Paul Grahame: Fire Strike 7/9

I radioed the first pilot. ‘ Hog Two Two , I want immediate reattack, the woodline spraying on same line of attack.’

‘Roger that. Banking around now. Tipping in.’

The pilot put his aircraft into a tight climb, the jet engines screaming away like a pair of overworked giant hairdryers. As he reached the apex and threw the aircraft into a steep dive, I cleared him in.

The stubby muzzle on the A-10’s nose spat fire. The pilot did a second, even longer and more devastating strafe.

‘Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrzztt.’

As the last echoes of the cannon fire faded away, it suddenly all went very quiet. Our own 50-cals and Gimpys had ceased firing. And for the first time since that opening RPG volley, we weren’t being pounded by bullets and warheads any more.

For now at least, the valley of Adin Zai had fallen into an eerie silence.

It was barely 0700 and the 2 MERCIAN lads had yet to set foot into bandit country. But my heart was beating as fast as an A-10’s Gatling gun, my pulse booming in my ears. The boiling Afghan heat was yet to hit us, but I was already sweating like a pig.

I glanced at Sticky beside me in the wagon’s turret, then Chris below up front. Everyone’s eyes were like saucers.

‘Fookin’ hell,’ I muttered, doing my best Redcar accent. ‘Fookin’ fookin’ fookin’ ’ell.’

I’m from the north-east of England, and everyone mistakes me for a Geordie. I was forever playing up to it with the three southerners who made up our FST.

Sticky smiled. ‘You took your time to hit ’em, mate.’

‘Result,’ Chris added.

‘Sorted,’ I confirmed.

‘You have to, mate?’ Throp grunted, from where his bulk was halfhidden, hunched over the Vector’s wheel. ‘I was enjoying the scrap.’

It was typical Throp. Like Chris, Lance Bombardier Martin Hemmingfield was a Royal Artillery lad. He was a six-foot-two hunk of muscle and bone, with the breaking strain of a KitKat. He was also completely fearless. You could put him in front of ten meatheads in a street brawl, and stand back as he took them all on.

I loved having Throp on the team, but I never got to the bottom of why everyone called him ‘Throp’. He claimed it was something about ‘Hemmingfield’ sounding like Hetty Wainthropp off Hetty Wainthropp Investigates , some BBC series about a pensioner solving minor crimes. Wainthropp had been shortened to Throp, and that became his name. Or something. Anyhow, who would want to argue with Throp about why he was called Throp?

There was a noisy upsurge in radio traffic. Reports were coming in of the enemy chatter thick and fast. There were increasingly desperate calls for ‘Hamid’ to check in with the Taliban commander. Each call was met with an echoing void of static. If Hamid was still alive he certainly wasn’t answering.

With the enemy guns having fallen silent, Major Butt ordered his men up and into the advance. Twenty minutes later the three platoons had pushed five hundred metres into the Green Zone on foot, with not a shot having been fired. If it carried on like this we’d be back at base in time to get the kettle on for breakfast.

The two WMIKs left us and moved up to what remained of the RPG-gunners’ position. They radioed in reports of blood-spattered undergrowth, but no bodies. The enemy were good at collecting their dead. In an effort to show that we came not to kill but to fight when attacked, we’d leave them to do so unhindered. It seemed wrong not to.

The A-10s were ripped by a lone Dutch F-16, call sign Rammit Six Two . I was halfway through giving the pilot an Area of Operations (AO) update, when it all went bloody bananas. The Company HQ had been ambushed at close quarters. Major Butt and his men were deep in the Green Zone on foot, and getting smashed in there.

Butsy radioed in that four enemy had been killed, but that fighters kept coming. From the turret of the wagon I couldn’t make out a bloody thing. I could hear the crack and thump of battle, and see the odd flash of desert camo as our lads tried to get into position to fight. But I couldn’t see how I could drop any bombs or strafe. The contact was beyond danger-close. Plus I couldn’t ID the enemy to hit them.

It was a classic Taliban ambush. Their favourite tactic was to let a force advance, whilst outflanking them. Then they’d capture or kill the lot. There was no way I was going to let that happen to our lads. Most of the 2 MERCIANS were late teenagers or in their early twenties. They were fresh-faced and only a few weeks out of the UK.

Many had never left home before, but they were in the British Army and they were under orders. They’d come thousands of miles to soldier on behalf of the Afghan people and their fellow countrymen back in the UK. They were brave and tough, despite their youth, and they’d fight to the very last for their brothers in arms.

They weren’t my regiment, but that didn’t matter. JTAC-ing is a highly specialist role. There’s never more than a couple of hundred qualified JTACs in the entire British Army. In theatre we’d get embedded with whatever unit needs us. Pretty much from the start of their tour I’d been with B Company, 2 MERCIAN. I’d bonded with those young lads, just as I’d bonded with my FST. I was their JTAC . And as far as I was concerned they were my boys, and I felt responsible for every last one of them.

Those 2 MERCIAN lads were some of the best infantrymen around — England’s finest. I wasn’t about to let them get injured, or fall into the hands of the enemy if I could help it. A few days back we’d been told a story about some elite French commandos on some hush-hush mission. Somehow, eleven of them had got themselves captured by Taliban, or more likely Al Qaeda elements. None of the French captives had made it out of enemy captivity alive, and I shudder to think what had happened to them before they were killed.

We knew what the enemy were capable of, and now we had B Company’s HQ element about to be overrun in Adin Zai. In a way I wasn’t surprised. I knew what Major Butt was like. You couldn’t wish for a better OC. Butsy was always taking himself and his HQ element into the heart of the action.

Major Butt led from the very front. Always . The OC was always to be found in the thick of it, with just the four men of his HQ element as security. Butsy was a legend, and no way was the OC getting captured and tortured or killed on our watch. The question was, what the fuck were me and Rammit Six Two going to do about it?

Butsy’s signaller was giving a running commentary on the firefight over the net. From the open turret of the wagon the noise of battle was deafening. In part the signaller was hoping that our fourman FST would hear him, and find a way to get them out of the shit. No one else had a hope of doing so, that was for certain.

Trouble was, a lot of the firepower at our disposal was a pretty blunt instrument. We had a battery of 105mm howitzers that Sticky, Throp and Chris could call on to target, plus we had the mortar teams. But with the HQ element surrounded, we risked shelling our own men.

Air power was the precision killing machine. But not even the state-of-the-art F-16 Fighting Falcon I had above me could do much right now. Our lads were tens of metres away from an invisible enemy. No JTAC would risk calling in ordnance in such danger-close conditions.

An idea came to me. It was something I’d learned about in JTAC school, back in the UK. The JTAC course is far from easy, especially for someone like me. I’d left school at sixteen, and I’m the first to admit I’m no Einstein. The course has a high dropout rate, and I was hardly your ideal candidate. But my CO at The Light Dragoons had backed me all the way.