Alex Duncan - Sweating the Metal

‘Hardwood One Three, Buzzard. Change task. Footballs have been evacuated by vehicle to Viking. You are to route to Viking, pick up footballs and return to Normandy. Confirm copy?’

Nichol okays it and plots me a route to Viking, the British base at Lash, rather than the airfield. The ‘footballs’ are casualties and Normandy is Bastion. Straightforward enough.

‘Okay mate, we’re going to approach from the east,’ Nichol advises me. ‘You okay with it?’

I have a pretty good idea where Lashkar Gah is. I remember some markers on the run in from my TQ, so I say, ‘Yeah, all good.’

The early evening haze lends everything a warm glow as I make my run in. The markers are all there: bright pink house; blue school; across the big avenue with a right turn at the big green house; pass the right-hand side of the mast; re-cross the avenue again for a left-hand turn and a quick stop and flare at Lashkar Gah.

Lesson one: Afghanistan isn’t the UK, so air density and temperature mean the flare isn’t going to be anywhere near as effective in scrubbing off my speed here as it is at home. My hands have just written a cheque that my talent can’t pay.

It’s a very public way of eating humble pie, but there’s nothing else for it: I swallow my pride and overshoot, flying us through the HLS, a quick teardrop around, and I land on with Nichol looking at me, a wry smirk on his face. Oh well, I got us down. And I won’t be making that mistake again!

We take on six casualties, all walking wounded but none serious. We’re advised that there are more en route from the crash site, so Nichol makes an executive decision that we’re not going to wait for them. It makes more sense to drop off the casualties we have and fly back for the others. If all things are equal, we should get back to Viking at the same time as the rest of the casualties.

So I lift and fly us back to Bastion. When I land at Nightingale, the ambulances are already waiting for us and swiftly move the casualties. There’s no major trauma – some bruises and shock but that’s about it.

More details come in as we sit on the pan at Bastion doing a rotors-turning refuel. The Hercules had flown from Kabul with an armoured car for the governor of Helmand on-board, along with seven aircrew and twenty passengers, including the governor’s brother and His Excellency Mr Stephen Evans, HM Ambassador to Afghanistan. It was also carrying a sizeable amount of cash, which was destined for local warlords in exchange for their influence and intelligence. Apparently, the aircraft had barely touched down on the dirt runway when it was engulfed in flames, sending black smoke billowing into the sky. Afghan fire-fighters tackled the blaze, but ammunition in the hold was cooking off and exploding. When the fire was extinguished, all that remained was the Herc’s tail section and the burnt-out carcass of the bullet-proof car.

An investigation later concluded that the aircraft was destroyed after detonating an anti-tank landmine buried in the surface of the runway, resulting in aircraft debris puncturing the port wing fuel tanks, leading to an uncontrollable fire. The aircraft captain managed to evacuate all the aircraft’s passengers without major injury.

By now, it’s early evening. The light is fading but it’s not dark enough to warrant using NVGs. Nichol errs on the side of caution and tells the guys down the back to get them ready; if we’re delayed for any reason at Lash, we’ll need them for the return leg of the sortie.

Refuelling complete, I lift to height and fly us on a different route to Lashkar Gah – if the Taliban have eyes on, it’s common sense to vary the direction of your approach. My route in is much better this time around – I pick my markers and come in from the south with a low-level sweeping left-hand turn that scrubs off our speed in plenty of time. This time I don’t overshoot, and land on the target with a perfectly executed descent.

Some of the casualties from the crash are there when I touch down, but a handful are still on their way from the crash site, so we end up turning and burning on the HLS for ten minutes waiting for them. We don NVGs for the flight back, although the light’s at that annoying level where it’s not really dark enough for the goggles to be effective, but it’s too dark for the Mk.1 Human Eyeball to see properly. It’s not ideal for my first operational ‘night’ flight in theatre, but then this is a war zone and let’s be honest, nothing is ideal here.

It is 22:00 by the time I land on at Nightingale. The casualties are transferred to the hospital and I transition to the pan, where we put the aircraft to bed. So concludes my first operational sortie in Afghanistan where I did something useful.

We’re on sixty minutes notice to move on the IRT at night, thirty during the day, although the crews are always much quicker than that.

I remember thinking: ‘If it carries on like this I might be able to cope with this Det.’

If . Such a small but significant word.

The next few days did nothing to dispel my optimism that my first Afghan Det was going to be relatively benign. I’d had a quiet first twenty-four hours on the IRT, and the following days saw some pretty routine taskings on the HRF. It was all good experience for me, as I was a far less capable pilot than I am now and some of the dust landings took me right to the edge of my ability. It was a steep learning curve, but flying with Nichol really opened my eyes to what was possible. He was, and is, an incredibly skilful pilot.

That first mission on the IRT opened my eyes too, in other ways. Having flown on ops in Iraq, I was used to flying in body armour, with my own sidearm and carbine, but I guess I’d never really considered that nurses and doctors would have to do the same. It’s pretty fucked up when you think about it, doctors and nurses carrying weapons, because although they work within the accords of the Hippocratic axiom ‘ Primum non nocere ’ – ‘Above all, do no harm’ – they may be forced into taking a life in order to preserve one.

I was getting into my stride on the admin front too. Communication with home was quite good, considering. We had email, and every soldier, sailor and airman in theatre got twenty minutes a week of free phone calls (since increased to thirty minutes). Alison and I were luckier than most – because of her role in the Cabinet Office, she had a phone on her desk connected to the Military Network so we could talk pretty much at will.

The next couple of weeks passed in a blur, with quite a few taskings which, although they threatened much, didn’t come to anything. They were all instructive and educational in their own way though, whether in terms of improving my skills as a pilot or opening my eyes to the weird and bizarre reality of life in Helmand Province. I flew a sortie on May 25th with Nichol which had me a bit worried, because it was the first sortie I’d flown where there was a clear and present danger from the Taliban.

A 3 Para platoon had gone out on a recce just north of what would later become the HLS at Sangin. They were patrolling in vehicles and a Pinzgauer High Mobility ATV had become bogged down at a wadi where it crossed the Helmand River. It was causing Lt Col Stuart Tootal, the 3 Para CO, a rather large headache, and we were in the frame to be his painkiller.

The mission was a good example of the ‘small picture’ effect, and the frustration that it puts on those of us at the lower end of the command chain. There were probably very good reasons why Col Tootal wanted the vehicle recovered, but we couldn’t for the life of us imagine what they might be. To me, the solution seemed simple, and I said as much to Nichol as we were flying in towards the stricken truck: ‘Can’t we just drop a bomb on it and deny it to the enemy that way?’ He was of the same view, but those at the JOC had other ideas.