Alex Duncan - Sweating the Metal

Before we’d left that morning, we’d filled the cab with crates of Coca Cola and porn from our own budget, so we could give it all to Widow Seven Five by way of a thank you. I said to Alex as we were flying in, ‘I know it’s going against protocol, but I’m going to unstrap myself and walk off the aircraft when we get there because I want to look that bloke in the eye and shake his hand,’ and that’s exactly what happened. I gathered everything up and went and found him and I said, ‘Cheers mate.’

He was so modest. ‘You must be joking; you gave us all sorts of stuff yesterday.’

I was like, ‘Forget it mate, you have nothing here. We want you to have this.’ After we’d been shot down, it was him I spoke to on the radio, he’d cleared us in, guided us, met us off the aircraft, sorted food and everything else for us while we were kicking around. His humility really touched us all. What a top bloke.

However, if we thought the Chinook Force’s run of bad luck was out of the way, we were very much mistaken. It would be German’s cab that was next in the Taliban’s firing line.

It’s thought that the Taliban had brought in various teams of shooters for the assassination attempt on Gulab Mangal and, with that attempt made, the teams were about to leave Helmand. They were determined to down a Chinook (ours!) and they’d failed, so they engineered a situation to get the IRT cab into a certain place, at a time of their choosing. And how best to scramble the IRT and get it where you want it? Kill a load of civilians, of course. So that’s what the Taliban did.

Late that evening, a suicide bomber drove a vehicle packed with explosives into a crowded market square in Musa Qala and detonated himself. The ensuing carnage left mass casualties and the British Army’s first-aid post in the DC was soon overwhelmed. I was in the JOC when the first reports started coming in and a debate started about whether or not to scramble the IRT. The consensus of opinion was that the suicide bombing was a ‘come on’ designed to lure the helicopter in, but there were a lot of casualties and, regardless of the risk, they all needed treating. There’s no ambulance service in Afghanistan and almost no medical care as we know it, so either we reacted or the casualties would die.

I suggested that instead of risking the IRT, they consider picking the casualties up using Mastiffs which, at the time, offered protection against mines and IEDs. If we’d done that and driven them to Edinburgh, we could have sent a cab in there to scoop them up and run, but the thinking was that it would take three to four hours, which was simply too long for many of the casualties.

There’s an irony there, because by the time they’d worked through all the iterations of the numerous plans and decided on which HLS they were going to use, it was three or four hours before an aircraft got in anyway. German went in and did really well. He came in from the west at low level, which was the right way to do it, and once the casualties were on board, flew away as fast as he could. Unfortunately he’d been lured into a trap, and he flew right over the compound where the Taliban team was based. They opened up and several rounds found their mark, hitting the cab when the MERT were busy treating the six severely wounded casualties they’d picked up. Among them was Rahima, a five-year-old Afghani who had suffered a traumatic amputation of her left hand and shrapnel to the stomach in the explosion, and was in critical condition.

I later learned that Flt Lt Vanessa Miles, an emergency nurse on the MERT, was on her very first mission in Afghanistan; a quite literal baptism of fire! Through it all she remained completely composed and focused, working tirelessly with her colleagues to keep every one of those casualties alive. To me, that speaks volumes about the skill, bravery and dedication of the MERT crews working in Helmand.

And Vanessa wasn’t the only hero that day. Pete Winn was Rich’s co-pilot and Mark ‘Gammo’ Gamson was the No.2 crewman that night. Gammo got a line on the firing point for three separate weapons. Showing great initiative, he didn’t wait to get authorisation – he took it upon himself to open up on them, rather than describe the target and miss the window of opportunity. This was Gammo’s first Det and he’d only been in theatre a month, but he had the balls and the intelligence to do what had to be done without being told. He fired into the compound and suppressed all three firing points, enabling German to get them out of the danger zone. Top man!

Before Gammo took the shooters out, several rounds hit the right-hand side of the cab, although thankfully none hit vital systems. In fact, the Chinook survived its enemy encounter well and lived up to its reputation: it’ll take a tremendous amount of punishment and still get you back to base!

There’s nowhere quite like Afghanistan to disabuse you of quaint, idealistic notions about fear. I thought I knew what fear was after being shot down on May 17th, but an operation less than a week later showed me that I knew nothing.

JP had outlined the operation to me and said he wanted me on it. He asked me if I felt happy to fly the mission and I told him I did. The operation was Oqab Sturga (Eagle’s Eye), a helicopter raid involving four Chinooks with Apaches providing support, planned for the night of May 23rd. The objective was to move hundreds of troops to disrupt the Taliban south of Musa Qala.

The mission profile was for two pairs, separated by five minutes, to fly from Bastion to FOB Gibraltar to collect ‘C’ Company, 2 Para. Five minutes later, both two-ships would fly to FOB Inkerman to pick up ‘B’ Company, and the plan then was for us to insert the troops at a grid between Sangin and Musa Qala for an assault to clear the Taliban from two nearby villages.

The first two-ship would be led by JP, flying alongside Ian ‘Chomper’ Fortune, with Hannah Brown and Debbers as his wingman. I was leading the second formation, flying with Alex as my co-pilot and German and Stu Hague as my wingman. It was all worked out; JP and Hannah would be four minutes on the ground; we would land one minute later.

We couldn’t have been more sorted on the planning. JP is a brilliant boss and tactician, as I’ve said, and on the afternoon before the op we’d done our RoC drills outside the tent and then went into crew rest, so the lead-up was perfection. We slept until about 22:00 and got up ready for departure at 01:00. We had the pre-brief, double-checked the weather, and then went into the JOC for the intelligence brief. Then, as had become our custom, all the captains walked out together down to the line. I happened to walk with Hannah that night. We were all wearing red head torches to preserve our night vision and they were giving off an eerie glow.

The enormity of what had happened to us near Musa Qala a week earlier was really playing on my mind, so I wasn’t exactly brimming with confidence as we walked out. I’d always had the same attitude as most aircrew: ‘It’ll never happen to me.’ It’s how you cope – aviation is a relatively dangerous business; military aviation more so. Flying on the front line? Dodgy as hell. Sadly, I couldn’t think like that any more because events had proven that it could, and did, happen to me. We were so close to going home at the end of tour by then too, so I was more than a little worried; in fact, if I’m being honest, I was shit-scared.

‘Mate, I’ve not got a lot left in the tank… I’m scraping the bottom of my well of courage,’ I said to Hannah.

‘Come on mate, dig deep. One more mission; that’s it.’

‘Hannah, I’ve got nothing left.’

‘Come on, Frenchie; it’ll be okay.’