Ed Macy - Hellfire

It had been hot in the JOC and the JHF(A), but the cookhouse felt like a sauna. The heat was so bad that people came in, grabbed their food, sat down, shovelled it into their mouths and left. I don’t sweat easily – it’s not something I do even when out running – but in less than a minute at the table, I was drenched. Rivulets ran down my arms and onto my plate. My plastic bucket chair was like a swimming pool. It didn’t take me long to figure out why nobody hung around to chat. I did what everybody else did: stuffed my meal into my mouth and got off and out – total elapsed time, three minutes. Talk about fast food.

Our tent, my new bedroom, was fifteen feet wide and thirty long and filled with eight camp beds: four on the right and four on the left. A giant plastic duct pumped cool air in from a huge exterior air-conditioning unit, but it was fighting a losing battle against the heat. The talcum-like dust – that had so nearly done for me during my landing – covered everything.

After my various exertions, I was exhausted. I took a shower, threw my sleeping bag on my cot and crashed out, my head buzzing with thoughts of the ‘bag’ and dust-outs; so much so that I found myself dreaming about an Apache flight in which Billy had been replaced by my old instructor, Chopper Palmer. Palmer was bollocking me for the way I was attempting to land my aircraft in a dust-out. While I was trying to concentrate, Chopper reached forward and shook me by the shoulder, which was fucking annoying because I was trying to concentrate on not killing us. But still he kept on shaking…

I opened my eyes and there was Billy.

‘Ed,’ he said, slightly freaked, no doubt, by the wild look in my eyes. ‘We’ve got to get on back to the JOC. Now.’

‘Why?’ I said, wiping away the thin film of dust that had settled on my face in the couple of hours I’d been asleep.

‘The mission’s on,’ Billy said. ‘It’s Now Zad.’

FRIDAY, 2 JUNE 2006

Camp Bastion, Afghanistan

Billy and I headed for the duties board with a spring in our step. We’d heard whispers about the upcoming operation over the past few days, and been told we’d be on a deliberate mission.

Sure enough, Op Mutay was up there, lined up for the fourth. But our flight was marked HRF and IRT. We’d be on standby; we’d been taken off the mission.

As Helmand Reaction Force and Incident Response Team we needed to be ready for anything, and that included supporting the Deliberate Ops Apache pair. We’d be the next to fly, responsible for replacing Pat and his crews if needed. How on earth could we do that if we’d been kept in the dark?

Pat told us it was because we weren’t a constituted flight – we hadn’t operated together. The OC had his two flights up and running, under Pat and Dan. He wanted to keep it that way because they’d know what they were doing.

‘Why do you need constituted flights?’ I asked.

Pat shrugged. ‘Flight procedure.’

Billy beat me to it. ‘There’s no such thing.’

He wasn’t wrong. The only flight procedure was that any one of us could jump into any aircraft with any wingman and mesh in seamlessly. Pilots were matched in an aircraft and kept together until they operated as one, but periodic changeovers stopped errors creeping in.

‘Well, our flights are constituted,’ Pat insisted. ‘We’ve practised together.’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. They’d flown together on a handful of missions in Afghanistan, that was all. We’d trained together for years.

We left, knowing only that Op Mutay would take place around Now Zad. Even the broadest brushstrokes were being kept secret from other aircrew.

The alarm bells kept ringing in my head. I turned to Billy and Jon. ‘What if it goes tits up and the rest of us have to step in?’ We hadn’t been here long and only had four Apaches up and running.

Keeping the circle of knowledge to a minimum was normal and necessary. A lot of locals worked at Camp Bastion. The Taliban could infiltrate their ranks, or intimidate them into handing over information. That was why we only ever discussed a mission in the secure Ops tents and briefing areas.

The OC and Pat – who commanded the only Apache flight designated to the mission – had taken this to extremes. They had attended the preliminary mission orders along with Dickie Bonn, the new Operations Officer, and decided not to allow any other crews into the planning process.

We discovered that confirmatory orders were going to be at 0700 on the morning of the mission – two days’ time – and knew we had to be there.

This was going to be 3 Para’s – but more importantly to us, the British Apaches’ – first ever deliberate operation in Afghanistan. We’d spent over two and a half years training for this, and by hook or by crook, we’d have what it took to make it work.

Back at the tent, 3 Flight’s lights were out. A quick shower and I was into my doss bag on my camp cot. It wasn’t particularly comfortable, but then again, I wasn’t in the pissing rain in the middle of Dartmoor in December with a hunter force tracking me down with dogs and dragging me away for interrogation.

When the artillery temporarily eased up my mind still wouldn’t let me sleep. I’d been plagued by the fear of failure or rejection all my life; I didn’t want to be remembered as one of the bumbling idiots that fucked up our very first mission. Worse still, if we left a gap in the support to 3 Para and someone died we’d be dismissed as a shambles and never be trusted again. If the papers got hold of the details the whole Apache programme would be seen as a big white elephant.

Billy and I skipped breakfast the next morning and headed over to the Ops tent for a coffee. We had an escort mission – to insert the Gurkhas into Now Zad – but when we weren’t flying we kept pushing.

We finally decided to brief for the operation ourselves, late in the evening when the Ops room was quiet. We knew jack shit, but we could at least do a detailed map recce, and settle on a strategy if everything did go pear-shaped.

We crisis-planned. We went through all the what ifs. What if one of them was sick in the morning? What if the plan changed and they needed four Apaches? What if they crashed on departure, en route, in the target area or returning to base? What if they got low on fuel and 3 Para were in a firefight? We planned for every eventuality we could think of.

We were in the Ops tent bang on time the following morning. I’d had nightmares about not being able to start the Apache, about the CO of 3 Para shouting through the cockpit window that it was my fault his men were bleeding to death in Now Zad.

The boss barked, ‘3 Flight we need to get over for the JMB now.’

We asked our Ops Officer yet again if we could attend the Joint Mission Brief. Dickie Bonn finally relented; we could squeeze in if there was room.

We were off before he finished speaking. We didn’t even have time to make a brew.

The tent was packed and stiflingly hot. The briefing team stood in front of an array of maps and satellite photography. Most of the guys were seated, but for late arrivals and the officially uninvited it was standing room only, at the very back.

The 3 Para Ops Officer began the orders. The mission was a cordon and search operation of a known Taliban house and grounds. The commander of the operation was Lieutenant Colonel Tootal. The CO was an extremely astute man. He had delegated mission command to the lead Chinook for the insertion and extraction phases. The lead Chinook callsign, Hardwood Two Five, was captained by Nichol Benzie, a polite, dark-haired, highly capable naval lieutenant.