by Ed Macy
Later that day, I read that a Canadian JTAC had not been so lucky. She’d been killed in an RPG attack when the Taliban launched an assault on their position after the Apaches, low on fuel, had been forced to fly back to KAF. She had been the first female NATO soldier to be killed in Afghanistan.
Within a few hours, the news channels reported the crowing response of Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban. ‘The Taliban consider themselves at war with British troops in Afghanistan,’ the Mad One trumpeted. ‘There will be a wave of suicide attacks as we step up our fight against the government and its allies.’
According to Mullah Omar, there were people queuing around the block to don explosive vests and pick up Kalashnikovs, he had twenty-five mid-level commanders in southern Afghanistan, and his forces there were armed with anti-aircraft weapons.
Well, this was shaping up to be a ding-dong tour.
Several thoughts popped into my head. I wondered what John Reid was making of all this. What about our reconstruction mission? The Mujahideen tactics I’d read about in Egypt seemed to be alive and well. And when the fuck were Jon and I going to get our marching orders?
I got the answer to the last question later that day. Jon and I were due to leave on 20 May, in two days’ time. Whatever the ins and outs, we were on our way at last-and not a moment too soon. The Brits were engaged in heavy fighting down south and the Americans were doing their bit by sending the bombers in-big heavy B-1Bs armed with 2,000-lb GPS-guided JDAMs; bombs would do a whole lot more than rattle the bars of the Taliban cages.
The night before I left, Emily was on night-shift at the hospital again, hoping to deliver Jake’s baby, and I was at my desk doing some cheerful last-minute admin-signing my tax forms, upping my military life insurance and checking the details of my will-when the phone rang. I raised it to my ear.
‘Andy…’ I said cautiously.
‘Just checking that everything’s okay for tomorrow and wishing you well for the tour, Ed. Remember, if Emily needs anything, she only needs to pick up the phone.’
Transport had been laid on from the base to Brize Norton, a journey of around six hours. From Brize, we’d fly to Kabul. It was going to be a long day.
I went to bed early and slept so soundly that I never heard Emily return from her shift.
The next morning we got up, ate breakfast and drove straight to Dishforth. Neither of us said much and the weather wasn’t helping-it was tipping it down.
The car that would take us to Brize was already waiting.
I chucked my bags in the boot and turned to say goodbye to my girl. She was sitting at the wheel of her car, window down. The wipers were doing their best against the rain and I could see that Em was struggling too. God, I hated this. We both did.
I leaned in and gave her a kiss. ‘Love you,’ I said.
‘Love you too. I suppose there isn’t any point asking you not to do anything stupid…’
I kissed her again. ‘See you in three months.’
I watched her go until I lost sight of the tail-lights in the rain.
As we started our final descent, the loudspeaker told us to get our helmet and body armour ready. Ready for what? Nobody told us and it didn’t seem to matter much because somehow the threat-whatever it was-seemed a long way away.
As we banked I got my first real look at Afghanistan. The mountains looked majestic beneath us. Kabul itself looked dusty and exotic as it swam in and out of the heat haze. Smoke from a number of fires hung listlessly at the edge of the city. I thought for a moment that it might have been the result of some kind of attack, but an old RAF hand behind me said that it was always like that. Carbon emissions legislation wasn’t high on Hammid Karzai’s agenda; the ‘Mayor of Kabul’, as he was known, had more pressing problems to solve.
We landed in Kabul at 0615 Local-0245 in the UK-and joined the queue to get processed into theatre. Jon and I joshed about the place we now found ourselves in; the airport was a cross between a junkyard and a high-tech arms fair, with rusting Soviet-era transport aircraft mixing it with gleaming F-16s and NATO and UN helicopters. Neither of us could believe how hot it was, or the smells that assaulted our nostrils.
When we got to the head of the queue we were ushered into a tent and, after showing our ID cards, were pointed towards a cargo trolley where our bags from the UK flight awaited us. From here we’d board a C-130 Hercules to Kandahar, where the rest of the squadron was assembled.
We took our seats in the Herc and waited for it to take off. The rear ramp remained open to allow what little ambient air there was onto the aircraft.
We weren’t the first on board. To our right was the fattest bloke I’d ever seen in the armed forces, a Territorial Army captain, awash with sweat. Next to him were two other members of the TA: a skinny major-Little to his Large-and a female sergeant major unenviably close to a small open urinal that was bolted onto the bulkhead that separated the flight-deck from the cargo area.
A loadmaster appeared and handed out ‘white death’ boxes containing our rations for the flight.
The big bloke was eating out of it almost before the box had left the loadie’s hand. Jon and I watched in amazement as he stuffed two whole muffins into his mouth, holding his helmet beneath them to catch the crumbs. He then fell asleep.
Upon being woken by the loadie a short time later and told the plane was about to take off, the captain slapped on his helmet and ended up with so many crumbs clinging to his sweat-soaked skin that he looked like he’d suffered an outbreak of scabies.
A moment or two after we were in the cruise, a Para corporal celebrated the fact that the train had left the station by climbing over everyone to get to the urinal. He beamed at the female sergeant major as he vigorously relieved himself. This, I imagined, was not contained in any in-theatre threat brief she’d ever attended. A few hours in Afghanistan, poor thing, and she looked like she was ready to go home.
The rest of the flight was relatively normal, except for the fact that the two loadies stood by the side doors during takeoff and landing, watching for missile launches. In their hands was a ‘pipper’ connected by a bungee cable to a box that controlled the flare launchers on the Herc’s fuselage. It was all very Heath Robinson.
Unlike Kabul, Kandahar was flat. The first thing that assailed us on landing wasn’t the heat-although it was like a furnace-but the stench. The smell of excrement in the air was unbelievable and it forced its way into the aircraft even before the ramp opened.
As we made our way onto the concrete, a bus drew up. It was painted in garish greens, reds and yellows and was festooned on the outside and inside with chains, from which a bizarre assortment of pendants dangled and jangled.
As we took our places, the bus seemed as if it might collapse under our weight as the driver, an Afghan with very few teeth, revved the engine noisily to signal his impatience. An RAF warrant officer, the guy who’d told me about Kabul’s fires on the earlier flight, noticed my expression and told me to relax. The bus had no first or second gear, but he promised it would get us there.
I was about to ask where ‘there’ was when I saw a huge tented city through the windscreen.
We pulled up by a marquee-like structure alongside a sign that said, ‘Cambridge Lines’. We went in, got processed again-‘Had we had the mine-threat brief, the medical brief and several other kinds of brief?’ We had, thank God, back in the UK-before finally being released through a flap on the opposite side.
There, we were greeted by the cheery sight of Pat, the 3 Flight Commander, lolling behind the wheel of a Land Rover. He was brushing flies away with his cap, but fighting a losing battle.
We piled into the vehicle and set off towards our accommodation. As we wove in and out of the tents, the smell that had greeted us on landing seemed to be getting worse and worse.
‘What is that?’ I asked eventually, as Pat ground through the gears.
‘What’s what?’ he said.
‘That smell.’
‘It�
�s shit, Ed. What else can I say?’
‘Where’s it coming from?’
‘You’ll find out soon enough.’
Five minutes later, we screeched up in front of a white, semipermanent, single-storey structure, approximately twenty metres wide and sixty long. As aircrew, Pat said, we were fortunate to be given ‘hardened accommodation’-ours was one of the 200 identical tin hutches lined up in this part of KAF.
Jon and I grabbed our bags and prepared to enter our new home, but before we got as far as the door a gust of wind, stoked by the fires of hell, blew through, bringing with it a smell that eclipsed anything we’d experienced so far.
With my hand clamped over my face, I asked Pat again: ‘What the fuck was that?’ And this time, to shut me up, he offered to show me.
After threading our way through several alleyways we found ourselves facing a huge circular shit-pit. The giant 150-metre pond
-filled with gravel and God knew what else, and fed by a giant revolving arm-was right next to our accommodation block. It was that fucking big we could spot it on Google Earth before the camp itself.
There was a huge sign:
SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK
NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY
‘So now you know,’ Pat said, with a resigned shrug. ‘Either of you sleepwalk?’
Safely inside the hut, though still not entirely removed from the smell, we were led to our room. I was greeted by Billy and Mick, an old ex-Para mate, now the Regimental QHI.
‘Ed, Jon,’ Billy said cheerily from the edge of his bed, to the right of the now firmly closed door. ‘Come and wave hello to Andrea.’
‘Are you delusional?’ I asked. Andrea was Billy’s wife.
Billy pulled a face. Only then did I notice the laptop beside him. ‘She’s on MSN, you idiot.’
I dropped my bags and peered around the edge of the screen. Andrea beamed at me. She gave me a fuzzy wave then the ticker tape flashed.
‘Hi Ed.’
I leaned over Billy.
‘Hi Andrea.’
While Billy and Andrea cooed sweet nothings at each other, Jon and I settled ourselves in. The room was cool and comfortable, with only the merest hint of Eau de Shite to spoil the ambience. There were Glade air fresheners everywhere. My bed was back left; Jon’s back right.
When Billy had finished his chat, he and Mick filled us in on the latest news. Although the squadron hadn’t yet fired a shot in anger, it had loosed off a Hellfire. The day before, a French Special Forces convoy had been ambushed-they’d suffered one KIA, two MIAs and had been forced to abandon three vehicles in the desert. One of them, ironically, had been stuffed full of Electronic Counter Measures (ECM) equipment. It could not fall into enemy hands, so Pat had been dispatched to take it out with a Hellfire and Chris finished it off with a hundred rounds of 30 mil. Other than that, in the wake of them dodging RPGs and Chris using up two of his nine lives, things had settled down a bit-apart from the odd bit of bitching that some of the guys were getting more flying hours than others.
Billy then said he had to nip out, but suggested I got online to tell Emily I’d arrived safely.
Ten minutes later, my girl’s face crackled into view on the screen of Billy’s laptop.
She took one look at me and promptly burst into tears.
Knowing that something radical was required, I stuck my hands up on my head and moosed her.
How to explain ‘moosing’?
Some years earlier there had been a dare going round the squadron. In the midst of a shag, the bloke had to place his thumbs on his forehead, fingers upright and splayed like antlers, then take a look at himself in the mirror. That was it. The trick was not to get caught; the girl was never supposed to find out.
I failed dismally, and had a great deal of explaining to do. Emily found it so funny that, from then on, we used it as our special greeting. If I was out and about and happened to spot her, I’d moose her and she me.
Through the graininess of the connection, I saw her raise her hands to her head, give me a couple of shaky antlers, and break into a brave smile.
I moosed her back and then, together, we both pressed the button that severed the connection.
There are times when antlers speak louder than words.
WILDMAN OF HELMAND
MAY 2006
Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan
Work had always kept me focused and at KAF there was a hell of a lot of it to be done. There were six Apaches in-theatre and all needed time, love and attention to get them into full operational shape. The Apaches had been flown to Afghanistan in RAF C-17 transporters-giant four-engined aircraft that reminded me of International Rescue’s lumbering Thunderbird 2-and then offloaded and reassembled. Once they were back together again, they had to be tested on the ground then airtested before they were deemed safe enough to fly and ready to fight the Taliban.
While Jon and I had been in the air between the UK and Afghanistan, the first Apaches had flown out to Camp Bastion. The CO’s plan in the early days was to keep half the aircraft stationed at Bastion and the remainder at KAF, because you never quite knew where the threat was going to develop next. As Squadron Weapons Officer, my focus was now on ensuring that the aircraft could fight as well as fly and I’d already heard there were problems. The rockets had proven horrendously inaccurate when tested on a nearby range, but to anyone who knew the foibles of that particular weapon system when coupled to the Apache, it didn’t come as a huge surprise.
I’d spoken to the IPT about it after Oman. The Integrated Project Team-a multi-disciplinary band of experts drawn from the armed services, the UK MoD and the defence industry-was brought together in the 1990s to bring weapons into service and maintain them as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.
US Hydra rockets were so inaccurate that American Apache crews didn’t generally fire theirs at any targets in excess of 1,000 metres. We used different rockets, but shared some of the same problems. If the pod wasn’t correctly aligned, you could get a wide dispersal of rockets-they could go low and to the right from one pod and high and left from the other. When I broached this with the IPT, they gave me a pat on the back and told me to stop fussing because the CRV7 rocket was an ‘area weapon’, to which I’d replied: ‘Yeah, but which area?’ I didn’t want to be responsible for a blue-on-blue-a friendly fire incident-our worst nightmare.
The cannons also needed to be aligned correctly to each Apache airframe. They slipped out of alignment for a variety of reasons and needed, every so often, to undergo ‘dynamic harmonisation’-a little like getting the wheels of your car balanced down at Kwik Fit.
I’d slept badly; it hadn’t helped that Mick had snored like a pig all night and KAF still stank like a sewer. But the cookhouse brightened my day; it served some of the best food I’d ever eaten in a military camp.
Jon, Billy and I strolled over to the Joint Helicopter Force Afghanistan (JHF(A)) Headquarters, a Nissen hut where the CO and his team were busy working out what needed to be done to bring the squadron up to ramming speed. With Apaches still rolling off C-17s inbound from the UK, the priority was still to ensure the aircraft were performing as they were supposed to after reassembly.
The aircraft were put together by the technicians in concrete bays, protected by rows of Hesco Bastion barricades, a kilometre away, close to the north threshold of KAF’s main runway. The five given over to our aircraft sat in the full glare of the Afghan sun; temperatures routinely reached forty-seven degrees, although working in the cockpit, where the rays were magnified, they generally exceeded fifty.
Over the next week, the race was on to get the aircraft ready before the Taliban got busy again. ‘Hot and high’ was bad news and Afghanistan had both-heat that could fry your brains and mountains that stretched towards the sky.
Helicopters hate heat and most do not perform well at altitude. We used a temperature and pressure chart to come up with a daily ‘density altitude’ that we adjusted according to the conditions. Thank
God for the 30 per cent additional power our British Apaches got from their Rolls-Royce engines. The Americans had to remove the Longbow radar from their Apaches and still lacked the power to get above 10,000 feet with a full range of weapons.
Some of the peak temperatures still pushed us extremely close to our limits. The Apache was initially cleared not to exceed forty degrees. On most days, we’d seen the needle creep closer to fifty. We were in uncharted territory. It would be bad enough to lose an aircraft due to enemy action; it would be criminal if we lost one because we’d just not paid enough attention to the climatic conditions.
Getting the weapons aligned was a slow, methodical operation. I’d devised the method myself after the IPT gave us a no-show on a solution. In one particular Apache, the left launcher was found to be one and a half degrees low, which would have resulted in its rockets falling almost 700 metres short of their target. The right launcher, on the other hand, would have dispatched its ordnance more than 300 metres long; the total dispersal area would have been a kilometre wide. We would have been inviting catastrophe every time we fired: a blue-on-blue of headline-grabbing proportions.
The technicians were losing weight fast and getting blacker by the day as they struggled to push out as many hours as possible. I joined them in the sweltering bays, working side by side to ready the gunships. Getting the weapons sorted was no picnic in this heat and I eventually took a break in the groundies’ tent beside the flight line. Sheltered by a Hesco Bastion wall, it was a twelve foot square affair with no ends, a table and a few well-carved benches.
‘All right Taff? Mind if I grab some warm water?’
‘Get it quick,’ he said. ‘There’ll be none left when this lot finish.’
Four of the team were stuffing multiple king-size muffins into their mouths.
‘What on earth are they up to?’
‘Ah…’ His eyes gleamed. ‘That would be the Spunk-muffin Challenge, sir.’
