Apache (4 page)

‘John looks knackered, doesn’t he,’ Billy said as we unpacked.

It was true. John had developed a manic stare, skin stretched over his cheekbones and huge bags under his eyes. We knew that look all too well; three months ago we’d seen it every time we’d stood in front of the shaving mirror.

We’d never have conceded it to anyone in our sister squadron, but the sitreps we’d got back at 9 Regiment’s North Yorkshire HQ proved they had been just as busy as we were on our first tour. Perhaps more so. The Helmand Task Force’s first six months had been a true baptism of fire.

British forces had first been deployed in April 2006 as part of a dramatic expansion of NATO’s role in Afghanistan, to establish a secure environment for reconstruction, development and government. We’d had troops in Kabul since the fall of the Taliban regime in November 2001. But while the capital and its northern surroundings had, as a result, remained relatively secure, the rest of the country had dramatically deteriorated.

In many areas, President Hamid Karzai’s government existed only in name – hence his derogatory nickname, the ‘Mayor of Kabul’. Warlords and, increasingly, rich opium barons held the real reins of power. With nobody to stop it, the heroin business boomed. The opium poppy crop doubled or tripled every year. Every local official who mattered, even slightly, was in the traffickers’ back pockets.

Nowhere was the spiralling anarchy worse than in the south. Huge swathes of the four southern provinces – Helmand, Kandahar, Uruzgan and Nimruz – were run by the drugs tsars as their own lawless fiefdoms.

With attention drifting away from Iraq, Tony Blair and George Bush were adamant that what they had started five years earlier in
Afghanistan should be properly concluded. At their insistence, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force’s remit was widened to take on the mountainous eastern provinces, then the western flatlands, and finally the barren deserts of the south.

The Dutch deployed to sparsely populated Uruzgan and Nimruz, and the Canadians to Kandahar. The British government volunteered to take on Helmand – the hardest nut of all to crack. It was the biggest province, and produced a staggering 42 per cent of Afghanistan’s total raw opium.

In the 1980s, the Soviet Army had failed to control Helmand with a whole motorised rifle division of 12,000 fighting soldiers. Twenty years later, we were going to try it with less than a third of that number. And of the 3,300 the British government initially sent, less than a quarter were fighting troops. The British Army has always relished a challenge. This one was called Operation Herrick.

Not even the most cynical military planners dared to imagine the viciousness and intensity with which the resurgent Taliban would oppose our arrival. Forming an unholy alliance with the drugs lords, the Taliban threw everything they had at the Paras of 16 Air Assault Brigade. Its small infantry force was spread out across five thinly manned and remote outpost bases across the north of the province – known as platoon houses or district centres.

A never-ending supply of holy warriors swarmed over the Pakistan border to fight alongside local guns for hire and launch wave after wave of attacks on the DCs at Sangin, Kajaki, Musa Qa’leh, Gereshk and Now Zad. Day and night, each was pounded with small arms, RPGs, rockets and mortars. Each turned into a mini Alamo.

The army had not seen fighting as sustained and desperate since Korea. It was as bad as anything thrown at either American or
British troops during the occupation of Iraq; and, a lot of the time, it was worse.

NATO’s intelligence about enemy strengths before we arrived was poor. They estimated 1,000 Taliban fighters spread across both the Helmand and Kandahar provinces. By August, the estimate for Helmand alone was upped to 10,000.

One of the greatest problems the Task Force faced was the distance it had to cover. At 275 miles long and 100 wide (a total of 23,000 square miles), Helmand is not much smaller than the Republic of Ireland. Ensuring every DC had enough ammunition, food and water was a logistical nightmare. At times some of the guys ran dangerously low; down to their last few hundred rounds and the emergency rations they carried in their webbing.

In September, the brigade reluctantly abandoned the most distant DC at Musa Qa’leh, more than fifty miles from Camp Bastion. It was too dangerous to land Chinooks anywhere near it, and a ground resupply couldn’t break through the besieging Taliban’s lines without a full on battalion-strength attack.

The guys holding the other four DCs just stuck it out with sheer grit and the odd Apache gunship in support. As the RSM of 3 Para declared with relish, ‘We’re paratroopers – we’re
supposed
to be surrounded.’ It was a hell of a feat, especially as so many of the lads were on their first operational tour.

It was all a bit of a far cry from the public aspirations of the man who signed the deployment paperwork, Defence Secretary John Reid. He told the House of Commons that he hoped the troops would come home having ‘not fired a single bullet’. He’d also somewhat optimistically termed the mission ‘nation building’.

Actually, between June and October 2006, the Paras and their supporting cap badges ended up firing a total of 450,000 bullets,
10,000 artillery shells and 6,500 mortar rounds. In addition, and between May and August 2006 alone, the sixteen Apache pilots of 656 Squadron put down 7,305 cannon rounds, 68 rockets and 11 Hellfire missiles. I don’t think it was quite what John Reid had in mind.

Our defiance came at a heavy price. A total of thirty-five servicemen were killed in that first six months: sixteen in combat, fourteen when a Nimrod MR2 spy plane crashed, four in accidents – and one committed suicide. A further 140 were wounded in action, forty-three of them seriously or very seriously. It all meant we didn’t have much time for nation building.

And there lay the real problem. It wasn’t just kinetic – we were also fighting a war of minds. We could carry on killing Taliban forever. But it wasn’t going to win over the local Afghan people in whose name we had come. We had to deliver them a better life, and soon. All we’d achieved so far was to turn their streets, orchards and fields into lethal battle grounds.

Most Helmandis were still perched on the fence, waiting in the time-honoured Afghan way to see which side looked like winning. British soldiers were welcomed wherever they went; there was little love for the Taliban. Yet if our presence made things worse, they’d cosy up to the other side soon enough.

The Taliban knew that too. They understood that reconstruction was pretty bloody hard with a war going on. There’s an old Afghan phrase their mullah leaders loved to quote: ‘They have the watches, we have the time.’ They didn’t need a spectacular knockout blow – just a constant, paralysing war of attrition.

The squadron’s first foray into Helmand had been quite something. I sat on my cot and wondered what this tour would bring. The Taliban were becoming more successful at killing us as time
moved on. They learned lessons quickly from each contact and adapted immediately. By sheer luck we hadn’t yet lost a helicopter but it was only a matter of time. They’d been getting better whilst I’d been planning my retirement. I’d be the one playing catch up, not them. I needed to be lucky every second I was in the air; they only needed to be lucky once. There were no two ways about it – for the first time in my whole military career, I was genuinely concerned that I might not come home alive.

‘You know what Billy? I’ve got butterflies.’

‘Yeah, right. Probably that Gurkha curry in the Kandahar cookhouse.’

Billy was not in a sympathetic mood. He was too busy hanging up his impossibly well-pressed uniforms.

There was no point letting it gnaw away at me; however I played it, what was for me wouldn’t pass me. I couldn’t wait to climb back into the cockpit and get stuck in again. I’d always loved being on operations, ever since my first Northern Ireland tour as a young Para.

The sixteen pilots in 656 Squadron could not have come from more diverse backgrounds. My route to the Apache cockpit had been one of the longest of all.

I was born and grew up in a seaside town in the North-East. It was a holiday resort for miners until package holidays were invented and the miners stopped coming. After that, most folk worked for the local steel factory and chemical works.

Dad was an engineering fitter at the chemical works, and Mum brought us up. My brother Greg was only thirteen months younger than me. We did everything together; we were known as the terrible twins. Other kids’ parents banned us from playing with them. No surprise really; we nicked our first milk float when we were three and four.

My parents’ unhappy marriage finally fell apart when I was eleven, and Mum wouldn’t let us live with Dad. Without a father’s firm hand, my teenage years descended into chaos. Greg and I ran riot. We always stuck up for each other, no matter what the consequences. One day when I was fourteen, Greg burst into my science class bawling his eyes out. ‘Ed, I smacked the RE teacher in the face,’
he tried to explain. ‘It wasn’t on purpose. He was taking the Mickey out of me…’

My science teacher, Mr Hastings, didn’t take kindly to his own class being interrupted in this fashion and leaped down the classroom to intervene. There were a few seconds of confusion as Greg clung onto my desk while Mr Hastings tried to heave him to the door. Greg wasn’t budging, so Mr Hastings hit Greg’s arm with the bottom of his fist to dislodge him. I flipped. I jumped up and launched myself into Mr Hastings’s midriff with both arms out-stretched. The teacher went head over heels across another desk, sending children, books and chairs flying. They all landed in a heap on the floor, but Greg and I didn’t look back, and sprinted all the way home.

It was the final straw. Both of us were expelled and sent to different schools. We were split up for the first time in our lives.

I missed my brother terribly. My new school was a rough one and when I was goaded I fought back. I spent most of my time there fighting all comers – alone. Six months into it, I started missing lessons. In my last year I rarely went at all.

Mum was too busy running a pub so I wasn’t missed at home. I’d often spend weeks away, sleeping wherever I liked. The woods were my favourite place, and I lived by stealing food and poaching fish to sell to local pubs. I was turning wild.

On my sixteenth birthday, I was old enough to choose who I lived with, and Dad was waiting with a big smile on his face. He straightened me out, forced me to use a knife and fork again, to keep myself clean, and eventually got me a metalworker’s apprenticeship.

I enjoyed training to be an engineer and wanted to be like Dad, but I hated the job. I was trapped indoors in a routine life I didn’t want. At night, I’d drink and fight.

Dad remarried and got the person he always deserved; I got three
new brothers as part of the deal. They were great lads and all of them joined the army. I’d found my way out.

Two months after my eighteenth birthday, I enlisted in the Parachute Regiment. I didn’t particularly want to be a soldier, and I only asked for the airborne because
The Paras
was on TV at the time. It looked like a good challenge.

‘You’ll never pass, son. You haven’t got what it takes,’ my dad said. It was a textbook case of reverse psychology, but I didn’t recognise it as such at the time. It gave me all the determination I needed to pass P Company.

I was posted to 2 Para. I got one hell of a kicking as a crow – military slang for a junior paratrooper – but everybody did in those days. It was the 1980s, and the battalion was full of hard men with droopy moustaches who’d fought at Goose Green during the Falklands War.

Once my bust nose, dislocated jaw, three broken ribs and split testicle had healed, I fell in love with life as a paratrooper – surprising everyone, myself the most. After a couple of years and a six-month combat tour to Enniskillen fighting the IRA, I won promotion to lance corporal.

But I was still an angry young man, and getting into too many fights. I never started them, but I always had to be the one to finish them. The red mist would descend and I could never back down. I even once flattened an RMP sergeant who wound me up on a train, and had to do fourteen days in the regimental nick.

After promotion to full corporal and with the promise of sergeant’s stripes if I could keep out of trouble, I began to take my military career a little more seriously. I wanted to challenge myself at the highest level, so I began to prepare for SAS selection.

Months of hard, self-imposed training followed, but my
ambitions came to a sudden end one night in Aldershot during a gruelling bicycle ride in the pouring rain. I’d let half the air out of the tyres to make the pedalling twice as hard. A Volvo clipped my handlebars on a main road, sending me careering across the road and under the wheels of an old man’s oncoming car. My head hit the bumper and my feet peeled round and went through the windscreen, before the bloke drove over my right arm and shoulder. My heart stopped in the ambulance on the way to hospital.

In the days that followed, I learned the true meaning of pain. During one operation I was handcuffed to a bed and a vice-like clamp was strapped around my haemorrhaging kidneys for half an hour to squeeze the blood out of them.

It was six months before I put on a uniform again and nine before I could run. I was no use to the Paras any more; my bust shoulder, spine, hips, knees and ankles could no longer bear any real weight. My front-line fighting career was at an end, and I was devastated. I had lost my purpose in life and was forced to abandon all my dreams of SAS selection. My gloom deepened as I contemplated my lack of a future – until a mate suggested the Army Air Corps. If I couldn’t fight on the front line, perhaps I could fly people to it instead. Perhaps I could even fly for the SAS.

Then came a stroke of luck – my doctor lost all my medical records. Suddenly, and against all expectations, I stood a chance of passing the Army Air Corps’ stringent medical with my battered body.

I was accepted, and came top of my class at flying school. I had to – it was my last chance. I loved flying and the freedom it gave me and I relished playing my part in battle formations. But I hated flying routine ass and trash flights, so whenever anything interesting came up, I went for it. It was always about the next challenge – it always has been.

I got a place on a reconnaissance squadron, flying Gazelles. Five years later, I began to fly for the SAS, hunting down war criminals in the Balkans. The work was amazing, the most exciting I’d ever done.

Something else happened in Bosnia. In late 2002, I met Emily. She was a nursing officer in the RAF. After a night out in the local town, I hitched a lift back to base in the back of the same Land Rover. In thick fog, the vehicle left the road, flipped and rolled down a bank into a muddy irrigation ditch. Emily was trapped in the back, under four feet of water. I pulled her out.

I went to see her in hospital the next day. I was single again – I was the proud father of two children by two previous relationships, but neither had worked out. Emily was a pretty blonde Scot, and as sharp as she was funny. She was way out of my league and we both knew it. By the end of the week, I’d decided I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.

But Emily wasn’t convinced. At least she was honest with me.

‘Listen Ed, I don’t date full stop. If I did date, I certainly wouldn’t date a Pongo. And If I did date a Pongo you can bet your life I wouldn’t date a
flyboy
Pongo. So why don’t you quit with your pride intact?’

‘Aha – so that’s not a no …’

It took some time, but eventually we became an item and have been together ever since. Emily’s forces background was both a good and a bad thing. It meant she knew the pressures of military life, and to expect long periods of separation. It also meant she knew the real risks of military flying, and the chances of me not coming home.

The British Army’s much hyped attack helicopter programme had been in the pipeline for years. In 2002, it finally came online.
Of course I had to be on it. It was the closest I could ever get to being in the front line again. I bent every rule in the book to make sure I was posted onto the very first Apache conversion course and Emily didn’t try to stop me. Before I got there, I read up everything I could about the amazing new machine.

The Apache AH64A was initially designed by Boeing for the US government in the 1980s for the giant battlefields of the Cold War. The Pentagon wanted something to take out Soviet armour the moment it rolled across the West German border.

Following the US military tradition of new aircraft honouring Indian tribes, the Apache was not just the next generation attack helicopter. It was the hunter-killer supreme for all future wars. Its surveillance capabilities far outstripped anything its predecessor the Bell AH1 ‘Huey’ Cobra had, and its destructive capability was without precedent.

It looked very different to any previous attack helicopter too. The smooth aerodynamic curves and contours of the Sixties and Seventies were replaced with the hard angles and mean edges of the very first anti-radar – or stealth – technology.

It was also larger: 49 ft 1 in. from the tip of its nose to the back of its tail, with its rotor blades reaching a further 8 ft. It stood 17 ft 6 in. tall and 16 ft 4 in. wide, and weighed 23,000 lb fully laden – 10.4 tonnes, or 140 fully grown men.

Its angular shape wasn’t the Apache’s only stealth quality. It had four rotor blades rather than two, allowing it to turn at half the speed – five revolutions per second – and thus with half the noise to generate the same lift as the traditional two-bladed helicopters like the great thumping Hueys of the Vietnam War. Each blade’s high-tech design made the aircraft quieter still. Instead of
hammering the air like the Chinook, Apache blades sliced through it, giving the gunship its trademark low-pitched growl.

It also gave off the lowest heat signature of any helicopter built. Though the engine burned fuel at 800 degrees celsius, a powerful cooling system meant you wouldn’t even burn your hand if you pressed it against the exhaust. That seriously hindered a heat-seeking missile’s ability to track it. To mask more heat, its skin was coated with special paint that reflected less light too.

When incoming fire did hit the Apache, its ingenious design meant it could withstand a remarkable amount of it – including a 23-mm high explosive round. A US Apache in Iraq even once took a direct hit from a shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile, shredding its starboard engine and wing and leaving its rotor blades in tatters. It still managed to return fire, kill its attackers and make it back to base.

What went on inside the aircraft was cleverer still. Thirteen kilometres of electric wiring linked the avionics, engines, visual aids and weapons systems run by a myriad of on-board computers which monitored every tiny electronic pulse.

Most impressive of all the Apache’s cutting edge technology was how it found its prey. Its Target Acquisition and Designation Sight system was made up of an array of cameras housed in a double-headed nose cone that looked like a pair of giant insect eyes. Its 127-times-magnification day TV camera could read a car number plate 4.2 kilometres away. At night, the thermal camera was so powerful it could identify a human form from a distance of four kilometres, and spots of blood on the ground from a kilometre up.

Then there was the Apache’s punch. The aircraft’s three weapons systems struck with varying degrees of power, speed and precision, depending on the desired target. The 30-mm M230 cannon under
the Apache’s belly was best for individual targets, firing ten High Explosive Dual Purpose rounds a second to an accuracy of within three metres. Their armour-piercing tips made light work of Armoured Personnel Carriers, vehicles and buildings. Their bodies fragmented on impact just like a large grenade, throwing out hundreds of sharp red-hot pieces of metal. But duality came from the incendiary charge; once it had penetrated or fragged the target, it set it alight. The helicopter’s magazine packed up to 1,160 of them, fired in bursts of 10, 20, 50, 100 – or all at once.

Rockets were its optimum area weapon for hitting infantry, dismounted or in vehicles. A maximum of seventy-six could be loaded into up to four CRV7 rocket pods on the weapons pylons, hung from the stubby wings either side of the aircraft. There were two types of rockets: the Flechette, an anti-personnel / vehicle weapon, containing eighty five-inch-long Tungsten darts; and the HEISAP for buildings, vehicles or ships. Its kinetic penetrating head drove through up to half an inch of steel, and the body of the projectile contained an explosive zirconium incendiary that stuck to light alloys and combustibles, torching them.

Finally, thick-walled buildings and fast moving armour were taken out with our main anti-tank weapon, the Semi-Active Laser Hellfire II air-to-ground missile. Each Apache could carry up to sixteen of them, mounted on four rails under the wings. Laser guided from the cockpit for pinpoint accuracy, its 20-lb high explosive and dual shaped charge warhead packed a 5 million-lb-per-square-inch punch on impact – defeating all known armour.