Ed Macy - Apache

‘Not bad lads. I’ve got to admit it, not at all bad.’ He broke into a smile. ‘I hear you were put to shame by a bird, though.’

I caught sight of the Boss, walking straight towards us. Thank God we’d got the fuel in …

A Chinook thumped past over his left shoulder, on its way to the hospital landing site. Must have been Mathew. It was odd that the Boss had come down to the flight line to see us, even today. He was too busy for that. His brow was heavily furrowed and he looked like he had the weight of an elephant on each shoulder.

I gave him a smile, but I didn’t get one back. When he saw my hands he stopped short and stared at them. I looked down too and realised they were still stained with Mathew’s blood.

He nodded at them. ‘You all right?’

‘Yeah, it’s not mine.’ I gave him a big thumbs up as reassurance.

Trigger’s expression still didn’t change. His clear blue eyes burned with a peculiar intensity. ‘Look, I just want you to know that I’m backing all four of you – no matter what happens next.’

There was a silence. I was bewildered. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The CO has just got in from Kandahar on a Lynx,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you up top.’

He turned and walked away.

Carl signed in the aircraft while I went to wash Mathew’s blood off my hands.

I sat on the lid of a missile box in the bright sun and poured water from a jerrycan. I couldn’t bring myself to use the Portaloo handscrub.

I tried to fathom what the hell was going on. It couldn’t have been about our fuel levels – Trigger would have understood, given the circumstances. I had never seen him that bothered before. And we weren’t expecting the CO in Bastion today…

I joined Carl inside the Groundies’ hangar. We’d been delayed on the flight line while a technician examined my broken FLIR camera, so the others had gone ahead. We were both locked in thought. Okay, we’d broken a few rules that day. But anything we’d done wrong had been whilst trying to do something right. Our problem was that the road to hell was paved with good intentions.

The downside of the rescue didn’t bear thinking about. If both Apaches had gone down on the way out of the fort, we’d have been close to double figures dead. The very thought of that would have seriously scared a lot of important people, and the four of us had pushed hardest for the mission throughout. After twenty-two years in the army I knew only too well that a little hindsight could be a very dangerous thing. The more I thought about it, the more I understood what Trigger must have meant. Our actions were now going to be judged in the cold light of day, and it could go either way.

I swung open the door of my locker. The word ‘angel’ was still scrawled across the inside of it in black marker as a reminder not to leave home without her. Carl was absorbed in his own little ritual: he pulled a letter from his wife out of a drawer and gave it a kiss. My angel deserved one too, after this morning. I tore open the Velcro seal of my right breast pocket and dug in my hand. I could only feel my war ID card.

‘Mate, take a look in here and see if you can find my angel, will you?’

He peered in and shook his head. We scanned the smooth concrete floor beneath our feet, but there was no sign of her there either. My throat went dry. How would I tell Emily? She’d think it was an omen; that I’d die on my very next flight.

‘This is no joking matter,’ Carl said. ‘We might need her when the CO gets hold of us…’

He put a hand on my shoulder. His expression told me that he knew this was no time to piss about. ‘Shoot a basket for the brews?’

I hesitated for a moment, re-checking my pocket. Still nothing.

‘Let’s do it,’ I replied.

It was another of our sacred post-mission rituals, and nobody was going to stop us doing it. Carl won.

He drove us up to the JHF Ops tent in the Land Rover he had parked by the hangar five hours earlier. Billy and Geordie were already there, and neither could bring themselves to meet my eye. So they’d picked up the vibe too. Nobody in the room was saying much.

Trigger walked in. The look on his face was completely impenetrable. I had a bad feeling about this. ‘Can you four go through to the back, please? I’ll be in with the CO shortly.’

We made our way out of the tent and into the secure Tactical Planning Facility.

‘Make us that brew, Piss Boy,’ Carl said, in a bid to break the tension.

‘Yeah, make that a double, Piss Boy,’ Geordie chipped in. ‘You were also last back from the fort.’

But that was the end of the banter. I made four coffees in silence. Trigger reappeared as I handed them round, followed by the Commanding Officer. Trigger closed the door behind them. It was the first time I’d seen Colonel Sexton since his arrival in Afghanistan two weeks earlier.

‘Welcome to Bastion, sir.’

The temperature in the room dropped by ten degrees.

‘It’s the second time I’ve been here.’

The four of us sat in a row on the comfy seats. Trigger pulled up a couple of hard plastic chairs and he and Colonel Sexton took their places opposite us. As always, the Colonel looked freshly scrubbed. His dark, perfectly parted hair gleamed under the neon lights.

‘Right, gentlemen…’

He paused to eyeball each of us individually. I suddenly knew how those poor bloody apprentices must feel when Sir Alan Sugar was about to tell them: ‘You’re fired…’

‘What the FUCK were you doing?’

We stared at him in stunned silence.

‘You have advertised to the wider army a capability we do not have. People are now going to expect that this is a service we offer…’

He slowed right down, making every word sound like a threat.

‘I’m not sure that you are aware of the gravity of your actions. People are going to come down on us from a great height. The JHC and the Directorate are going to want some answers.’

Hindsight was kicking in. Shit . It was going to go against us.

‘You decided that you would break the RTS, which clearly states what you can and can’t do. Tell me, where in the RTS does it say that untrained troops can use this procedure? It is an emergency procedure, for aircrew only.’

This went against every principle I have ever stood for. How could we have one rule for us, and one for everyone else?

‘You decided that you would ignore the RTS. Who here has done this for real? Who here has trained for this? Those marines were not trained for this. They were just hanging off the side.’

Billy was the first to tiptoe across this minefield. ‘They were strapped on sir. Well, they were o–’

‘ HOW were they strapped on?’

I kept my voice as even as possible. ‘I showed each one of them the correct method, sir.’

He ignored me.

‘So, without any training and with a total disregard for the RTS, you decided to strap men to an aircraft. What would have happened if one of them had fallen off?’

His dark, slightly hooded eyes flashed dangerously. No one answered. We were starting to realise that there would be no ‘well done’.

‘You flew into an enemy stronghold! What would have happened if one of your aircraft had been shot down? Do you realise the implications of the Taliban parading round with an Apache?’

You could have cut the silence that followed with a knife. But the Colonel still hadn’t finished.

‘I simply cannot believe you put two £40-million helicopters in harm’s way, in a vain attempt to save someone that was already dead.’