A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (25 page)

The third Chinook, piloted by Hasler and Thompson, had the roughest landing of all. 'There was so much incoming it was like putting down on the set of
Star Wars
,' Thompson recalled. He and Hasler were so distracted by this, as well as blinded by the dust that had plumed up to fifty feet from the first two Chinooks, that they badly misjudged the speed of their approach. They only avoided a crash by 'flaring' violently at the last minute – a manoeuvre that uses the fuselage's belly as an air brake, and very dangerous in a Chinook, because if the angle is too great the rear rotor can hit the ground. As it was, the machine bunny-hopped and then landed with such a thump that the Paras in the back, who were all on their feet in preparation for the charge off the ramp, collapsed in a violently cursing heap of limbs and weaponry. There would be no thirty-second unload from this Chinook, either. The force of the landing was so great that the engineers at Bastion later discovered it had bent the airframe.

Hasler and Thompson were under fire from a machine-gun nest about a hundred yards to port. The side-gunner tried to return fire, but stopped in horror when he realized that there were women and children in his sights. The gunmen had pushed them out in front of their positions for cover – a Taliban tactic the crewmen had heard of but never seen used before. The crew might have obtained a better angle from the ramp machine-gun, but this had been put out of action by a Para who tripped over it in the scramble to disembark. The skin of the Chinook was only lightly armoured, according to Thompson, so on the ground it was a very easy target. A machine-gun round punctured the side, missing a crewman's head by six inches. Jones, still pumping away with his rifle by the aft wheel of the second Chinook, watched amazed as an RPG streaked twenty yards past his ramp and just in front of the nose of Hasler and Thompson's machine.

The crews had been warned beforehand not to remain on the ground longer than the thirty seconds it was supposed to take to get everybody out from the back, so Hasler, urged on by his crew, began to lift off. But too soon: three men, two of them Para sergeants, were still struggling with a crate of ammunition on the loading ramp. Rather than stay safely aboard, the three of them looked at one another and then leapt into the darkness – a brave thing to do, since it was impossible to gauge how far from the ground they were. In fact it was about fifteen feet. One broke a hand, the other fractured a leg; the third man was unscathed. He was Flight Lieutenant Matt Carter, a thirty-two-year-old from Worthing and a joint tactical air controller with the RAF regiment, a unit whose usual role was airfield defence. Carter had already proved himself at Now Zad during Operation Mutay, when he directed Apache cannon fire on to a position only thirty metres in front of him. Now he did it again, this time with the firepower of a Spectre gun-ship at his disposal. He was later awarded the Military Cross.

Over at the second Chinook, Graham Jones was understandably anxious to be gone. As the first Chinook was taking off, banking sharply to port as soon as it lifted, he saw another RPG streak a few feet below its undercarriage. 'We got the lads off eventually and I said, "Right, troops gone, let's go!" And then I looked forward and saw we'd got a man down. I thought it was the number two crewman, Matt Clarkson. And Woodsy [the captain, Wing Commander Mike Woods] said, "Who is it?" And I said, "Don't worry, let's go, let's go!" And we lifted.'

As soon as they did so, the Chinook surging and weaving away from the trap on the ground, Jones stowed his rifle and scrambled forward to the casualty. 'The man down wasn't Matt. He was actually behind the armour, still firing his M60 as we cleared away. It was a Para lad, one of the last to get off, who had taken a round through the fuselage. Not down the ramp – he didn't get that far. He was really unlucky because the bullet hole was only an inch above the ballistic protection.' Others might think that Private Steven Jones was actually very lucky. The bullet, almost certainly from a Kalashnikov, had passed straight through his left arm. 'He'd got his weapon off himself; we took his body armour off. He was all right, he was with it. He turned down his morphine. So we put a field dressing on, and my old tourniquet. It was an amazingly clean wound – because I've seen casualties out there since who have taken 7.62mm rounds, and they do a lot more damage.' His namesake's courage greatly impressed the ex-winchman from Grimsby. 'I've got massive respect for the Paras. As I was patching him up he said, "Is there any chance of getting me back on the ground?" And I laughed and said, "No, no chance, mate, you're going back to Bastion. You can't go on the ground with that, like."'

With so much close air support the Paras soon regained control of the landing zone and moved forward to their objectives. It was astonishing that none of them was killed, even more so that none of the Chinooks was destroyed. 'How they missed us,' said Jones. 'I just can't see how they missed us, you know? I'm surprised – absolutely amazed – that we didn't lose an aircraft. All of us are.'

The Task Force, it turned out, had taken a huge risk for a very small return. The resistance at the landing site melted away, leaving ten dead bodies behind them. In one of the compounds further on, the Paras found a vehicle loaded with two 107mm rockets; in another, half a dozen RPGs were uncovered. There were also a lot of recently slept-in beds squeezed into small rooms, but whoever their occupants had been there was no sign of them now, nor of the Taliban commander whom the Paras had hoped to capture. The near-misses against the Chinooks were noted by the chiefs of staff. So was the fact that one of the assault force had been shot even before he could get off his helicopter. Operation Augustus was an experiment that was never repeated.

Britain possesses a grand total of forty Chinooks, almost all of them based at RAF Odiham in Hampshire. They have long been a familiar sight to motorists on the nearby M3, scudding along the horizon in pairs, the ominous thump of their enormous rotors audible even above the noise of a speeding car with its windows shut. When I visited the base, thirty-four Chinooks were in service – the other six were 'in storage' – with thirteen of them operating overseas. The fleet is distributed between three RAF squadrons, two of which, 18 and 27, flew in Herrick 4. They were a close-knit community. The total aircrew of 18 Squadron, which was much the largest of the three, numbered fewer than a hundred people. In fact, there were no more than about 40,000 people in the entire air force – 'fewer than a Saturday crowd at Old Trafford', as one of them put it.

They were a different breed from the Army personnel I had met. There was none of the regimented, head-up-shoulders-back posture that is recognizable in some soldiers, even when they are out of uniform. The all-in-one green flying suits they wore, baggy patchworks of transparent map-pockets, useful pouches and loops to clip things through, were designed with comfort and efficiency in mind, not smartness. They even had their nicknames stitched on patches on their chests, suggesting that the informal style was formally sanctioned. Good flying, I understood, required an element of creativity, an autonomy of thought that is drilled out of Army recruits and discouraged in all but the most senior ranks. A culture of self-reliance extended even to the so-called 'grease-monkeys' of the engineer ground crew. Some of them had worked alongside the Army Air Corps mechanics at Kandahar, and been amazed at how differently they operated.

'I haven't got the time to go out and check every piece of work an engineer has done, so you have to have a level of trust,' said Flight Sergeant Phil Westwood. 'In some cases that erodes the rank structure. We find the more relaxed approach works better, but the Army can't seem to take that on board.' 'It's a very open system that encourages people to speak up if something's wrong,' added his colleague Adrian Bolton. 'A mechanic is more likely to say, "Excuse me, sir, I've made a bit of a whoopsy here," rather than covering the problem up or just passing it up the chain.'

The Chinook pilots were also physically different from their Army peers, for there was no premium on muscles at Odiham. One or two of them had the delicate hands of pianists. Operating a helicopter is an art that requires quick reactions, mental stamina and exceptional hand-to-eye co-ordination. According to Flight Sergeant Angus Highet, the latter quality is innate and cannot be taught. Highet was forty, and had been crewing Chinooks since the First Gulf War in 1991, but although he knew how to fly one 'in an emergency', he had always known and accepted that he did not have the natural skill necessary to qualify as a pilot. 'I can take off, climb to height, fly straight from A to B, but the difference between flying and operating is huge,' he said. 'As soon as you're hooking on loads, with a crosswind, within a foot of something puncturing the aircraft, at night, on goggles, flying by your ears . . . then it gets very complicated. The minute details and distances these guys work within? Nah. I couldn't do that.'

Highet and one of the pilots showed me around a Chinook parked out on the tarmac. Like many of his colleagues, the pilot asked not to be identified by name. The possibility of publishing his photograph was emphatically ruled out as well. He said this was to protect family and friends from finding out precisely what he had faced in Helmand. Unlike most soldiers, the helicopter crews knew for certain that they would soon be going back to Afghanistan – and not just soon, but repeatedly. In June 2007, 18 Squadron was preparing for its third tour of Helmand in a year. Highet, too, was wary of sharing the gorier details of his experiences with me. 'I have an agreement with my wife that I don't talk about it,' he said. 'And she doesn't ask. Otherwise, how's she going to cope when I go away again? Breaking it down into the nuts and bolts of what I do when they know I'm going back out there again . . . that's very difficult for us.'

This is the debit side of the shortness of the RAF's operational tours, which at two months are a third of the standard Army one. The infantry consider the RAF a soft option partly for that reason – their common term of abuse for them is 'crabs', because while soldiers go forward, the fly-boys always seem to go sideways – but they couldn't be more wrong. The effects of intensive combat flying, both on machines and crews, mean that longer tours are impractical. Instead, the squadrons complete a greater number of shorter tours, shuttling between home and the war zones with a frequency that is truly bewildering. The pilots commit to a minimum of twelve years when they join a Chinook squadron – double the standard Short Service Commission in the Army Air Corps, and quadruple that in the regular Army. And there are so few Chinooks and crews available that they are all locked into a cycle of deployment that would make any line regiment blench. For the Chinook pilots that summer of 2007, the war in Helmand was only just beginning.

We entered by the rear loading ramp, stepping over the empty machine-gun mounting in its centre. The cargo bay was lower and narrower than I had expected. Dark and tubular, it felt claustrophobic, even when empty. There were two long benches ranged against the sides where the troops sat. The silver-coloured walls were festooned with buckles and webbing and red nylon straps. It was not hard to imagine what it must be like to head into combat in one of these things. Photographs I had seen – and there were lots of them, because a Chinook ride is always a good opportunity for a snap – showed the men wedged in so tightly with their weapons and Bergen rucksacks at their feet that moving about the craft was impossible. So, because of the engines, is conversation. The troops are routinely offered foam ear-plugs as they come aboard. They sit and sweat in their body armour, with solemn faces and their legs going to sleep, and nothing but their own thoughts to distract them from what is about to come.

We passed along to the hatch to the cockpit where I scrambled down and in. Once again the space was surprisingly tight, although less claustrophobic because it was surrounded top, bottom and to the sides by glass. Only some of it was armoured. The pilots wore special body armour that weighed a massive 70lb ('with the go-kit and everything, it can easily double your body weight', I was told), but it still felt a fearfully vulnerable place to sit. Wasn't it terrifying to be strapped into this goldfish bowl, flaring on to a landing site with balls of tracer streaking towards you? 'You can only see tracer fire from behind,' the pilot replied with a shrug, 'so if you can see it you're OK. It means it's already missed you.' His nonchalance might have seemed affected, but it wasn't. All the pilots were the same. 'You have to worry about incoming fire in a professional sense,' said Flight Lieutenant James 'Birty' Birtwistle (one of the few pilots who didn't mind his name being used). 'There are things you have to do to avoid it. But there isn't any time to concentrate on the psychological side of it. I suppose it's a good defence mechanism.'

It is often impossible to tell from inside if a Chinook is being shot at as incoming fire is seldom audible above the engines. All the pilots hear during a contact is voices on their headphones passing vital information and urgent instructions, which come to them on as many as five different frequencies and radio systems, from other aircraft, from troops on the ground, from headquarters, and from their own crew. Sifting all this information while flying, I was told, is highly 'capacity-sapping' – which is why so much importance is attached to restricting a crew's flying time, and to making sure they receive regulation amounts of rest. 'The aviator's greatest enemy is fatigue' is the pilots' dictum. A lapse of concentration at the controls of any helicopter can be just as dangerous as an enemy bullet, and that leaves little time to feel fear. It helps that they are also physically cut off from the back of their aircraft by a thick Velcro flap that remains in place to protect sensitive avionics from dust. There were times, the pilots said, when they did not even know whom or what they had on board, and so were shielded from the infectious tension in the faces of troops going into combat, and the grisly sight of casualties coming back.