Hellfire

HELLFIRE

SUNDAY, 16 JULY 2006

Now Zad

We both studied the target carefully. We could see heat sources around its three-metre-square perimeter. Small objects, not human beings: empty shell casings. They couldn’t have been ours; our cannon rounds exploded when they hit and the spent casings would have fallen into the Green Zone a klick to the east. They were still hot enough for us to know they were the remains of the tracer that had nearly knocked us out of the sky.

The ZU-23-2 – if that’s what it was – must have been hidden under what I could now confirm was not a roof but a hessian cover. The gunner must have hammered it good style, then disappeared back under the hessian. That’s why we hadn’t seen any points of impact. Our rounds had gone clean through the loosely woven material.

‘Delta Hotel, Delta Hotel,’ Widow Seven One called after watching Simon’s rounds pummel the Turret. ‘Destroy the building.’

‘I agree, Ed. It’s got to be a bomb or a Hellfire – and there are no jets here.’

The Widow continued to build the picture. ‘We’ve been under attack from there for the last three days.’

‘Wildman Five One, copied. We’ll put a Hellfire into it.’

‘We’re close to chicken, so expedite – the men are now in the base.’ Jake confirmed and authorised on the JTAC’s frequency.

‘Widow, copied.’ He knew we were off after this.

‘Five One, copied,’ Simon said.

We were now to the north-east. We could see the Turret quite easily.

The Hellfire missile had a double-shaped charge. If we fired from the north-east, it would direct its energy towards our troops. The blast would throw debris their way, and if we had a malfunction, the Hellfire could carry on and land anywhere along the line of aim, depending on its reserves of propellant. And if it had a potted coil failure it would nose dive into Now Zad.

Our boys were to the south-west; I wanted to keep them at ninety degrees.

‘We’re going to run in west to east,’ I told Jake and Jon on the inter-aircraft radio.

That way we had a clear view of the street in front of the building. If the gunner legged it we could adjust the crosshair and whack him in the street.

‘Copied-expedite,’ Jon said. They wanted us to get our skates on.

We kicked out to the west and I brought the aircraft round. We lined back up with the target. Now all we needed was clearance from the JTAC.

Simon zoomed in with the TADS.

‘Widow Seven One, Wildman Five One. Confirm clear to engage with Hellfire.’

The Widow shouted: ‘Stop, stop, stop. My men need to get under hard cover.’

What?

We were three klicks out. I turned ninety degrees left so Simon could maintain eyes on the Turret and the street. We didn’t want to orbit back over the town. I weaved between north and south, always keeping the target in view.

Jake and Jon were silent. I used the Longbow radar to keep tabs on them to the south of the Shrine.

After a few minutes we were pretty sure our boys would be under cover; they were used to being mortared and it never took them long.

We started our attack run again. Simon identified the banana, then the bakery.

‘Wildman Five One. Confirm we are clear hot on that target?’

‘Widow Seven One. My ground commander wants to know the safety distance.’

I cringed.

I carried the safety distances for bombs on a small card in my black brain, but there was nothing for Apache munitions.

Simon muttered, ‘We don’t have one, do we?’

‘No. Stand by, buddy.’

I switched radios. ‘Widow Seven Zero, Wildman Five One – there isn’t one. Just get your north-east sangar to wear a helmet; it’s not that spectacular.’

‘Stand by.’

We were still running in, but I was slowing up. I needed his green light.

Come on, let us go!

Jake came on the inter-aircraft: ‘We’re chicken and they’re not happy. Don’t fire without clearance. Break off.’

‘Does he really think I’m going to fire without clearance?’ I snapped.

‘He’s just doing his job, mate,’ Simon said quietly.

The JTAC finally came back to us.

‘We’re less than 200 metres from the target and more than a little bit concerned about the safety distance.’

‘You sure they’ll be okay?’ Jake asked on the inter-aircraft frequency.

My frustration bubbled over again. ‘For crying out loud, mate, I’m the army’s Hellfire guru!’

‘And he’s the patrol commander,’ Simon replied.

I got a grip on myself. ‘Yeah, I know.’

I switched radios.

‘Wildman Five Zero and Widow Seven One this is Wildman Five One breaking off.’

I leaned the stick and we flew a graceful arc that would take us back over the DC on the way south.

Simon said, ‘It’s the right call, mate. It doesn’t look as though they want this to go down.’

‘It’s going to have to happen some time, buddy.’

Jon and Jake were circling to the south. I picked up their heat source in my monocle.

‘Wildman Five Zero, roger. Widow Seven One, we’re out of gas and we’re RTB.’

Widow Seven One came back on, his tone urgent: ‘My commander wants that firing point destroyed.’

There was an overly long silence. No one knew what to do. They didn’t want a Hellfire and we had nothing else that could do the job. Jon was critical on fuel and we were running out fast. We were just passing south of the Shrine and needed to decide if we stayed or ran.

‘This is becoming farcical,’ I said to Jon and Jake on the inter-aircraft radio.

‘What’s the risk to them?’ Jake asked.

‘There isn’t any risk.’

‘Go for it then, but be quick.’

‘Widow Seven One, Wildman Five One. Trust me, you’ll be fine. If you’re worried, get your men under cover. I will attack south to north, so the blast is away from you. Do you want it destroyed?’

In other words, make your bloody mind up: you either want it taken out or you don’t.

‘Widow Seven One. A-firm, clear hot.’

Fucking brilliant!

I turned the aircraft hard round and rolled it out. We were running in. We were pointing straight at Now Zad’s centre. The DC was low and left of us on my thermal picture. We were going to fire the missile long of the base.

I glanced down at my MPD. I wanted Simon to fire from as far away as he could and that meant as soon as possible. We had to turn 180 degrees after firing to begin the journey home. We’d already hit chicken fuel and every minute in this direction was an extra minute getting back.

Simon said, ‘I can’t ID it.’

I nodded at the screen. ‘It’s about thirty metres along the top of the building.’

Then I realised: Simon hadn’t been with us when we orientated to find the bakery the other day.

‘Keep coming right, keep coming right – ON!’

The Turret looked completely different from this angle because it was sited at the front of the roof. The thermal contrast on it was very poor too. From the east or west it stood proud of the roofline; from here it merged with the buildings behind it.

‘Are you sure, Ed?’

‘One hundred per cent. I can see the bakery and the banana to its right. It’s the only three-storey set-up here.’

Simon tried to lock it up with the Image Auto-Track (IAT) but was struggling to capture the image against the backdrop.

We were getting closer and closer.

‘Break off and run in again, Ed. I’m not doing this manually,’ Simon said. ‘I need this locked up. He’s freaking about it as it is. If we miss we’ll never get permission to use a Hellfire again.’

‘Okay, mate. No problem.’

I didn’t blame him for wanting to lock the target up properly. Neither of us had ever fired a Hellfire out of training. We already had people shitting themselves on the ground. So if we were going to make this happen, it had to go like clockwork, no matter what the fuel gauge read.

I broke off right to come round again.

The IAT was an awesome TADS tool which grabbed the target and held it. You looked for a thermal contrast and centred the crosshair on the brighter or darker constituent. When you engaged the IAT’s gates they closed in on the contrasting shape and centred the crosshair on it. From then on, no matter what you did with the Apache, the gates would hold that target dead centre.

You could fire the missile without locking up the target by holding the crosshair over it with your right thumb, pulling the laser with your right index finger and squeezing the trigger with your left, keeping the crosshair and laser in place throughout the missile’s flight. But if something momentarily interrupted your aim, you’d have to fight to get the crosshair back on what was already a difficult target to ID. And this wasn’t a stationary vehicle or a remote outpost in the middle of nowhere that we had all the time in the world to hit – and no worries about where the missile might go if we fucked up. This was a hard target to ID, close to troops, in the middle of a town, at night. And we were rapidly running out of fuel.

It was also going to be the first Hellfire that had ever been fired in anger – but nothing angered me more right now than the AA gun sitting in the Turret.

I broke off and set up. Jake came on the radio as we turned. ‘We need to RTB now; we’re short of gas.’

‘One more run…Setting up…’ I didn’t quite know whether I was asking him or telling him.

No answer; he wants us to fire

I banged it around. ‘We’re running in.’

I begged he wouldn’t say stop.

We were a lot further out this time and Simon needed every available second to ID the target.

The thermal contrast on the Turret was poor. The gates wouldn’t hold the centre of it. Simon moved his crosshair to the left, where the edge was dark enough to engage the IAT. The gates grabbed on and the crosshair centred itself on the left extreme.

Simon flicked the offset button which gave him a certain amount of authority over his crosshair when it was held by the IAT. We were closing fast and virtually running on air. I kept quiet. Simon was doing a brilliant job. As he applied pressure to a thumb-force-controller the crosshair moved to the centre of the Turret while the gates still held the lock to the left. He’d done it.

‘It’s the right-hand missile,’ I said, ‘and I’ve stepped on it so it doesn’t break your lock.’ The nose was pointing slightly right so the Hellfire wouldn’t fly across his TADS image.

‘Confirm we’re still hot,’ he barked. He was right to call it one more time. Everyone was jumpy as hell. He wanted to make sure the Widow hadn’t changed his mind.

‘Wildman Five One,’ I said over the radio, ‘confirm we’re cleared hot.’ Simon couldn’t change frequency; he was using every finger and thumb to hold his aim. I bet he hadn’t blinked either.

‘Clear hot.’

‘Fire, Simon!’ I yelled.

And then he must have pressed the trigger.

I heard the whoosh from the right-hand side of the aircraft, and the missile glowed as it shot off the launcher, clearing the aircraft without cutting through Simon’s line of sight.

‘Climbing.’ My job was to build Simon’s mental image of what was happening every step of the way. If something odd happened – like a woman or child suddenly appearing beside the target – he needed to know where the missile was, not just how much time remained before impact.

‘Climbing… Levelling… And dropping.’ I glanced down. Simon still had his crosshair smack in the middle of the target. I looked back up.

‘Dropping,’ I confirmed. I watched the glow of its heat source shrink to a pinpoint as it sped towards Now Zad.

‘Three… Two… One… Impact…’

The whole MPD screen went white and Simon’s IAT gates lost their lock in the blossoming explosion.

Simon immediately zoomed the FLIR picture out to the widest field of view. All I could see was 500 metres of Now Zad town and this big ball of heat in front of it. A second later everything was black again.

I looked through the front of my window and saw an orange glow give way to darkness.

‘Breaking off,’ I called to Jake and the JTAC on the Mission Net. I threw the aircraft onto its right side and brought it round hard.

‘Wildman Five Zero and Wildman Five One are RTB, send BDA.’ Jake was all over it like a rash. He was keen to get out of there.

I could see Simon manually tracking the target for as long as he could to get the Battle Damage Assessment himself. As we passed 120 degrees, his TADS hit its left stop. He couldn’t get any further back. We’d lost it. The last image was of intense heat and a devastated building.

‘Widow Seven One – stand by.’

We were running back and once again the Apache told me exactly what speed to fly at to maximise our distance. Jon was forward and right of us by about four klicks. He’d set off before the impact so I could only guess he was on fumes.

‘Widow Seven One – Delta Hotel, Delta Hotel, firing point destroyed.’

I tried hard not to give out a whoop.

Jake asked: ‘Wildman Five Zero – was there any collateral to you?’

‘Widow Seven One – negative, just a bang.’

‘Wildman Five Zero – pass that information onto the rest of the JTACs and copy.’ He wanted tonight’s lessons identified to be lessons learned.

‘Copied – and I hope not to see you again tonight.’

Jake, ever the cool guy, replied: ‘Don’t hesitate if it kicks off again.’

We headed south over the desert and past the mountains. I felt fantastic. We’d fired our first Hellfire. But I also felt drained. We couldn’t go through this nightmare again. I resolved to go and debrief the Widow Tactical Operations Cell when we got back. We had to be clear about this on future sorties. The guys on the ground could say what effect they wanted: I want that man killed. I want that building destroyed. I want that area suppressed. But how any of those things were achieved had to be up to us. We were the only ones qualified to know which weapon matched the target. I didn’t ever want to go down this route again. We called it the long screwdriver; someone else, detached from us, tinkering with what we were doing in the cockpit, fine-tuning our attack.

We knew the risk to the troops on the ground and we’d tell the JTAC if it wasn’t safe to fire. Normally it was the JTAC’s responsibility to make sure there was separation and distance, but he worked with fast jets that dropped bombs. They had all the distances worked out – Apaches didn’t. We’d been firing just ten metres from our own troops this morning and we’d swapped initials, so surely they must know that if we were prepared to do that, we weren’t talking danger close?

I could understand this ground commander’s concerns. He’d never seen a Hellfire go off before.

I could understand the Widow’s concern too. Charlie Alpha had been out in Oman with us, staying miles away from the target in case something went wrong. Now all of a sudden he was just 200 metres from it, shitting himself.

The dropping of a bomb is a fine art. JTACs work with the expectation of a hit, so they have all the safety distances worked out. With an Apache, it was more fluid. We’d bring it as close as we needed to without killing our own troops. And we’d always let them know how bad it was going to get.

This was another evolution in the rules of engagement, in how we employed our weapons and integrated with the ground force with intimate fires. We could get in close, like we had in the run-in earlier, to narrow down our arcs. If need be, we’d fire 100 metres from them. We’d do whatever we could to help them, but they had to understand they couldn’t tell us which weapon to fire. They just had to tell us what the target was, what effect they wanted, and we would do the rest.

We were not Close Air Support. We were Intimate Support.

I admitted to Simon on the way back that I was dog tired. He was too. We weren’t getting much sleep, we weren’t eating regularly, and we were taking far too many risks. They were escalating with every sortie. No matter what we planned for, we would always get something blindside that we didn’t see coming.

We’d gone up there and we’d achieved our objective. Now Zad was resupplied with men and materials. Above all, they’d taken us on with a double A and we’d won.

We refuelled, rearmed with 30 mm and Hellfire, and called Ops for permission to shut down.

We were about to go in and debrief the sortie. As the Squadron Weapons Officer, I was becoming increasingly unpopular, debriefing every shot, but it was a very steep learning curve for everyone. I wasn’t there to be popular and I was going to have to tell our Apache pilots that they were responsible for their own weapons and there were no guidelines. We must have had the only weapon system in the UK arsenal that didn’t have any safety parameters.

I gathered them all before we went into our debrief to explain what I meant.

‘Simon. How close to our own troops can you fire a Hellfire?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ he said.

I asked a few others and they were just as stumped. I told them what we’d just done and explained about the angles we used to limit collateral.

‘In the end it’s down to you to decide what you think is safe,’ I said. ‘If you blow it, if you shoot too close and kill someone, the MoD will hang you out to dry. A board of inquiry will acknowledge that you didn’t have sufficient guidelines or safety distances in which to operate the weapon system. But it will find that the cause of death was aircrew error. No matter what the operational risk, you shouldn’t kill someone you are trying to protect.’

I asked the boss his position on the safety distances. His reply was typically politically correct. If in doubt, you don’t take the shot.

‘Then what is too close, sir?’ I pressed.

‘I don’t know, Mr Macy,’ he replied.

‘Two hundred metres, sir?’

No answer.

‘One hundred?’

Still no answer.

‘The pressure is on, lads. You need to be 100 per cent sure 100 per cent of the time, and that’s why every cannon, rocket and Hellfire shot will be viewed in slow time by everyone. Any questions?’

‘Yeah,’ Chris said. ‘So what are we going to do about the rockets?’

The rockets were notoriously inaccurate. I had a system of aligning them so they were absolutely smack on but couldn’t get permission to use it. I was using it on my own aircraft when the boss wasn’t around. I wasn’t going to fall foul of the system and didn’t care what he, the IPT, the JHC or the MoD thought. There was no way I was going to cause a blue-on-blue.

‘What do you think?’ I said.

‘Take ’em off and stick more Hellfires on instead. I won’t be using them.’

I could see the concern etched on everyone’s faces. We were weary, bone weary, and fighting a war with no umbrella to protect us from above. If we fucked up, shit would come up and shit would come down and we would be hung out to dry.

We went to watch the video of our weapon releases. Jake flung his arm over my shoulder and we walked in side by side. He gave me a manly hug.

‘Well done, matey,’ he said gently. ‘I wasn’t stepping on your toes when I told you to break off. We were seriously low on gas and I genuinely didn’t think he was ever going to give you clearance to fire that Hellfire.’

‘I know, mate. I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘You don’t have to be sorry to me, Ed. Ever.’

Jake was just too nice for his own good; he didn’t know what I’d apologised for. I ’fessed up.

‘I’m sorry because I was bumping my gums to Simon about you thinking we might shoot before getting clearance and—’

‘Stop it. It’s okay.’ He hugged me tighter. ‘We just need to save as many lives as possible and all get home safely to our families. Now let’s enjoy that Hellfire shot.’

We recounted the sortie from start to finish: the boys on the ground; the fact that the mission was a success; the fact that we couldn’t do it the same way again. We were running out of ways of getting in and out of Now Zad.

We talked about getting fired at, and how we avoided it. I ended up having to write that episode up for the Air Warfare Centre and send it to them explaining how our manoeuvre had worked. It wasn’t rocket science. Pilots had been doing that sort of stuff since the very first aircraft was fired at. This was just the first time it had been used by a helicopter in combat.

We considered ourselves extremely lucky to have got away with it because, whoever the gunner had been, he was bloody good. Jake and Jon said they thought we’d been taken out – they’d seen the rounds go up; they’d seen the aircraft tumble out of the sky.

I admitted I’d pulled out of it far too low. I’d put us in a really poor position against small arms, but it wasn’t a small arms threat that worried us right then, it was an AA threat.

I tried to convince Simon I’d known how low we were. ‘Like that’d stop me crapping myself,’ he said.

We had no footage of our aircraft being fired upon. The TADS moved around and was recording, but we couldn’t see a thing. Jake, ever the professional, had been concentrating on his mission and was already heading back to Bastion when the Hellfire hit.

We had caught the mayhem of the missile impacting. Frame by frame proved we had had a direct hit. It had hit the Turret inch perfect. There was a huge and instant heat source and a cloud of dust and debris, then Now Zad was plunged back into darkness. I forwarded it a few frames and froze it. We could make out what looked like the structure’s skeleton. The Hellfire had blown the thing to bits.

Jon and I made our way next door to tell Widow TOC what they were and weren’t qualified to do. If they were in doubt, I said, they just needed to confirm by calling the aircraft and asking them: ‘Are we safe here?’

The JTACs moved around a lot. There were only a handful of them, and they were in demand all over the theatre. The one I was speaking to that evening was pretty much the senior JTAC at the time.

Jon as the SupFAC explained what had happened. It was nobody’s fault, he said. You must let your lads know what to do: tell us what they want, where they want it and when. We’ll do the rest.

The JTAC listened and nodded, and then explained that his guys had strict ROE guidelines to follow and some of them worried about just telling an aircraft to crack on.

That was that. No ruckus. Lessons taken onboard. New policy implemented. The learning curve was getting steeper for everyone.

‘Just one thing,’ he said, ‘before you go…’ He pointed at my cheekbone. He thought I’d been fragged.

Action Man figures had their trademark scar down the right cheek. Apache pilots did too. If the monocle were to move one millimetre it would be disastrous for our ground troops. One millimetre at about two centimetres equated to a 150 metre error at three kilometres. We couldn’t risk even 0.1 millimetre, so we dug it into the cheek bone and locked it tight. The weal normally took about half an hour to disappear.

The protective ring was missing on my monocle and the high G had cut an arc under my right eye.

‘Nice work, Ed,’ Jon said. ‘Looks like you’ve had some much-needed cosmetic surgery.’

Four days later, when Charlie Alpha was back in Bastion, we found out they’d had their first full night of peace after we’d fired the Hellfire. Icom chatter had been detected and a Taliban commander had been heard saying that the mosquitoes had a weapon that is silent and deadly. It comes from the sky without warning and kills everything.

The DC hadn’t been shot at again from that vantage point, and for the next three nights there was no sustained fire against the DC. The Taliban had got smacked up a treat. The tables had truly turned in Now Zad.

The troops hadn’t been able to patrol into that area to see what had happened to the AA gun, but between us we reckoned he’d fired somewhere in the region of eighty rounds per burst. It wouldn’t all have been tracer – it’d probably have been every other round – and he’d loosed off four of them. That was an absolute shed-load of ammunition, and he might have stopped firing simply because he’d run out. I liked to think it was because the rounds that I fired back made him run for cover.

Because we never had proof we’d hit the gun or the gunner, we had to assume that they were both still operational. He wasn’t a known player, so intelligence couldn’t confirm if we got him or not. From that point onwards, everyone dreaded getting caught over Now Zad. If the gunner was still alive, he’d had his warm-up. He would have analysed what went wrong, and he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

The truth was that we’d got away with it by the skin of our teeth. The guy was better than anyone could have imagined. How he got to that level was beyond belief. I certainly didn’t want to fly over him twice.

The Intelligence guy confirmed our suspicions about the night sight. In other words, we could be seen day or night, wherever we were. It was open season on Apaches.

Now the pressure was really on. We knew that they wanted to bag one. They were constantly shooting the Chinooks on the ground but had failed to kill one…so far. They’d been taking potshots at us as well; Pat and Tony had two holes in their fuselage to prove it. Tony went on to collect a lot more too.

Now they’d brought in the one weapon system that we couldn’t defend against. RPGs we could survive, assuming they were lucky enough to hit us. SAMs we prayed the aircraft could deal with. The geeks at RAF Waddington said it could, but it was yet to be proven. But an anti-aircraft gun could kill us.

They could now do so, day or night. The Taliban wanted a spectacular – to break into a base or to take down an aircraft. They’d come within inches of both today. The charred remains of an Apache would do nicely, as far as they were concerned. We’d got away with it this time, but there was still a weapon out there that potentially had our name on it.

Uppermost in everyone’s mind was the fact that, because the sun was so bright in Afghanistan, you couldn’t see tracer by day at 1,000 feet. We wouldn’t know the blind death was heading in our direction until it hit us. If our encounter with the AA gunner had taken place in daylight, the first clue to his presence might have been when we were hurtling out of the sky, breaking into small pieces as we went.