Sweating the Metal

by Alex Duncan Frenchie

  In the event, we flew two loads of troops and, logistically, it was well organised. It ran on rails, nobody came under contact and we all shut down back at KAF at the end of the day, satisfied with a job well done. They don’t often end that way.

  We had a change of crew at the end of the month and for the rest of the Det, I was flying with Alex Townsend, Bob Ruffles and Neil ‘Coops’ Cooper. Both Bob and Coops are ex-7 Squadron, and you couldn’t ask for a more experienced rear crew.

  We flew some interesting sorties to kick off with. There was one we flew with German as my wingman in a two-ship where we were delivering multiple HICHS (Helicopter Internal Cargo Handling System) loads. Basically, the cabin floor is fitted with rollers and all the loads are secured to special pallets, so they just roll straight off the ramp when it’s lowered. We flew all over the north-east of Kandahar Province to myriad bases, but the icing on the cake was taking one of the drops to a mountain peak where a US sniper team was located. It was a prime location, giving them commanding views down the valley, but it meant there was nowhere for the helicopter to land. So German did the only thing you can do at a time like that – he landed the rear wheels onto the ridge.

  It’s a tough manoeuvre because you have one rotor head that’s on the ground and the other rotor head is still trying to fly – we’re entirely reliant on the rear to keep us informed, flying that particular manoeuvre. Bear in mind we’re sixty feet or so forward of the ramp and below us, through the clear glass under our feet, all we can see is a 3,000 ft drop. The back wheels are on the ridgeline, so the loadmaster is in the back hanging off the ramp and screaming in our ear to keep the wheels down, ‘Nag, nag, nag!’ It’s the longest thirty seconds you can spend at the controls. German’s rear crew threw the load out on what looked like an empty ridge line and then suddenly, all these superbly well-camouflaged snipers appeared from out of nowhere. It was incredible to see – one minute I could have sworn there was nobody on the ridge, and then these guys just stood up and there they were. That was pretty awesome – not just the snipers, but watching German hovering on the edge of that peak. It’s one thing flying the actual manoeuvre, but it was the first time I’d actually watched another cab doing it.

  We also had a run of non-standard underslung loads to deal with. Properly set up, underslung loads present no problem to any Chinook crew – they’re the bread and butter of what we do, after all. But all it takes is for someone to get their figures wrong, or for us to pick up a load at the extreme end of the weight parameters, and suddenly life gets very interesting. Sweating the metal was never fun.

  A run that really stands out came about when we had to take a Warrior engine pack to FOB Edinburgh. I hated doing that because the underslung load weighs four tonnes and it bends the cab. You’ve got no speed, it takes forever and a day to get anywhere and twice as long to slow down – you have to start slowing almost before you’ve taken off! Basically, the Warrior engine pack acted as a pendulum suspended from the belly of the cab and took on a momentum of its own. The load pulled on the aircraft and caused a phugoid motion, where the aircraft started to oscillate, intermittently diving and climbing. It gained speed during the dive portion until the added speed caused it to climb, and then lost speed until the cycle was repeated. It made me feel nauseous, and it was a complete pain in the ass. We also have the rotor blades spinning round at 225rpm, so we had all these gyros going around. Putting a load underneath it meant we had the aircraft gyroscoping around the weight. It was no fun at all, so we were all pleased when we finally dropped that load.

  By then the light was fading so I thought it would be a good opportunity to finish off Alex’s TQ with some night flying. When we fly at night, conditions are green, red or black illume. Green is normal – that is, there is sufficient ambient light for the NVGs to deliver a good picture. Red illume is the opposite – on a night with full cloud cover, no moon and no cultural or reflected light, you’re as good as blind, even with the NVGs, because they have no light to amplify. Flying under those conditions is nigh on impossible because you have no references; it’s frightening, dangerous and extraordinarily draining. Consequently, the only flying we usually do under red illume is on the IRT and training sorties – you have to know what to expect.

  When it starts to get dark, we’ll put down what we call a desert box to practise night landings – four cyalume light sticks are placed on the ground to form a rectangle big enough to land a Chinook in. The aim is to land on with the cockpit by the rearmost two cyalumes so that when you run on, you stop by the two at the front of the box. That way, you have markers in view throughout. People often make the mistake of landing in the middle of the box, but if you do that, the two markers at the back are about as useful as tits on a fish! What you want is to see the rear cyalumes at your 11 o’clock and 2 o’clock when your wheels touch ground, so that by the time you get engulfed in dust, with a bit of run on, you’ll move forward, the dust will clear and the front two should now be in your 11 and 2 o’clock.

  I found us a nice empty patch of desert just as the light was going down and landed on.

  ‘Okay Bob, can you do us a box outside please?’

  ‘No worries Frenchie, one box coming up,’ Bob said and got busy doing the necessary. He took four one-litre bottles of water from the cool box, broke four cyalume sticks to activate them and placed one in each bottle of water before resealing the bottles. The benefits are twofold; the weight of the water anchors the bottle and the water magnifies the glow from the sticks. Like all the best ideas, it’s simple and effective. Job done, he ran off the ramp, placed the bottles then jumped back in.

  ‘All done, Frenchie. Clear above and behind,’ he said, so I pulled power and pulled back on the stick, doing a nice aggressive J-turn, or over-the-shoulder departure, to take us out into the empty desert. There was no reason for it; I just felt like it.

  Bear in mind it was very dark now and there was no moon. Although it was a cloudless night, there’s very little cultural lighting in Afghanistan, even in populated areas. Over the desert, it’s non-existent, so we were in red illume conditions.

  ‘Okay Alex, you just follow me through on the controls with this one. I’ll do a demo and then you have a go,’ I told him and he came back with an ‘Okay.’

  I flew around the corner and turned back to make my approach, but as I became visual with the cyalumes, I noticed there was something wrong with the box.

  ‘Bob, that is the shittiest box I’ve ever seen, mate! It’s like a fucking triangle. What did you do?!’ I asked.

  ‘Frenchie,’ he said, ‘I know the difference between a box and a fucking triangle, and I made a box! Maybe one of them blew away when you lifted?’

  It might sound like I was giving him a hard time, but it was just the normal sort of banter and piss-taking that characterises every sortie. Well, there was little we could do about it now so I told him, ‘Don’t worry, mate. I’ll just work with what we’ve got.’

  I looked ahead and we were downwind so I did the pre-landing checks – all good. I came around the corner again crosswind and then Bob came over the radio again, ‘For fuck’s sake, what’s going on? You saw it – it was a box – then we had a triangle and now the fucking thing has changed shape.’

  And as we watched, one of the other cyalumes started moving. I thought, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ and then the moving cyalume disappeared. We were trying to take it in when a third one disappeared. And then I got it.

  ‘I bet some fucker down on the ground is nicking them!’ As I said it, I hit the IR lights on the underside of the cab. Caught full-on in its glare was an Afghan male doing the rabbit-caught-in-headlights dance. He’d seen Bob putting the box out and after we took off, ran out from his compound about 200 metres away and started nicking them!

  I flew over him at about 50ft and I could see him looking up at me; because I had the IR on, it was reflecting off the back of his retinas – through the NVGs he looked like a cat or dog when the light catch
es its eyes. He stood resolutely on the spot, frozen in time. I was coming in low with all the dirt, grit, corruption and destruction that the downforce gives birth to and he just stood there with our four cyalumes, ready to take them home. Fuck knows what he was doing with them – they’re no use to man or beast – but there you go.

  ‘Bet he goes to market tomorrow,’ said Alex.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Bob. ‘He’ll be going round saying, “Look everyone, I got magic light stick, I got magic light stick! I sell to you for good price!”’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘But imagine his surprise when they burn out and suddenly stop working! Someone’s going to come looking for him wanting their money back!’

  So much for Alex’s TQ.

  26

  STANDING MY GROUND

  The beginning of May saw Alex, Bob, Coops and I down at Bastion on the HRF. First thing in the morning, some troops on a patrol out of Kajaki found a huge IED, so we were tasked with flying the EOD (bomb disposal) team up from Bastion to deal with it. Those guys have got guts; that’s real bravery to me, and all the money in the world wouldn’t convince me to do what they do. They’re seriously impressive – they went straight to the site of the IED, defused it, job done. That was a nice result.

  When we returned to Bastion that afternoon, we swapped cabs and took over the IRT with the call sign Lobster Three One. All our kit stays on board the aircraft, whether we’re doing HRF or IRT. Weapons will be slung on to the seats, my water will be on the right and I always leave my flying helmet on a seat at the back right of the aircraft because that way if I’m late because I’ve been planning, the aircraft is turning and burning and I can just put it on as I run up the ramp. Then I’ll pull on my Mk61 and secure it, eject the clip from the 9mm on my chest, check it, holster my pistol, and finally jump into my seat, plug in and brief the boys.

  The IRT is just a cab with the MERT on board and all their equipment in the back – oxygen, saline drips, drug packs, tubes, scalpels, defibrillators – basically everything they might possibly need to perform life-saving surgical interventions on the badly wounded and dying. It’s axiomatic that the victim’s chances of survival are greatest if they receive care within a very short period of time after a severe injury. The whole focus, the very raison d’être of the MERT, is to get the doctor and the med team there as soon as is humanly possible, and we shave off every minute, every second, we can. A minute saved at our end means a greater chance of survival for whoever we’re being scrambled to scoop and run. The injured will feel the touch of a doctor within an hour whether they are in camp or on the ground. There’s also a ‘Platinum 10 Minutes’ which is the preserve of the medics with the soldiers. They accompany them on patrol and live with them in the FOBs or PBs so British casualties will be seen by one of them within ten minutes and treated. That preliminary treatment really makes a difference.

  Sometimes, the combat medics who patrol with the soldiers are so efficient there’s little for the MERT team to do once the casualties are loaded on. Take someone with a traumatic injury – they’ll apply a ‘cat’ (a combat tourniquet) and a first field dressing and they’ll have completely stopped any exsanguination (bleeding out). That’s something that guys were dying from just twelve months ago. The MERT team say casualties are coming on with beautifully applied first field dressings, and they are seeing patients who are already cannulated so they can take on fluids. While there’s always something for the MERT to do, often the hardest and most important bits have been done on the ground. That’s a massive improvement on last year and shows how the standard of medicine – and the overall awareness of the guys on the ground of basic first aid – has evolved.

  When we switch from HRF, we can’t just say, ‘Right, we’re now IRT on this cab’ – we have to change cabs. So every two days we move all our kit across – weapons, bits of uniform, helmets, personal go kits etc. It takes about half an hour, which is a bit of a nightmare if a call comes in while we’re mid-transfer. So we make sure we’re on the radio at all times and if a shout comes in, one of the crew will go to get the details and the non-IRT crew will pull out all the stops to help the MERT team get their kit on board.

  That day, pretty soon after we’d swapped, we got a shout to pick up a T1 from a spot just north-west of FOB Edinburgh – a British soldier suffering from heat stress. There was a convoy running between Now Zad and Musa Qala and when we came in all the guys were waving at us. I think they were enjoying the downtime to be honest – they were all logistics guys and these resupply convoys that have to go by road are massive undertakings with loads of vehicles involved, so it must get a bit tedious. They can only travel slowly and have to stop repeatedly to check for IEDs.

  I landed on and the QRF guys ran out to defend us, although they were rather surplus to requirements given the firepower that ranged around us in the convoy. Basically, whenever our convoys leave the base, they always travel with their own force protection – an infantry unit travelling in a mix of relatively fast, armoured vehicles with heavy firepower. Also, most of the trucks in the convoy have guys on top cover manning .50 calibre machine-guns.

  Anyway, we got the guy on board and I took off over the convoy and turned sharp left back to Bastion. It was 11:40 when I landed, so I did a quick debrief and we were back in the tent for 12:10. We just had time for a bit of lunch at the DFAC and then went back to the tent to chill out watching TV for bit.

  At 13:30 the phone rings – we’ve got a shout. I pull myself out of the chair and put my boots on, grab my notebook and run for the JOC. Bob drives Coops and Alex to the cab and while they’re getting her going, he races back to find me in the JOC, where I’m taking down the details from the nine-liner. There’s not much; there’s been an IED strike at a grid east of where we’d picked up the T1 from the convoy a couple of hours earlier. We have five casualties to pick up – two T1s, two T2s and a T3. Bob drives us the short distance to the cab and parks the vehicle at the edge of the pan and we sprint for the ramp. I grab my helmet from its perch at the rear, put my vest on and check my pistol, and then I jump into my seat. Alex has got us turning and burning, so I plug in and brief the crew as we complete our last few checks.

  Our Apache escort is already airborne as Alex says, ‘Pre-take offs good; ready to lift.’

  ‘Clear above and behind,’ says Bob.

  ‘Lifting,’ I say, pulling power, and the two Lycoming Turbo-shafts make light work of lifting us into the blindingly bright Afghanistan sky. I drop the dark visor on my helmet and immediately the picture improves. We’re airborne by 13:40.

  As we’re running in, my mind starts to work over the detail. We’re flying to an area very close to where we’d lifted the guy with heat stress earlier that morning. There are no FOBs or PBs at or near the grid we’ve been given, so it has to be the convoy: one of the vehicles must have run over an IED.

  Sadly, my fears are confirmed almost immediately as I look ahead. There on the nose in my 12 o’clock, I can see the same convoy that we visited earlier snaking away into the distance. At its head is a thick pall of black smoke drifting lazily into the windless Afghan sky, like a dirty smear on the windscreen of the cab. My heart sinks; it’s funny how little it takes for something to become personal, but this one most definitely is. We’d been to these guys already; we were their focus of interest for a while and they ours.

  When we landed alongside them earlier, some of their guys came aboard to give us bottles of ice-cold water. We had a drink with them and Bob and Coops enjoyed a bit of banter with a couple of the guys. There was a connection. Now we’re back again in circumstances much less happy. We’re sat on the aircraft as the doctor heads off to meet the ground team bringing the casualties, dealing with the knowledge that, once again, the lives of several of our boys, who had been at the peak of physical fitness and in prime health, have changed forever. They got up that morning as they always did – just another day, doing what they’ve done so many times before. Some with thoughts of loved ones back hom
e, others daydreaming about girls they’ve met on Facebook; probably wondering about stuff as mundane as what they’d be eating later. An ordinary day like any other suddenly turned into a personal hell for all those involved, courtesy of that most cowardly and indiscriminate of weapons: an IED.

  The Taliban’s increased use of IEDs evidenced a sea change in tactics; no fighting force can suffer the rate of attrition that the Taliban did throughout 2006 and 2007 without feeling it. So they went the only way they could. IEDs require one man to manufacture, one or two men to plant. No maintenance required. No risk to their fighters. Forty-seven ISAF troops died as a result of IEDs in 2006; but in twelve months to December 2008, that figure had more than trebled to 152. Everything changes in a nanosecond; life really does turn on a sixpence.

  It’s one of the vehicles that had been providing force protection for the convoy that has been blown up. The MERT is off and on again in quick order, bringing with them five casualties. One is beyond help, having died on the ground – Fijian Trooper Ratu Babakobau, twenty-nine, of the Household Cavalry. Princes William and Harry will both later pay tribute to him. Poor guy, he’d been in theatre less than a month and it was his first deployment overseas. He was married, and the father of two young boys aged four and one who will now have to grow up without him. It’s heartbreaking. Another of the casualties is in a bad way, with traumatic injuries to his legs and arms – it looks like he and Ratu took the brunt of the blast. Two others have burns of varying degrees – one is another soldier from the Household Cavalry, the other an Afghan national who had been working with the team as a translator. Finally, there is one T3, another soldier of the Household Cavalry who is walking wounded.

  We race back to Bastion as quickly as we can and are on the ground at Nightingale by 14:20, so it’s a quick mission. Fortunately, the four casualties survived.