Hellfire

EPILOGUE

I only flew three more sorties after Operation Snakebite.

The Taliban took the death of their sniper very badly, and they didn’t take it lying down. They hit Musa Qa’leh DC day after day with everything they had but without his elite marksmanship skills they failed to hit our boys again, and for us, every mission became a turkey shoot.

We were in predictably high spirits on our final return to Camp Bastion, knowing we were only one night away from being whisked back to the UK to catch some well-earned zeds. And this was my last tour; my twenty-two years were up. I’d miss the camaraderie of the squadron, and I’d miss the awesome Apache gunship, but the damage I’d sustained in that car accident was starting to take its toll, and I’d finally be able to give my family the time they so richly deserved.

Billy bet me that the RAF’s big white freedom bird wouldn’t turn up and we’d be stuck in the Desert of Death until the end of time. I typed Emily’s coordinates into the computer; it told me she was 3,601 miles away. If Billy was right, at a walking speed of 4 mph it would only take us 900 hours to get there. I told him that if we kept going for ten hours a day we’d be home on 7 November.

We both burst out laughing. It was the date he was due to return to Afghanistan for his next tour. I said I’d raise a pint of Guinness to him at my local – but as it turned out, he had the last laugh.

Brigadier Ed Butler, Commander of 16 Air Assault Brigade, was now hailing the Apache as ‘mission essential’, and we certainly felt we’d done our bit to bring it centre stage. Whitehall was ecstatic. The visits programme was now crammed full with Members of Parliament, random dignitaries and anyone they could usher from the corridors of power in front of a fully tooled-up Apache gunship.

During 664 Squadron’s tour immediately after ours, the mangled remains of an AA gun mount were discovered in the alleyway behind the building we Hellfired in Now Zad. I heard a rumour that the gunner had been Iranian-trained and brought in to deal with the ‘mosquitoes’. Whether or not that’s true, we’d come a long way since taking pot shots at the drone on Salisbury Plain.

But as we prepared to land at Brize Norton and I gazed out at the startlingly green Oxfordshire countryside, I couldn’t help wondering what we’d really achieved. We’d been sent on a reconstruction mission to a patch of desert no bigger than 150 square miles and one government minister thought we might return without having fired a single shot. We ended up covering an area ten times that size, found ourselves constantly under siege and unable to patrol far from any of our bases without our ground troops being at significant risk, and fired off more ammunition than even Taff cared to think about.

We were also told that our mission had nothing to do with the Taliban or the narcotics trade. But during the three sweat-soaked months we spent with 3 Para in Helmand we were in contact with the Taliban every single day and found ourselves fighting for survival in villages that grew vast quantities of raw opium that ended up as heroin on the streets of the UK.

Sitting in the window of a coffee bar in broad daylight on my first trip to London after getting home, I was asked if I’d like to buy some.

It wasn’t my only rude awakening.

The army was short of Apache Weapons Officers. In fact, they had none. They wanted me to go back for another tour. I guess it wasn’t that surprising. For every soldier or marine accepted as a candidate for pilot selection, eighteen were shown the door. Over 2,000 applicants fell by the wayside just to get one of us through the course and onto operations.

We were lucky. Out of the fourteen on my grading, four went on to become pilots – an attrition rate of three and a half to one instead of the more normal five.

As we prepared ourselves to head out to Afghanistan once more, Scottie, my friend and instructor, decided to move Down Under with his family. He now teaches Attack Aviation to the Aussies. After years of abusing him about his outrageous watch collection, in a moment of madness I bought two of the twenty-five limited edition titanium Breitlings commissioned by the 656 Squadron aircrew to commemorate being the UK’s first Apache attack pilots. They had a dark blue face with a rippling Union Flag at three o’clock and an Apache AH1 – complete with our trademark weapons fit – replacing the nine.

After more than two decades in the British Army I couldn’t exactly put a Hellfire missile in my trophy cabinet, but at least I had a couple of suitably muscular timepieces to hand down to my young sons in case they ever need reminding that Dad wasn’t always a boring old fart.