Sweating the Metal

by Alex Duncan Frenchie

I flare us for the descent, scrubbing off speed. ‘50ft and 22kts, you’re in the gate,’ says Alex. ‘40; 16.’

  Simultaneously, the RadAlt warning sounds.

  ‘Cancel, continuing,’ I say, killing the alarm.

  Bob and Coops start calling my height: ‘30… 20… dust cloud forming… 15… at the ramp… 10, 8… centre… 6… at the door; with you…’

  I see the dust cloud enveloping the nose.

  ‘4… 3… 2… 1, two wheels on,’ says Bob as the rear wheels touch. I lower the collective to get the nose down. ‘Six wheels on,’ he continues, as a huge, swirling cloud of grit and fine, powdery sand envelops the cab, coating everyone in it. We’re down.

  ‘Fuck me, Frenchie, that was an awesome bit of flying mate,’ says Alex.

  ‘Guys, I think we can all give ourselves a good old pat on the back,’ I tell the crew. ‘That was a real team effort. Well done!’

  Coops shepherds our pax to safety. Then a thought occurs to me: ‘Guys, we can’t shut down here, it’ll block the FOB and nobody will be able to get in. We may need the space to land another aircraft full of engineers and spares to repair her. The cab’s got us this far, so I don’t think it’s going to give up on us now.’

  ‘Passengers are all off,’ says Coops raising the ramp. ‘Clear above and behind.’

  I pull power and lift us no more than 2ft off the ground, push the cyclic right and forward, and we crab to the far corner of the base where I land on again.

  ‘Stabs are secured, brakes are on, EAPS off, clear APU,’ says Alex as we start to shut down the cab.

  I reach up to the overhead panel and flick the switch to engage the Auxiliary Power Unit. The APU supplies power to the cab with the engines off. I move my hand to the twin engine control levers (ECLs) – and pull them out of the ‘Flight’ position and into the gate marked ‘Stop’. With the power cut, the blades immediately begin to slow.

  ‘DAS and nav kit off,’ says Alex.

  ‘Engaging rotor brake,’ I say as I pull on the huge handle that stops the rotors spinning. As they come to a halt, I switch off the APU and silence descends.

  I unbuckle my chin strap and remove my flying helmet, placing it on the centre console. I run my hand through my matted hair. All I can hear is the ticking sound of the engines cooling.

  It’s over.

  31

  NINE LIVES DOWN

  Alex and I look at one another across the cockpit. ‘Mate, you look fucked!’ he tells me. I smile. I don’t care how I look – I’m alive!

  ‘You’re not exactly going to make the cover of Vogue yourself mate!’ I retort. ‘How fucking lucky were we, though? Two RPGs nearly hit us! I guess we were lucky that we were only hit by small arms, although I reckon it must have been a .50 cal to take out the blade like that.’

  The two of us unstrap ourselves from the machine that almost took us to our deaths, and walk through the cab and down the ramp. Coops and Bob are standing there looking at the aft disc.

  ‘Fucking hell, Frenchie, look at the twist on that blade,’ says Coops and I look up to see a massive chunk of it missing. The whole outer end of one of the blades has ceased to exist.

  ‘How the fuck could a .50 cal do that?’ I ask.

  ‘That was no .50 cal,’ says Coops. ‘We’ve been hit by an RPG!’

  I look at Alex and all the colour has drained from his face. He looks like he’s in shock. Bob’s laughing, but then Bob’s always laughing. I think it’s nervous laughter now though.

  I look at the aft pylon and there are huge football-sized, RPG-shaped holes through both sides of it, and that’s when my blood runs cold; it feels like it’s turned to ice in my veins.

  ‘We’ve been hit by a fucking RPG,’ I think. But it’s too big – I can’t get my mind around it. The thought repeats like a mantra, over and over. My brain’s working overtime, trying to figure it out. It can’t have armed – if it had, it would have taken the cab out in a huge fireball and there’d be nothing left. It’s hit the aft head in an upward trajectory, passed clean through both sides of the aft pylon and travelled up and through the blades.

  I walk around the cab and when I take in the extent of the damage, I can’t conceive of how we stayed aloft after the incident. We’ve been hit by three separate weapons systems: as well as the RPG passing through the pylon and taking out part of the aft rotor, we’ve taken a significant degree of shrapnel damage, seven or eight rounds of .50 cal and some 7.62mm. In total there are thirty-four holes in the aircraft.

  The thoughts are coming thick and fast as I play it back in my mind. I saw a Toyota Hilux and jinked the aircraft left suddenly, a second before we were hit… I shiver as I realise that that probably saved our lives, because the RPG would have hit us square on otherwise. The angle at which it hit means it didn’t arm; it struck us more of a glancing blow.

  We learn much later that the RPG was identified as being first generation – investigators were able to tell via cut marks on the rotor that showed the round as having four fins. One of the problems of the first-generation RPG is that it needs to hit a target square-on. If it doesn’t, the fuse fails to detonate and it remains inert. That’s the only reason it didn’t explode when it hit us.

  The head of the RPG went through the pylon, then it deviated into the blade, which disintegrated under the force. Boeing, the Chinook’s manufacturers, told us that the blade whipped it back round, so we were effectively hit a second time by the RPG; some of the shrapnel damage we took was caused by its outer casing coming in. It was that which nicked a hydraulic pipe – just the tiniest bit. But the hydraulic system is pressurised to 3,000psi, so we lost the lot within a second; there you are, no hydraulics, just to make life a bit more interesting. One of the .50 cal rounds hit the gearbox, but it struck a big round nut and didn’t go in – it just bounced off and disappeared. If it had hit straight on, it would have jammed the gearbox and destroyed it.

  Fuck me; are life and death really so finely balanced on a knife’s edge?

  As we’re standing by the cab, a Mastiff AFV drives up and some Scots Guards soldiers get out to look at the cab. One of the sergeants comes over to Alex and me.

  ‘Fuck me, sirs. I was listening to the ICOM – I can’t believe you guys carried on!’ he says. I wonder then just what the ICOM was saying. ‘I can’t believe how lucky you are!’ He looks at the airframe and laughs. There seems to be a lot of nervous laughter around today.

  I mull over the irony of our call sign, Black Cat Two Two. To take an RPG and have it punch a hole through your rotor – that’s got to be all nine lives lost in one go.

  A Squadron Leader approaches us and shakes my hand. ‘Bloody hell, guys. Well done!’ he says. ‘That was almost a strategic victory for the Taliban – that’s how close it was.’ And I guess it would have been. When you bear in mind that as well as Gulab Mangal, we had his whole team in the back and the FCO Provincial Reconstruction Team, and then there was the aircraft itself – it wouldn’t just have represented a major tactical and PR victory for the Taliban, but it would arguably have meant a strategic disaster for ISAF that could have changed the course of events in Helmand Province. That’s how serious it was.

  Widow Seven Five comes over and introduces himself and he’s hospitality itself. He wakes up the chef, gets him to knock something up for us. We’re humbled and touched beyond belief because these guys have nothing and they’re sharing what little they’ve got with us.

  We spent over six hours at FOB Edinburgh in the end, while waiting for a lift back to Camp Bastion, and it was a real eye-opener. It’s the first time I’d ever seen life in a FOB first-hand and, if I’m honest, it shocked me just how spartan it was. They didn’t even have any running water there. A couple of hours after we touched down, my digestive system woke up and had an argument with my guts, which is when I got to use the Vietnam-style toilet – a plank of wood with a hole in, laid over a ten-gallon oil drum. Gulab Mangal came over to say thanks a short time later and he shook my hand – for
tunately I’d washed them at that point!

  Being at Edinburgh all that time made me realise just how different the war can be for those of us out there; this was illustrated in vivid, colourful fashion. Although FOBs are our bread and butter – and we’re flying in to as many as ten, maybe more, each day – all we ever really see is the HLS. We get a brief overview of the camp as we come in, we’re on the ground for a minute or so, and then we’re off again. Here, we actually got a taste of how the guys lived because we were up close and personal.

  We saw their accommodation, got a good look at their faces – drawn, tired, unshaven, unkempt. No running water, no electricity, primitive toilets. They lived in shelters built out of two blocks of Hesco with a sheet of black fabric over the top to create an air gap (and hopefully provide some rudimentary cooling) and they slept on cots with mozzie nets over them. That was quite literally it – this is how they live for their six-month tours. Spartan doesn’t even come close. We were left with an even deeper respect for the guys that we serve.

  What we experienced at the FOB made us feel embarrassed by the relative opulence of KAF – its shops and restaurants on the boardwalk, the air-conditioned, brick-built accommodation and flushing toilets, proper showers, wi-fi – the whole nine yards. The contrast is immense between the guys on the ground and the guys driving desks, and somehow it all seems upside down and back to front.

  For us, it meant that every opportunity we got subsequently, we’d make a personal effort to get stuff to the FOBs, anything to make the guys’ lives easier. We’d buy crates of Coke – as many as we could afford – and kick them out to the guys whenever we could.

  I think all of us found it pretty hard in the aftermath, while we sat around waiting to be lifted, because suddenly we had nothing to do and all the adrenaline was wearing off. Once the initial elation of having survived waned, we were all left alone with our thoughts, each of us reliving what had happened, what might have been.

  One of the PRT’s close protection officers sought us out later and told us he’d seen the firing point – it was about 300m away in our 10 o’clock as we flew along the wadi – and he saw how many guys there were. He said he saw the RPG being fired at us, and even noticed the puff of dust from the back-blast. He’d seen other guys around the trigger man armed with heavy machine-guns and AK-47s; they’d been hiding behind a compound, which was why neither Alex nor I had seen them on our run in. It was complete luck – the bodyguard happened to look out of the window at precisely the time we were engaged. On such matters of chance, life is built.

  Eventually we got back to Bastion and JP met us off the cab with Woodsy, who’d been my flight commander on my first Det in 2006. Typical JP – he’s straight down the line and brutally honest.

  ‘Are you going to be alright fellas? Do you want to stand down or crack on?’

  ‘Don’t worry Frenchie,’ added Woodsy, ‘lightning never strikes twice.’

  I glanced at the other guys and they all nodded. I looked JP in the eye and said, ‘I think it’s best to get straight back into that saddle and not think about it.’

  I’ve mulled over what happened extensively; all of us have. You try and look for explanations; but even now, I still can’t believe we survived after that RPG hit us. You don’t even want to think about the fallout if we’d gone down: the PR cost to the Government or the tactical impact on the guys in theatre. We only had eight Chinooks in Afghanistan then and they were being flown relentlessly – losing one would have been an absolute nightmare.

  The only way I can rationalise it is that it was down to my training: had I not flown the way I did, had I not been trained the way I was, we’d have been killed – full stop. I made the firer’s job so much harder by flying fast and low. Had I been higher, he could have put two RPGs in the aircraft. It was partially to do with luck – but it was mostly about professionalism and training.

  32

  TAKING THE BAIT

  True to his word, JP had us flying again the following morning; although he kept it simple, so there was nothing too taxing about the day’s taskings. Perhaps more importantly, one of them allowed me to do something I’d been planning since the previous evening: thank Widow Seven Five at Edinburgh for everything he’d done for us.

  I guess things were a little awkward for Alex, Coops, Bob and I at first. The day started just like every other day in theatre, except the last time we’d gone through the machinations before taking off, we’d ended the day having been shot down. I guess things were just a little bit harder than we expected and the entire crew was very, very nervous, so we just took everything very slowly. We had a resupply to do first thing into a grid just west of Gereshk, followed by a tasking into FOB Edinburgh.

  We went in at high level this time so we could see exactly where we’d been hit. It was all a bit difficult to get our heads around, I guess. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel landing at Edinburgh, but I soon found out. Landing next to ZD575 – our cab – now that was weird. There’s nothing like a bit of psychological hangover to start your day.

  Before we’d left that morning, we’d filled the cab with crates of Coca Cola and porn from our own budget, so we could give it all to Widow Seven Five by way of a thank you. I said to Alex as we were flying in, ‘I know it’s going against protocol, but I’m going to unstrap myself and walk off the aircraft when we get there because I want to look that bloke in the eye and shake his hand,’ and that’s exactly what happened. I gathered everything up and went and found him and I said, ‘Cheers mate.’

  He was so modest. ‘You must be joking; you gave us all sorts of stuff yesterday.’

  I was like, ‘Forget it mate, you have nothing here. We want you to have this.’ After we’d been shot down, it was him I spoke to on the radio, he’d cleared us in, guided us, met us off the aircraft, sorted food and everything else for us while we were kicking around. His humility really touched us all. What a top bloke.

  However, if we thought the Chinook Force’s run of bad luck was out of the way, we were very much mistaken. It would be German’s cab that was next in the Taliban’s firing line.

  It’s thought that the Taliban had brought in various teams of shooters for the assassination attempt on Gulab Mangal and, with that attempt made, the teams were about to leave Helmand. They were determined to down a Chinook (ours!) and they’d failed, so they engineered a situation to get the IRT cab into a certain place, at a time of their choosing. And how best to scramble the IRT and get it where you want it? Kill a load of civilians, of course. So that’s what the Taliban did.

  Late that evening, a suicide bomber drove a vehicle packed with explosives into a crowded market square in Musa Qala and detonated himself. The ensuing carnage left mass casualties and the British Army’s first-aid post in the DC was soon overwhelmed. I was in the JOC when the first reports started coming in and a debate started about whether or not to scramble the IRT. The consensus of opinion was that the suicide bombing was a ‘come on’ designed to lure the helicopter in, but there were a lot of casualties and, regardless of the risk, they all needed treating. There’s no ambulance service in Afghanistan and almost no medical care as we know it, so either we reacted or the casualties would die.

  I suggested that instead of risking the IRT, they consider picking the casualties up using Mastiffs which, at the time, offered protection against mines and IEDs. If we’d done that and driven them to Edinburgh, we could have sent a cab in there to scoop them up and run, but the thinking was that it would take three to four hours, which was simply too long for many of the casualties.

  There’s an irony there, because by the time they’d worked through all the iterations of the numerous plans and decided on which HLS they were going to use, it was three or four hours before an aircraft got in anyway. German went in and did really well. He came in from the west at low level, which was the right way to do it, and once the casualties were on board, flew away as fast as he could. Unfortunately he’d been lured into a trap, and he flew right
over the compound where the Taliban team was based. They opened up and several rounds found their mark, hitting the cab when the MERT were busy treating the six severely wounded casualties they’d picked up. Among them was Rahima, a five-year-old Afghani who had suffered a traumatic amputation of her left hand and shrapnel to the stomach in the explosion, and was in critical condition.

  I later learned that Flt Lt Vanessa Miles, an emergency nurse on the MERT, was on her very first mission in Afghanistan; a quite literal baptism of fire! Through it all she remained completely composed and focused, working tirelessly with her colleagues to keep every one of those casualties alive. To me, that speaks volumes about the skill, bravery and dedication of the MERT crews working in Helmand.

  And Vanessa wasn’t the only hero that day. Pete Winn was Rich’s co-pilot and Mark ‘Gammo’ Gamson was the No.2 crewman that night. Gammo got a line on the firing point for three separate weapons. Showing great initiative, he didn’t wait to get authorisation – he took it upon himself to open up on them, rather than describe the target and miss the window of opportunity. This was Gammo’s first Det and he’d only been in theatre a month, but he had the balls and the intelligence to do what had to be done without being told. He fired into the compound and suppressed all three firing points, enabling German to get them out of the danger zone. Top man!

  Before Gammo took the shooters out, several rounds hit the right-hand side of the cab, although thankfully none hit vital systems. In fact, the Chinook survived its enemy encounter well and lived up to its reputation: it’ll take a tremendous amount of punishment and still get you back to base!

  33

  THE WELL OF COURAGE

  There’s nowhere quite like Afghanistan to disabuse you of quaint, idealistic notions about fear. I thought I knew what fear was after being shot down on May 17th, but an operation less than a week later showed me that I knew nothing.