Paul Grahame - Fire Strike 7/9

The two lads looked to be no more than eighteen- or nineteenyears old, and they carried these long, L96 sniper rifles. We shared an Army ration milkshake, my other favourite scoff when in continuous action. I’d kept a couple of water bottles on the burning roof of the Vector, the contents of which were the perfect temperature for dissolving the powdered shake.

From the turrets we had a good vantage point over the battlefield. As we supped our shakes and gazed out over the Green Zone, I ribbed the sniper lads about how they should have trained as JTACs. We spotted movement some eight hundred metres away, in territory where we’d just been smashing the enemy.

I was about to alert the F-18, when one of the young lads took a butcher’s through his scope. The L96 is fitted with a Schmidt & Bender 12x magnification sight. He had two enemy figures in the crosshairs of his scope. Both were armed, and they were advancing towards our troops.

I watched in fascination as this teenage lad flipped out the bipod of his weapon, and settled himself down to fire. He squeezed off the first shot, adjusted his aim, and squeezed off a second. We were just about to congratulate him — two shots: two kills — when all hell broke loose below us.

Pushing up towards the main target — Objective Platinum — the lead platoon had stumbled into another hornets’ nest. They had machine-gun rounds and RPGs slamming into them from a treeline just to their front.

Major Butt was on the air immediately, requesting a danger-close air mission to smash that enemy position. Their fighters were positioned around 100 metres ahead of our lads, and they were pushing men forward to surround and outflank us.

I talked City Desk Four One on to the enemy in the treeline, and told him to look a hundred metres to his west for the lead platoon. When he was visual with our lads I told him I needed a danger-close strike to smash the enemy. I asked him what ordnance he’d recommend at a hundred metres’ distance from friendly troops.

‘A thousand-pound JDAM,’ came back the pilot’s calm reply.

It wasn’t quite the answer I’d been expecting. A thousandpounder was twice the weight and destructive power of anything I’d dropped so far, yet this was the most danger-close air mission. I swallowed hard. It was the JTAC who bought the bomb, and I knew that I’d never be able to live with myself if I smashed my own lads.

‘A thousand-pounder?’ I queried. ‘Not owt a bit smaller?’

‘Sir, that’s a pinpoint-accurate munition,’ came the pilot’s reply. ‘As long as your boys have their heads down, they’ll be OK.’

I flicked a glance at Sticky. He gave me a thumbs-up. There was something about the calm tone of the F-18 pilot that gave me real confidence in his abilities.

‘Roger, a thousand-pound JDAM,’ I confirmed. ‘Attack on north–south run, to keep the blast away from friendlies.’

The pilot told me he was tipping in, and called for clearance. I had him visual to the north of us, and I could tell he knew what he was doing. I could hear Chris screaming into the radio for all stations to get low. I gave the pilot the green light.

‘You’re clear hot. Ground commander’s initials are SB.’ ‘SB’ for Major Simon Butt.

‘In hot,’ the pilot confirmed. ‘Stores.’

A moment later I heard the faint whistle of the incoming JDAM. Within seconds it grew into an ear-piercing scream. The noise was like an express train speeding down a tunnel with us at the very end of it. It drilled into my head. There was the flash of a wheelie bin-sized object streaking through the air in front of us, and then the thing hit.

The blinding flash of the explosion burned away the lateafternoon shadows, leaving a fuzzy white blob on my retina. The sound and blast wave hit, rolling and thundering across the valley in a deafening tidal wave of noise, rocking the wagon backwards and forwards on its suspension.

Sticky and I gazed in open-mouthed amazement at the impact point. The boiling cloud of dust and debris tore ever upwards and outwards, dwarfing the bush and the compounds that lay below it. Chunks of masonry and trees flew high into the air, each trailing its own dark and angry finger of smoke. From the centre of the explosion an ink-black pillar of burning barrelled into the air, pooling into a mushroom cloud high above the strike point. Unsurprisingly, the battlefield had fallen echoingly silent.

I turned to Sticky to get a sitrep from the lead platoon. As I did so rounds started coughing out of the treeline, one hundred metres to the north of the JDAM’s impact point. I could barely believe that anyone was left alive in there — but they were, and they were still fighting.

The OC was up on the net immediately: ‘Bommer, we need that target sorting! Get the air in again now!’

‘ City Desk Four One, Widow Seven Nine,’ I yelled into the TACSAT. ‘I want immediate re-attack on the same target, but one hundred metres north. Put a five-hundred-pound airburst over that position.’

‘Roger that. Banking round.’ A beat. ‘Tipping in now.’

The pilot brought the F-18 around in a spanking turn, streaks of cloud-like vapour trail clinging to the twin, v-shaped fins of its tail. Forty seconds later I cleared him in hot. He put the airburst exactly where I’d asked, and the northern end of the treeline was torn to shreds in the blast that rained down from the air.

The pilot was low on fuel, and he got ripped by Devo Two One and Devo Two Two , the pair of F-18s that I’d had earlier. It was 1800 by now, and three platoons were on their objectives. They were a thousand metres away across the Green Zone, and in the gathering dusk I couldn’t see much with the naked eye.

I got the pair of F-18s flying recces over the objectives, but no further enemy fighters were seen. By 1830 Objectives Silver, Gold and Platinum had been taken. Whether it was the air power or whatever had done it, the enemy’s will to fight seemed to have been broken.

They’d bugged out leaving behind three huge, mud-walled compounds stuffed full of ammo, weapons and big bales of opium. There were also stacks of maps, notebooks and other useful Intel. The platoons went firm and set about destroying all the weaponry they could find.

As darkness fell across the valley, the men of 2 MERCIAN began their withdrawal. The mission brief called for all friendly forces to be out of the Green Zone by nightfall, and laagered up in the comparative safety of the open desert.

But as the men fell back through the silent territory they’d just been fighting across, the rear platoon got hit. All of a sudden I could see the fiery trails of RPGs and tracer rounds sparking red through the thickening Afghan night.

I got the F-18s overhead the contact point. Almost immediately Devo Two One picked up two glowing, pipe-like objects — the heat signatures of RPG launchers that had just fired. I asked the pilot to hit them with a GBU-12 in non-airburst mode.

As the eight-hundred-pound smart bomb smashed into the position, there was a burst of white-hot fire that lit up the entire night sky, fading to a darker orange at the edges. Walls and trees and rooftops were silhouetted in the heat of the explosion, which fired the valley a ghostly volcanic red.

The OC’s voice came up on the net. ‘Cheers, Bommer. Thanks for that.’

I asked for an immediate BDA, and the pilot reported that the heat spots had gone. Finally, all had fallen utterly silent across the night-dark battlefield.

The platoons withdrew past the ridge line and pushed into the desert, and we prepared to leave our position on the high ground. As Throp gunned the Vector’s motor and turned the wagon away from the battlefield, I presumed I’d seen the last of Adin Zai. But in fact, this very stretch of terrain was to become our permanent battleground. We would be back. Today was just one day, and we would spend the next hundred days fighting here.