Alex Duncan - Sweating the Metal

Craig and I are sat in the cockpit waiting for the rotors to slow down so we can apply the brakes and stop them altogether. We’ve been up since the previous morning at 08:00 and flying since around 20:00 the previous night, so we’re beyond tired. My whole concept of time is skewed as I sit there. It’s a concept too far for a brain that’s been on the go for eighteen or more hours. Right now, my bed – even in the IRT tent – is all I want. I’d trade a week at home for it, right here, right now.

Woodsy appears. He’s not smiling. I look at Craig, who looks back at me, our faces impassive. This is Groundhog Day.

‘Guys, it’s bad news, I’m afraid. I’m really sorry but you’re going to have to go back to the same area. That patrol has got a KIA – Captain Jim Philippson.’

My heart sinks. It had to happen sometime – someone had to be the first; but why now, why him? He’s the first British casualty of our deployment to Helmand Province. It hits hard. It’s difficult to believe now, looking back across a sea of Britain’s dead in Afghanistan that numbers over 360 at the time of writing, but Capt Jim Philippson was the first to die in Helmand from enemy action.

‘There’s more to it than the KIA,’ Woodsy continues. ‘There are a lot of guys bogged down in a firefight with enemy forces that have been there since the first T1 you picked up yesterday evening. We need to insert a company of troops in support so they can flush the enemy forces out. And don’t feel obliged or think you’ll be judged if you turn this down; you’ve all worked more than hard enough. I can always raise the other crew.’

We look at each other – Craig, Rob, Jonah and me. We’ve all got the beginnings of a beard. The shower I’d taken before getting into bed seems like another life ago. We are all stinking, wide-eyed and knackered. Jonah, Rob and I nod.

‘No, we’ll do it,’ Craig says. ‘There’s no point breaking in another crew when we’re already this far down the line. Keep them fresh for duty as rostered. We’ll do the insert.’

Back in the UK, it’d be illegal for us to fly this tired, for this long. But then again, we wouldn’t be flying as low as we do here either. Here, Concealed Approach and Departure means we can fly at whatever height and speed we want. In the UK, when we say height commensurate with safety of the aircraft, it means when I’m flying at 20ft I’m flying at 10 knots. In Afghanistan, if you’re flying at 10ft, you want to be flying at 150 knots! That’s what’s going to make it safer. We’re stretching all sorts of rules and regs but we’re in a theatre of operations during a war and people’s lives are at risk. We’re willing and just about able. Different rules apply.

We take off again at first light flying as part of a three-ship formation with two Apaches in support, freshly armed and refuelled. A whole company is spread across three Chinooks with Craig and me in one cab, Nichol leading the pack from another and Scot Eldridge flying the third. In the event, it is pretty straightforward; we drop our element of A Company, 3 Para and are then diverted to FOB Robinson along with Nichol to repatriate Capt Jim Philippson’s body to Bastion.

We are more than a little ragged by the time we lift from FOB Robinson. It is like looking at the world through a veil, like we are six degrees of separation removed from events; they are happening but there is a weird kind of lag to everything, as though space–time has become distorted.

My hand is on the switch ready to arm up the Defensive Aids Suite as per normal, the minute we are about to lift, when out of nowhere, Craig yells, ‘For fuck’s sake Frenchie. Fucking arm up the cab!’

I feel myself tense up. His manner and words are completely contrary to the concepts of crew resource management, but more to the point, his behaviour is completely out of character. Craig is one of the nicest, most laid-back guys I know – certainly not the sort to throw his weight around.

The thought occurs to me, ‘If I did it any faster, I’d have to defeat the laws of physics,’ but I know that Craig’s outburst is born of intense fatigue; nothing more and nothing less. I’m not the sort of person to take shit from anyone and I stare angrily at Craig for a second. But when I see the stubble on his face, his lips cracked and bleeding, how caked in dust he is and how bloodshot his eyes are, I realise that it was the distorted perspective of fatigue that made him react that way. We all look the same – tired, yet fired up because we still have a job to do. The symptoms of that Det Tourette’s we all suffer from when in theatre are always worse when sleep is lacking. Craig was just sounding off – that’s how it affects him. As for me, I feel calmer so I just let his rant slide. It’s funny how fatigue affects us all differently.

When we eventually shut down the cab, it’s twenty-four hours and thirty-five minutes since we’d started duty. It is for the missions we’ve flown this night that Craig is later gazetted and awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

The week following that mammoth IRT duty with Craig was a nice antidote to the madness of those twenty-four hours. There were no stand-out missions, just a raft of routine taskings around the Helmand Triangle – Bastion to Lashkar Gah to Gereshk and back to Bastion again. Underslung loads, mail and parcels for the troops – we’ll move mountains to deliver those because it’s the greatest motivator and morale booster known to man.

I’d also received my own motivator and morale booster in the form of a chat with Woodsy, where he informed me that I’d be going home early from the Det so I could spend some time with my very pregnant wife. That was the good news. The bad news was that there was no free space available on a TriStar out of theatre any time soon.

KAF is tolerable but it’s no place for a holiday and, away from the routine of flight planning, taskings and deploying forward to Bastion, it soon becomes dull. The food’s okay but the bullshit is relentless – speed restrictions, senior officers from non-front line units insisting on correct attire, caps worn, being properly shaved etc. When you’ve just returned from an operational sortie or you’ve been on the IRT for twenty-four hours, being shot at, and you haven’t eaten, you’re not overly concerned about the finer aspects of personal admin, such as shining your boots or dragging a razor over your stubble. It’s one of the reasons that Bastion was preferable – aside from the fact that it was a British base, the only people there were operational. There was none of the bollocks about wearing the right shorts with the right sandals or wearing your uniform shirt outside of your trousers. It was about getting the job done, and you were surrounded by like-minded people.

REMF – the acronym for Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers – is a sobriquet applied to any non-forward based jobsworth. You didn’t have far to go to find them at KAF. In fact, you didn’t need to find them at all. They’d find you. Alongside the enforcers of bullshit, the term also encompassed those who had convinced their friends back home that they were single-handedly taking the fight to the enemy and getting shot at on a daily basis. Kind of difficult when they were paper pushers and admin clerks who never set foot outside of, or flew above, the relative safety of Kandahar. Some of these guys were so far from the front they could send their laundry forward.

I quickly became bored of the good food, the gym and the TV, and I’d read all the books I’d brought with me. I also started to feel a little paranoid about the regular rocket and mortar attacks that were a feature of life at KAF. They weren’t aimed – the launch system that the Taliban was using was far too primitive for anything like aiming – but they were no less dangerous for that. It was more a case of ‘fire and forget’ from anywhere in what became known as the ‘Rocket Box’ – an area of vegetation and crops outside the wire which the Taliban could rock up to in a truck, fire their ordnance and drive away before we could respond.