Ed Macy - Apache

‘Right,’ the Boss announced, playing master of ceremonies. ‘These are the rules: the name has to be relevant to something you’ve done or are famous for. It has to be funny, but it can’t be offensive because we can’t go around shouting obscenities over the radio. Most importantly, it has to sound reasonably polite – so I can explain it away to a visiting VIP. I can’t have the general staff thinking we’re all twats. Okay Billy, you’re first. Out you go.’

The pilot being named wasn’t allowed to play any part in the process. Billy’s was quite quick. As soon as someone opened up with the A-Team theme tune – ‘Dur, da, dur, duuurrr, dur duuuuurrr’ – we all got it.

The Boss called Billy back in. ‘Okay Billy. You are “The Face”. Can you work it out?’

Billy just looked puzzled, so Carl helped him out.

‘You’re The Face for two reasons. First, because you always get the face time with the visiting big cheeses.’

‘No, that’s not always true.’

‘Yes it bloody well is,’ the Boss retorted. ‘Do you want me to give you a list?’

Billy grinned. ‘Well, you’ve either got it or you haven’t.’

‘Well said. That’s the polite reason. The real one is because only you think you’re a pretty boy.’

Billy had kippered himself. Carl was ejected next. Billy slipped into the comfy chair he had just vacated, blocking two other pilots. ‘Too slow, gentlemen.’

Carl took longer. Unfortunately for him, there were quite a few suggestions.

‘I’ve got one, but I can’t remember his name,’ the Boss said. ‘Borat’s producer from his Kazakhstan film. You know, the great fat bloke who puts his horrible hairy arse in Borat’s face?’ Despite raucous laughter, it was rejected as too cruel.

‘Okay, what about Cartman from South Park then?’ suggested Geordie, a member of 1 Flight and the squadron’s Combat Search and Rescue Officer. He adopted a cod American accent: ‘ Why the fuck not? Fuck, fuckety, fuck, fuck, fuck .’

But Tony had had a bolt of inspiration. He was a back-seater on 3 Flight, the team with whom we worked closest. We sometimes doubled up on missions, and our tents were next door to each other.

‘I’ve got it! Ewok out of Star Wars . He’s small, strange and hairy, and he’s the EWO – the Electronic Warfare Officer.’

It was perfect. Then it was Nick’s turn.

Nick was another very talented young captain, like Charlotte. They were close friends, having gone to university together, and they flew alongside each other as the two front-seaters on 3 Flight.

Devilishly good looking, with blond hair and blue eyes and a mouth full of Hollywood teeth, the Army Air Corps had never had more of a pin-up than Captain Nick. He’d won the Sword of Honour at Sandhurst, went on to become the first pilot ever to go through training directly onto the Apache, and won the Corps’ own highly coveted Sword of Excellence while he was at it. Not a bad CV. He’d become a general one day, if he stayed in the army. He had the talent. More importantly, he had the luck.

Women melted in front of Nick’s charm and old-fashioned chivalry. He left a string of them utterly broken-hearted wherever he went. He was always good humoured, never swore, and didn’t like pornography.

I liked Nick a lot. It was hard not to. We trained on the Apache together – he was another of the sixteen originals and we’d been through the first tour together too. As a newish pilot, Nick was always bursting with enthusiasm and bounding around the place like an overexcited spaniel. He’d take the odd risk in his constant drive to better himself – which landed him in a few scrapes – but he always got away with it.

‘Rover?’

‘Lassie?’

‘How about Bonnie?’ Charlotte piped up. ‘As in Bonnie Tyler. Remember I Need a Hero ?’

During the first tour, Nick just happened to be the first pilot that visiting Sun journalist Tom Newton Dunn collared for an interview. An article and photo duly appeared in the next day’s paper under the headline ‘Hero Nick’. He’d got a shed-load of abuse for that. We made sure it lasted weeks, but it didn’t faze Nick for a second.

‘You know, Mr M,’ he told me one day. ‘Some of us have got the looks, and some haven’t. I didn’t see The Sun chasing you too hard…’

Nick became Bonnie. Charlotte came next.

There had always been a strong suspicion that some of the blondeness came out of a bottle.

‘This might be a bit close to the bone,’ one of the other pilots began. ‘But what about Cuffs?’

There was a baffled silence.

‘Come on you lot. First because she’s, you know… Posh.’

‘Very clever. And?’

‘Well, it’s just possible that her collar doesn’t match them…’

That brought the house down. The Boss plumped for Posh, but she was always Cuffs to the rest of us.

Geordie was Vidal, on account of the fact that he had always driven hairdressers’ cars, a convertible Saab or an Audi TT – and that he was also slightly thinning on top.

Geordie was an honorary member of HQ Flight really. He often filled in for the Boss when he was called away to meetings. Everybody liked him. He was a typical Newcastle lad with a quick wit and a razor-sharp tongue. All of his sentences ended with ‘like’, and as far as Geordie was concerned, everyone was a ‘canny lad, like’.

Despite being a staff sergeant and well into his thirties, his lifestyle hadn’t changed since he was nineteen. Commitment wasn’t his bag – he never had a girlfriend for more than five minutes. He loved nothing more than pissing it up with his mates and pulling birds in the Toon on a Saturday night. And he’d cane it up the motorway to Newcastle in his soft top every weekend to do exactly that, music blaring and his thinning blond hair blowing in the wind. He was one of life’s perennial good blokes and we’d been mates for ever.

In the air, though, Geordie was as serious as they came, and one of the very best pilots in the Army Air Corps – his long-held place on the Blue Eagles Display Team testified to that.

Geordie’s sidekick was Tony. They were close buddies and spent every spare minute shooting out wisecracks as a double act. A cheeky chappie cockney, Tony was just as quick-witted as Geordie, and a staff sergeant too. He was also the shortest pilot on the squadron and had big ears, closely cropped dark hair and a small forehead. Not even Tony would deny that he looked uncannily like a chimp. It wasn’t hard to crack his callsign.

‘Spank, as in Spank the Monkey,’ someone suggested.

The OC rejected it as too crude, so he was renamed Darwin, because he was the missing link.

The final member of 3 Flight was Jim, a WO1 well into his forties. He was the granddad of the squadron. He’d also flown for the SAS, and was a quiet and unassuming man who often kept his own company. Out of work, he had two obsessions. The first was eating healthily and regularly. If Jim missed a meal, he’d go man down. It was that serious. When he checked in to order up a rearm on a sortie, he was often heard to say, ‘One Hellfire, 60 thirty Mike Mike, and five late meals with fruit please,’ so he could have an extra one for himself.

He was also the Grand Master of the Internet – to the point that it would send people mad because they could never get on the terminal. God knows what he did online for so long, but he loved it.

‘How about FOG?’ Tony said. ‘Food or Google. If he’s not doing one, he’s doing the other.’

‘And?’

‘Well he’s a Fucking Old Guy isn’t he?’

Billy and I came up with ‘Trigger’ for the Boss. He was the fastest in the squadron and had the MBE to prove it. He was also completely incompetent when it came to texting. His replies always carried half of the original message – possibly because his fingers were too big for the keyboard. But we knew he hadn’t found the ‘Clear Text’ button and that made him as thick as Trigger from Only Fools and Horses .