Alex Duncan - Sweating the Metal

The firefight is clearly still going on because both Apaches are now involved. I watch transfixed as both aircraft are illuminated by the muzzle flash from their 30mm cannons, which are delivering hell to the enemy on the ground. Those M230 cannons fire 10 armour-piercing High Explosive Dual Purpose (HEDP) rounds every second, and they fragment on impact like a grenade. You really wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end.

‘Have some of that, motherfuckers!’ I say out loud.

‘Quite!’ says Craig.

I have a thought: ‘Er, how much fuel do we have?’

Craig does the calculation. ‘About twenty minutes of playtime.’

‘How long ago did we get the call?’

‘About forty-five minutes, an hour at most.’

‘Okay. So we’ve got a T1 casualty down there who’s already been moved to an alternative LS and he’s been bleeding badly for at least forty-five minutes. Actually, it’s going to be longer than that – that’s when we got the call. What are our options if we don’t get clearance to go in before we reach our minima?’

‘Er… nearest refuelling site is at Gereshk. Let me see… twenty minutes there, fuel another twenty minutes and then twenty minutes back. Another hour at least. The guy is never going to make it out alive.’

Craig tries to raise one of the Apaches over the radio, but they are both still busy engaging the target area and trying to clean out the enemy. Eventually, he gets through.

‘Ugly Five Zero, Hardwood One Three. We’re going to position further up so that we can get on station quicker once you clear us in. We’re almost bingo fuel.’

‘Copy that, Hardwood One Three.’

I’ve just started flying us in the direction of the LS when the AH comes back over the radio:

‘Hardwood One Three, Ugly Five Zero. We’ve got a grid for you but we’ll need another few minutes to suppress the area because it’s still hot.’

‘Negative Ugly Five Zero,’ said Craig. ‘We’re bingo fuel; it has to be now or not at all.’

The radio goes quiet for a few seconds, like the AH pilot is thinking.

‘Okay, Hardwood One Three. You’re clear in, grid reference 41SPR71405 46516. One of the ground units will mark the target to aid you with a visual reference.’

Craig takes over flying for an aggressive approach. I’m calling distance and speed again and we’re both looking for the marker, which we see ahead of us as we’ve been briefed. We land, the ramp goes down and Rob leans out into the night looking for the casualty. His voice comes over the intercom, ‘Er guys, there’s nothing fucking moving out there. I’m going off to see what’s happening.’ He grabs his rifle and walks off but is only gone for a few seconds. He’s not happy.

‘Fuck! It’s the wrong fucking landing site!’

‘What do you mean, wrong landing site?’ I ask.

‘Wrong landing site – as in, we’re not supposed to be here. Some idiot didn’t remove his fucking marker when we picked up the first casualty earlier. For fuck’s sake, let’s get the fuck out of here!’

After all the debate getting the casualty moved to an alternative landing site, we’ve landed on at the last place in the world that we want to be: the same landing site we took fire at earlier.

‘Hardwood One Three, Ugly Five Zero, you want to get out of there. The enemy looks like they’re preparing to fire on your position.’

‘Clear above and behind. Let’s get the fuck out of Dodge,’ says Jonah but Craig is ahead of the game; he is hauling the collective upwards as soon as he hears the word ‘above’. And as we lift, it’s like Guy Fawkes’ Night down below us. The Taliban seem to let loose everything they have onto the spot where seconds before we’d been turning and burning.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ says Craig, echoing what we are all feeling. ‘How lucky was that?’

‘Lucky?’ says Rob. ‘What’s lucky about landing on a hot HLS twice in one evening?’

‘Lucky because we must have landed on at exactly the moment the Taliban had their heads down or were reloading. Lucky because the fuckers missed again.’

It’s bizarre, the first time you come under fire. Your head is so full of the job at hand that you don’t get a chance to be scared – you go into automatic mode and you’re working flat out doing what you’ve been trained to do.

Almost as soon as we take off again, we see another marker for the correct HLS. Craig pulls a couple of tight turns and flares the cab to reduce airspeed for the descent.

‘100ft, 80 knots, you’re in the gate,’ I say and the guys take over in the back with height and dust cloud calls.

‘At the ramp,’ says Rob.

‘20, at the centre,’ says Jonah.

‘10, 8, 5… at the front door.’

‘4, 3, 2, with you…’

‘1. Two wheels on… six on. We’re down.’

‘Ramp going down,’ says Rob. ‘Okay, the medics are off, the QRF are out now in defence.’ The swirling, blinding dust cloud settles and clears and I can see again. I look over my shoulder to the rear cab and I can see a figure walking up the ramp…

‘I don’t believe this,’ I say to Craig. ‘The T1… the guy with his arm hanging off? He’s walking up the ramp unassisted, smoking a cigarette. What the fuck are these guys made of?’ Andy Stockton’s arm is all but missing below the elbow, and what remains is only held on by a few strips of muscle. He must be in agony, but he looks for all the world like he’s taking a stroll through the Sussex countryside.

Once again, I’m amazed at the conditions that the MERT guys work in. It’s dark in the back – no lights means less chance of us being hit by ground fire (there’s no point making the enemy’s job easier) so the only illumination is from green glow sticks. It’s hellishly hot, dirty, dusty and cramped. The dust grates at your throat as you swallow. We’re used to it – as Chinook pilots it goes with the territory. But these guys are medics, many of them drawn from the TA where their day jobs see them working out of climate-controlled, clinically clean, safe and hygienic hospitals. What a contrast. All that, yet they work uncomplainingly, in impossible conditions, and perform miracles on badly injured soldiers.

The biggest killer in military penetrating trauma is blood loss; lose enough and you can’t get oxygen from the lungs to the brain. It’s also an avoidable killer. In Vietnam, over 9% of the men who died did so through bleeding out from an arm or a leg. Nobody should ever die from bleeding out via a limb injury and with the advances in knowledge and equipment the medics now have in theatre, almost nobody ever does.

Soon after, the QRF and the medics return and we get the all clear from Rob at the ramp.

‘Lifting,’ says Craig as we transition away.

‘How’d you like us to fly this?’ I ask the doctor.

The answer comes back the same as before: ‘Fast as you can, please. We need to get this guy back asap. He’s lost a lot of blood.’

Once again the medics are waiting for us as soon as we land on back at Bastion and, within minutes, they have Stockton stabilised on a table in the operating theatre. He’s lost his arm but they have saved his life.

By now it is around 04:00 and all of us are done in. If it’s tough for us, you can’t imagine what it’s like for the crewmen. I honestly don’t know how they do it. They have different but interchangeable roles and they may swap about on the same sortie, but basically the No.1 crewman is the primary interface with the outside for loading and unloading. The No.2 crewman will generally stay at the front of the aircraft and is more involved with the mission; he’ll do the radios, look at navigation and give a tactical review of what’s going on. When we’ve got the MERT on board, they’re doing all that plus whatever else they can – putting on tourniquets, applying pressure to bleeding arteries. To be honest, I think they have the hardest job of all and they don’t get enough recognition for it.