Apache

by Ed Macy

And there was Tony Blair, standing right in front of us. We’d been so busy hurling abuse at the man from the Mirror that most of us hadn’t seen him approach.

  ‘Gather round the Prime Minister please,’ the RSM instructed.

  Tony Blair was in official Prime Ministerial war zone kit: blue slacks, a navy blazer and a dark blue shirt, open at the neck. He looked tired and old. The famous blue eyes still twinkled, but huge crow’s feet spread from each corner of them and his hair was more salt than pepper. He was a different man to the one I remembered walking into Downing Street nine years before.

  The squadron wags had gone quiet now; everyone was a little bit star-struck. Trigger must have breathed a sigh of relief; it was immediately obvious that all the big talk wasn’t going to come to anything.

  Blair thrust his hand forward to each of us. There was no chance of holding onto it, even if someone did have the balls. We were given a quick, forceful shake, up and down, a momentary fix of the eyeballs and then it was onto the next bloke. Two seconds each, max. He moved incredibly quickly, clearly well drilled in how to avoid the ‘I’m going to hold onto his hand the longest’ game. No surprises there; he’d been shaking squaddies by the hand for years.

  ‘Prime Minister, this is 656 Squadron, Army Air Corps. They operate the Apache AH Mk1.’

  ‘Ah yes.’ The trademark grin stretched from ear to ear. ‘So you must work with the locals.’

  None of us knew how to answer that, so none of us did. That kind of killed the conversation.

  Someone did ask for a photograph, but instead of pulling Darwin’s cheeky prank we all gathered sheepishly round Blair instead – Darwin included. The most rebellious we got was slipping the odd thumbs-up to the camera behind Blair’s back as we posed up for the group snaps.

  Then, just as quickly as he’d arrived, he was ushered away to the medics, the next group in line.

  Billy couldn’t conceal his disappointment. ‘I thought he might ask us one question about the aircraft. He did buy the bloody thing, after all.’

  Geordie was still as confused as the rest of us.

  ‘Hang on, did you hear what he said to us, like? “So you must work with the locals.” What the fuck does that mean?’

  It was obvious Blair had no real idea of who we were or what we did. Sadly, scaring the locals half to death was about the closest we ever got to working with them. Since we spent most of our lives 3,000 feet up, he couldn’t have been further from the mark. Maybe he’d offered everyone down the line the same catch-all remark. I suppose it saved having to think of twenty different ones.

  The procession finished and, 200-odd hands shaken, Blair was whisked across to the croissant tent. A dais had been erected at the opposite end of it, with a loud speaker on either side. After Blair had downed his coffee, we were ordered to gather round for his speech.

  A bank of raised platforms had been thrown up for the travelling media. They offered the best view, so Billy and I jumped up on one of them. It earned us an evil look from its occupier, a man with thick black glasses later identified to me as the BBC’s Political Editor Nick Robinson. He didn’t seem totally thrilled about sharing his platform with us. Billy and I gave him a grin.

  ‘Here, in this extraordinary piece of desert, is where the future of the world’s security is going to be played out … The only way we can ensure security is being prepared to fight for it … We will beat the Taliban by having the determination and courage to stand up to them … You defeat them not just on behalf of the people here in Afghanistan but in Britain, and the wider world … People back home are very proud of the work you do, whatever they think of the politicians who sent you …’

  He went on for about fifteen minutes, and finished with ‘a huge debt of thanks from a humbled nation’. For that, he got a spontaneous cheer and a generous round of applause as he was swiftly channelled back to the waiting Hercules. It was an upbeat, crowd-pleasing performance and went down very well with the younger soldiers. Pride, support, courage; he knew all the buzz words twenty-year-old squaddies wanted to hear.

  As far as I was concerned, the Blair magic began to fade as the Prime Minister and his flying circus trundled down the runway. Despite his well-crafted phrases and emotional expressions, he hadn’t actually told us anything we didn’t already know. There was no big announcement, no addition to the defence budget, no deadline for the end of the conflict, no council tax rebate for our families at home. He’d had nothing new to say. I wondered why he’d bothered to come all that way. Still, the bacon croissant had been nice.

  As November became December, Alice’s first situation brief proved increasingly accurate. Not only were the Taliban getting better, they were coming after us.

  Close air support had changed the outcome of a lot of battles in our ground troops’ favour, so the Taliban hated all Coalition offensive aircraft – but they still hated Apaches the most.

  If you wanted to go after aircraft and had none of your own, you needed surface-to-air missiles. SAMs had been the preserve of the world’s superpowers, but by the 1980s they had become a global phenomenon.

  The missiles employed one of three different systems to track and hit moving targets: radar-tracking, heat-seeking, or laser-guided. They varied in quality, but most could detect any aircraft flying in the SAM belt – between 1,000 and 20,000 feet – from about six miles, and engage it from four.

  All three types of SAMs were believed to be kicking around Afghanistan. The principal threat came from Man Portable Air Defence Systems – SAMs fired from shoulder launchers that a couple of blokes could carry around on foot. There was no shortage of them. At Dishforth, we had been briefed to expect Russian SA7s and SA14s, Chinese HN15s – and the US Stingers and British Blowpipes that the CIA and MI6 had flooded into the country during the Soviet occupation.

  The good news was that although we knew the Taliban had ManPADs, we didn’t believe they had many of them left that actually worked. Their biggest problem – our greatest advantage – was that their battery system decayed. This was especially the case with Stingers, and the Taliban had no means of replacing them. Even the world’s most unscrupulous arms dealers thought twice about dealing with Islamic extremists because of the heat it brought down on them.

  ‘Working SAMs are a highly prized commodity to the Taliban,’ an Int Corps briefer told us. ‘We reckon that the few they retain will be used only as a last ditch defence for very senior people; they’ll only be fired if a Taliban or al Qaeda leader’s life is under imminent threat.’

  No SAMs had been fired at Coalition aircraft in Afghanistan for quite a while, so while we remained cautious, we hadn’t been taking the SAM threat too seriously. Then, four weeks into the tour, they did fire a SAM at us – in Helmand, at a Dutch F16 jet bomber, callsign Ramit.

  I was in the JHF at the time, watching some gun tapes on the computer. The news came through on the MIRC. There was a Military Internet Relay Chat in every HQ across the four southern provinces – a giant TV screen / video printer pumping out one line sitreps as they came in about operations ongoing over Regional Command South; a running ticker tape on the whole war.

  ‘Jesus, have you seen this?’

  All eight of us in the tent crowded around the MIRC.

  ‘KABUL: RAMIT ENGAGED BY SAM. SOUTH SANGIN. SAM DEFEATED …’

  ‘Bloody hell. What’s going on at Sangin? Are Special Forces lifting some big player we don’t know about?’

  They weren’t. A quick call to brigade confirmed there were no arrest operations going down in the Sangin area. In fact, troops weren’t even out on the ground.

  The next day, the full report came through. Lookouts in Forward Operating Base Robinson, a support base seven klicks south of the Sangin DC for the marines in the Green Zone, had heard some sporadic shooting from the west. They’d put in a call to the brigade air cell to ask if any passing aircraft might be able to take a quick peek.

  The cloud base was fairly low that day. To see through it, the F16 had to d
rop down below it, to 3,000 feet. The shooting had stopped, so the jet tootled around for a minute or two as a show of force. A corkscrew trail of grey smoke rose from the Green Zone as the missile arced towards the F16. It passed just behind the jet, diverted by a flare, and disappeared into the clouds.

  Arcing meant it was guided – a SAM. Corkscrew and grey smoke meant SA7b – a tail chaser that locked onto engine heat. It wasn’t just a pot shot. It took a fair few minutes to set up an SA7. It bore all the hallmarks of a deliberate trap. Ramit had been lucky.

  The incident shook the air community. It told us two things. One, the Taliban had SAMs that worked; and two, they were now very happy to attack opportunity targets. We didn’t enjoy hearing either. It was a major break from their previous operating pattern.

  Ramit’s SAM escape threw a different perspective on an intelligence hit we’d picked up recently. Some days before the launch, a radio intercept heard a Taliban commander saying, ‘Fetch the rakes and spades to hit the helicopters.’ Initially, the Int cell had assessed rakes and spades meant Chinese rockets and a launcher. Now, we had to assume they meant SAMs.

  Alice then delivered a series of different snippets of bad news about SAMs over the next week’s morning and evening briefs.

  ‘We believe they’re planning to move a Stinger to Sangin or Kajaki.’

  ‘What do you mean,’ the Boss asked. ‘Where did this information come from?’

  ‘I can’t tell you sir, sorry.’

  That normally meant HumInt; human intelligence – aka: a spy. I and every other pilot in the room mentally crossed our fingers not to get the next IRT call-out to Sangin or Kajaki.

  We were told that a specific Taliban commander in the north of the province, had boasted that he could listen in on all our movements. ‘I have a British radio frequency and I know everywhere they go.’

  It was certainly possible. Perhaps he’d taken it from the dead SBS pair in June. He couldn’t hear Apaches on it as our radios were secure and codes regularly changed. But the ones in the Chinooks weren’t.

  Alice also told us that some bright desk officer had discovered that there were no less than five Stingers in the valley between Sangin and Kajaki.

  But a second Taliban radio intercept in Now Zad a couple of days afterwards picked up the most worrying SAM intelligence of all. A commander was overheard saying, ‘When the helicopters arrive, if the professional man brings his thing, fire from a distance.’

  A ‘professional man’ and a ‘thing’ weren’t SAM-specific, but ‘fire from a distance’ certainly was. It was good advice, too. It identified the ‘thing’ as a heat-seeking SAM. The longer the missile had in the air, the better its chance of homing in on the aircraft’s engines: as the gap closed, the heat source became clearer to the missile’s seeker. Translation: they were anticipating the arrival of some bloke who knew what he was doing, and then they were going to fire another heat-seeking SAM specifically at one of us.

  A huge amount of SAM activity and intelligence had come in over a short period. How much of it was true and how much bluff we had no idea. That was always the problem with the intelligence game; it was a world of smoke and mirrors. All we knew was that the bastards were up to something. The ante had been upped, big time.

  The feeling of foreboding with which I’d started the tour had lessened after a few successful enemy contacts. Now it was right back again. I was in no hurry to become the first British Apache pilot to get shot down by a SAM.

  I decided to have a quiet chat with Carl the next time I got the chance. He wasn’t just our Electronic Warfare Officer – he was one of the most clued up guys in the Army Air Corps. Only a few people in Britain would have known more about Electronic Warfare with regard to the Apache’s Helicopter Integrated Defensive Aid System than Carl. The EW manual was his Book at Bedtime, for Christ’s sake. I thought I could do with a few of his reassuring stats.

  ‘Sure Ed, where do you want to start? HIDAS is a beautiful thing …’

  ‘Just keep it simple and pretty, please buddy.’

  Most of it I already knew, but it was good to hear it again. There was no escape from a SAM in Afghanistan. You couldn’t go and hide behind a tree or a rock, and if you climbed it was worse. Instead, HIDAS took the SAM on. The Apache’s Helicopter Integrated Defensive Aid System had been painstakingly constructed to defeat all known SAMs. What’s more, it did it automatically.

  HIDAS detected every missile threat – any laser beam that tried to track the aircraft, any radar attempting a lock onto it, and any missile that was fired at us – from a huge distance, with a web of sensors that picked up a specific UV plume generated by the missile’s propulsion. Then Bitching Betty, the Apache’s female cockpit warning system, passed on the message. The moment the aircraft came under threat – from air or ground – she gave us the good news, telling us what it was and where it was coming from.

  When a missile was fired against you, HIDAS would automatically launch the necessary countermeasure. For a radar-tracking SAM, the Apache threw out clouds of chaff that appeared as large-sized aircraft to confuse the radar. If it was a heat-seeker, it would spray out a shower of flares – hotter than our engines – to divert it. If the missile was being manually laser-guided, Betty would issue a series of rapid (and highly classified) instructions for violent manoeuvre: ‘Break right’, ‘Break left’, ‘Climb’ and ‘Descend’. When we were out of danger, she would say, ‘Lock broken.’ It was the closest she got to a compliment. What a woman.

  HIDAS had never really been tested on operations. The boffins had done everything they could in the labs and on the ranges. But until you sent up a couple of guys and fired a ManPAD at them, you wouldn’t know for sure how well it could cope.

  ‘So what do we do in the meantime?’ I asked.

  ‘Just trust in the aircraft.’

  Just when I’d started to feel a little better …

  SAMs weren’t the only threats we faced. HIDAS could do nothing to defeat conventional ‘line of sight’ weapons. We were just as vulnerable to old-fashioned bullets as anyone else. Rifle and RPG fire wasn’t necessarily a big concern for us. An AK47 had an effective range of 800 metres. RPGs were timed to explode at 900 metres or on impact, though they could be doctored to achieve twice the distance. We generally stood 2,000 metres off enemy targets because the power of our weapons and sensors allowed us to.

  Higher calibre anti-aircraft guns were a different matter. The Taliban had a lot of them, mostly ex-Soviet stuff. Anti-aircraft guns were single-, double-or quadruple-barrelled and put down a phenomenal rate of fire. Afghans used them as ground weapons, firing them horizontally at each other.

  We liked the 14.5-mm Soviet ZPU the least. Each barrel could crack out 600 rounds of ammunition per minute, lethal up to 5,000 feet in the air. Luckily they were prized pieces of equipment, and not in limitless supply.

  DShK’s, or Dushkas as they were nicknamed, were more common than ZPU’s. Firing a slightly smaller round, a 12.7-mm, they had a range of 4,000 feet. Every tribal chief normally had access to a Dushka for his tribe’s protection – they were that common. And they caused us a lot of grief. Only good flying – and a sizeable helping of luck – had stopped a British helicopter from being shot out of the Helmand skies thus far.

  It was rare for a full day to go by without at least one helicopter getting some incoming. It had been like that ever since we’d arrived in Helmand; the statistics defied belief.

  By the time of their departure in September, the Joint Helicopter Force had counted more than fifty close calls from enemy ground fire on Apaches, Chinooks and Lynxes. 16 Air Assault Brigade saw a lot more than we did: rounds had passed through or bounced off all three machines. A Dushka bullet went straight through the tail boom of Darwin’s Apache on his very first combat engagement in May – he hadn’t known until he landed. Another large calibre round had hit a second Apache’s rotor head, bouncing straight off it. If the rotor head had broken, the aircraft would have fallen out o
f the sky.

  During the first month of fighting in June, a Chinook’s fuselage had been riddled with bullets while coming into land to insert Paras north of Sangin, and one of its passengers seriously wounded. And a young female Chinook pilot – on her very first combat sortie – had a bullet enter through her side door and pass through her seat, inches behind her chest.

  Nobody had yet been killed by ground fire. That had amazed us on our return. And as the year drew to a close, it was a living miracle that it was still the case.

  From the generals in Whitehall who read the damage reports all the way down to the young pilots who just got on with their daily flights, everyone was in full agreement: it was no longer a case of if a helicopter got shot down in Helmand, but when. And now that the Taliban seemed to have got their hands on a shed-load of working SAMs that moment seemed an awful lot closer.

  But something was being done to address the Taliban’s ever more proficient supply of men and arms. The brigade had a plan. And it was one hell of a good one.

  OP GLACIER BEGINS

  Smashing the Taliban’s supply chain to smithereens was 3 Commando Brigade’s first objective with Operation Glacier. Five days into December, we had a ringside seat at the second.

  Things in Garmsir had gone from bad to worse. The Taliban still believed they could dislodge the Brits, as they had done before. And they were giving it their all. The fighting had deteriorated at times to hand to hand combat; it was like something out of the Zulu War.

  The marines’ every movement in or out of the DC compound drew withering sniper fire. The Taliban also launched daily attacks on the commandos’ lookout post on a neighbouring hill to the south.

  The compound was at the edge of the town. Its western flank was protected by the north–south running Helmand River and the Green Zone narrowed to a funnel point to the north, so the Taliban hit it from the east – from the cover of Garmsir’s five-or six-street grid – and, even more vigorously, from the farmland to the south. The fields and orchards offered the enemy excellent natural cover. With its regular treelines and deep irrigation ditches, they could move with impunity to within 100 metres of the British compound, then open up with AK47s and RPGs, supported by WOMBATs and mortars.