Hellfire

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.’

Taff saved me the embarrassment of inquiring.

‘The boys get free Otis Spunkmeyer muffins from the MWR, don’t they? And bring them back here by the truckload. They were about to hit their best before date, so I’m making them eat ’em, see, for being greedy. That’ll learn ‘em.’

The challenge was to eat five as fast as they could. The winner dropped out and the remainder had to do the challenge again. The numbers worked out perfectly.

‘When I was at a Navy Seals base in the States they had something called the Subway Challenge.’

‘What’s that?’ Gifted asked.

A blond lad with boyish good looks, he was the youngest member of the team; every mother’s dream. Fresh from school he turned up on his first day in the army wearing a T-shirt with ‘GIFTED’ emblazoned across it. The name stuck because he wasn’t.

I began to regret opening my mouth, but they pushed me for an explanation. Little did I know I’d just inspired them…

Lieutenant Colonel Richard Felton stood at the far end of the bird table and sucked thoughtfully on a cigarette. How anyone could smoke in this heat was beyond me, but it was the way the CO did it that cracked me up. He pinched the tab between the very tips of the index and middle fingers of his right hand, keeping it as far as possible from his lips until the moment he seemed to force himself to take a drag, face contorted, as if it was a freshly lit fuse that might detonate at any moment.

‘The Rules of Engagement, gentlemen…’ Legs crossed, left hand on his hip, he started to outline, in that soft, well-spoken way of his, exactly what we could and could not do while we were in-theatre. If it wasn’t for the seriousness of the brief and the fact that Felton was one of the youngest, toughest, no-nonsense colonels on the circuit, we’d have been forgiven for thinking we’d walked into a sketch for Comic Relief.

The ROE briefing was always going to be a bitch; I’d need to keep my wits about me. So far, our enemy were armed with little more than small arms and RPGs. But we already knew they weren’t afraid of the Apache, the weapon system that had been billed as a quantum leap in the way the British Army would fight future wars. The Taliban were medieval in their fighting methods – but also in their brutality. The boffins called it asymmetric warfare. All we knew was that with a handful of rudimentary weapons the bad guys had levelled the playing field.

Lieutenant Colonel Felton took a last drag of his cigarette before dropping it into the dregs of his coffee. I checked the battery level on my digital voice-recorder and placed it on the edge of the bird table, next to the map that depicted our area of operations. The temperature in the long metal tube that housed the CO’s HQ was unbelievable. I glanced at the blokes propped around the table. Simon, Billy, Pat, Tony, Carl, Nick and the others seemed to be taking it in their stride. If I was the only one suffering, I didn’t want them to know.

‘I know how much you’ve been looking forward to this,’ Felton said. There was a groan from the floor. ‘There are basically two different scenarios in which the ROE apply. The first is where we’re told to go and destroy a target deliberately – a known Taliban HQ, for example. Deliberate Attacks are covered under a document called the Targeting Directive. It’s for pre-planned targets only and will have been cleared by government, with signatures all the way to the top. So, if the Intelligence community find a Taliban set-up at a particular location and we confirm it’s definitely there, and the authority is given from Whitehall, then that is a legitimate target under the current guidelines. Is that clear?’

Billy nudged me and muttered in my ear: ‘They’re giving with one hand and taking away with the other.’

Yup, I thought. Legitimate, maybe, but once all those checks and balances had been attended to, it wouldn’t be us who’d be inflicting the damage, it would be fast air in their Harriers, B-1Bs and A-10s.

But the fun and games had only just begun.

‘Fast air don’t have it all their own way,’ Felton continued, ‘because the target set also has to conform to the collateral damage matrix. Each of the nations out here has different ideas over what constitutes collateral damage.’

Someone opened the door behind us and a blast of air from the furnace outside blew through the HQ, scattering the ROE sheets across the bird table. Beads of sweat dripped from one lad’s nose. I forced myself to focus on what the CO was saying.

‘The second scenario and the rules that affect you basically fall into two categories: self-defence and when you want to take specific action against a target for a reason other than self-defence.’ The second category was obviously the hot potato.

If, for example, the enemy below was about to lob a mortar round at our boys on the ground – we would be allowed to engage without consulting the chain of command, as long as we had ‘reasonable belief’ that the person in our sights was the enemy.

Somebody next to me made a choking sound. If the CO heard he didn’t show it, but the civilian in the chair behind him clearly did; I saw him glance up sharply from his notepad like an eagle-eyed schoolteacher. We were never told who this individual was, but in his conspicuously smart clothes, God bless him, he might as well have had ‘Whitehall’ stamped across his forehead. He was probably a lawyer of some description; maybe the pen-pusher who’d drafted this nonsense in the first place.

How the hell were we meant to know who had hostile intent when just about every male in Afghanistan carried a weapon. In the middle of the Green Zone a primitive house and a few livestock was all that most could afford, but they were never without an AK47 and a moped. How were we to know the difference between a farmer out patrolling his crop or the Taliban out patrolling? With a distinct lack of uniforms it was impossible to distinguish the enemy from the Afghan Army, Afghan Police, Afghan Security Forces and some other discreet security forces.

An unsettled feeling started to gnaw at my stomach. I stuck up my hand. The man from Whitehall peered at me over his glasses. The CO paused and gave me an encouraging smile.

‘Yes, Mr Macy.’

Lester W. Grau, a CIA analyst who’d studied the tactics of the Mujahideen against the Soviets, had been high on my reading list. As the Squadron Weapons Officer, I was expected to know everything about the Taliban’s capabilities, but I’d also wanted to get inside the heads of these bastards. What I’d learned was simple and frightening. We were up against an astute, resourceful enemy that would never give up. In the 1980s, a handful of armed resistance fighters had gathered the populace and had seen off the mightiest army in the world. And no Soviet general had had to pussyfoot around under a set of unworkable guidelines.

‘How do I demonstrate they have hostile intent?’

‘Very good question, Mr Macy.’ The CO reached for another cigarette. He was clearly in no hurry to answer it.

My hand stayed up. ‘And what happens if they’re still armed, but looking for cover? How do I know they’re not going to continue the fight after we’ve run low on fuel and buggered off? How do I know whether they’re farmers scared out of their wits looking for somewhere to hide, or Taliban looking for defensive positions from which to continue the fight?’

I paused and looked around the bird table at my fellow pilots before turning back to the CO. ‘What then, sir? What do I do?’

The CO lit his cigarette and took the smoke deep into his lungs. He shook his head. ‘Your call, Mr Macy.’

My call?

The existence of hostile intent would be judged on evidence presented via our TADS camera footage and the camera didn’t always see everything.

Jesus…

As I walked back to our billet I thought about the nightmare we now found ourselves in. It wasn’t the CO’s fault; he was just the messenger. This was down to the politicians. They were sending us to fight their war in a bird that cost £46 million a pop; a bird that was on trial every bit as much as we were. We were both expected to perform flawlessly – with our arms now tied behind our backs. And if I put so much as a foot wrong, because I didn’t have crystal balls and couldn’t read the enemy’s mind, I’d find myself court-martialled for not knowing whether the enemy had hostile intent.

No one else was subject to this level of scrutiny.

As they prepared to rain shells on a position ten kilometres away, the artillery boys weren’t asked to file a report stating that their enemy had hostile intent.

Nobody would ask 3 Para to explain themselves.

The fast-jet pilot who dropped a bomb on a grid wasn’t called to task if he made a mistake – his authority came from a guy on the ground.

But we were well and truly in the crosshairs.

If we got it wrong we’d find ourselves in a court of law and the first-ever deployment of the British Army’s Apache weapons system would be judged a complete failure. We’d be crucified by the media, the politicians and the Whitehall bean-counters. The Apache would be branded a white elephant – a £4.13 billion mistake.

The press hadn’t helped by spouting shite about the Apache programme since the outset. Every time the attack helicopter programme came across a hiccup they would wade in and blow it out of all proportion. It was just an excuse to have a go at the politicians for spending more money than ever before on a single piece of hardware, but Joe Public had swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Due to the bad press, it had already failed in their eyes.

When I’d joined the army twenty-two years earlier, this was not how I’d imagined it would be.

But fuck it, I’d come this far, and the people around the bird table were my mates. Some of them – Billy and Geordie, for example – had been with me damn near the whole time I’d been on the path.

One way or another, we had to find a way of making this work. Or else the Taliban, who didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘rules’, would shoot us out of the sky and decorate their caves with our entrails.

For the past seventeen years I’d bent the rules every which way to get to where I wanted: here, on Ops, with the greatest weapons system in the world, in the stinking heat of an Afghan summer.

Why the hell should I stop now?

Later that evening, as the sirens went silent after a rocket attack, the groundies came bursting into my room.

‘Sir, sir, you’ve got to come quickly.’

I dived from my bed thinking we’d lost a man or an aircraft. Then I was told they were about to start the Subway Challenge.

‘You and your big mouth.’ Billy smiled and grabbed his pistol.

‘Wait for me,’ Jon shouted.

Inside one of the huge US-built relaxation facilities was a gaming area, movie area, coffee bar, games area and a 150-feet-square music room jam-packed with instruments. We entered the music room to see the groundies gathered enthusiastically around three six-foot tables, arranged in a triangle.

Half a dozen foot-long Subway sandwiches had been laid end to end in front of each of the competitors.

Airtrooper Howson – Challenger Number One – was your typical prop forward and played rugby at club level for civilian teams as well as the army. He looked as if he could have swallowed every one of his Subways without pausing for breath.

Gifted looked at the contents of his table as if they were a series of incoming Hellfires.

Which just left Tiny, who looked as though he was about to try to eat several times his own body weight.

‘My money’s on Howson,’ Billy said before Jon or I could wage a bet.

I bagged Gifted.

‘Three, two, one, go,’ Taff called.

They all started at a nice slow pace. Facing each other; matching each other bite for bite. Tiny was being advised not to drink anything because he wouldn’t be able to fit a single Sub in.

They had an hour in which to eat their own height in Subs. The winner would be the first to finish, or the one to have consumed the most when the clock chimed. Anyone that barfed would be instantly disqualified, unless he ate what he’d just thrown up. I’d seen a Navy Seal eat seven feet of Subs in thirty minutes in Atlanta.

They were all finishing their third Sub with thirty minutes to go. Everyone had placed their bets. The music room had glass windows and curiosity got the better of everyone who passed them. The place was packed with Brits, Americans, Canadians, Italians, French; you name it, they were there. The banter was ear-splitting, but Gifted, Howson and Tiny continued to match each other munch for munch.

Forty-five minutes in, Gifted was fading, halfway through his fourth Sub.

‘Gifted’s going,’ the opposition shouted.

He grabbed the bucket from under the table and chundered explosively to a chorus of laughter and a flurry of fresh bets. Howson was now the favourite by a country mile.

The two remaining tables were pushed around to face each other as the noise got louder and the contest became ever more gladiatorial.

Five minutes away from the final bell, both reached for their sixth and final Sub. They’d clearly begun to tire.

Tiny threw down his Sub, folded his arms and looked Howson in the eye. Realising he too was unlikely to finish the whole two yards, Howson followed suit and took a slurp of Gatorade. There was uproar; both of them looked as sick as pigs.

‘Two minutes to go,’ Taff shouted.

A sprint finish was now a dead cert.

‘One minute.’

Howson moved his Sub, positioning it for the perfect draw, but Tiny kept his nerve and barely blinked.

‘Forty seconds to go.’

Howson picked up his Sub, almost in slow motion, and held it a foot from his mouth, directly in the path of Tiny’s steely gaze.

‘Thirty seconds.’

They were locked in complex mental calculation. If they started too soon and had to stop, they’d lose the contest.

I knew which way Howson’s pendulum was swinging. He reckoned that he’d easily out-bite Tiny.

The second the prop forward looked up at Taff, Tiny swiped his Sub and went at it like a termite on speed. Howson rammed his down his throat and removed three inches in one go.

The noise was deafening.

‘Ten seconds,’ Taff bellowed.

Howson was doing his best to swallow and Tiny was still going the chomp-swallow-chomp-swallow route.

‘Five…’

Tiny had another eight inches to go.

‘Four…’

Howson swallowed hard and tore off another three inches. His cheeks looked like an overpumped airbed.

‘Three…’

Tiny was seven inches away from glory.

‘Two…’

Tiny grinned and gave Howson a cheeky wink.

As Taff called, ‘One’, Tiny took a huge three-inch bite of his Sub and placed the remainder on the table.

The crowd went crazy.

‘STOP,’ Taff yelled.

Knowing Tiny only had to swallow his last mouthful to win, Howson lost the battle to keep his last couple of Subways down. His head disappeared into his bucket.

A huge roar and a round of multinational applause egged Tiny on to finish and set the new Afghan Subway Challenge record: one hour and six minutes.

‘Gee!’ an American girl shouted. ‘What does he win?’

‘He gets his Subs paid for by the losers,’ I said. ‘And they pay for their own.’