Alex Duncan - Sweating the Metal

First though, a hasty training exercise was put together so that the Chinook and Apache crews could get used to working with one another. We spent two weeks at the end of March 2006 flying together. Those two weeks were hard work – I logged a total of thirty hours of day flying and seven hours at night, which was pretty impressive. It was the last piece of proper tactical training we’d have before deploying to theatre in mid-May.

Alison and I married on April 29th, 2006 at Brighton Register Office. It was a very small affair – my parents were there, together with Philip and his wife; on Alison’s side it was just her parents and three sisters. I wore my No.1 uniform, Ali a simple but pretty cream and black dress. It was a beautiful day of the sort that recalls the Battle of Britain – blue sky, sunshine and little fluffy white clouds. When we walked out of the Register Office as man and wife for the first time, Mike Woods (my boss) and his wife Lisa, together with Johnny Shallcross (a mate from the Squadron) and his girlfriend, had driven all the way down from Odiham just to throw rice over us. After lunch at a local restaurant, I whisked Ali off for a week’s honeymoon in Lanzarote. I got back just in time for a final training sortie on May 11th.

There was no time to sit and reminisce. We filled a cab with some additional fuel tanks that were brimful and went flying. They help create the perfect simulation of a half-full aircraft in a hot and high environment. Lots more power required; lots more inertia. The aircraft wallows and shakes, and you can’t stop on a sixpence so you have to plan your flying a lot further ahead.

There was also a lot of last minute admin to take care of. I hadn’t made a will, so I had to rectify that. We had to check our dog tags were in order, make sure that next-of-kin details were correct, so that if anything happened the right person would get the late-night knock on the door. I didn’t write an ‘Open in event of my death’ letter. To me, that would be tempting fate!

A lot of the kit we were issued before deployment simply wasn’t up to the job, so that meant many of us investing in our own bespoke items either online or at army surplus stores. The holster I was given for my pistol is a good example – it looked like vintage 1960s issue with a lanyard that went through uniform epaulettes, thus rendering it useless when worn with body armour. I replaced that with a thigh holster that I bought myself. I bought a CamelBak – we were only issued with one. Ditto a liner for my green maggot (sleeping bag) and a thermal mattress – the ones we were issued with were absolute rubbish. Ali really went nuclear about all that; she couldn’t believe that we had to buy some of our equipment ourselves.

The body armour we’d been given before deployment wasn’t really fit for purpose. It was a twenty-year-old design and not of the same standard as a Kevlar soft vest, which can stop a 9mm bullet. The ceramic anti-ballistic plates that stop high-velocity rounds had one major issue: in a heavy landing, the chest plate had a tendency to come up and take your face off. Still, you can only play with the cards you’ve been dealt. The current vest issued to aircrew is called the Mk60 – although far from perfect, it’s definitely an improvement.

There’s a line in the Mamas and Papas song ‘Dedicated to the One I Love’ that goes ‘and the darkest hour is just before dawn’; it underlines how things were at home in the final days before my deployment. There comes a point where you’ve packed and checked everything twice, you’re mentally ready to go, and you just want the whole thing over with.

It’s always harder for Ali. I’m leaving to join a family – my Flight – and she’s losing a key part of hers. I’m experiencing things first-hand, and although there’s a risk, I know what I’m exposing myself to. Ali doesn’t. For her, life goes on, but it’s different. She has to cope alone, manage the house, work. Meanwhile, the fear is like an unwanted close companion. All she knows is that it’s dangerous out there – and for her, that means all of it. Subconsciously, we both start to become more remote, and an unwanted distance opens up between us. In the day or two before I go, both of us wish I was already gone so that the clock has begun to wind down to the day I come home again.

The goodbye is always the hardest part. That’s the time when the hold is greatest, when you’re trying to break away from a world that you’re an integral part of. When the goodbyes are done, you can focus on getting to grips with the job at hand, and each of us has our own coping mechanisms for that. The day or so before you leave is purgatory.

I leave early in the morning. Ali is still in bed. There’s a scene in the Mel Gibson film We Were Soldiers like that, where his screen wife, Madeleine Stowe, is still in bed and he slips quietly away to go to war. Was that life imitating art, or the other way around?

We’re flying from RAF Brize Norton to Kandahar via Kabul, so we meet as a Flight at 18 Squadron HQ, where a coach is waiting to transfer us to the RAF’s Oxfordshire-based hub. We’ve all had a week’s leave so it is the first time we’ve seen one another in seven days. Everyone is wearing their desert gear. The ground is awash with brown and beige, items of kit strewn hither and thither; everyone has been to the barber and a quick look round reveals a sea of heads sporting low-maintenance No.1 haircuts. The mood is subdued; the customary banter and piss-taking strangely absent. People are alone with their thoughts, the warmth of home and the scent of loved ones clinging to the folds of our uniforms.

We arrive at Brize Norton to learn that our aircraft has a technical fault and we’re delayed for twenty-four hours, so it’s back on the buses, back to Odiham and back home. It’s the worst thing possible: Groundhog Day. Another evening meal with Ali – what is there to say? We’ve said it all already. I shouldn’t be here. I feel strangely awkward. Darkness means another sleepless night spent watching Ali slumber and the clock count down. Sleep claims me just as the alarm shatters the silence, heralding another painful goodbye. The events of the previous twenty-four hours play out again. I feel like an actor treading the boards, playing out the same script, in the same place night after night. This one ends differently though; the TriStar is fixed and we depart on time just after lunch. England’s green and pleasant land falls rapidly away as the aircraft begins its journey eastwards.

The ageing TriStar that carries us and a couple of hundred assorted infantrymen and support staff is the only way into theatre for the countless servicemen and women deployed there. It’s stripped down, functional, bare. The faded decals in the toilets and galleys, all circa 1962, hint at the ageing airliner’s previous, rather more glamorous, life. Once people dressed up to fly; now its passengers wear desert combats, Kevlar helmets and body armour for a night-time descent made in total darkness. I’m sure each passenger deals with the darkened tactical approach differently, but there can’t be a man or woman aboard who doesn’t momentarily dwell on the fact that there is a better than even chance that one or more of their fellow passengers won’t be coming home the same way.

For those destined to increase the British casualty list, the route home is rather more high profile: a C-17 Globemaster into RAF Lyneham, preceded by a full military remembrance parade and followed by a procession through the centre of Royal Wooton Bassett, lined by locals who turn out to honour every fallen soldier repatriated back to Britain.