Ed Macy - Apache

By nightfall that day, the Union Flag over the JOC had been lowered to half mast. The T1 had become a T4. Marine Jonathan Wigley was pronounced dead in Camp Bastion’s field hospital; a mem-ber of Zulu Company, 45 Commando, he was twenty-one years old.

The Apache force was brought in on Operation Glacier two days later. We hadn’t heard about it before, because we hadn’t needed to. Like all covert operations, it was kept very hush hush. The brigade were only bringing us into the loop now because they needed our help.

Colonel Magowan’s southern battlegroup had been doing a lot more than just holding Garmsir. And they’d be doing it for a month already.

‘They’ve got a few jobs for us.’ Our Ops Officer briefed out the basics of the plan. ‘And they will take priority over all other Deliberate Taskings.’

Everything was being thrown at Operation Glacier, because it was the most ambitious plan the Helmand Task Force had drawn up since our arrival. As far back as early November, it had been decided that Garmsir could not be held successfully by British grit alone – however steely it was proving. The periodic counter-attacks were only cutting off a few Taliban snakeheads, and they soon grew back.

We needed to put a 7.62-mm high-velocity bullet straight through Medusa’s temple. That meant hitting the Taliban where it really hurt: smashing the long underbelly of their southern supply chain. They came to have a crack at us from Kandahar in the east, and the mountains of Uruzgan in the north. But the Taliban’s main supply route into Helmand was from the Pakistani border in the south.

Not only would severing it reduce the pressure on Garmsir, it would also reduce the flow of men and arms to the other four contested locations, impairing the Taliban’s operations across the province: up to five birds killed – or at least badly winged – with one big stone. Of course, the Taliban would eventually recover and establish a new MSR, but that would take them time – and time is what the Task Force was most keen to buy. The harder the enemy MSR was hit, the longer it would take to rebuild.

Operation Glacier had two stages: quiet and then noisy. The first was a thorough and painstaking reconnaissance of the roads they used, the places they stopped to rest, their supply dumps and command centres. Their entire southern logistical structure had to be analysed piece by piece. Concentrations of enemy fighters were the most prized targets. Only once the main concentration points had been acquired would Brigadier Jerry Thomas give the order for them to be destroyed; methodically, one after the other, and with a massive display of force. The quiet reconnaissance stage was expected to take around two months. Nothing was likely to go noisy until January. Or so we were told.

It had been no coincidence that Magowan’s Information Exploitation Battlegroup had been given Helmand’s southern stretch as their area of operations. The brigadier had obviously had a pretty good idea of what he wanted to achieve down there from the moment he arrived. The battlegroup was structured as a highly advanced recce unit, pulling together under Colonel Magowan’s command all the intelligence gathering formations the brigade had: 45 Commando’s lightly armed and highly mobile Recce Troop, C Squadron of the Light Dragoons in their armoured Scimitars, the Brigade Reconnaissance Force – the marines in-house Special Forces – and Y Troop, the expert signallers who eavesdropped on the enemy’s communications. As his muscle when he needed it, he also had two regular Royal Marine rifle companies: 42 Commando’s India Company and 45 Commando’s Zulu Company.

The units had been discreetly sent out to track even further south of Garmsir. They would come off the desert into the Green Zone’s fringes, and probe for any reaction. Some areas were quiet, others a hive of Taliban activity. They would never stay in one place long enough to give the enemy the impression they had any special interest in it. Instead, everything they witnessed was logged. If the Taliban had engaged them or they had spotted sentries, it was pinged as a hot spot and an eavesdropping station was set up to intercept all radio transmissions and phone calls.

Magowan didn’t just have the use of his own troops. Every asset in the UK inventory had been laid at his battlegroup’s disposal, from SBS teams specialising in close-target reconnaissance to aerial drones and a Nimrod MR2 spy plane. Fitted with a high-tech surveillance suite, the ageing jet followed vehicle and troop movements from 25,000 feet, for many hours and over hundreds of miles, totally unseen. Even the national intelligence agencies, MI6 and GCHQ, were tapped up for any SigInt or HumInt which might be of use.

‘The operation has made some good progress so far,’ the Ops Officer told us. ‘They’ve picked up a lot more than they expected to by this stage. They’ve got some valuable int hits on how the Tier Two fighters come in; to be frank – it’s because there are so bloody many of them.’

Huge numbers were coming through from Pakistan. They passed over the border at Baram Chah, a lawless opium trading town that straddled both countries. From there, they would be split into groups of three or four to avoid detection, put into single Toyota 4x4s, and driven at speed across the desert until they hit the Green Zone. The Helmand River ran from north to south until it bent west sixty klicks south of Garmsir into what we called ‘the fish hook’, and swept on into Nimruz. It was somewhere north of the fish hook that the Toyotas deposited the new combatants and the Green Zone MSR began. The exact location had yet to be pinpointed because the recce units hadn’t got down that far – but the battlegroup was confident it was only a question of time. We were impressed. It was a hell of an operation.

‘So where do we come in?’ Billy said. ‘Skip to the chase, sir – the suspense is killing me.’

‘Because we’re a bit too noisy to do masses of stand-off recce and we’ve got enough on our plates already, our bit kicks in with Stage Two. It looks like we’re getting written in big time for the kinetic assaults.’

There were grunts of approval from every attack pilot in the room.

‘But there are one or two little tasks they’ve asked for us to help with during Stage One as well…’

HQ Flight was given an Op Glacier job on our next Deliberate Tasking shift. The Brigade Reconnaissance Force had asked for Apache close air support for a tricky little spot fifteen kilometres south of Garmsir on the eastern edge of the Green Zone. They had some good intelligence that the place was a major Taliban hot spot. But the vegetation was particularly thick there, so they had to go in close to verify and pin down the enemy’s exact location. If it went badly for them and they got smacked, they wanted us to steam in and sort it out.

We were asked to go down late morning and stand off five klicks into the Red Desert so as not to give the game away. If the Taliban heard us clattering over them, they’d immediately go to ground.

I’d finally managed to wrestle the front seat back from Trigger, so I was mission commander for the sortie. It was a forty-five minute trip from Bastion, giving us about an hour on station.

We arrived at our desert spot and I checked in with their JTAC, Knight Rider Five Five. The Brigade Recce Force (BRF) had chosen their own callsign as well: they were clearly Hoff fans. They gave us their grid, and we pinged them 700 metres from the Green Zone, in a convoy of six WMIK Land Rovers and Pinzgauer trucks – a light, manoeuvrable and well-armed force, but without any protection when the rounds started coming in.

‘Ugly Five One, Knight Rider Five Five. Here’s the plan. We don’t want to go into the Green Zone because we think we’ll get cut up. We’re going to try and entice the Taliban to take a shot at us by going up on a ridgeline just before the Zone starts.’