Hellfire

VISITING THE SHRINE

A couple of days later, I found myself on a mission to Camp Bastion. I’d familiarised myself with the area around KAF; an airtest or two had given me glimpses of the mountains and the desert, but the trip to Bastion was my first foray into the Helmand region.

Our tasking was to escort a Chinook, callsign Hardwood Two Two, to Lashkar Gah, where it would drop off some personnel. From there we’d fly directly to Bastion where another Chinook, Hardwood Two One, would lift off and RV with us. All four of us would proceed first to Now Zad, then to Musa Qa’leh, with the Chinooks dropping off and picking up men and materiel along the way. After the round-trip, we’d land at Bastion and remain forward-deployed there for six days. We’d been getting wind of some kind of operation – the reason for calling us forward.

We were two Apaches, callsigns Wildman Five Zero with Simon in the front and Jon in the back, and Wildman Five One, with Billy in the gunner’s seat and me behind him.

‘Wildman Five Zero Flight are two Apaches and one Chinook, ready for departure,’ Simon said as we lined up on Foxtrot taxiway.

‘Wildman Five Zero Flight, you are clear to depart Two Three Foxtrot,’ the American controller replied.

The Chinook lifted off first and we started to roll down the taxiway. I quickly tucked in behind it, our Apache hanging off to the back left, Jon to the back right. All three of us hugged the desert floor till we were away from KAF, then the Chinook shot up to altitude.

I turned to Billy. ‘That’ll change when we get back.’

‘What will?’

‘That procedure: the Chinook going up first.’

‘I see what you mean,’ Billy said after a moment’s thought. ‘That was all wrong, wasn’t it?’

Had someone fired at the Chinook while it was climbing to altitude, our two Apaches, supposedly its escorts, would never have seen the threat – and the Chinook, which had no armour (all Chinooks received their armour later in the tour), would not have withstood the shot.

One of the Apaches should have popped up to altitude first, to maintain a hawk-like vigil for the second Apache’s climb to height. Once we were both up, we could then provide cover for the Chinook’s ascent. The Apaches were built to take small arms fire and they could handle a missile launch; the Chinook couldn’t. And we all knew that the Taliban would have given their eye teeth to shoot down a ‘Cow’ – their name for the big, lumbering RAF helicopter.

Well, not on my watch, I swore to myself. We’d need to talk to the Chinook boys and fix that procedure at the first available opportunity.

I looked down. We were crossing into the Red Desert – so named because of the colour of its remarkable three-hundred-feet-high dunes. From the air they looked like rust-coated waves rolling inexorably north from Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan and threatening to engulf the south-eastern city of Kandahar.

The desert was impassable by foot, almost impossible to cross by vehicle, and was uninhabited except by nomads who only ventured onto its fringes in winter. As far as NATO pilots were concerned, the Red Desert was a friend; being devoid of people, it was also devoid of threat.

We ploughed on at altitude until a pale strip appeared hazily on the horizon. As I peered at it, the outline of a sprawling city began to emerge.

I checked the navigation page on my MPD. Lashkar Gah: the first stop on my cook’s tour of Afghanistan.

The Chinook’s nose dropped sharply. Jon and I eased our Apaches left and right to take up station above and to each side of it as it swooped low over the desert towards the base nestled in the north-east quadrant of the city.

All the bases in Afghanistan were programmed into our computer and with a punch of a button the crosshairs in my monocle shot away to rest squarely over the one at Lashkar Gah.

The cueing dots directed me to look down and to my right and, as if by magic, there it was in my line of sight: a large compound filled with two-storey buildings surrounded by a fortified wall with sangars built into it as watchtowers.

Except for the dust and the heat haze it didn’t look a whole lot different from some of the set-ups I’d overflown in Northern Ireland.

Even from two miles away, I could see the helicopter landing strip (HLS). The Chinook was bombing towards it at full-throttle.

I checked what Billy could see with the TADS. Bisecting the screen, pointing like an arrow towards the army base, there was a long straight street, one hundred metres wide and a kilometre in length. Leading off it were little alleyways and housing blocks. With the DTV camera in the TADS on zoom, it was as if we were only twenty-five metres away from the teeming throng of people on bikes, women with pots on their heads, kids running about, trucks and mopeds grinding along in low gear, dogs nipping at their wheels. It was all happening in Lashkar Gah.

The Chinook suddenly cut into the bottom of the picture. In a remarkable piece of flying, the pilot took it straight down the street. I would have expected the women and the kids and the dogs to have scattered, but none did, used as they were, perhaps, to a generation of machines that had brought conflict to their country.

At the last second, the Chinook pulled up its nose, bled off speed, dropped over the wall and disappeared in a cloud of dust.

We started to wheel over the city, keeping our eyes peeled, but didn’t have to wait long. Less than twenty seconds after it had vanished there was a ‘click-click’ on the radio – the only signal we would receive from the CH47 boys on the Chinook flight-deck, and the Cow suddenly emerged out of the muck. Batting low over the rooftops, it pulled up clear of the small arms belt. We crossed into the Green Zone as soon as it resumed station alongside us.

The strip of fertile land was irrigated by the Helmand River, glistening through the trees below us. Around two kilometres across at its widest point, its lush foliage provided plenty of cover, not just for roaming Taliban units, but for anti-aircraft guns and ManPADS that could shoot us down.

We passed on into the dusty air above a parched, sand-coloured desert that stretched south, west and north as far as I could see.

‘Twelve o’clock, fifteen kilometres, Camp Bastion,’ Billy said.

I peered out of the cockpit and saw nothing except for tyre-tracks criss-crossing the barren wastes below us. Billy still had the TADS set to DTV zoom and I could see Bastion starting to take shape in black and white on the screen. First some tunnel-type tents in the south-east corner of the base, then other features sprang into view: the berm bulldozed up around the perimeter, the sangars with their tin roofs and sandbag fortifications and numerous vehicle parks brimming with Land Rovers and various types of APCs. A Chinook sat at the northern edge, blades milling, on one of two square pads that marked out the HLS.

There were two stationary Apaches on the other pad. The HLS was tiny compared to the luxurious concrete-lined complex we’d become used to at KAF. Technically, we were supposed to be able to fit four Apaches at a pinch on one pad, but I wondered, from up here how that would be possible. I didn’t have time to dwell on it, because Hardwood Two One, the second Chinook, lifted off its square. When it popped out of its own dust cloud, I could see its underslung load: a bunch of crates in a low-hanging net. The Chinook hugged the ground for several hundred metres then rose to meet us in a zoom climb.

As soon as we RV’d, we set course to the north and our next destination: Now Zad.

The two Chinooks flew in formation about a thousand metres apart. Billy and I took up station above and around two kilometres behind and to the left of them; Jon and Simon did the same to their right.

We could see the Chinooks from our vantage point, and more importantly the ground beneath and behind them. Our primary concern was a SAM launch. Unlike us, the Chinooks didn’t always have an integrated defensive aids suite. If the Taliban did fire on them, they’d have to rely on the good old Mark 1 Eyeball – ours as well as theirs – to spot the launch plume. After that, it would be down to good judgement and their ‘pippers’, hand-held controllers like the ones I’d seen on the C-130 flight from Kabul to KAF, to launch flares to seduce the missile away from the aircraft.

The only place where the threat was deemed at all likely on this segment of our journey was the point at which we crossed Highway Zero One, which looped around most of Afghanistan. You never quite knew who was going to be on the road as you roared across it – on this occasion we were fortunate; it was empty – and we always treated it with respect.

Shortly afterwards I saw a pockmarked town, smaller than Lashkar Gah. Surrounded by hills and mountains Now Zad sat in a basin, with a rough road running north-south for around 500 metres through its centre.

Houses spread back for 300 metres on either side of this road, with smaller streets and alleyways running east-west. The place looked medieval in its chaos. The houses were ramshackle and built to no discernible pattern, the majority constructed on one or two levels, with access to the flat roofs via a staircase from within. The roofs of the handful of three-storey buildings gave the Taliban some excellent fields of fire direct into the District Centre.

The DC was located to the west of the potholed main street. It had been a police station and its compound had recently come under some very heavy fire. Surrounded by a high wall that was still remarkably intact, it had a big metal gate at the front and a sandbagged watchtower turret at each corner, manned by sentries round the clock.

Billy told me that forty-one Paras were stationed there and that the threat level was judged to be so high that they were in ‘lockdown’ – they went nowhere except to collect ammo and provisions from their Chinook replen flights using their quad-bikes and WMIK all-terrain vehicles – stripped down Land Rovers fitted with a Weapons Mounted Installation Kit that allowed a GPMG and a .50 cal to hang from its frame.

All the inhabitants to the west of the road were friendly towards the Brits and had a good relationship with us. Everyone to the east had taken to their heels as the Taliban moved in.

A few hundred metres to the south-west, just outside and a couple of hundred feet above the town perimeter, was a hill, easily identifiable from the air, occupied by the ANP and known to us as ‘the Shrine’ because the slope facing Now Zad was a burial ground, full of fluttering flags and streamers.

If the Shrine went down, Now Zad would too. From here, the ANP and a few British troops kept a watchful eye on the area and directed fire out of the DC onto the Taliban. The DC was too small to accept a Chinook within its compound, so flights landed to the south-west of the Shrine, under its garrison’s protective gaze but out of sight of the town.

The landing site (LS) was approached across flat desert and through a wide opening in the mountains. The town extended for a further 500 metres north-west of the DC, and was occupied mainly by Afghans intent on living a normal life.

‘They bring no bother to this area,’ Billy said, ‘so we try to patrol out that far to reassure them we’re friends.’

The town stopped abruptly at the western edge of the built-up area and turned to desert. Two kilometres further on, steep hills rose to form the edge of the Now Zad basin.

The dodgy area of town stretched a few hundred metres east of the main road before entering a small wadi, used as a route out through the Green Zone, filled with orchards, crop-fields and tree-lined groves and bordered by a huge mountain ridge, only a few hundred metres wide, but climbing a thousand feet above Now Zad and stretching north as far as the eye could see.

The so-called Green Zones were christened by the Russians in the late seventies. Southern Afghanistan was not naturally fertile but the mountains were so high they generated their own microclimates. Clouds often obscured the tops of the ranges and produced rivers that meandered during the summer months and thundered down in winter. The Helmand was the largest of these, stretching for hundreds of miles through the southern deserts.

The Afghans had mastered irrigation, and the river banks were lined by fields that spread back from ten metres to a couple of kilometres on each side.

The Taliban lived in and where possible fought from the Green Zones. They didn’t have the numbers, equipment, weapons, logistics or support with which to do so in the open.

The richly fertile area provided a latticework of concealed approaches and escape routes. It was so dense in some areas that you could barely see thirty metres. They built hides and underground tunnels, disguising the entrances so they couldn’t be seen from the ground or air, and the irrigation system, channelling water from field to field, made their movements virtually impossible to detect. In many places, the only way through was on foot. The soft-earthed labyrinth was often inaccessible to tanks, APCs and vehicles of any description.

The Taliban didn’t want us anywhere near Now Zad, and saw the DC as a big threat. The Paras had come under intense fire, morning, noon and night the entire time they had occupied it. In the recent upsurge of violence the town had been mortared by what the threat-briefers called a ‘hard core’ of Taliban. The Green Zone on the eastern edge of the town was the place to watch; it was where they’d mounted their last attack-principally with rockets and mortars.

Simon’s voice came over the radio. ‘Widow Seven Three, Widow Seven Three, this is Wildman Five Zero, how do you read?’

Widow Seven Three was the JTAC who coordinated all air-to-ground activity in this area.

With no acknowledgement from him, Simon tried again. I suddenly spotted blue smoke below. I checked Billy’s TADS image. It was coming from the grid-reference we’d been given for the LS. Billy increased the zoom and I was able to make out a couple of vehicles at the base of the Shrine – a quad-bike and a WMIK. Blue smoke meant that the LS was secure.

The Chinooks were beating their way across the desert approaches from the south-east. Jon was already wheeling his Apache above the streets just north of the Shrine to allow Simon an unrestricted top-down view of activity in the alleyways and the compounds below. I was doing the same above the area of Green Zone to the east. The danger was a mortar strike on the LS during the few brief seconds that the Chinooks would be on the ground. My responsibility was to keep an eye on them as well as on my wingman.

The Chinook with the underslung load disappeared in a pillar of whirling dust; the second went to land just outside this cloud and promptly disappeared as well.

Seconds later, we heard a double-click on the radio and first one machine then the next reappeared.

The Cows veered away to the south, keeping low, then pulled up to join us at altitude. Within moments we were back over the desert, cruising at a safe height en route to Musa Qa’leh, our last RV before heading back to Bastion.

The Musa Qa’leh drop-off went without incident. We saw one of the Chinooks descend into a wadi to deliver a vital supply item, the identity of which was on a need-to-know basis (which meant we had no need to know), to an American patrol operating in the area, and then we turned for home.

As we flew high over the desert towards Bastion, I thought back to the ROE brief and, for the umpteenth time since I’d heard the CO deliver it, how crazy it was.

What if I went down in this hell-hole? How would I protect myself?

I glanced across at my SA80. I had three magazines with thirty rounds of 5.56 mm each, and an unusually short mag packed with twenty 5.56 mm tracer rounds in case of emergency. It jutted out from my carbine in the seat frame to my right. Strapped to my right thigh, inside an Uncle Mike’s Sidekick holster, was my 9 mm pistol for which I had four magazines, thirteen rounds in each, with one inserted-ready-into the grip.

Three days earlier, I’d visited some Para mates. In exchange for some AAC patches and badges, I’d been given two hand grenades. Needless to say, it was absolutely verboten to fly with grenades – I’d be drummed out of the corps, most likely, if they were discovered in the aircraft. But the way I saw it, they were only dangerous to those unfamiliar with them. They sat in my grab bag to my right-hand side with my spare magazines and two smoke grenades. I was out there flying against the Taliban and the rule-makers weren’t, so the grenades flew with me.

If it ever came to my Black Hawk Down moment, the grenades would allow me to take as many of the bastards down with me as I could – my final two-fingered salute to the ROE.

We cleared Highway Zero One and prepared for our landing at Bastion.

The patrol commander always landed first and I saw Jon’s nose drop as he readied to take us in. I lowered the collective, ensuring that I retained a bit of power to keep the clutch from disengaging, and kept the nose up, bleeding speed. Then I lowered the nose, accelerating and jinking left and right – shades of the lessons I’d learned as a young Para when trying to shoot down drones on the range at Larkhill. I could hear Captain Mainwaring shouting at me now. It was damn difficult to hit an aircraft that was manoeuvring unpredictably…

‘Jon’s going to dust-out massive,’ Billy said. ‘I know it looks like he’s heading for a hardened landing site down there, Ed, but trust me, in a moment he’s going to disappear from view.’ He paused. ‘Do you want me to take this one for you?’

I grinned. ‘I’m going to have to do this at some point. Just follow me on the controls in case I fuck up.’

I’d already been told that landing at Bastion was a nightmare. Helicopters hated hot and high – that had been drummed into us from Lesson Number One. Add dust to the mixture and everything threatened to turn to ratshit.

To get around this problem at Bastion, they were planning on building a hardened aircraft landing strip (HALS); a short runway, in effect, that would allow us to do rolling takeoffs and landings. Rolling takeoffs not only allowed us to get airborne with more ordnance, they also ensured we didn’t get lost in our own sandstorm.

The trouble was, the HALS hadn’t yet been built at Bastion; instead, we had to land on a square pad – there were two of them – a raised area built from builder’s rubble that the Chinook and Apache boys had robbed from the engineers constructing the camp.

The pads had originally been built as a vehicle park. This was all well and good, except that the omnipresent dust settled in among the rubble. Only ‘dust’ didn’t really do this stuff justice – at Bastion, apparently, it was like talcum powder, and it went fucking everywhere. The makeshift landing pad I was heading for, Billy had warned me, was barely safe to use.

Terrific.

‘Billy?’

‘Yes, mate?’

‘You still there?’

‘Following your every move.’

‘Good. Just checking.’

I continued towards the pad. I needed to carry out a ‘zero-zero’ landing. I didn’t want to end up in the hover, because I’d find myself still in the air in a dust-out and that’s where crashes begin; and I didn’t want any forward speed when I hit the ground either or I’d roll into the two Apaches that were already parked ahead of my landing spot. The only way to crack this was to fly forward and down, forward and down, in one steep smooth approach, until we banged onto the pad.

My fears were confirmed when I saw Jon bringing his Apache into land ahead of me. One moment I could see him, the next he just vanished along with the whole pad and the two Apaches already on it. There was no room for error. If I drifted left, I’d collide with Jon and Simon. If I drifted right, we’d hit uneven ground and roll over. If I rolled forward, I’d hit the two stationary aircraft.

Oman had been bad, but at least it had been sand, not dust, and there’d been nothing else to hit.

I continued towards the pad bringing back the speed with the ground 100 feet below. Billy advised me to slow down some more to allow the dust from Jon’s landing to settle.

‘Yeah, copied mate.’ I did as he said. Trouble was, dust was also blowing in from the two Chinooks that had landed a hundred metres or so to the south; a roiling, billowing cloud of dust, 150 feet high and hundreds of metres wide, was blowing across the camp.

I began my zero-zero descent. The world as I knew it immediately disappeared.

‘Fuck me.’

‘Don’t worry, just trust your symbology.’

Suddenly, through the dust, I saw the dim silhouettes of aircraft-two directly in front of me and one forward and to my left. I was bleeding speed off and dropping down towards them, forward and down, forward and down…

‘You’re doing good, doing good,’ Billy said. ‘Trust your symbology…’

If I bottled it and attempted to go around again, I’d hit the aircraft in front of me. I was getting to the point of no return.

I glanced left and saw two faces – Simon’s and Jon’s. You always watched somebody coming in to land because there was every chance it would go wrong. It wasn’t a morbid curiosity, it was just plain dangerous, and they were watching me like a pair of hawks.

Any second now and I’d have to commit.

‘Stand by,’ I said. ‘Three…two…one…committed!’

The aircraft was slowing, the ground still rising to meet me. I fought the instinct to pull power, but in the end I couldn’t help myself. I tweaked some on – just a fraction – and the dust came up. Oh God, I thought, here we go…

‘I’ve got the toe-brakes, mate,’ Billy said.

Thank fuck – one thing less to worry about. Billy would pop the brakes the moment we hit the ground.

We passed through sixty feet and I made the big mistake of glancing down to my left.

The dust was blowing away from me in rivulets – the ground, wherever it was, looked as if it had turned to liquid. I had lost all sense of terra firma below me. Anything and everything that represented solidity had disappeared from view and been replaced by a rippling carpet of liquid mush. This sea of dust moving left made me feel like I was side-slipping right at speed. I fought to trust my symbology.

The Apache on my left began to disappear from my peripheral vision and then, wham, the dust started recirculating down through my rotors, and my peripheral vision disappeared entirely. I was still fifty feet off the ground and totally blind.

‘Forward and down,’ Billy continued. ‘Forward and down…’

I kept my head still, not moving a muscle, as I stared into the monocle. It was in hover mode. The velocity vector line moved ever so slowly back from the top of the monocle towards the centre; I knew I was doing six knots. I had to get the vector back to the centre-zero speed across the ground – at exactly the same time as the height also hit zero.

I didn’t know for sure if I would hit my point on the pad and took a quick peep out of the right-hand window.

Mistake…

The line drifted to the left.

‘No further left!’ Billy yelled.

‘I’ve got it, I’ve got it…’ I shouldn’t have fucking looked. I was concentrating so hard to fight the urge to stop a drift that wasn’t even there.

I brought the stick back to the right to compensate for my error and – smack! – we hit the ground and I felt a reassuring lurch as the struts stroked downwards and the undercarriage took our full weight evenly.

I had no idea if I’d landed where I was supposed to, but was ecstatic that I’d not rolled over or hit anything. I looked to my left. After a few minutes the dust thinned and I caught sight of Jon and Simon, arms above their heads, giving me a slow theatrical handclap. I should have acknowledged with a little bow, but I was too damned drained to do anything. I slumped back in my seat.

I glanced up and saw Billy’s face in his mirror. He gave me a cheeky smile and a thumbs-up.

‘Fucking hell, that was scary,’ I said.

‘Well,’ he replied, ‘I did offer…’

We were bounced over the rough terrain to the main camp in a Land Rover. On the ground, Bastion was smaller than I imagined and it only took a minute or two of driving in our own dust cloud before we reached the accommodation area, a tented compound surrounded by Hesco Bastion barriers. The Portakabin luxury we’d known briefly at KAF was markedly absent but, on the plus side, so was the stink of shit. Bastion was still in its infancy and very austere.

After dropping our kit off in our tent, Billy and I walked over to the north side of the compound, past a couple of Paras manning a gap in a Hesco Bastion wall, and entered the Joint Operations Cell. The JOC was run by the 3 Para CO, Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Tootal, a short, wiry man with several masters degrees under his belt and, rumour had it, a PhD or two for good measure. Tootal was passionate about the men under his charge and just as determined to fulfil his mission in Afghanistan.

The JOC was a very long tent with a walkway down either side. Men and women in uniform sat at long tables staring at computers, some with their heads jammed to radio handsets. Every unit operating in Helmand, including ours, had a desk here. During an operation, Major Black would move into the JOC and act as liaison between us and Tootal.

One of the most important areas in the JOC – Billy pointed to two adjacent positions on his left – was given over to the JTACs, the ‘Widow’ callsigns who acted as liaison for air operations. The JTACs out in the field had a special radio for communicating back to this Widow Tactical Operations Cell (TOC), Billy explained, and this was the hub, where it all happened. He directed my attention to some large tables in the middle of the room, covered in maps that depicted the Helmand Area of Responsibility (AOR). The maps were covered with plastic laminate and ringed in places by red chinagraph.

‘ROZs,’ Billy said pointing to the Restricted Operating Zones. ‘If the shit hits the fan and there’s a battle, no one is allowed to enter a ROZ without permission from the relevant JTAC on the ground. The JTACs are all-important. Without them, nothing would happen here.’

I noticed that there was a large red ring over Now Zad.

‘It looks like something’s going down there,’ I said. Several members of Tootal’s staff seemed to be paying particular attention to the place.

‘After the trouble a few weeks back, there are persistent rumours that the Taliban are going to strike at Now Zad next,’ Billy said. ‘When I ask anyone who should be in a position to know, they shrug and give me the brush-off, which means, almost certainly, that the rumours are true. B Company 3 Para moved into Now Zad about a week ago and found the place deserted. Everybody had buggered off, including the ANP.’

If the Afghan National Police had left, it was a fair indication of trouble.

I thought back to my time in Northern Ireland, to the indicators I’d been trained to look for – dumper trucks parked where they shouldn’t have been; a dustbin out on a non-collection day; upper windows open to prevent them being blown in by the pressure wave of an explosion; kids not out playing when they should be…

Here we go again, I thought.

We left the JOC and walked next door. The ‘JHF(A) Forward’ was our Ops centre, known to us as the ‘Ops tent’. There was a desk manned by a corporal where visitors checked in and out. Otherwise, it looked like a smaller version of the JOC. There was a desk for the OC, Major Black, a desk for the Ops Officer, a couple of positions for our signallers and watchkeepers and a few other spare desks for people like us to use when we needed them. In the middle, again, were two tables, one given over to a 1:50,000 map of Helmand, the other to aviation maps of Afghanistan.

Two-thirds of the way down the tent was a screen – a large white board that separated the operations area of the Ops tent from the administration area. The admin area, Billy explained, also doubled as a place where pilots on readiness could hang out, away from the frenetic activity that would kick off next door if and when the shit hit the fan.

In the corner, a flat-screen TV was tuned to Sky News – quite how, I didn’t know. On a table next to the TV was a laptop where we could send and receive emails to and from home and pull data from the internet. On the opposite side of the tent were two mission planning stations – computers where we could sit down and map out our sorties.

Mission planning had reached new heights with the Apache. Everything from weapon parameters to frequencies and codewords was input into the laptop before we flew. Once we were happy with the way the mission looked, we pressed ‘save’, downloaded the data to a data transfer cartridge then took it down to the aircraft and plugged it in. The mission was then uploaded into the Apache’s own computer and we were ready to fly.

After the Ops tent, Billy led me back to ‘tent city’ where we went and grabbed some nosh from the ‘Para kitchen’. The Regimental Sergeant Major of 3 Para, flanked by a couple of burly mates, was checking to ensure that everyone washed their hands with antibacterial scrub before they sat down to eat. It was like being back at school. But Bastion was such a tight ship, and so stretched, Billy explained, that nobody could afford a bunch of rogue e-coli to sweep through the camp. And the capacity for transmission of this or any other disease was breathtaking, as I was about to find out.

It had been hot in the JOC and the JHF(A), but the cookhouse felt like a sauna. The heat was so bad that people came in, grabbed their food, sat down, shovelled it into their mouths and left. I don’t sweat easily – it’s not something I do even when out running – but in less than a minute at the table, I was drenched. Rivulets ran down my arms and onto my plate. My plastic bucket chair was like a swimming pool. It didn’t take me long to figure out why nobody hung around to chat. I did what everybody else did: stuffed my meal into my mouth and got off and out – total elapsed time, three minutes. Talk about fast food.

Our tent, my new bedroom, was fifteen feet wide and thirty long and filled with eight camp beds: four on the right and four on the left. A giant plastic duct pumped cool air in from a huge exterior air-conditioning unit, but it was fighting a losing battle against the heat. The talcum-like dust – that had so nearly done for me during my landing – covered everything.

After my various exertions, I was exhausted. I took a shower, threw my sleeping bag on my cot and crashed out, my head buzzing with thoughts of the ‘bag’ and dust-outs; so much so that I found myself dreaming about an Apache flight in which Billy had been replaced by my old instructor, Chopper Palmer. Palmer was bollocking me for the way I was attempting to land my aircraft in a dust-out. While I was trying to concentrate, Chopper reached forward and shook me by the shoulder, which was fucking annoying because I was trying to concentrate on not killing us. But still he kept on shaking…

I opened my eyes and there was Billy.

‘Ed,’ he said, slightly freaked, no doubt, by the wild look in my eyes. ‘We’ve got to get on back to the JOC. Now.’

‘Why?’ I said, wiping away the thin film of dust that had settled on my face in the couple of hours I’d been asleep.

‘The mission’s on,’ Billy said. ‘It’s Now Zad.’