A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (28 page)

The Apache's arsenal included rockets and missiles, but in this situation the 30mm cannon, although classified as an 'area weapon', was the most accurate and appropriate option. The Apache carried 1,200 rounds of 30mm shells which it fired at a rate of 625 a minute. Like the helicopter itself, these rounds were intended for Cold War combat – its high-explosive tip was designed to penetrate the skin of a Soviet armoured personnel carrier before fragmenting and killing everyone inside – but it was effective in urban fighting too, since the tip generally had no problem breaching bricks or the thick mud-wall architecture of Afghanistan.

The Apaches set themselves up in an 'opposing race-track pattern' above the compound. The plan was to attack the clinic from its east and west sides in rapid alternation. Captain J went first, approaching from the west and keeping the aircraft as steady as he could. He dialled up a twenty-round burst – the standard combat amount, at least in training – aligned the cross-hairs of his gun sight on the roof, and squeezed the trigger.

There was an immediate yell of 'Stop! Stop!' from Aggrey. Some of the rounds had detonated in the Gurkha compound. 'I suddenly thought, "Oh my God, have I hit one of my friendlies?"' said Captain J. He hadn't, thankfully. 'Roger that, breaking off,' he replied – even though he knew he was powerless to shorten a burst once his trigger was pulled. His semi-automated cannon was slow compared to the Gatling on an American A10 (which, remarkably, fires 3,900 rounds a minute) but it still took less than two seconds to fire twenty shells. The Gurkhas worried that the Apache's targeting was slightly off, although Captain J reckoned the likelier reason was ricochet caused by the near-simultaneous fragmentation of so many shells. His backseat co-pilot, Staff Sergeant L, thought the roof of the building was probably concrete, which the 30mm cannon shells wouldn't necessarily penetrate. 'I thought, "Fuck this," if you'll excuse my language . . . I said to [Captain J], "Look, mate, you want to be putting them through the windows." There were a number of windows on the western side . . . I can still visualize how many there were. So that's what we did.'

Captain J and his wing-man switched to ten-round bursts to reduce the risk of spreading, warned the Gurkhas to keep well down, and carried on with the attack. The clinic's occupiers somehow survived several passes by the Apaches, and even shot at their tormentors as they swept overhead. ('That was a bit cheeky,' Captain J remarked.) Between them the Apaches fired some 500 shells at the building, working methodically along it, window by window. They only broke off the attack when Aggrey reported that the shooting had been replaced by the sound of screaming. That detail caused Captain J some unease. 'It was my first definitive kill without a doubt,' he said. 'It was a little bit chilling. I started to think, "Were they all Taliban in there, or were there civvies as well?" It didn't stop me from doing what I was doing, by any means. But it did send a bit of a question.'

The fact that the building was one of Now Zad's few formally designated medical establishments had not passed the Taliban by, and their propaganda machine reacted with great speed. By the time Captain J and the others were back at Bastion – a mere twenty-five-minute flight away – the news that they had attacked a 'medical clinic' was already on Sky News, which was always playing somewhere in the background at headquarters. 'Everyone was giving me banter, like, "Oh, right, so you shot up a hospital." And I went, "No, the Gurkhas were being engaged from there . . ." Obviously you do a full debrief afterwards, and show the video, so there was no doubt that it was justified.'

The Taliban had deliberately exploited the ambiguity of the term 'clinic'. The building was not a hospital so much as a cross between a small doctor's surgery and a pharmacist's dispensary. No one could be certain that it didn't contain civilian patients at the time of the attack, but given its extreme proximity to the compound it seemed very unlikely. Major Dan Rex's men never heard anything to suggest that innocents had been hit, and no civilian bodies were ever found in the wreckage – although that of course proved little, because the Taliban always made a point of extracting their dead and wounded.

It was a long day for Captain J's Apaches. That night they were called to Now Zad once again, this time to shepherd a Chinook bringing in much-needed reinforcements. While Captain J was in overwatch, Captain M was fired on by an anti-aircraft gun set up on a rooftop near the town bakery, a scant 100 metres north-east of the compound. The gun type was never identified; the Gurkhas said only that it spewed slow green tracer shells like an erupting volcano, and was strangely silent as it fired. 'The fire was sustained and very accurate,' Captain J said. 'We were a hard target to see because we always flew without lights. This was the first time that we knew for sure that the Taliban had night vision capability.' It was only Captain M's flying skills that saved him. 'He's a very good aviator. You could see these tracer rounds following him around the sky trying to shoot him . . . he was jinking and diving around the bullets, accelerating, changing altitude, slowing down again.'

Captain M responded with his 30mm cannon and then proposed a Hellfire missile – the first ever to be fired in anger by a British Apache. This, too, was a weapon originally designed for the Cold War. It followed a laser beam down to its target, generating a million pounds of pressure per square inch as it blew – enough to penetrate the armour of any tank. The strike had to be cleared through the JTAC, Charlie Aggrey, who was so worried about the proximity of the target that he aborted the Apache's first approach while he checked that everyone in the compound was under cover. By the time the Hellfire was released, the enemy machine-gunners had collapsed their weapon and escaped to safety. Still, the top floor of their building was turned to rubble, making that rooftop unusable as a firing point in future, and the gun was probably also destroyed, for it was never heard from again. At £60,000 each, the Hellfire was an expensive way of dealing with such threats, but it was to be used more and more in the months that followed. The squadron fired eleven of them during their first three-month tour, but ninety-eight in their second, at a cost of nearly £6 million. However, the accuracy of the missile meant that it was a sought-after capability.

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The Apache is probably the most sophisticated cog in the Coalition's high-tech war machine. To fly one demands much expertise. Like the Chinook pilots, Captain J and the others spoke of operating in a curious bubble of concentration that left little time to feel fear; and because they normally flew hundreds of feet from the ground, they were even more detached from the action below. In Chinooks, pilots are subjected to instructions from five different radio channels; in Apaches, there are as many as seven.

In some ways they are more like computer operators than pilots. Their job is as much about the rapid interpretation of complex information as controlling the movement of the aircraft which, under the right conditions, could virtually fly itself anyway. The avionics, connected by thirteen kilometres of wiring, contain so many processors that even the specialists are unsure quite how many there are. Each one is duplicated and cleverly hidden away in some asymmetric corner of the airframe, as a back-up in the event of a successful strike from a bullet or missile. One electronic warfare officer told me that he had found sixteen of them, 'although there could be more'. All the computers are talking to one another all the time, and a glitch in any of them can necessitate the rebooting of the entire helicopter.

Sensors automatically detect a thousand potential targets, of which 256 are classified before the top sixteen are prioritized. A monocle attachment to the pilot's right eye relays footage from a telephoto lens in the aircraft's nose. At the touch of a switch it is possible to 'slave the head', causing the underslung cannon to swivel wherever the pilot is looking, and to fire where he focuses his eye. As the former squadron leader of 656, the newly promoted Lieutenant Colonel Andy Cash, remarked, there were times when flying an Apache was disturbingly like some futuristic shoot-'emup video game – a video, moreover, that can be replayed, since every move a pilot makes is captured on a gun tape for later analysis.

Yet however advanced the technology, there is always room for human error. Night vision goggles and powerful telephoto lenses can help, but it is ultimately the pilots who have to decide what constitutes a target and what does not. That is the heaviest responsibility of being in charge of a machine of such awesome destructive power. In a campaign for hearts and minds, proportionality of response is politically vital.

It didn't help that some of the armaments at the pilots' disposal were quite inappropriate for the task, particularly in the early stages of Herrick 4. The rockets attached to Captain J's Apache on the day of the clinic attack, for instance, carried armour-piercing incendiary warheads designed to disable ships. The clinic was an important part of the town's civilian infrastructure; Captain J needed to kill the gunmen occupying it, not incinerate it. The antitank Hellfire was also wrong for this kind of warfare, since the Taliban possessed no armour of any kind. 'We're getting a different kind of Hellfire now, with more fragmentation, because we're firing at buildings and people rather than tanks,' Captain J said.

Meanwhile, it was decided that a potentially more useful weapon, the medieval-sounding 'flechette' rocket, should not initially be used during Herrick 4. Fired in pairs, each of these terrifying weapons is packed with eighty five-inch-long tungsten steel darts. Travelling at supersonic speed, the projectiles spread out into a flying metal wall that can pass through brickwork and thick trees and still kill any living thing in their path. Careful forethought was always needed when firing a flechette because the risk of collateral damage was high.

It is perhaps just as well that the crews were trained to err on the side of caution. Of course there were times when they got it wrong – as they did, for example, at Now Zad, when a pilot declined to fire on an enemy mortar team and ended up having to apologize to the Fusiliers. But just as often they got it right. In one incident, Major A was urged to attack a building the local JTAC insisted was being used as a fire point. 'But I couldn't see any evidence of that at all,' he recalled. 'The JTAC was screaming at me, but I wasn't going to pull any trigger without being sure of the target. In the end I aimed off and fired a burst at some nearby empty ground. Then the JTAC reported that the shooting had stopped. He even thanked me for it. I never owned up to what I'd done. Sometimes, with Apaches, less is more.'

Like the Chinook crews, Major A and his pilots were intensely and justifiably proud of their achievements in Helmand. Their confidence in the capability of their machines was supreme. As Andy Cash said, the Apache was the 'perfect weapon for "war amongst the people" ' and its performance would only improve as the weapons systems it carried were upgraded and refined. Brigadier Ed Butler described the Apache as 'the real battle-winner . . . Without dedicated AH support, especially the surgical ability to put 30mm cannon fire down within twenty-five metres of our troops, the Task Force could not have achieved what it did in 2006.' The extreme environment of southern Afghanistan had proved the Apache's versatility, and a role in all military deployments of the future looked assured.

So morale at Wattisham should have been soaring, yet it was not. Instead, the Squadron Leader had a serious crew retention problem. Despite the honour and prestige of being the first to fly Apaches in combat, all bar one of 656 Squadron were getting out as soon as they could. On his next tour, Major A was likely to be leading a group of pilots who had never flown in Helmand before. The hard lessons of Herrick 4 would have to be learned almost from scratch.

The glamour of flying Apaches, it seemed, was a veneer; the reality was that many of the pilots felt trapped and exhausted by their jobs. The Apache's great strength, its technical sophistication, was also partly to blame. It takes six months to learn to fly one, even for previously qualified pilots, and then another six months of CTR, the conversion-to-role course that teaches them how to operate its futuristic weapons systems. Both courses are intensive, and the Herrick 4 crews had hardly completed them when they were deployed to Helmand, with the promise of many more such tours in the future. They were, as Warrant Officer G explained, 'away all the time'. No doubt this lifestyle suited young men without families to worry about, but the Air Corps had made a point of hand-picking older and more experienced men for the first training intake – 'the old and the bold', as Warrant Officer G put it – and now many of them had had enough. 'My boss has lived in thirteen houses in the last fourteen years,' said Captain D, who was thirty-one. 'That's not good at all. And I got married last Christmas. It's time for me to settle down.'

Warrant Officer G's nickname was 'Fog'. 'It stands for Food or Google,' he explained, 'because I'm usually doing one or the other. Although some people have suggested it stands for Fucking Old Git.' He was forty-four, and about to leave the Army after twenty-eight years of service. 'This aircraft burns people out,' he said. 'The hours you've got to put in are unbelievable.'

Fog was the squadron's acknowledged expert on the Apache's electronic defence systems. He spent two years studying them during the machine's critical development phase, but despite that, and despite the £3 million it had cost to teach him to fly the Apache, there was no real retention package, no financial incentive to persuade him to stay on. Being away for seven months of the year, he said, had cost him his marriage. His accommodation at Wattisham was a soulless 'box'. He was desperate for a different kind of life, but the war in Afghanistan had ensured that there was no prospect of that. 'The way things are going, we're going to be in and out of Afghanistan every eighteen months, at best. And that's if we're fully manned. But we're nowhere near fully manned right now.' An inability to retain its crews was a serious problem for the Army Air Corps, though not nearly as serious as its failure to attract replacements. 'There's no one coming through the sausage machine. We were a bad advert, chatting in the bar with blokes thinking of doing it. They've seen us with black eyes, the sixteen-hour days on CTR; they've seen us going out to Afghan. And certainly after the first tour we came back absolutely knackered. You don't get a day off.'