Ed Macy - Hellfire

We passed through sixty feet and I made the big mistake of glancing down to my left.

The dust was blowing away from me in rivulets – the ground, wherever it was, looked as if it had turned to liquid. I had lost all sense of terra firma below me. Anything and everything that represented solidity had disappeared from view and been replaced by a rippling carpet of liquid mush. This sea of dust moving left made me feel like I was side-slipping right at speed. I fought to trust my symbology.

The Apache on my left began to disappear from my peripheral vision and then, wham, the dust started recirculating down through my rotors, and my peripheral vision disappeared entirely. I was still fifty feet off the ground and totally blind.

‘Forward and down,’ Billy continued. ‘Forward and down…’

I kept my head still, not moving a muscle, as I stared into the monocle. It was in hover mode. The velocity vector line moved ever so slowly back from the top of the monocle towards the centre; I knew I was doing six knots. I had to get the vector back to the centre-zero speed across the ground – at exactly the same time as the height also hit zero.

I didn’t know for sure if I would hit my point on the pad and took a quick peep out of the right-hand window.

Mistake…

The line drifted to the left.

‘No further left!’ Billy yelled.

‘I’ve got it, I’ve got it…’ I shouldn’t have fucking looked. I was concentrating so hard to fight the urge to stop a drift that wasn’t even there.

I brought the stick back to the right to compensate for my error and – smack! – we hit the ground and I felt a reassuring lurch as the struts stroked downwards and the undercarriage took our full weight evenly.

I had no idea if I’d landed where I was supposed to, but was ecstatic that I’d not rolled over or hit anything. I looked to my left. After a few minutes the dust thinned and I caught sight of Jon and Simon, arms above their heads, giving me a slow theatrical handclap. I should have acknowledged with a little bow, but I was too damned drained to do anything. I slumped back in my seat.

I glanced up and saw Billy’s face in his mirror. He gave me a cheeky smile and a thumbs-up.

‘Fucking hell, that was scary,’ I said.

‘Well,’ he replied, ‘I did offer…’

We were bounced over the rough terrain to the main camp in a Land Rover. On the ground, Bastion was smaller than I imagined and it only took a minute or two of driving in our own dust cloud before we reached the accommodation area, a tented compound surrounded by Hesco Bastion barriers. The Portakabin luxury we’d known briefly at KAF was markedly absent but, on the plus side, so was the stink of shit. Bastion was still in its infancy and very austere.

After dropping our kit off in our tent, Billy and I walked over to the north side of the compound, past a couple of Paras manning a gap in a Hesco Bastion wall, and entered the Joint Operations Cell. The JOC was run by the 3 Para CO, Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Tootal, a short, wiry man with several masters degrees under his belt and, rumour had it, a PhD or two for good measure. Tootal was passionate about the men under his charge and just as determined to fulfil his mission in Afghanistan.

The JOC was a very long tent with a walkway down either side. Men and women in uniform sat at long tables staring at computers, some with their heads jammed to radio handsets. Every unit operating in Helmand, including ours, had a desk here. During an operation, Major Black would move into the JOC and act as liaison between us and Tootal.

One of the most important areas in the JOC – Billy pointed to two adjacent positions on his left – was given over to the JTACs, the ‘Widow’ callsigns who acted as liaison for air operations. The JTACs out in the field had a special radio for communicating back to this Widow Tactical Operations Cell (TOC), Billy explained, and this was the hub, where it all happened. He directed my attention to some large tables in the middle of the room, covered in maps that depicted the Helmand Area of Responsibility (AOR). The maps were covered with plastic laminate and ringed in places by red chinagraph.

‘ROZs,’ Billy said pointing to the Restricted Operating Zones. ‘If the shit hits the fan and there’s a battle, no one is allowed to enter a ROZ without permission from the relevant JTAC on the ground. The JTACs are all-important. Without them, nothing would happen here.’

I noticed that there was a large red ring over Now Zad.

‘It looks like something’s going down there,’ I said. Several members of Tootal’s staff seemed to be paying particular attention to the place.

‘After the trouble a few weeks back, there are persistent rumours that the Taliban are going to strike at Now Zad next,’ Billy said. ‘When I ask anyone who should be in a position to know, they shrug and give me the brush-off, which means, almost certainly, that the rumours are true. B Company 3 Para moved into Now Zad about a week ago and found the place deserted. Everybody had buggered off, including the ANP.’

If the Afghan National Police had left, it was a fair indication of trouble.

I thought back to my time in Northern Ireland, to the indicators I’d been trained to look for – dumper trucks parked where they shouldn’t have been; a dustbin out on a non-collection day; upper windows open to prevent them being blown in by the pressure wave of an explosion; kids not out playing when they should be…

Here we go again, I thought.

We left the JOC and walked next door. The ‘JHF(A) Forward’ was our Ops centre, known to us as the ‘Ops tent’. There was a desk manned by a corporal where visitors checked in and out. Otherwise, it looked like a smaller version of the JOC. There was a desk for the OC, Major Black, a desk for the Ops Officer, a couple of positions for our signallers and watchkeepers and a few other spare desks for people like us to use when we needed them. In the middle, again, were two tables, one given over to a 1:50,000 map of Helmand, the other to aviation maps of Afghanistan.

Two-thirds of the way down the tent was a screen – a large white board that separated the operations area of the Ops tent from the administration area. The admin area, Billy explained, also doubled as a place where pilots on readiness could hang out, away from the frenetic activity that would kick off next door if and when the shit hit the fan.

In the corner, a flat-screen TV was tuned to Sky News – quite how, I didn’t know. On a table next to the TV was a laptop where we could send and receive emails to and from home and pull data from the internet. On the opposite side of the tent were two mission planning stations – computers where we could sit down and map out our sorties.

Mission planning had reached new heights with the Apache. Everything from weapon parameters to frequencies and codewords was input into the laptop before we flew. Once we were happy with the way the mission looked, we pressed ‘save’, downloaded the data to a data transfer cartridge then took it down to the aircraft and plugged it in. The mission was then uploaded into the Apache’s own computer and we were ready to fly.

After the Ops tent, Billy led me back to ‘tent city’ where we went and grabbed some nosh from the ‘Para kitchen’. The Regimental Sergeant Major of 3 Para, flanked by a couple of burly mates, was checking to ensure that everyone washed their hands with antibacterial scrub before they sat down to eat. It was like being back at school. But Bastion was such a tight ship, and so stretched, Billy explained, that nobody could afford a bunch of rogue e-coli to sweep through the camp. And the capacity for transmission of this or any other disease was breathtaking, as I was about to find out.