Alex Duncan - Sweating the Metal

Job done. I was TQ’d and ready for whatever lay ahead.

The morning after my TQ, Craig Wilson and I caught a Hercules down to Camp Bastion to join Nichol Benzie on the IRT. While I’d be flying on the IRT with Nichol, Craig – an experienced squadron pilot – was rostered on to the HRF.

It’s a great aircraft, the Herc; similar to a Chinook in many ways. You board from a ramp at the rear and the inside can be configured in a host of different ways depending on if it’s carrying pax, cargo or a mix of the two. For the shuttle down to Bastion, it was configured for pax, although the accommodation is about as spartan as it gets. Seats are in four rows – one on each side of the fuselage with a double row running lengthways along the middle, with the seats facing out. Half empty it’s manageable, but full up, the knees of passengers on the central seats touch those of the passengers facing them. Add in kit, weapons, body armour and helmets and it’s almost impossible to get anywhere near a comfortable position – although being good at Twister would be a distinct advantage.

All the aircraft’s cables, wires and pipes are exposed along the inside of the fuselage and the walls are bare metal. As on the Chinook, the designers have cleverly engineered the aircraft to route the bulk of the noise from its four Allison AE 2100D3 turboprops to the cabin rather than the outside. At least, that’s how it seems. The crewmen issue ear plugs to all pax as they board, so it’s at least bearable.

It’s a short flight from KAF to Camp Bastion, the main forward base for all British Forces in Helmand Province, and Nichol meets us as we disembark from the Herc with our kit. We walk to a battered Land Rover and climb aboard for the short drive to the JHF (A) tent, which is the forward HQ for the IRT/HRF and the Apache Force, which is permanently based here.

Camp Bastion is like a small town in the middle of the flat, featureless, dusty lunar landscape that is this corner of Helmand Province. It’s the perfect location for the 2,000 British troops who live and work here – at the sharp end, but removed from it. A perfect paradox.

The living conditions are more basic than at KAF. ISO freight containers are the de facto choice for storage, and air-conditioned tents are used for all the accommodation – for eating, sleeping, working and downtime. Hesco Bastion blast walls are everywhere. The name Hesco comes from the company that makes them – collapsible wire mesh containers with a heavy-duty fabric liner that are used as semi-permanent barriers against blast and small arms fire.

I knew a little about Helmand Province and the Taliban from some of the guys who had been out here earlier on Prelim Ops. Plus I’d done a bit of reading up on the area. Eastwards, the Helmand River creates a ribbon of green through arid desolation. Known colloquially as the Green Zone, it’s where the majority of the population in Helmand live. Being where the people and the poppies are, it’s also where the battle for hearts and minds must be won. The Taliban revival is at its strongest here: poppies are the most widely cultivated crop in Helmand Province, and it’s the money from the drugs trade that finances the Taliban resurgence, buys their weapons and allows them to fight. Ultimately, it is why British Forces are here; not to fight the Taliban per se, but to create enough stability for development to take place.

Helmand Province consists of some fourteen districts, including Nad Ali, Gereshk, Sangin, Musa Qala, Naw Zad and Kajaki, with the provincial capital at Lashkar Gah a short hop from Camp Bastion. The governors for each district live in the District Centres or DCs, and it’s in the DCs that the majority of British troops in Helmand are based, either in Platoon Houses, or Forward Operating Bases (FOBs). You can’t ensure the security of an area and engage with the local population by hiding inside huge defensive garrisons like Bastion, or even the DCs, so the troops mount regular patrols so that they can build relationships with the local elders. Boots on the ground mean that it is harder for the Taliban to exert control.

It doesn’t stop them trying though, and it’s led to a pretty tough existence for a lot of our troops, who are being shot at and mortared on an almost daily basis while living in spartan conditions. A lot of the Platoon Houses and FOBs are little more than compounds without electricity or water.

We arrive at the IRT tent and Nichol follows us in as we dump our stuff.

Our role in theatre is to support the guys on the ground at the FOBs and Platoon Houses, principally through taskings such as those carried out by the task line at KAF – resupplies, moving troops, pax and freight from one place to another.

The IRT (Incident Response Team) was a UK military initiative born under the aegis of the UN Protection Force in Bosnia in the early 1990s. Its role then was to deliver engineers, medics and support to any situation where they were needed. The role eventually evolved to mimic that of HEMS London, which was the first civilian air ambulance in the UK to ‘transport the hospital to the patient’, rather than simply taking the patient to hospital.

That concept delivered a senior doctor and paramedic to the scene of major traumas – traffic collisions, shootings, stabbings – where they were able to perform life-saving surgical and medical interventions, stabilising patients for transfer to major trauma centres. It’s well established that the victim’s chances of survival increase markedly if they receive care within a short period of time after a severe injury – the so-called ‘Golden Hour’ of trauma medicine.

The Chinook is the helicopter of choice for the IRT in Afghanistan due to its capacity to transport people and kit and get them where they are most needed – fast. The IRT team includes the MERT (Medical Emergency Response Team), which consists of up to four paramedics or senior nurses, usually led by a consultant anaesthetist or surgeon. They can be supplemented by two or three members of the resident RAF Fire and Rescue team, equipped with cutting equipment and other heavy-duty hydraulic gear – useful if troops are trapped inside the wreckage of vehicles following IED strikes. Finally, on every flight the IRT carries an element of force protection – soldiers from 3 Para whose job is to deploy as soon as the cab is on the ground and protect the aircraft and the medics as they work to get the casualty on board. The IRT is not an air ambulance; it’s a flying, fighting ER.

It’s a tough environment for the medics to work in – the back of a Chinook in the skies over Afghanistan has to be the most traumatic operating theatre in the world. It’s cramped; it’s dark; it’s hot and noisy. Also, it’s not the most stable of platforms, particularly if we’re flying tactically. Then there’s the prospect of turbulence, and the buffeting of the wind through the side doors and the open rear of the cab. All this, and then the threat from Taliban fighters on the ground firing small arms, heavy machine-guns and RPG rounds at the cab. At 99ft long, it represents a big and potentially valuable target to the Taliban, who will stop at nothing to bring one down; they’re a veritable bull’s-eye in the sky.

There’s a disconnect on board the Chinooks between us, in the Plexiglass-walled goldfish bowls that serve as the cockpit, and our crewmen in the back of the aircraft. We need to see in front, above, around and below and you can’t armour the glass – it’s too heavy. The fuselage which serves as home to the loadmasters, though, is Kevlar-walled and floored, giving them and their cargo – be it soldiers, medics or kit – a degree of protection. And they need it; they’re there to look after the safety of the passengers and the aircraft.