A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (27 page)

Did the RAF deserve better? There were plenty who thought so, and many of them blamed the government, which seemed no longer to regard the Armed Forces as a treasured national institution and the noble defender of society, but as an 'asset' like any other. The pride of servicemen such as Adam Thompson was hurt. Their dignity was damaged, too, by the adoption of New Labour-style management techniques within the Forces. The Blairite obsession with presentation and publicity clashed particularly badly with the traditional values of the past. One egregious example concerned the RAF roundel, the famous tri-coloured insignia that first adorned the wings of Sopwith Camels above the trenches of Flanders. Some insensitive modernizer in the Air Force saw fit to allow the roundel to be remarketed on a line of casual clothing that included bikinis. 'Jesus H Christ,' wrote one contributor to Pprune.org, an online forum for the RAF, 'I've seen the bloody trainers before, but this is even worse. Trenchard, Bader, Harris, Dowding, Gibson and practically everyone who has ever earned the right to wear the uniform with pride would weep to see this. The RAF has been reduced to a f----g catalogue store.' Another commented, 'Has there ever, ever, ever been anything quite so tacky in the history of the Royal Air Farce [
sic
]? How utterly ashamed I am that this once proud service has allowed itself to stoop to such levels. Can you imagine what our fellow aviators around the world must think?'

In the end, they reckoned at Odiham, it all came down to money. The media cry of 'not enough helicopters' was a simplification of a widespread and debilitating malaise that was affecting all of the Armed Forces, not just the RAF, and under-funding was one of its root causes. 'It's all money-driven now,' said Adam Thompson sadly.

6
Apache: A Weapon for
'War Amongst the People'

The Chinook wing certainly looked old and under-funded compared to the Apaches. At £38 million each, an Apache cost more than twice as much as a Chinook – and Britain owned sixty-seven of them. There were no complaints from the crews, either, about under-funding. It took a year to train a Lynx or a Gazelle pilot to fly one, and the conversion course alone cost £3 million per head. This made them very highly valued indeed by the MoD, and the men of 656 Squadron knew it. After all, they were the first in the country to be equipped with these world-beating American machines.

At their new headquarters at Wattisham, in Suffolk, I was struck at once by the glamour and confidence of the crews. The squadron leader, a thirty-four-year-old major, once won a flying competition in the US and was actually awarded 'Top Gun' status – the title of the famous Tom Cruise movie, which I had previously assumed to be the invention of a Hollywood scriptwriter. His squadron was the apogee of many decades of close Anglo-American cooperation. Wattisham itself, appropriately, had once been an important US airbase, from where USAF Mustangs and Lightnings flew out to patrol the beachheads during the Normandy invasion. The hangars retained a mournful period atmosphere, as did the cracked concrete aprons across which young Americans in Mae Wests and bomber jackets once scrambled.

The final cost of Britain's Apache programme, which began in 1993, is expected to be more than £4 billion. In the wake of such investment it was politically imperative that the Apache's first deployment in combat was seen as a success – and so it was. Everyone was pleased with the machine's performance in Helmand. Its state-of-the-art targeting and weapons systems, particularly the 30mm chain gun, worked just as they should have. So, rather to the chagrin of the Americans, did the new Rolls-Royce engines, which could deliver 25 per cent more power than the General Electric originals, and proved very useful when taking off in the hot, thin air of Afghanistan. The squadron's human element performed superbly too. The crews won widespread respect from the hard-pressed ground troops for the promptness and willingness with which they supported them.

When the Apache procurement programme was first announced there was fierce competition between the Army and the RAF over who was going to operate it. The Army won, arguing that in the ground-oriented, interventionist missions of the future, the closer cooperation that would result from bringing the Apaches under their command would be essential. Now their argument seemed justified. 'Flown by soldiers for soldiers' was the Army Air Corps' proudest boast. On one extraordinary occasion, following an operation near Garmsir in southern Helmand in January 2007, a wounded Marine who had accidentally been left behind was retrieved by four of his colleagues who strapped themselves to the sides of two Apaches which flew in low and slow with their cannons blazing to cover the rescue mission. It was a brilliant and daring piece of improvisation, as good as any James Bond stunt. The ministry fell over itself to publicize it, and the public were duly thrilled by the story – which of course also served as a potent advertisement of the versatility of the Army's expensive new toy. It was in fact quite a coup for the MoD press office. In all the excitement the media somehow forgot to mention that the wider Garmsir operation, a frontal assault on a heavily defended fort involving up to 300 British troops, was a failure. So, in fact, was the attempt to rescue the wounded Marine, who was already dead by the time his would-be rescuers reached him. (The rescuers didn't know he was dead at the time, however; and it was psychologically important, both for the troops and for the Marine's next of kin, that his body was brought back.)

Like the Chinook wing, the eight-strong Apache flight of 656 Squadron was committed to combat tours in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. The only differences were that their commissions were shorter – four and a half years, after preliminary training, rather than twelve in the RAF – and that their tours lasted for three months rather than two. The pilots were even more insistent on anonymity than their counterparts at Odiham, and asked to be referred to only by an initial. They, too, were anxious to spare their families the gory details of combat, although they had another reason: as pilots of helicopters, which were the visible linchpins of the British operation in Helmand, they were obvious high-value targets for the enemy. Both on and off the battlefield, therefore, they considered themselves prone to kidnap – or worse.

None of them was allowed to forget John Nichol, the Tornado navigator who was tortured and paraded on Iraqi television in 1991. The American Black Hawk pilot who was shot down and captured by an angry mob in Mogadishu in 1993 (an event later turned into a best-selling book and film,
Black Hawk Down
) provided another cautionary tale. Early on in Herrick 4, furthermore, the members of a French Special Forces patrol had been captured, tied up and gutted alive. This was one reason why the British went to such extraordinary lengths to rescue any of their own. It was also why the distinctive pink-hued flying suits the Army Air Corps usually wore were rapidly abandoned at Bastion in favour of drab fire-retardant overalls that made them look like everybody else.

The threat to aircrew, furthermore, was no longer confined to the war zones. At the time of the Garmsir rescue operation, the West Midlands Police uncovered a plot to kidnap a British Muslim soldier who had recently returned from deployment, and behead him live on the internet. The plotters, from Birmingham, had obtained a list of the names and addresses of twenty-five British Muslim servicemen around the country. According to some press reports, their source was thought to be a mole working at the MoD. The Apache was originally designed as an anti-tank helicopter during the Cold War, when the West's greatest fear was a massed mechanized invasion of Europe by the Soviet Union. That its pilots now had to worry about betrayal from within its own defence ministry illustrated how dramatically the role first envisaged for it had changed.

Despite all the precautions, flying an Apache in Helmand was not nearly as dangerous as crewing a Chinook. None of the squadron received a DFC, and there were only two Mentions in Dispatches for them at the end of their tour. Apaches were small, fast and heavily armed, and therefore far better able to defend themselves than the support helicopters. More to the point, although Apaches were occasionally hit by small-arms fire from the ground – and although they faced the same threat from surface-to-air missiles – they seldom had any reason to put down in enemy territory as the RAF so constantly did. The Garmsir rescue mission was a one-off. The majority of the Apaches' time was spent escorting the vulnerable Chinooks, flying high above them in pairs. Even in direct attack mode, the Apaches typically operated 2,000 to 3,000 feet above the ground.

This was noticed by the ground troops, a few of whom complained that their close air support did not always feel very close. US Apache pilots, it was observed, tended to be far readier to attack at low level, which led some to assert that the Americans were the better and braver allies in a fire-fight – a judgement with which the Americans naturally agreed. 'The Brits are good but they don't have the extreme aggression that we do,' said one pilot, Captain Larry Staley. 'When you are on top of the enemy you look, shoot, and it's, "You die, you die, you die",' said his wing-man, Lieutenant Jack Denton. The pilots at Wattisham were predictably dismissive of this. 'I can see what's happening on the ground far better from higher up,' said Major A, the Top Gun squadron leader, 'and I can be far more useful to the boys on the ground from there.' Flying at low level had its place. It could be helpful if a 'show of force' was required, to intimidate the enemy or even to boost the morale of friendly forces, but it also carried risks that the Army Air Corps thought unacceptable. American Apaches sometimes flew low to evade missile fire, but the British defensive aid suite was better than theirs and made such tactics unnecessary. 'You've only got to look at US helicopter losses compared to ours in Iraq and Afghanistan,' observed Major A. Although the Americans had many more Apaches in service than the British – 800 of them – it was nevertheless true that they had lost more of them than any other type of aircraft. Twelve of them had been shot down since 2003, with another dozen lost to low-level collisions and crashes. The British over the same period lost only one helicopter to hostile fire, a Navy Lynx over Basra in May 2006.

Besides, British Apaches did drop into a low-level attack when necessary. Captain D recalled a mission to rescue a casualty just south of Musa Qala in July 2006. A large American convoy had been attacked with the loss of three vehicles, and had gone into a defensive wagon circle in a dangerously exposed wadi. Captain D agreed to 'ride shotgun' for the IRT Chinook, following it all the way down to the landing zone. 'It wasn't a standard operating procedure or even a tactic we'd practised before, but that was what I agreed to do,' he said.

They dropped quickly to about 300 feet when they were ambushed from a dozen firing points on two sides. 'It was dusk, the light was fading. Suddenly the whole sky was lit up with tracer going in every direction . . . I replied with my 30 mil into the nearest wood line.' The greatest danger, perversely, came not from the gunmen hidden in the trees but from the Americans. There were more than a dozen Humvees laagered up in the wadi, and all of them responded with their turret-mounted .50 cals, blazing away not just at the enemy firing points but randomly, to every point of the compass. 'At least half the tracers were ricochets off the ground from the .50 cals. There were these red flashes all over the place, and the bullets were going straight up. They were far more dangerous than 7.62s.'

At 200 feet, the Chinook pilot, Navy Lieutenant Nichol Benzie, realized he had overshot the landing site. He explained afterwards that the tracer fire was so bright that he had lost all his outside visual references. There was too little fuel for a second attempt and the mission was aborted. (The casualty was rescued later that night by a Black Hawk helicopter equipped with specialist infrared night vision.) 'Honestly, it was like the last scene in
Star Wars
when Luke Skywalker flies down that gulley on the Death Star and you think there's no way he isn't going to get hit,' said Captain D. Astonishingly, just like Luke Skywalker, neither the Chinook nor the Apache was touched by a single bullet.

As the Gurkhas at Now Zad could confirm, the close air support a pair of Apaches provided on the day of their famous hand-grenade exchange could hardly have been any closer. 'I was firing 30 mil within ten metres of them,' said Captain J, the lead pilot. 'That's the closest any Apache has fired to friendly forces. It was an extreme measure.' It worked, though. The Gurkhas later retrieved and engraved one of his empty shell casings and presented it to the squadron as a thank-you present.

From the air at dawn on 16 July, it was apparent that the Gurkhas were in serious danger of being overrun. Captain J, an Anglo-Dutchman who was brought up in Antigua – he called himself a 'Biwi', short for British West Indian – was one of the most experienced pilots in his squadron. The clinic, the building across the road from the compound which the Taliban had occupied, at first appeared to be on fire, but then he realized that he was observing the detonations of grenades. He could see muzzle flashes, and then enemy grenades exploding within the compound walls. He and his wing-man, Captain M, had been scrambled from Bastion less than an hour before. A pair of RAF Harriers had also responded to the Gurkhas' call for help, but the Apaches had arrived first in spite of the jets' faster response times. The Harriers were powerless in this situation anyway: they could not risk dropping a bomb so close to friendly forces. Ten metres was theoretically too close to deploy any airborne weapon system, let alone a 500-pounder. Even Captain J had his doubts, but he could hear the urgency in the voice of the resident joint tactical air controller, Sergeant Charlie Aggrey from 7 Para RHA. 'We were never trained to fire that close,' Captain J explained. 'You can't be. But you're not going to go, "Sorry, I'm just going to stand back and watch because they're too close for me to fire."' Even so, he insisted on 'swapping initials' with Aggrey before attacking. He wanted him formally to acknowledge that the target's proximity was unprecedented. If things went wrong, responsibility would at least be shared.