Paul Grahame - Fire Strike 7/9

‘As low as you can get. I want a low-level pass with flares and sonic boom.’

‘Roger that.’

‘What about the mortars?’ I queried.

‘ Widow Seven Nine , I don’t give a fuck. It’s a big sky small target. Tippin’ in.’

I turned to Sticky and grinned. ‘Fucking top bloke, or what!’

The F-18 came screaming in popping flares as it went, and if you’d thrown a rock you could have hit it, it was so low. Right over the grid the pilot pulled up violently, the air in the jet’s wake like a tortured steam cloud. A massive deep BOOM! thundered the length and breadth of the Green Zone, and I could feel the Vector beneath me shiver with the shockwave.

Now that was a sonic boom.

Achieving sonic boom uses up shedloads of fuel. The F-18 pilot warned me he had to head directly for the refuelling tanker. He got ripped with a Dutch F-16, call sign Rammit Six Three . The Dutch jet was inbound into my Restricted Operating Zone (ROZ) four minutes out. He’d enter my ROZ just as the F-18 was leaving it.

A ROZ is a block of airspace above a battlefield that is the exclusive domain of a JTAC. No other JTAC is allowed to operate in that ROZ, and no aircraft other than those controlled by that JTAC are permitted to fly in it. This allows for deconfliction between air assets, and prevents one aircraft flying into another, or getting hit by ‘friendly’ bombs.

I briefed Rammit Six Three on the battle as he was inbound. 3 Platoon were still under withering fire. I asked the pilot to fly an immediate low-level pass over their grid as soon as he was with us, firing flares. But I sensed the enemy were getting wise to these shows of force.

I was getting well pissed off. I knew where the enemy were, yet I couldn’t kill them, for they were too close to our lads. What I needed was Apache. I put a call through to Widow Tactical Operations Centre (TOC), the central command element for all air operations.

‘ Widow TOC, Widow Seven Nine ,’ I rasped.

‘ Widow Seven Nine, Widow TOC .’

‘Sitrep: as at now — TIC.’ TIC stands for Troops in Contact, the minimum requirement to call out Apache gunships. ‘I’ve got a platoon in close-quarters combat in the Green Zone.’

As I spoke into the TACSAT there was a deafening explosion right on my left shoulder. Yet another mortar had slammed into the ridge line barely metres from us. It hadn’t taken that mortar team long to retarget our wagon.

‘ Widow TOC , wait out!’ I yelled.

I grabbed the edge of the turret and clung on tight, as Throp gunned the Vector through the cloud of blasted smoke and sand, doing his hide-and-seek routine with the enemy mortar team.

He wrenched the wagon to one side, crunching over boulders and the broken masonry of a half-demolished wall. He pulled up in a flattened and deserted compound, gaining us a little cover.

On the net I could hear the leader of 3 Platoon calling for airstrikes. The enemy were pressing in on his position. I fucking needed those Apache yesterday.

‘ Widow TOC, Widow Seven Nine — requesting immediate CCA!’ I yelled into the handset. ‘Repeat: immediate CCA.’

CCA was the call to launch Apache. ‘ Widow Seven Nine, Widow TOC : affirm: CCA, fifteen minutes to launch. Repeat: fifteen minutes to launch.’

The AH-64 Apache gunships would be in the air in fifteen minutes, which would get them over Adin Zai in twenty. That’s how long the lads of 3 Platoon had to hang on before we had some surgical air power above us. I got Sticky to tell them what was what, and they reported back five enemy fighters killed. But still they were pinned down and taking murderous fire.

The Apache helicopter gunships can engage targets closer than any other air asset. They can sit at altitude eyeing their sniper optics and cuing up their 30mm cannon, and doing danger-close engagements. With jets it was all about positioning attack runs, and with their speed of approach they were far less accurate. That’s what I’d learned at JTAC school, and that’s how it had proven over the last few weeks in Helmand. But it was a lesson the enemy also seemed to have learned well.

I got allocated two Apaches, call signs Ugly Five Zero and Ugly Five One . I got the F-16 banked up high, to allow the gunships in to do their work. But as soon as the squat black predatory shapes of the Apaches tipped up over the battlefield, the contact died down.

It all went deadly silent. I sat in the Vector’s turret hardly believing what was happening. Nothing . There wasn’t a single round being loosed off below, or a mortar being lobbed at us lot on the high ground. It was as if I’d called out the Ugly call signs on a lie.

The enemy seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth.

I split the flight. I got Ugly Five Two scanning the compounds to the front of 3 Platoon, whilst Ugly Five Zero got overhead the enemy mortar plate. Not a soul was moving on the ground, and there wasn’t a thing to be seen in either location. Nothing. Nada . Zilch.

At least it gave 3 Platoon time to re-bomb their mags and get some water down their necks. It was late morning under a burning Afghan sun, and the lads in the Green Zone had to be sweating their cocks off. It was like an oven in the Vector. It had zero airconditioning, which was another reason we kept the turrets open.

By rights we shouldn’t even have been using an armoured truck like the Vector. On arrival in Camp Bastion our FST had been issued with a WMIK — an open-topped vehicle bristling with machine guns. It sure looked the business, but after a handful of missions we’d realised how utterly useless it was for our tasking.

The WMIK is a three-seater vehicle: two at the front and one at the rear on the 50-cal. Someone seemed to have overlooked the fact that we were four in our FST. Smart. Whenever we went out on ops we had to leave one behind. Plus using an open-topped Land Rover in the burning heat and dust killed the kind of kit we were using. The tools of the trade are all kinds of sensitive electronic equipment: radios, satellite comms, laser target designators, computers and handheld navigation devices. The kit was taking a right hammering in the WMIK, and it wouldn’t last the duration of the tour.

A month into our deployment Sticky, Throp and I had been rotated back through Camp Bastion. We’d been promised a Vector at the very least, and we had our hearts set on getting one. But when we got there we were told that ‘our’ vehicle had been allocated to another unit.

So we went looking for one. We found a Vector complete with its work ticket — a green leather wallet containing all its roadworthy certs — and with the keys in the ignition. It had a full tank of fuel, so we jumped aboard and joined a convoy heading back to base, at FOB Price.

Admittedly, we’d ‘borrowed’ that Vector, but no one seemed to mind. And ever since then we’d been driving around in ‘our’ Vector. It was about the minimum that the four of us plus all our kit could get away with.

And I was mighty glad of it now, stuck up here on the ridge line overlooking Adin Zai. I’d lost count of the number of times we’d been bracketed by the enemy mortar team, shrapnel and rocks slamming into the steel sides of the wagon.

By now we were also getting targeted by a 107mm rocket launcher. A direct hit from a 107mm warhead would be terminally lethal. Plus small arms rounds kept pinging off the armoured skin of the beast. The Vector mightn’t be bomb-proof, but it sure as hell was doing its job up here on the high ground.

By 1300 there was still not the slightest sign of the enemy. The Apache gunships were low on fuel, and they left to return to Bastion without a shot being fired. We were yet to have a single injury amongst our lads, which was unbelievable. We’d been lucky as fuck, and having the Apaches overhead had bought us some precious time.