Alex Duncan - Sweating the Metal

The worst twist of all was that the Bowman radio that Rob Foster had been carrying survived the blast intact and it’s thought that a piece of rubble flicked the switch that sent out the emergency signal; he’d been dead all along. We were completely gutted by that and, as you might imagine, the mood in the JOC was very sombre. But there was work to be done – the bodies all needed recovering and the troops we’d moved up to search for Private Foster would all need moving back to their original positions.

The full details of what happened took almost three years to come out, so all that was known at the time was that the guys had been killed as the result of a JDAM dropped by a US fast jet. As you might imagine, emotions were running pretty high. Later that morning, we were joined in the JOC by the crew of a US Pave Hawk; they wanted to be part of any attempt to recover the bodies because they felt a sense of responsibility. Obviously, because of what had happened, you could have cut the atmosphere with a knife in the tent when they came in. There were a lot of heads down including, I’m ashamed to say, mine. It was difficult not to feel angry towards them at the time. Whenever there’s a blue-on-blue, it always seems like it’s the Americans dropping the bombs and our boys on the end of it, never the other way around.

All that said, I think it took a lot of guts on the part of that US crew to come in at that time. They must have known how we’d be feeling; it would have been easy for them to hide, but they faced up to it, and I think ultimately we respected them for that. We were all professionals and we had a job to do, so we brushed our feelings aside and soon there was the usual banter between aviators. It helped that the navigator was pretty fit too – blonde, female, really attractive, which always stands out, especially with so many alpha males floating around. She showed us some pretty cool kit that they have which we, of course, don’t. Things like that really highlight the dichotomy between cultures in the US and UK – the US all Gucci kit, no expense spared; the UK more of a make-do, ‘Heath Robinson’ approach. She had a moving map on an iPad-like device and she said, ‘We’ll go this way, and this way,’ and moved the map around, plotting the routes with her finger.

‘That’s a pretty impressive bit of kit,’ I said.

‘Really?’ she asked. ‘What sort of kit do you guys use?’

I unfolded a map from my pocket and waved it around and said, ‘There you go. Mk.1 Human Eyeball and that’s our moving map,’ which really made her laugh, and that broke any remaining tension. The difference in the kit that we have access to compared to the US is astounding. You make light of it at times like that, but you know the Americans are shaking their heads and thinking ‘Oh my God, who are we working with?’

An hour or so later, we both flew up to Kajaki to recover the bodies. There’d been so much effort put into finding Rob Foster because we really believed he was out there, alive and alone. It was a crushing blow to us all to learn that he’d died. When they brought his body out, I felt awful. I had all sorts of thoughts in my head; all the stuff in life that this guy will never get to experience, all the lost opportunities. He was only nineteen, as was Private Aaron McClure. Private John Thrumble – the oldest – was just twenty-one.

I watched them bring Robert Foster’s rifle and his kit out – they were all mangled up. It’s funny how your mind works; I became so focused on that, and it got me thinking about the fragility of life. I don’t know why it affected me so much – it’s not like it was the first death we’d dealt with, but there was something really poignant, sad and hopeless about the futility of it all. I was feeling really melancholic and introspective.

I guess it might have been because this was the first Det I’d done since Guy was born. Being a father had given me a completely different perspective on it all. I felt a much greater insight into the family’s loss and had a real empathy for the poor lad’s parents – all the love, the experiences, the laughter and those rites of passage that everyone takes for granted that he’d never get to do. None of those poor soldiers would, not any more. Three young lives snuffed out, just like that. That was hard to bear.

Rich and I took off with the Pave Hawk and we ended up flying a complete reversal of what we’d done earlier that night, moving all the troops back to where we’d picked them up from. It was a long, very emotional and hard day’s flying. After we’d shut down, I went to the showers and stripped off; I wanted to wash all the cares, the grit, the grime – all the thoughts of that long, hard night – off of me. It was pretty busy – at around 07:00, it was the time that everyone was getting ready for a new day in Helmand. I saw the OC Forward, Major Jules Face.

‘Alright, mate. Here we are again. Start of another day in paradise, eh?’ he said.

‘Not for us, sir. It’s the end of a very long one. You know how you saw us at the evening brief yesterday? We haven’t stopped. That’s a good twenty-four hours on duty. I think we must have moved somewhere in excess of 160 people; 160 people there, 160 people back again.’

I got that fuzzy feeling again, where every cell in my body seemed to be vibrating. I felt wired but drained; a paradox of emotions and feelings. It’s hard to grasp how long we’ve been on duty. Days are measures of time divided by sleep, not by the cycle of night and day. So when you don’t sleep the days become longer and ‘yesterday’ becomes a redundant concept.

I was dog tired. I could have slept for a week. But there was no chance of that because in a few hours we were up again for more of the same.

The end of Det couldn’t come soon enough.

I know one swallow doesn’t make a summer, and I guess by the same token the difficulty I had getting home at the end of my Det in summer 2006 shouldn’t have meant that history would repeat itself in 2007 – but it did!

Rich and I were positioned on the IRT/HRF for the last three days of our Det, and I still had concerns about making it back to KAF for the TriStar home – even more so now that the Squadron Leader’s personal Herc wasn’t an option. By September 3rd – our last day at Bastion – things were looking even bleaker for me.

We were handing over to ‘A’ Flight, 27 Sqn who were taking over from us to form 1310 Flight, but Squadron Leader John Murnane, their OC, had made it clear he wasn’t prepared to take on any kind of tasking without one of us from ‘C’ Flight being on board the cab. JP tried to argue against it, but to no avail.

JP rang me that afternoon and the news wasn’t good. ‘Frenchie,’ he said, ‘I’m really sorry but you’re going to have to stay an extra day.’

‘Sir, you’ve got to be joking. We’re supposed to be going tomorrow!’

‘I’m so sorry, mate. Get your kit packed and take it on the cab with you. You can then bring it straight to KAF at the end of the sortie and still make the flight home. They want you on the jump seat with them tomorrow while they do a standard resupply tasking to Inkerman and back. You’ll be there to give them some advice, so that they’re entirely happy with what they’re doing.’

They might have been happy but I wasn’t, and sadly there was nothing I could do. The mission was for a pair of cabs escorted by one AH to take an underslung load from Bastion to FOB Inkerman at exactly the time of day when Inkerman gets hammered. You could set your watch by the Taliban; they were malleting the place every day from around 13:00, so that was a concern although, ironically, it turned out that they took that day off and the base wasn’t hit. If it was a relief for us, it must have felt like Christmas come early for the poor guys at the FOB.