Ed Macy - Apache

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.