Apache (33 page)

‘We did the right thing.’

We all agreed with him. And then the four of us shook hands. All for one, and one for all. It was lunchtime, but only Carl and Geordie were hungry. Billy and I wandered back into the Ops Room to get on with the day’s work.

FOG wandered over and told us about the Colonel’s IRT plan. It was to re-role a Chinook at Bastion and carry twenty-odd marines into the fort to pick up Mathew. Trigger had asked FOG to pass it on to us when we’d hit our radio black spot at Magowan’s HQ. He’d forgotten.

It changed nothing. The Chinook was twenty minutes behind us, minimum, and Mathew didn’t have twenty minutes. And anyway, it
was total lunacy. A big old bird like a Chinook would have been shot to shit at Jugroom. If it had gone down in the air there would have been twenty-five-plus dead. The brigadier clearly had no interest in it either; he’d only mentioned two options during his orders broadcast on the net.

FOG also forgot to tell us that Trigger was sending a second Chinook down to the gun line with extra gas. Now that would have been nice to know. Ironically, the fuel drama was the one thing the CO still didn’t know about yet.

HQ Flight was taken off the IRT / HRF task with immediate effect. As with all fatalities, there was a mountain of admin to climb over. A couple of MPs from the Red Caps’ Special Investigations Branch turned up to take lengthy statements from all the pilots – Nick, Charlotte, FOG and Darwin included. Under the law, we were all witnesses to a death, and until it was solved, it was treated as suspicious.

Trigger came back after lunch to lead the routine mission debrief. Standing up for us in the face of the CO was a brave thing to do, but he didn’t see it like that. As far as he was concerned, he’d just told the truth as he always did. If an officer lied, he had no integrity. Without integrity, how could he lead his men?

He admitted that this was a defining moment in his career, though – because he most probably wouldn’t have one now. I told him I’d never forget what he’d done, and I never will. We didn’t bother discussing our situation any further. It was out of all our hands now – Trigger’s included.

The eight pilots, the guy from Intelligence, the Ops Officer and the Boss filed back into the Tactical Planning Facility and watched the gun tapes on the five-foot-square screen. It taught us some pretty interesting things about the morning.

There were RPGs everywhere. We’d missed most of them because our screens were small and we were obsessed with Mathew. More than 100 were fired at or past HQ Flight while we were on station; the majority in volley-fire from the south-east – the bottom of the treeline and the village.

We checked out Billy’s FLIR tape and saw just how hot Mathew had been throughout the mission. He was glowing, and his temperature never dissipated, despite the cold. It meant he had circulation. His heart was beating throughout. I didn’t know whether that made things better or worse.

Billy’s tape made it clear that Mathew had never moved. We replayed it three times at the point Billy thought he had – then realised his shadow had moved as the sun rose.

Alarmingly, 3 Flight’s tapes revealed just how many Taliban had been piling down the eastern side of the fort in their attempt to encircle us: literally dozens of them, using a kilometre-long drainage ditch as cover. Almost everything Charlotte and Tony fired had been to suppress that lot. No wonder they went Winchester.

Overall, we estimated that there had been between around 100 of them to the north and east of the fort. It was impossible to tell how many more lay in wait in the village, the fort’s buildings and the tunnel systems, but we reckoned on at least twice as many again. They must have been coming in from miles away; they’d had enough warning.

As the tapes played themselves out, it became ever more obvious how small Zulu Company’s chances were of crossing the river again. Once the Taliban had reinforced, even a battalion of 600 infantry couldn’t have taken the place.

Last, we watched 3 Flight’s coverage of their orgy of fire as we flew out of the fort. The extraction took a total of fifty-five seconds
– during which they’d put down a total of £324,000 of rockets and missiles – £5,890 every second. Nobody in the forty-nine-year history of the Army Air Corps had ever fired half as much ordnance so quickly from one aircraft, and we doubted anyone would again.

At the end of the brief, there was a knock on the TPF door and the Chief Technician popped his head round.

‘Boss, got your aircraft damage report here.’

Trigger groaned.

‘Go on. How bad is it then?’

‘Not a bullet hole anywhere.’

‘Really? You sure?’

‘Not one. I couldn’t believe it myself. I got the lads to look at them twice. It’s gen. Not a single round hit any of the four of them down there.’

That spooked us. Tony the bullet magnet had been hit on three separate occasions in Afghanistan. No hits seemed impossible.

The Ops Officer concluded the brief. ‘There were no Rules of Engagement issues, the weight of fire was proportionate to the task and we have no damages to report this time. Do we, Darwin?’

Tony grinned. ‘No, sir.’

‘Well, Geordie, how do you think you did on your six-monthly handling check?’ Billy delivered his assessment without waiting for an answer to his question. ‘You failed. You broke every rule in the book – and you can refly in the morning at o-six hundred.’

‘I’m
never
getting in an Apache with
you
again,’ Geordie muttered. ‘Not ever.’

It was getting dark by the time we left the facility. Billy told me he was going up to the hospital to have a quiet word with the doctors. If Mathew’s death was going to prey on our minds, we needed
to understand it better. We needed to know what else we could have done for him.

The Royal Navy Surgeon Commander in charge of the hospital told him that Mathew had been hit by a round in the upper right temple. The injury was fatal; he would have died from his injuries even if he had been shot on the hospital’s front doorstep. His body may have lived on for a few more hours, but the damage to his brain was unsurvivable, no matter what anyone did. Mathew was effectively dead the moment the bullet hit him.

Billy and I were silent as we walked to cookhouse for dinner. It was a desperate end to an appalling day.

An older Royal Marine wearing a WO1’s rank slide stepped out in front of us. ‘Excuse me gents, did you two fly at Jugroom Fort today, by any chance?’

We nodded.

‘I’m the RSM of 42 Commando.’ He grabbed both our hands and gave them a bone-crunching shake. ‘What you boys did there was outstanding. Thank you for bringing him back. We always tell them this, but you showed all my young lads for real that we never leave anyone behind.’

We were gobsmacked by the strength of his emotion.

‘If there is anything I can ever do for you, or any of the other Apache guys, just tell me.’

As we queued for our food, we could hear the chefs talking about the rescue as they ladled out lasagne to the blokes ahead of us. We got a few more words of praise or gratitude from other marines when we sat down. Word was obviously spreading fast.

The next time we saw the CO was at the JHF evening brief in the Ops Room. By then, we were resigned to whatever was coming our way. If the gallows were under construction, so be it. The Colonel
said nothing to us as individuals. Trigger invited him to address the room at the beginning of the brief as the new commanding officer.

‘Thank you, Chris. What a day. Some extremely unconventional events occurred out there today. These were audacious in the extreme – but not something that I would want repeated.’

He paused for the message to sink in.

‘I will do my best, but the Joint Helicopter Command may need convincing …’

Billy and I shared a knowing glance. Carl shook his head in disgust. The Ops Officer then read out the full list of stats collated by the brigade from Op Glacier 2 so far. The Apaches weren’t the only ones to dish it out on Jugroom Fort’s defenders that day.

The three 105-mm artillery pieces fired a total of 430 high explosive shells, and twenty salvoes of Illume. The B1B bombers dropped six 500-lb bombs and eight 2,000-pounders. The A10s fired 1,500 rounds of 30-mm DU, seven CRV rockets, three 540-lb airburst bombs and two precision-guided 500-pounders. As for the Apaches: 1,543 rounds of 30-mm HEDP, fifteen HEISAP rockets, forty-seven Flechettes and eighteen Hellfires. Nobody had bothered to count the small arms rounds yet, but they were believed to be in the tens of thousands.

There was one friendly forces KIA, and four wounded. The enemy had forty confirmed KIA. The final tally was very likely to have been double that, possibly even more. It had been a hell of a ding dong. But I’d be a liar if I said we weren’t all very pleased to hear we’d given far better than we’d taken.

‘Also be aware,’ the Ops Officer added, ‘that an SA80 Mark 2 rifle fitted with a SUSAT sight is now missing.’

It was Dave Rigg’s. He’d left it at the fort because he couldn’t carry Mathew and the rifle at the same time.

Despite our complaints, the Boss put Billy, Geordie, Carl and me on enforced rest and gave the same order to 3 Flight. They’d sat in their Kevlar bathtubs for over eleven hours and had been on the go for twenty so far. He knew a break from combat would do us no harm at all.

It also meant the four of us were back in our usual tents that night. Geordie came in for a chat, wearing just his skiddies and a T-shirt, and we played out the whole rescue over again for hours, piecing together the bits that some of us had missed or hadn’t understood. Geordie recounted his escapade at the fort in full.

We crashed out just before 3am. I was totally ball-bagged but I couldn’t really sleep. From the amount of turning and creaking coming from Billy and Carl’s cots, I guessed they couldn’t either. There was still too much to think about, to churn through.

For some reason we all felt a lot better the next morning.

Billy and I played the air temperature game on our walk to the morning brief as usual. Billy won. Despite the bright sunshine, it was plus-one degree celsius and he’d got it bang on. I made the coffees, hot and strong. Carl and Geordie joined us from breakfast as we kicked our feet outside, enjoying the fresh air.

Carl, Billy and I were all going to Kandahar that day to air test the aircraft in maintenance. Two of us could go in the Apache with the broken FLIR camera because that needed to be fixed, too, leaving one to be consigned to the Hercules shuttle. None of us ever wanted to go on the Hercules. Why get flown when you can fly yourself?

Billy and I tried pulling rank on Carl, but he wasn’t having any of it. So we agreed to spoof for who got the Apache seats. Billy lost and was furious. I enjoyed that and told him so. ‘We’ll be in Timmy
Horton’s on our second round of doughnuts by the time you arrive, Face.’

‘Go do the coffees, Piss Boy.’

‘Morning gents.’ Trigger swept past us on his way into the tent. ‘And what a lovely morning it is.’

The Boss obviously also felt better for a night’s sleep. We followed him in. He took his usual spot in front of the map table, facing the room. Billy and I perched on ours, behind his right shoulder.

Trigger turned to us just as he was about to begin. I could see mischief in his eyes. ‘Just got a message from the brigadier,’ he whispered. ‘Thought you might like to hear it. The brigadier wants your citations for Jugroom Fort on his desk first thing tomorrow morning.’

He turned back to face the rest of the room.

‘Right, good morning everyone …’

Billy and I weren’t listening. A giant grin crept across our faces and a very warm feeling spread from our stomachs. By hook or by crook, the system had spoken. The official verdict had been passed. The noose had been cut down in front of our very eyes. We were in the clear.

The AAC hierarchy felt quite rightly that Mathew’s family should be allowed time to grieve before the story of Jugroom Fort was made public. Colonel Sexton decreed that until then the whole rescue should remain under wraps.

The MoD asked for some gun tape clips to release to the media in due course – but a still from my footage of Hearn on Geordie’s wing as they flew into the fort was leaked in advance. Within twenty-four hours it was on every British TV news channel and in every national newspaper. The following day it was being broadcast across the world. We were astonished.

Luckily for me Op Minimise was on and we couldn’t phone home for two days. It was no easy task explaining it all to Emily.

There were no official probes into our actions at the fort. Nothing more was ever said about disciplinary proceedings. We did hear that the MoD had asked some pretty serious questions when they saw the official reports. Word filtered out that they were unhappy about the Release to Service stuff, but again, nothing was ever said to us.

There was no second attempt by 3 Commando Brigade to enter
Jugroom Fort – which left Geordie with the dubious title of being the British serviceman who’d got furthest inside the place. From what I hear, he still holds it.

In the days that followed, a whole lot of stuff emerged about that extraordinary day. The Taliban’s losses had been considerable. A GCHQ intercept revealed that a senior commander was killed in the fighting. The attack had so enraged them that they hit the Garmsir DC for three whole days and nights in reprisal.

Our CO was summoned to Lashkar Gah for a good old-fashioned interview without coffee with Brigadier Jerry Thomas. It turned out he had rung the brigadier from Kandahar at the height of the crisis to tell him there would be no Apache rescue attempt. It had not gone down well. The brigadier reminded him in no uncertain terms who was in command in Helmand, on the day and again during the interview.

I felt sorry for the CO; he’d been fed incorrect information about what was happening at the fort by his headquarters in Kandahar. He’d stuck his neck out, trying to help, and got bollocked for it in the process. I didn’t care much that he’d bollocked us without asking what had happened first. We had felt betrayed by him, but in the end he’d let himself down, not us. But I struggle to forgive him for his treatment of Major Christopher James, the Boss.

We also discovered that Zulu Company’s commander, a Royal Marine major, had been relieved of his command by Colonel Magowan moments before the rescue began. He’d let the men of Zulu Company down badly. After being given a direct order to prepare the assault many hours before, he’d failed to brief his men and didn’t get the Viking vehicles prepped to cross the Helmand River.

A British company commander had not been dismissed from his
post in the field for many years. Understand-ably, it prompted a huge amount of very painful soul-searching among the marines – whose officers’ leadership was traditionally second to none.

Back in the UK, a board of inquiry was established by the Royal Navy Headquarters to find out what went wrong, and why Mathew Ford died. It went into everything: the mission, the initial orders, the Zulu Company assault, why five marines were instantly shot, the sacking, and how Mathew was left behind. It took a year and seven months to complete. Its conclusions were equally painful – and staggeringly honest.

First, it found that Mathew Ford and the four other marines wounded at the fort wall could have been all shot by a Royal Marine machine-gunner on one of the rear Vikings in the Zulu Company attack column, just after 7am. The gunner heard bangs coming from through the wall, and opened fire on the gap, thinking he was doing the right thing. Contrary to what everyone thought, it wasn’t the seething masses of Taliban in the tunnels, the village or the fort that had got any of them after all; it was one lethal burst of friendly fire. The devastated young marine admitted what he’d done immediately and was sent straight home, his nerves shot to pieces.

Mathew Ford was left behind because of confusion over two Fords – Lance Corporal Mathew Ford, and Marine Ford, who was already safe by this point. That confusion existed primarily because Zulu Company were withdrawing under fire and the Sergeant Major didn’t use zap numbers – the special few letters and numbers each serviceman has that are unique to them – to report his casualties.

It also revealed the full extent of Mathew’s injuries. A total of three bullets had entered Mathew’s body; he took a round in the
bicep and a round in the chest, as well as the round in the head. When we picked him up, I had only seen the head wound.

The bicep wound wasn’t serious. The pathologist ruled that the chest wound was very serious, but there was a chance that Mathew could have survived it had he received immediate medical help. The chest wound was almost certainly caused by the machine-gunner – the round was analysed and found to be 7.62-mm NATO issue. The pathologist also said the head wound would have killed Mathew ‘almost instantaneously’. It was impossible to ascertain whether that bullet had been fired by friendly or enemy forces, as it had fragmented on entry.

Who fired that third bullet, the head wound bullet and
when
it was fired are the crucial questions. This is what is most sad of all: if the head bullet had been fired by the marine machine-gunner, what I don’t understand is how Mathew could still have been warm on the thermal camera throughout our guarding him, and then still warm more than three and a half hours later when I got to him at 10.40am. There was a ground temperature of five degrees Celsius at the fort that morning – low enough to turn a body cold pretty quickly. He burned white hot on Billy’s FLIR screen lying there all the time.

It’s an anomaly that suggests that Mathew’s head wound could have been caused by a (possibly) ricochet Taliban bullet fired later – perhaps a lot later. If Zulu Company had picked Mathew up before they withdrew, or if we’d got to him earlier, could any of us have saved his life? The answer, none of us will ever know.

That wasn’t all the board revealed. Remarkably, it quite clearly also established that, despite their series of serious errors, the chaos at the fort was to a substantial extent not Zulu Company’s fault. It was found that the company hadn’t been trained back in the UK for
war fighting in Afghanistan. Their sacked commander hadn’t done the company commander’s course, and was only put in charge of them four weeks before they left for Afghanistan. And the sub-unit hadn’t even conducted live firing training together – the most basic of all company tasks.

Zulu Company were given the relatively benign job of security patrolling in Kabul for the tour and even this was asking too much from a unit that had not prepared for war fighting in Afghanistan.

Knowing that, it’s little wonder that the rookie machine-gunner accidentally shot his own men, that the sergeant major didn’t use zap numbers during this attack, and that the company commander couldn’t give the leadership needed. I feel very sorry for all three of those men; they carry round a terrible weight, unfairly.

At the start of the tour, Brigadier Thomas had asked the MoD for an extra manoeuvre battlegroup to carry out everything that was expected of 3 Commando Brigade in Helmand – especially securing Garmsir and carrying out Operation Glacier. Despite countless promises from the Prime Minister about commanders in Afghanistan getting everything they asked for, his request was flatly refused. Instead, the brigadier was told to make do with what he already had, and generate any extra attack forces from his existing establishment. In other words, if Garmsir was to be held he had little choice but to send undertrained men into the most ferocious battle.

Knowing all of that, it’s hard not to form a pretty depressing conclusion about Jugroom Fort: Mathew Ford probably died because the government gave the guys on the ground far too little and asked of them far too much.

Operation Glacier continued, with the three further planned attacks passing off as intended.

Glacier 3 set out to smash a relay post – the Cruciform – for enemy fighters five kilometres south of Garmsir. But the attacking force arrived to find it had already been vacated; there were not enough men in the area to man it and fight the DC – strong evidence that the enemy’s command chain was already in tatters.

Glacier 4 and 5 were both ground assaults launched from the DC southwards. The Taliban remnants marshalled into the killing fields, exactly where Colonel Magowan wanted them – all he had to do was come and get them. Hundreds of marines and Afghan National Army soldiers, backed by Apaches and fast air, swept through two kilometres of abandoned farmland, destroying everything in their way. With nowhere to run to, the Taliban were routed.

The Garmsir DC was never retaken by the Taliban. The enemy’s southern MSR was totally severed, and many hundreds of them were killed. Most important of all, Glacier had bought the marines the time they so desperately needed to consolidate. Yet its benefits could only ever be temporary. With the Task Force never being afforded enough troops to hold any of the ground the marines had fought so hard to win, the Taliban eventually reorganised and regrouped in the south – as Colonel Magowan predicted.

Jugroom Fort was reinfiltrated, and at the time of writing, the Taliban are still there. By the spring, sporadic fighting had returned to Garmsir; killing two of the Grenadier Guardsmen who inherited the DC when the marines left in April. By late summer the hard fighting had resumed. After the guardsmen, it was the Household Cavalry Regiment’s turn – and that’s where Prince Harry earned his military spurs. He was a JTAC in Garmsir for two months, operating under the callsign Widow Six Seven. The publicity shots showed him firing a .5 calibre machine gun off JTAC Hill, which
meant that by Christmas 2007 – after ten months of regrouping – the Taliban, yet again, weren’t far from the DC’s gates.

656 Squadron went home at the end of February 2007, the day of my departure coinciding exactly with Glacier’s finale. But I couldn’t leave without having to sit down for one final ammo tally with Kev Blundell. The Boss and the CO wanted the statistical data for 9 Regiment Army Air Corps’ final tour of Afghanistan before handing over to 3 Regiment. Only by working out the cost of particular operations and how much the individuals fire, can we plan for future operations.

Kev told me I’d personally fired more ammunition on this tour than the entire squadron had in the whole of the previous summer – some £2.5 million worth of weaponry. To be precise: twenty-six Hellfire missiles, fifty-four Flechette rockets and 4,120 cannon rounds.

The Koshtay raid proved to be (and still is) the most expensive single British Apache sortie in history. In our thirty-two minutes over the target area, we expended £1,060,794.20 of ammunition; or £33,149.82 every minute.

The fastest rate of fire award rightfully went to Charlotte and Tony. They put down £426,353.36 worth in six minutes over Jugroom, protecting us in and then out of the fort with Mathew Ford. They still hold that record today, and I can’t see it ever being beaten.

When we got home, I had to confess to Emily that I had returned from the fort with my life but no angel. Emily likes to think she served her purpose and wasn’t needed any more. My daughter insists she guided Mathew on his way. I’m a realist, so know what I believe: she remains MIA.

We got a chance to look at the newspaper coverage our families had kept for us. We found out more about Mathew and what sort of a guy he was. I think I would have really liked him.

He was the oldest of three brothers and known to everyone as an outgoing but gentle giant. Mathew’s mother Joan initially talked him out of his lifelong ambition to join the forces; she persuaded him to become a car mechanic instead. After seven years in the local garage, he decided to sign up anyway, telling Joan: ‘I’ve done what you wanted; now it’s my turn.’ Joan gave him her complete support, and told Mathew she was hugely proud of him when he earned his green beret. Joan didn’t want him to go to Afghanistan, his first combat tour. Mathew reassured her, telling her he’d be all right.

He was buried on 1 February – seven days after he was due to fly home from Afghanistan – with full military honours in St Andrew’s Church in Immingham, north-east Lincolnshire, the town where he’d grown up. He was thirty years old.

On a still, cold morning beneath a blue sky, his hearse was driven through Immingham at walking pace so the hundreds of mourners who lined the route could see him as he passed. His coffin was draped in a Union Flag and decorated with flower arrangements: ‘Son’, ‘Brother’ and ‘Maff’.

A bearer party from 45 Commando carried Mathew into the church, with Joan, Dad Bootsy Lewis and his fiancée Ina Reid following behind.

Mathew and Ina lived together in Dundee, where Ina was studying for her degree. They had met three years before – shortly after Mathew was posted to 45 Commando, based at RM Condor in nearby Arbroath – and instantly fallen in love. After almost six years of service, Mathew was planning on getting out of the Marines to settle down and have a family with her. He wanted to be a fireman
or a policeman, but most of all he wanted to be a daddy.