Ed Macy: Apache

In the months before we were first sent to Afghanistan, some of the top brass were quite sensitive about classifying the Apache as a killing machine. They didn’t really like us to talk about it, despite the fact we were walking around with a big fuck-off attack helicopter badge on our arms. God knew what they thought we were going to do when we got there.

To me it was breathtakingly simple. Attack pilots didn’t deliver soup. We didn’t help old ladies across the road, and we didn’t shoot out lollipops. Our main battle function was to close with the enemy and kill them.

Snipers and Apache pilots were the only two combatants to get a detailed look at the face of the man they were about to kill. Nine times out of ten, we’d watch them in close-up on a five-inch-square screen before we pulled the trigger. It was no different to a sniper fixing his quarry in the sights of his bolt action rifle until the optimum moment to engage. We shared the same mindset: the mindset of a professional assassin.

The first sixteen of us qualified in October 2004, allowing 656 Squadron to be declared an Initial Operating Capability – a viable strike force, but unable to sustain prolonged operations. On 5 May 2006, the squadron deployed to Afghanistan, and we were finally declared ready to fight as a battlegroup – six days into the deployment.

The Apache force arrived a month after the rest of the brigade, and none of the ground commanders really knew what to do with us at first. Years late and way over budget, the Apache programme had been derided as a white elephant by everyone in the military – an overpriced Cold War glamour machine of little practical worth in a twenty-first-century close combat counter-insurgency. They sent us out on missions anyway, because we were there. Then we were called to our first firefight – and we showed what we could do.

Within a few weeks, they were converted. So much so that 3 Para’s Commanding Officer often refused to allow his men out of their platoon houses unless they had an Apache above them.

We proved the aircraft was phenomenally good at close – sometimes very close – air support, swiftly overtaking the Harrier as the troops’ aircraft of choice. We were the Paras’ big brother; we turned up and immediately turned the tables on the bullies picking on them. Soon, the lads on the ground began to refer to us as ‘the muscle’. ‘Things were looking pretty shitty until the muscle turned up,’ was a regular refrain in the cookhouse.

For us, the mad summer was one constant rush between one under fire platoon house to another besieged district centre. At times, the job felt like playing the Whack-A-Mole game at the fair; the one where you never know which of the multiple holes the little bugger will pop out of first. You have to thump it quick with a mallet, but as soon as you have, another pops up from another hole. If you don’t keep on smashing them hard, you lose.

On a few occasions we almost did lose. I was on the phone home when we got the Broken Arrow call from Now Zad. Broken Arrow is an emergency call for assistance from any available aircraft. It meant the platoon house was in the process of being overrun. We got up there to find the company of Royal Fusiliers in a grenade fight with the Taliban at their walls.

Our major weakness was a limited play time. Our fuel and weapons load would always run out eventually, and then we had to go back to base or get relieved by another Apache pair.

Sometimes all we had to do was turn up. The enemy had learned to fear us. ‘When the Mosquitoes come, stay underground,’ Taliban commanders were overheard telling their men. But most of the time they fought on regardless.

I must have been in twenty different battles on that first tour; some a few minutes long, others lasting for hours. Yet despite all of that, there I was, sitting on my cot at the start of the second tour pondering my destiny.

It wasn’t that I was afraid of dying. After twenty-two and a half years of close scrapes all over the world, I’d come close to rolling a number seven several times – not least in Aldershot. And I’d believed for a long time that if your number was up, it was up – there was no point in fussing about it. What I was really bothered about was dying now .

I’d got away with the first tour, and that was supposed to be it for me. I just couldn’t help thinking that it would be a crying shame if I checked out now, minutes before I was about to leave. I’d been a bad boy in my past, and got away with all of that too. Maybe it was my turn next: fate, karma, Sod’s Law, Murphy’s Law; or just plain old tough shit – call it what you will. All I knew was that one bloke only gets a certain amount of luck in any one life, and my lucky bag should have been nigh on empty.

I didn’t tell Emily about any of this. Instead, I quietly upped my life insurance to the maximum, updated my will and ensured everything was in order for her and my kids if I didn’t come back.

But Emily had her own worries. Not long before I left for the second tour, we’d agreed to start a family together. We’d been together for years, she was thirty-four and the time felt right. I hadn’t realised how much the decision had affected her.

On my last night, Emily made me promise not to do anything stupid. It was a promise that I told her I had every intention of keeping – and I meant it. Then she gave me a tiny little good luck charm, a silver angel the size of a postage stamp.

‘Have it on you always, it’ll keep you safe,’ she said.

I burst out laughing. She burst into tears.

So I carried it in my top right breast pocket which was double sealed with buttons and Velcro. It went everywhere I went – as much from guilt as superstition… to start with, anyway.

There was an awful lot to be done in the five days before 664 Squadron left. Our handover had to be seamless. It was vital that the quality of Apache support to the guys on the ground wasn’t affected. There were lessons to be learned from their tour; we had to adapt to all the procedural changes and familiarise ourselves with any aircraft issues that might have cropped up after three more months of hard combat.

There were some nervous people in London. An awful lot of money had been spent on the Apache and the last thing they wanted was for us to break one in less than a year of ops. Because it was so new, the procurement pencil-necks back at the MoD watched us like hawks.

The MoD had given us an encyclopaedic document known as the Release to Service which told us what we were and were not allowed to do with the aircraft. If any pilot broke any of the RTS rules – in the air or on the ground – he would be investigated. If he was found to have broken them deliberately, he would be removed from flying duties – permanently.

As Mr Sky Cop, the flying regs were poor old Billy’s bag. I didn’t envy him the responsibility, but it was good wind-up material.

‘I take it looping the Apache is still out this tour is it, Billy?’

‘Don’t even think about it. You’re only an average pilot, remember.’ Then, under his breath but loud enough for us to hear: ‘Unlike me.’

‘I suppose a barrel roll or two is out the question too?’

While Billy exchanged notes with 664’s QHI, I ironed out the weapons systems’ nuances with their Weapons Officer. I also signed for the gun tape laptop, on which recordings of all our weapons releases were stored. The gun tape laptop was kept in a special safe in the Joint Helicopter Force Forward office. A lot of the material on it was highly classified. ‘Kill TV’ could be really damaging to us if it fell into the wrong hands. Something stuck on YouTube under a provocative headline could make us look like war criminals.