nick became Bonnie. Charlotte came next.
There had always been a strong suspicion that some of the blondeness came out of a bottle.
‘This might be a bit close to the bone,’ one of the other pilots began. ‘But what about Cuffs?’
There was a baffled silence.
‘Come on you lot. First because she’s, you know … Posh.’
‘Very clever. And?’
‘Well, it’s just possible that her collar doesn’t match them …’
That brought the house down. The Boss plumped for Posh, but she was always Cuffs to the rest of us.
Geordie was Vidal, on account of the fact that he had always driven hairdressers’ cars, a convertible Saab or an Audi TT – and that he was also slightly thinning on top.
Geordie was an honorary member of HQ Flight really. He often filled in for the Boss when he was called away to meetings. Everybody liked him. He was a typical Newcastle lad with a quick wit and a razor-sharp tongue. All of his sentences ended with ‘like’, and as far as Geordie was concerned, everyone was a ‘canny lad, like’.
Despite being a staff sergeant and well into his thirties, his lifestyle hadn’t changed since he was nineteen. Commitment wasn’t his bag – he never had a girlfriend for more than five minutes. He loved nothing more than pissing it up with his mates and pulling birds in the Toon on a Saturday night. And he’d cane it up the motorway to Newcastle in his soft top every weekend to do exactly that, music blaring and his thinning blond hair blowing in the wind. He was one of life’s perennial good blokes and we’d been mates for ever.
In the air, though, Geordie was as serious as they came, and one of the very best pilots in the Army Air Corps – his long-held place on the Blue Eagles Display Team testified to that.
Geordie’s sidekick was Tony. They were close buddies and spent every spare minute shooting out wisecracks as a double act. A cheeky chappie cockney, Tony was just as quick-witted as Geordie, and a staff sergeant too. He was also the shortest pilot on the squadron and had big ears, closely cropped dark hair and a small forehead. Not even Tony would deny that he looked uncannily like a chimp. It wasn’t hard to crack his callsign.
‘Spank, as in Spank the Monkey,’ someone suggested.
The OC rejected it as too crude, so he was renamed Darwin, because he was the missing link.
The final member of 3 Flight was Jim, a WO1 well into his forties. He was the granddad of the squadron. He’d also flown for the SAS, and was a quiet and unassuming man who often kept his own company. Out of work, he had two obsessions. The first was eating healthily and regularly. If Jim missed a meal, he’d go man down. It was that serious. When he checked in to order up a rearm on a sortie, he was often heard to say, ‘One Hellfire, 60 thirty Mike Mike, and five late meals with fruit please,’ so he could have an extra one for himself.
He was also the Grand Master of the Internet – to the point that it would send people mad because they could never get on the terminal. God knows what he did online for so long, but he loved it.
‘How about FOG?’ Tony said. ‘Food or Google. If he’s not doing one, he’s doing the other.’
‘And?’
‘Well he’s a Fucking Old Guy isn’t he?’
Billy and I came up with ‘Trigger’ for the Boss. He was the fastest in the squadron and had the MBE to prove it. He was also completely incompetent when it came to texting. His replies always carried half of the original message – possibly because his fingers were too big for the keyboard. But we knew he hadn’t found the ‘Clear Text’ button and that made him as thick as Trigger from Only Fools and Horses.
They christened me Elton. ‘Rocket Man’, after my disaster at Gereshk – I was never going to be allowed to live that down.
The tactical callsigns were so good that some became immediate nicknames. From that night onwards, Trigger, Darwin and FOG were seldom known as anything else.
By week two, our period of grace was over. While the Garmsir skirmishes continued, 3 Commando Brigade began to ramp up their operations all over the province and we were back into the hard routine. It was gruelling and rewarding work in equal measure. Every day followed a similar pattern.
My alarm clock went off at 6.45am – unless we’d had to fly a mission overnight and were already up and about. I’m a good riser, but Billy’s shaggy arse was not a sight I looked forward to at any time of day. One particularly gruesome morning I was greeted by one of his bollocks wedged between the backs of his legs. It could put a man off his food.
A trip to the cookhouse followed a shit, shower and shave, but Billy and I never fancied breakfast, so instead we strolled the 200 metres from the accommodation tents down to the JHF together for the 7.30am brief.
On the way down, we played the temperature game.
‘Okay, I reckon its 24.5 degrees celsius today.’
‘It’s warmer than that buddy. I’m going for 26.’
On arrival, we checked the digital thermometer on the weather terminal. Whoever was furthest away made a fresh pot of filter coffee. It was usually me.
After the Boss’s morning brief we got stuck into whatever our shift pattern dictated. The squadron’s four flights took it in turns to do the four tasks required of the Apache force. Each shift lasted three days. The cycle began with ‘Duty Ops’. We became four extra pairs of hands in the JHF, helping the Ops Officer and his team run the show from the ground. The pilots often did flight following: tracking the progress of ongoing missions over the radios. Being on Duty Ops also gave us time to read up thoroughly on the minutiae of the operational landscape. If it was quiet, we got a chance to plan the next shift, ‘Deliberate Tasking’.
Deliberate Tasking comprised any pre-planned sortie, from escorting a Chinook on an ‘ass and trash’ flight to prosecuting a deliberate attack. Most ops were planned days in advance, but some came as fastballs, giving us only a few hours to prepare.
As attack pilots, we lived for these moments. Creeping up on the enemy and smacking them hard was exactly what the Apache was built to do and why most of us wanted to fly it. Our resources were scarce, so sadly they were rare. Most of the time, the deliberate taskings were mundane. We spent long hours shadowing Chinooks around Helmand while they collected and dropped off bombs, beans, bullets and bayonets. The Green Zone was considered too dangerous for a highly vulnerable Chinook to land in – or even fly over – without us providing top cover.
The third shift was ‘IRT / HRF’ – the emergency scramble – the most important of the four, and the biggest adrenalin rush. Two Apaches were under starter’s orders 24 / 7, to lift immediately for any location in the province. We scrambled to bail out troops in a contact, cover reinforcements, or protect a medivac Chinook flight. It was proper seat-of-your-pants, World-War-Two-fighter-pilot stuff that always involved a mad dash to the flight line. We had thirty minutes to be off the ground once the call came in during daylight hours and sixty at night to wake up properly and allow our eyes to adjust to night vision.
There were two types of scramble. If we were going to a location that wasn’t under fire, a vehicle accident in the desert perhaps, only one aircraft – the Incident Response Team – would escort the Chinook. Two Apaches – the Helmand Reaction Force – would lift for medivacs in the Green Zone and other dangerous locations, and in support of troops in contact.
After three days of flying deliberate taskings and three more on IRT / HRF call-outs we were ball-bagged, so the fourth shift, ‘Testing and Maintenance’, provided a welcome break.
We had a total of eight aircraft in theatre. Four had to be fully serviceable in Camp Bastion at all times. That wasn’t easy. The technicians needed pilots to make sure that the parts they had replaced or repaired functioned correctly.
Aircraft were flown back to Kandahar for repairs or routine servicing. Only minor servicing was conducted at Bastion – so much of the shift was spent yo-yoing between the two bases. We’d test fly them around Kandahar Airfield and the makeshift shooting range next to it, returning the serviceable ones to Bastion.
An average three-hour sortie in the cockpit meant never less than six hours’ hard work on the ground: an hour’s planning and preparation, a twenty-minute crew brief, thirty minutes to start-up and taxi, forty minutes to refuel, rearm and shutdown, thirty to complete the aircraft paperwork and post-mission report, and a three-hour debrief – both gun tapes had to be viewed in their entirety and the average time at the pointy end was ninety minutes.
If you knew the time between sorties was going to be less than two hours, it was more efficient to keep the aircraft powered up, so we had to stay in the cockpit. We couldn’t even get out for a pee. Early in the first tour Nick had to fly three sorties in one day, one after the other. He was in the cockpit for fifteen hours on the trot, then each sortie had to be fully debriefed, adding a further nine. By the end of the summer we’d all been there.
In training, we found that our reactions started to slip after more than six or seven hours a day in the air. The aircraft sapped concentration levels and shredded energy reserves. Man simply couldn’t keep up with machine.
To avert disaster in Afghanistan, a strict eight-hour daily flying limit was imposed for each pilot. It didn’t include time spent preparing or even taxiing – just wheels off the ground. In emergencies, this could be extended to ten hours, but only with the signed permission of the CO of the aviation regiment.
Each pilot had to get eight hours’ undisturbed rest a day, of which six had to be sleep. In a squadron of workaholics, the Boss enforced the Crew Rest Periods as best he could.
‘Mr Macy, I know what time you were up this morning. Off you go to bed, please.’
‘Boss, I’ve got to finish this report –’
‘Bed, Macy. Now.’
I’d sneak the work out of the JHF and finish it on my cot with the aid of a head torch.
The odd half-hour of free time was catered for by the TV room at the tents (showing a couple of British Forces Broadcasting Service channels, Sky News and MTV via satellite), a NAAFI where you could get a really bad cup of coffee, and a Spar shop that sold cigarettes, toiletries and a few motoring magazines. The Groundies had also built their own makeshift gym.
If I fanci
ed shooting the breeze, I headed to the ten foot by twelve communal area we’d partitioned off at the end of the JHF tent. It was a less formal place for pilots to work in, with brew making facilities, Sky News showing 24 / 7 on a TV in the corner and an Internet terminal with a time sheet divided into twenty-minute slots. FOG booked about seven of them a day, and he’d stand over us tapping his watch a full five minutes before his next stint was due to begin.
I spent much of my Crew Rest Periods tapping away on my laptop, keeping up with weapons reports, or I phoned home. We got thirty minutes’ call time a week free, but I always paid out for more.
‘Are you okay, sweetie?’ Emily would always begin. ‘You’re taking care aren’t you? Have you still got my angel?’
Some of us called home all the time; others used to do it as little as possible – not because they didn’t love their wives or children, but because they hated not being able to tell them anything about what we were up to. Sometimes it was better not to talk at all.
Even the Boss had to take rest periods, chivvied out of the JHF by his second in command. He’d plug his headphones into his computer and lie on his cot to watch the first season of 24. He’d never get more than a few minutes into the first episode before falling asleep. He must have played that opening sequence twenty times over.
The official day ended at around 9pm, after the evening brief. It kicked off after dinner, following the same agenda as the one in the morning. We always started with the weather, the temperature, sunset, sunrise, moon state and light levels. Then came the permanently disappointed Kev Blundell’s ammo report, the fuel stocks, the callsigns and codewords for the radios the next day, the porn star airframe’s service standards, and Alice’s intelligence brief.
The Ops Officer spoke about that day’s missions and firefights, the next day’s tasks, which crews were on what shifts, and what the ground troops were up to. Billy might then say something about flight safety, I’d do a little on weapons and Carl would give an update on the aircraft’s self-defence. Trigger (aka the Boss/Major Christopher James) wrapped it up with a few last points of his own.
