Paul Grahame - Fire Strike 7/9

‘Fuckin’ hell!’ I yelled. ‘ Get in! ’ I turned to Sticky. ‘Get a sitrep from 3 Platoon.’

The lads knew the bomb was going in, so they’d be on their belt buckles hard in cover. And the airstrike had looked to be bang on target. But the splinter distance — the safe range for friendly forces — of a GBU-38 is 275 metres, and that’s with the good guys in proper cover. I wanted to make totally sure the 3 Platoon lads were still alive.

‘ Wicked Four One , BDA,’ I radioed the pilot. ‘Repeat: BDA.’

I was asking the F-16 pilot for a Battle Damage Assessment (BDA). I didn’t really need one, for the contact had died down to nothing. But with his sniper optics he was sure to see more than any of us lot.

‘Ground troops are all A-OK,’ Sticky reported back to me. ‘The impact point was right on top of the enemy. Platoon commander was visual with three enemy with RPGs as the bomb hit ’em.’

‘ Widow Seven Nine , BDA,’ the F-16 pilot cut in. ‘The only thing left is a smoking crater. Enemy position obliterated.’ He paused for a second to let it sink in. ‘Repeat: enemy obliterated. And sir, I gotta bug out, ’cause I’m all out of fuel.’

Fair enough. Enemy obliterated . What more could I ask of him?

The F-16 got ripped by a pair of F-18s, which I’d have on station for two hours. It was 1445 by now, and the 2 MERCIAN lads were on the move again, pushing further into enemy terrain. But we now had a barrage of mortars smashing into the Green Zone.

From the Vector’s open turret I could see the smoke plumes of those explosions. The mortars were impacting four hundred metres in front of us, and two hundred behind our forward line of troops. The barrage was creeping closer to our lads, and it wouldn’t take long for the dicker to walk the enemy mortars on to target.

I split the F-18s. I got Devo Two Two over a two-mile-square grid where we reckoned the mortar team were firing from. I briefed the pilot to search with his FLIR (Forward Looking Infra Red) scanner for a hot mortar tube. If he found it he was to smash it.

I got Devo Two One over the Green Zone to the front of our line of troops. All three platoons were in fierce contact now, sandwiched between the enemy to their front and a mortar barrage at their backs.

The focus of enemy fire seemed to be coming from a patch of dense bush two hundred and fifty metres to the north-west of our lads. I gave Devo Two One the coordinates of a hundred-metre-square box to search. Within minutes the pilot came back to me.

‘Visual six pax two-two-five metres north-west of your lead platoon. Visual four pax with weapons. Visual with muzzle flashes all along the woodline.’

‘ Nearest friendlies 225 metres south-east of enemy,’ I told the pilot. ‘Describe enemy position.’

I needed a better idea of the target, so I could work out how best to hit it. Our lead platoon were close to the splinter distance of some of the weapons that the F-18 was carrying.

‘Six pax have taken cover in a narrow ditch in the woodline,’ the pilot replied. ‘Visual with muzzle flashes from out of that ditch position.’

‘Right, I want you to drop a GBU-12 airburst right on top of ’em,’ I told the pilot. ‘Attack line coming in from the south-west to north-east. Confirm.’

The pilot repeated the details back to me. Coming in on that run he’d be flying over the heads of our lads as he launched his strike. But the trajectory of his attack should throw the blast away from our forces, or at least that was the theory.

A GBU-12 is an eight-hundred-pound smart bomb that can be set to ‘airburst’ mode, meaning it detonates one hundred metres above the target. It sends its explosive force downwards in a funnel of shrapnel that follows the bomb’s momentum. It was the only way to hit those enemy fighters in that ditch, and keep the blast away from our lads.

I listened in as Devo Two One warned his wing of his attacking run, to deconflict the air, and then he gave me the sixty-seconds call. But as Sticky went to pass the warning to the platoon, there was the scream of an incoming mortar.

Sticky and I dived into the open turrets, but we were too slow. An instant later there was a crunching impact, the round smashing into the dirt not sixty metres from our wagon. The wave of the explosion tore across us, and I felt the stinging pain of blast-driven dust and rock and shit smacking into me.

But I was halfway through doing a live run with an F-18, and I was the JTAC who was calling the bomb: I didn’t have the time to worry about getting hit.

‘Time to fucking man it out!’ I yelled at Sticky.

We let out a demented cackle, and thrust ourselves back out of the armoured turrets of the Vector. I swivelled and searched the skies to the south-west for a glimpse of a speeding F-18 Hornet. Almost immediately I spotted the gleaming dart of the aircraft on the far horizon. The pilot was right where I wanted him.

Let’s get the bomb in .

‘Call for clearance,’ came the pilot’s voice.

‘No change friendlies. Clear hot!’

‘In hot.’ A beat. ‘Stores.’

The GBU-12 is three metres long, and it ‘flies’ on a set of tail wings. It can be released from several kilometres away, gliding into target with a nine-metre margin of error. At a cost of some $20,000 it was far from being the most expensive munition in the F-18’s arsenal, but it was a peachy one.

Released at height and distance it could take a good thirty seconds to reach target — plenty of time for the 2 MERCIAN lads to get their heads down. This time, there was no conventional ground explosion. As the GBU-12 detonated, the sky above the Green Zone erupted in a massive ball of raging fire.

The blast tore downwards from the epicentre of the explosion. Fingers of hot shrapnel rained on to the enemy position, throwing up a plume of dirt and debris where they smashed into the earth. That enemy ditch position had to have been smashed, but still I needed a BDA.

‘BDA: there’s nothing left alive down there,’ came the pilot’s voice. ‘Correction: one male pax crawling away from the blast site.’ A beat. ‘Correction: he’s stopped moving. Unsure of how many killed, but there are tiny heat spots everywhere.’

‘Tiny heat spots’ equalled body parts. The six enemy fighters in that ditch had been shredded, along with anything else caught in the airburst’s downblast.

Devo Two One had to break off and head for the refuelling tanker. I pulled Devo Two Two in over the lead platoon, and gave him the grid of the most forward troops. The pilot confirmed he was visual with our lads, and happy with their route of advance. He told me that he was scanning the terrain up ahead for any sign of the enemy.

As the F-16 went about its work, Sticky held up an Army-issue Yorkie bar. He traced the distinctive red and yellow wording printed on the metallic blue wrapping.

‘Yorkie!’ he drawled, putting on a deep and manly voice as he did so. ‘It’s not for civvies!’

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had any scoff. I grabbed the proffered bar, tore off one corner with my teeth, and sucked the molten chocolate down in one greedy blast. Everything melted in the intense Afghan heat: food, shoes, your brains even. This was the only way to eat a Yorkie, plus it gave the body an instant burst of energy.

There was a squelch of static in my TACSAT. ‘ Widow Seven Nine , Devo Two Two .’ There was an urgency in the pilot’s voice. ‘Tell your lead platoon to go firm! Repeat: your lead platoon to go firm.’

I flicked my eyes across to Sticky, knowing that he was monitoring the air net. He gave me a nod, and put the call through to the OC. Not a word had been spoken between us. That instinctive communication was all part of the joy of conducting the ground-to-air war.