by Alex Duncan
Nichol was the handling pilot. For me, it was my first experience of being under direct threat and it wasn’t a nice feeling. Knowing that there are some demented, well-armed fuckers on the ground who want to shoot you out of the sky – and that they’re close by – is not something you’d wish on your worst enemy. Well actually, given that the Taliban are my worst enemy, maybe I would.
The mission just didn’t make sense to me. Why question the wisdom in scrambling us to rescue wounded troops because of the threat to the aircraft and crew, yet send us into the jaws of death to rescue a £40,000 vehicle that had already been ‘cleaned’ by the crew that abandoned it? All the doors and windows had gone, so it was little more than a chassis with six wheels, a back end and a steering wheel. Why go into the hover to try and pick up a worthless vehicle when there was a better than even chance we’d be taking fire, risking the four of us and our £15,000,000 cab? It was madness.
The ICOM chatter was increasing, the sun had dipped below the horizon, and we knew that if we didn’t pick the vehicle up, it would only pass the problem on to someone else. Bastion was telling us that if we didn’t do the job, they’d have to send in reinforcements to spend the night guarding the vehicle. What to do? Do we let twenty-four poor sods spend the night outside waiting for an attack, or do we go in and do it as ordered?
Nichol made the call: ‘We’re going to do this. I’m going to do a zero speed approach right next to the truck; we’ll throw a strop out to the Joint Helicopter Support Squadron guys, it’ll take them a few seconds to attach it to the hook and then we can lift.’
I was gripped with fear; convinced that we’d be sat there in the hover and some Taliban fighter would come out of the bushes and release an RPG straight through the arse of the aircraft. I had no frame of reference for this, so my mind played all sorts of tricks on me, none of which were remotely useful. It’s fight or flight, but what do you do when every cell of your being is telling you ‘flight’, yet running isn’t an option? You get on with it.
Nichol did an absolutely beautiful landing; absolutely fucking nailed it, putting the aircraft right next to the Pinzgauer. The crewman already had the floor hatch open with the hook ready. He chucked the strop under the aircraft, the JHSU ran out, secured the truck, and as soon as they were back in he raised the ramp. No fucking around. As soon as the guys were back on board, Nichol pulled power and did a beautifully smooth straight up and right. It was a beautiful bit of flying, no corrections required.
I’ve no idea how but we got away with it. I think it was down to how quickly it all happened and the fact that it was done so well. The enemy simply didn’t have time to get into position. We were all the way there and halfway back by the time they arrived. I was hanging out of my arse when we shut the cab down back at Bastion, but I’d turned a corner and learned something. The threat was becoming more real and I knew it was only a matter of time before we took fire. It’s a cliché, but I knew we’d have to keep being lucky, whereas the Taliban only needed to be lucky once.
It was around this time that the Taliban intensified their attacks on the towns of Now Zad and Musa Qala, and it was being reported that Now Zad in particular was about to fall. The governor of Helmand province, Mohammad Daoud, urged Brigadier Ed Butler, the commander of 16 Air Assault Brigade, to defend government positions in both places.
Butler was reluctant to do so because Lt Col Tootal’s 3 Para were already overstretched, and it was tactically unsound to see the small force that he had available being tied down to two fixed positions in remote outstations. Daoud threatened to resign over the issue, which would have caused the UK government – who had pressed for his appointment in the first place – some embarrassment. Butler was in an impossible position; in the end, he had to relent, dispatching B Company, 3 Para to protect Now Zad and a small force to Musa Qala. We were starting to feel the pinch as both 3 Para and the Chinook Force had finite resources available. There were a total of just six Chinooks available in theatre, so helicopter hours were scarce, and 3 Para were dangerously overstretched.
We’d been engaged to support their move into the newly established Platoon Houses and were flying supplies in, using underslung loads. We were flying as a four-ship: two Chinooks – Splinter Two Five (Nichol and I) and Splinter Two Six; and two Apaches to support us – Ugly Five Zero and Ugly Five One.
We were increasingly glad of the Apaches that accompanied us on every mission. The Apache helicopter is a revolutionary development in the history of war. It is essentially a flying tank – a helicopter designed to survive heavy attack and inflict massive damage. It can zero in on specific targets, day or night, even in terrible weather. It’s a terrifying machine to the Taliban, who call it ‘The Mosquito’, and for whom it vies with the Chinook as the aircraft that they would most like to shoot down.
The Apache’s main function in battle is to close with the enemy and kill them, and it’s a particularly personal form of killing for the pilots who, along with snipers, are the only two combatants to get a detailed look at the faces of the men they are about to kill. A sniper fixes his quarry in the crosshairs of the sight on his bolt-action rifle; the Apache crew watch theirs in close-up on a five-inch square screen in the cockpit before they pull the trigger. The main fixed armament is a 30mm M230 Chain Gun under the aircraft’s nose. It can also carry a mixture of AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, and Hydra 70 rocket pods on four hard points mounted on its stub-wing pylons.
One of its most impressive features is the helmet mounted display (HMD), which has a clip-on arm that drops a monocle-like screen in front of the pilot’s right eye. Instrument readings from around the cockpit are projected on to it and, at the flick of a button, a range of other images can also be superimposed underneath the glow of the instrument symbology, replicating the Apache’s camera images and the radar’s targets.
The monocle leaves the pilot’s left eye free to scan the world outside the cockpit. The HMD has one other major advantage: at the flick of a switch, it enables the Apache’s weapons systems to slave to either pilot’s line of sight. In each corner of the cockpit, sensors detect exactly where the right eye is looking and lock the weapons systems to the pilot’s eye-line. At the HMD’s centre is a crosshair sight, and as the pilot’s eye moves, so too, for example, does the Apache’s 30mm cannon, which swivels to point wherever the pilot is looking. Look at the target, pull the trigger and that’s where the rounds will land. If the Chinooks represented Cold War technology at its best, the AHs were the latest word in cutting edge.
A few hundred metres south of the DC at Now Zad was a small hillock with commanding views over the town, which had previously been manned by the Afghan National Police. It was known by everyone as ANP Hill and we had to drop off some pax there. First though, we had to drop an underslung load at the Patrol House in the DC. It’s a sortie I’ll never forget because I witnessed an incident at ANP Hill that really opened my eyes to one of the uglier elements of Afghan culture.
I was flying from the right-hand seat with Nichol on the left, and made my approach to Now Zad. We landed first while Splinter Two Six remained in the overhead to offer us an extra degree of protection. As I came in to drop the load, we were completely enveloped by what seemed to be the biggest dust cloud in the world! The target compound was ankle-deep in really powdery sand, and the height of the walls and the compound’s size both conspired to channel the dust vertically. What normally happens is that it builds gradually from the rear, but with this it was like someone had thrown a switch and we went from no dust with clear visibility to a complete brownout. How I managed to put the load down in the middle of the compound without breaking anything is anyone’s guess, but I was pretty chuffed about it.
Having dropped the load, I rapidly transitioned away and thought myself lucky that I was first aircraft in and not the second. As Splinter Two Six came in, they got exactly the same as us, only worse, because they also had to contend with the dust cloud that we’d whipped up as we departed. Still,
things aren’t meant to be easy – they just ‘are’, so you do what you have to.
With both underslung loads dropped, we landed on ANP Hill, turning and burning while our pax – a mortar platoon from the Ghurkhas that would be manning a position there – walked off. Almost out of nowhere, we were surrounded by a wall of people. It was the first time that the Chinooks had been into Now Zad, so I guess we created something of a spectacle. Dozens of women and children came out to look at the aircraft.
There was an ANP patrol milling around. Some of them engaged with the Ghurkhas that we’d dropped off, while others just stood and watched us. Then one decided he wanted to take a picture of us and started walking towards the aircraft from the front. Bear in mind that we’re on a hill, so the tips of the forward rotor blades were about four foot off the ground at their lowest point. Spinning at 225rpm, walk into one of those, as this clown was close to doing, and they’d cleave your head from your shoulders as easily as a hot knife through butter.
Everything happened in slow motion. We were frantically trying to motion to this ANP fellow, who was completely oblivious to the dangers and to our attempts to attract his attention. Fortunately for him, one of the British troops on the hill saw what we were doing and unceremoniously grabbed the Afghan policeman from behind and pulled him to the ground. There was no time to explain what he was doing – it was grab him or watch him die, so this Brit basically saved the guy’s life. But the policeman didn’t quite see things that way. He’d been trying to be clever, showing off about how close he could get, but he’d lost face in front of his mates. Worse, the women and children in the crowd saw it too.
Predictably, the guy’s mates were all laughing at him, much as I guess would happen had the characters in this particular saga been British or French. In that case, the guy who’d been dragged back would probably just have got up, thanked the guy who saved his life and laughed it off. Not this guy.
Instead, he headed towards the women and children who, although still about seventy metres away from us, were gradually edging closer. And what happened next stunned me. Instead of telling the women to get back, the ANP attacked them, using their AK-47s and batons to hit them. Faces, heads, bodies, legs – they didn’t care where they hit them. Bear in mind, these were the very people they were supposed to be protecting. They went about their task as though born to it, and the attack was vicious. But hey, they demonstrated their masculinity and I’m sure the guy who lost face felt a lot better. So that was alright then.
Nichol and I were incensed, but we were completely helpless; framed by the windscreen and with the sound muted by the noise from our aircraft it was like watching a particularly misogynistic and violent snuff movie. I’d have happily drawn my weapon and shot the guy; fuck the consequences. We’d come with the best of intentions, all about hearts and minds and winning over the local population, and this is what we had to confront: not only the evil of the Taliban, but the pig ignorance and violence shown by the narrow-minded idiots in the ANP. And they were supposed to be ‘onside’! What really got me was the knowledge that to those in the crowd, we were now guilty by association. That I really found hard to accept. It left a really sour taste in my mouth.
11
EMERALD BEAUTY
Much of what followed was a series of relatively straightforward taskings out of KAF; straightforward, but never mundane. How can anything be mundane when you tackle every sortie as if you’re going to war – armoured up, armed and with eyes on stalks waiting for the shots that are going to blow you out of the sky?
It’s amazing how quickly you adjust. Even at this point of the tour, less than two weeks after arriving, I could already see how much I’d advanced. Not just in terms of my flying – I was acquiring more and more knowledge of extreme tactical manoeuvres and becoming more proficient in executing them – but also in terms of my mindset. I had a frame of reference now; I’d flown missions where intelligence said the Taliban were waiting for us, and although nothing had happened, you only know that with the benefit of hindsight. For each sortie I flew with the expectation of something happening. It was a tick in the box; I’d done what I’d trained to do and I hadn’t been found wanting. Some people might call it courage. But what is courage, after all? I’ve heard it said that bravery is being the only one who knows you’re afraid. To me, that isn’t bravery, it’s leadership. It’s what being an officer is all about.
Every sortie I flew, I flew aggressively. That might sound nonsensical, but just as you can drive a car aggressively, so you can fly an aircraft like that too – even one as big and heavy as the Chinook. I had good teachers in the captains I flew with and I’m a perfectionist – if I learned a new trick, or another aggressive way to scrub speed off in as short a distance as possible, I honed it until it was second nature. Every mission was about doing it to the best of my ability, learning something from it and acting as aggressively as possible so as to deter the enemy from having a go. Every day we stayed alive was a day that we learned something.
The view from the office was something I never tired of either. Despite the risks – aviation per se is a risky business; military aviation the riskiest of all – I still feel privileged to do what I do and one of the best aspects of flying in Afghanistan was the ability to forget, if only for a few seconds, the reality of the conflict we found ourselves in and just take in the majesty and breathtaking, forbiddingly beautiful vista of Kajaki from the air.
The Kajaki Dam is a particularly important asset in Helmand, providing as it does the water that irrigates the Helmand Valley, and satisfying the demand for electricity for the whole province. Along with Musa Qala, Sangin and Now Zad, it came under increasing and prolonged attacks from the Taliban, who were effectively laying siege to it. Night after night, they would launch mortar attacks against the small contingent of the Afghan National Army (ANA) and the private security team led by an American contractor who defended it. Colonel Tootal was under pressure to bolster its defences but simply didn’t have a spare company to deploy there: they were all committed elsewhere.
The stunning beauty of Kajaki has to be seen to be believed, and is a startling contrast to the arid, dusty landscape that surrounds it. The dam itself was built by the US in 1953 and further developed in 1975. It holds back the melt water that flows from the Hindu Kush in a mammoth lake of the most intense aquamarine hue. The water then flows through the single working turbine, generating enough power to serve the demands of those in the valley, and emerging in a torrent of foaming white water that feeds into the crystal clear waters of the Helmand River.
Its remarkable beauty belies an incredibly violent past, although the signs are there if you look carefully enough. The minefields laid by the Soviets delineate the surrounding countryside and are as deadly a threat now as when they were laid. But the most chilling element of the Kajaki complex is a building just outside the perimeter known as the Russian House.
When the Soviets retreated towards the end of the war, a detachment of young soldiers who had been holding the strategically important dam were cut off. They fought wave after wave of attacks by Mujahideen fighters, but eventually they ran out of ammunition and were overrun. The Afghan fighters broke through the barricades to the ground floor and brutally butchered the soldiers they found there; it’s said that they were flayed alive while their friends and colleagues upstairs had to endure the agony of their screams. It’s thought that those upstairs were fed into the fans of the turbine. The walls, ceiling and doors bear witness to the last few bitter, desperate hours of the fight, pockmarked and scarred with scores of bullet holes and shrapnel damage.
These days, the handful of defenders at Kajaki enjoyed a miserable existence thanks to the Taliban’s regular mortar attacks, and the ANA were starting to get jittery. My first run-up to the dam came about when I was on the IRT and we got a call to pick up an ANA soldier with a minor bullet wound. The flight from Bastion to Kajaki takes about half an hour or so. Once we were across the Desert North of
Bastion, we’d transition to height and fly over the Green Zone, which is quite stunning when viewed from altitude. The Helmand River snakes across the landscape and a sea of green radiates from its banks to a distance of about 10km or so – lush, verdant vegetation and crops. The locals and Taliban both depend on it. But either side of the Green Zone lies arid desert – a flat nothingness.
Shortly after leaving the Green Zone behind, the route takes you through the Sangin Valley, and it’s around here that the topography starts to change. Suddenly, sharp crags appear as the valley floor rises up to a series of vertiginous peaks. The ground looks barren and dry, a canvas of ochre, beige and sand as far as the eye can see. Suddenly, the landscape changes dramatically and you’re confronted with the majestic beauty of Kajaki Lake. The colour of the water – a rich, vivid aquamarine that changes from a deep emerald to turquoise, depending on the position of the sun – takes your breath away and is perfectly framed by what appear to be luscious sandy shores. If they ever get the security situation in Afghanistan squared away, Kajaki would make the perfect holiday destination. There’d be no shortage of ex-RAF aircrew wanting to set up jet-ski schools on the lake.
You drop down low as you turn on finals for either of the two bases at Kajaki – Broadsword and Lancaster – and with the sun high in the sky, you get a perfect shadow of the aircraft below you in the water. It’s a tricky run in – there are a lot of wires to negotiate, a sharp descent downhill as the land falls away beneath you, and a ruined crane (another hangover from the Soviet occupation) to avoid. It requires some highly technical, precision flying; otherwise you could find yourself too high and too fast, with the aircraft literally running away from you in the latter stages.