Ed Macy - Hellfire

Jon and I grabbed our bags and prepared to enter our new home, but before we got as far as the door a gust of wind, stoked by the fires of hell, blew through, bringing with it a smell that eclipsed anything we’d experienced so far.

With my hand clamped over my face, I asked Pat again: ‘What the fuck was that?’ And this time, to shut me up, he offered to show me.

After threading our way through several alleyways we found ourselves facing a huge circular shit-pit. The giant 150-metre pond – filled with gravel and God knew what else, and fed by a giant revolving arm – was right next to our accommodation block. It was that fucking big we could spot it on Google Earth before the camp itself.

There was a huge sign:

‘So now you know,’ Pat said, with a resigned shrug. ‘Either of you sleepwalk?’

Safely inside the hut, though still not entirely removed from the smell, we were led to our room. I was greeted by Billy and Mick, an old ex-Para mate, now the Regimental QHI.

‘Ed, Jon,’ Billy said cheerily from the edge of his bed, to the right of the now firmly closed door. ‘Come and wave hello to Andrea.’

‘Are you delusional?’ I asked. Andrea was Billy’s wife.

Billy pulled a face. Only then did I notice the laptop beside him. ‘She’s on MSN, you idiot.’

I dropped my bags and peered around the edge of the screen. Andrea beamed at me. She gave me a fuzzy wave then the ticker tape flashed.

‘Hi Ed.’

I leaned over Billy.

‘Hi Andrea.’

While Billy and Andrea cooed sweet nothings at each other, Jon and I settled ourselves in. The room was cool and comfortable, with only the merest hint of Eau de Shite to spoil the ambience. There were Glade air fresheners everywhere. My bed was back left; Jon’s back right.

When Billy had finished his chat, he and Mick filled us in on the latest news. Although the squadron hadn’t yet fired a shot in anger, it had loosed off a Hellfire. The day before, a French Special Forces convoy had been ambushed – they’d suffered one KIA, two MIAs and had been forced to abandon three vehicles in the desert. One of them, ironically, had been stuffed full of Electronic Counter Measures (ECM) equipment. It could not fall into enemy hands, so Pat had been dispatched to take it out with a Hellfire and Chris finished it off with a hundred rounds of 30 mil. Other than that, in the wake of them dodging RPGs and Chris using up two of his nine lives, things had settled down a bit – apart from the odd bit of bitching that some of the guys were getting more flying hours than others.

Billy then said he had to nip out, but suggested I got online to tell Emily I’d arrived safely.

Ten minutes later, my girl’s face crackled into view on the screen of Billy’s laptop.

She took one look at me and promptly burst into tears.

Knowing that something radical was required, I stuck my hands up on my head and moosed her.

How to explain ‘moosing’?

Some years earlier there had been a dare going round the squadron. In the midst of a shag, the bloke had to place his thumbs on his forehead, fingers upright and splayed like antlers, then take a look at himself in the mirror. That was it. The trick was not to get caught; the girl was never supposed to find out.

I failed dismally, and had a great deal of explaining to do. Emily found it so funny that, from then on, we used it as our special greeting. If I was out and about and happened to spot her, I’d moose her and she me.

Through the graininess of the connection, I saw her raise her hands to her head, give me a couple of shaky antlers, and break into a brave smile.

I moosed her back and then, together, we both pressed the button that severed the connection.

There are times when antlers speak louder than words.

MAY 2006

Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan

Work had always kept me focused and at KAF there was a hell of a lot of it to be done. There were six Apaches in-theatre and all needed time, love and attention to get them into full operational shape. The Apaches had been flown to Afghanistan in RAF C-17 transporters – giant four-engined aircraft that reminded me of International Rescue’s lumbering Thunderbird 2 – and then offloaded and reassembled. Once they were back together again, they had to be tested on the ground then airtested before they were deemed safe enough to fly and ready to fight the Taliban.

While Jon and I had been in the air between the UK and Afghanistan, the first Apaches had flown out to Camp Bastion. The CO’s plan in the early days was to keep half the aircraft stationed at Bastion and the remainder at KAF, because you never quite knew where the threat was going to develop next. As Squadron Weapons Officer, my focus was now on ensuring that the aircraft could fight as well as fly and I’d already heard there were problems. The rockets had proven horrendously inaccurate when tested on a nearby range, but to anyone who knew the foibles of that particular weapon system when coupled to the Apache, it didn’t come as a huge surprise.

I’d spoken to the IPT about it after Oman. The Integrated Project Team – a multi-disciplinary band of experts drawn from the armed services, the UK MoD and the defence industry – was brought together in the 1990s to bring weapons into service and maintain them as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.

US Hydra rockets were so inaccurate that American Apache crews didn’t generally fire theirs at any targets in excess of 1,000 metres. We used different rockets, but shared some of the same problems. If the pod wasn’t correctly aligned, you could get a wide dispersal of rockets – they could go low and to the right from one pod and high and left from the other. When I broached this with the IPT, they gave me a pat on the back and told me to stop fussing because the CRV7 rocket was an ‘area weapon’, to which I’d replied: ‘Yeah, but which area?’ I didn’t want to be responsible for a blue-on-blue – a friendly fire incident – our worst nightmare.

The cannons also needed to be aligned correctly to each Apache airframe. They slipped out of alignment for a variety of reasons and needed, every so often, to undergo ‘dynamic harmonisation’ – a little like getting the wheels of your car balanced down at Kwik Fit.

I’d slept badly; it hadn’t helped that Mick had snored like a pig all night and KAF still stank like a sewer. But the cookhouse brightened my day; it served some of the best food I’d ever eaten in a military camp.

Jon, Billy and I strolled over to the Joint Helicopter Force Afghanistan (JHF(A)) Headquarters, a Nissen hut where the CO and his team were busy working out what needed to be done to bring the squadron up to ramming speed. With Apaches still rolling off C-17s inbound from the UK, the priority was still to ensure the aircraft were performing as they were supposed to after reassembly.

The aircraft were put together by the technicians in concrete bays, protected by rows of Hesco Bastion barricades, a kilometre away, close to the north threshold of KAF’s main runway. The five given over to our aircraft sat in the full glare of the Afghan sun; temperatures routinely reached forty-seven degrees, although working in the cockpit, where the rays were magnified, they generally exceeded fifty.

Over the next week, the race was on to get the aircraft ready before the Taliban got busy again. ‘Hot and high’ was bad news and Afghanistan had both – heat that could fry your brains and mountains that stretched towards the sky.

Helicopters hate heat and most do not perform well at altitude. We used a temperature and pressure chart to come up with a daily ‘density altitude’ that we adjusted according to the conditions. Thank God for the 30 per cent additional power our British Apaches got from their Rolls-Royce engines. The Americans had to remove the Longbow radar from their Apaches and still lacked the power to get above 10,000 feet with a full range of weapons.