by Alex Duncan
I always try and rationalise things but, if I’m honest, that’s one sortie I can’t explain.
20
A VALIANT SOLDIER
August 11th 2007 is a day I’ll never forget. Rich and I, together with crewmen Jim Warner and Bob Ruffles, were on the third day of a four-day stint in Bastion, which had been dominated by trips to and from FOB Inkerman to extract a significant number of British casualties. The base, which was home to ‘C’ (Essex) Company Royal Anglians, is situated about eight klicks north of Sangin and acted as a buffer between the town and the Taliban for whom it seemed to be some form of ordnance magnet.
Every day was the same. Sometime between 13:00 hrs and 14:00 hrs, the Taliban would launch concerted attacks on the base, employing every weapon at their disposal. Those inside the base got used to a daily diet of recoilless rifle, RPGs, rockets, mortars and small arms fire, and in giving as good as they got, they took a number of casualties. In the two previous days, we’d recovered at least eleven troops, including the body of Private Tony Rawson, who had been shot dead while on patrol. His Company Commander, Captain David Hicks, had written a very moving eulogy for him.
Whenever a British soldier is killed in theatre, Brigade HQ immediately enforces Op Minimise, a blackout of communications across the entire country. Phones, email, Paradigm text and internet are affected simultaneously. When it happens, and it can be at any time of the day or night, an announcement is made to that effect by Tannoy at each base and FOB. If you’re in the middle of a call or surfing the net, you won’t get a chance to say goodbye – Op Minimise has the immediacy of a power outage.
Its purpose is to allow the next-of-kin informing process to begin and not be inadvertently or wilfully undermined by members of the casualty’s unit advising the family, friends or media before the military can track them down. How long that takes can vary – Op Minimise might last a few hours, it could last a whole day, or during summer (when the UK’s casualties are at their highest) Op Minimise can be called back-to-back, meaning we can go four, five, six or more days without being able to contact our loved ones. Of course, as soon as Op Minimise comes into effect, every Brit in Afghanistan knows that somewhere in the country a commanding officer is making the call that will set in chain the sequence of events that will lead to someone’s partner, parent or sibling getting the dreaded knock on the door.
The morning of the 11th had been quiet, so we’d taken the opportunity to enjoy lunch as a crew together at one of Bastion’s DFACS (dining facilities), although the radio was always close at hand. Sadly, life at FOB Inkerman wasn’t so sunny. At around 13:30, just as we were arriving back at the IRT tent, the Taliban had launched another attack on the base and a mortar round had landed on a fuel tank, causing multiple injuries. An RPG had also found its mark, hitting an observation tower in the middle of the base, severely wounding Captain Hicks. We got the call just after 14:00: two long rings, which by now sounded to us like the clanging chimes of doom. Like Pavlov’s dogs, we responded through conditioning; we hated the sound, but it produced a surge of adrenaline in all of us.
I’m captain, so Rich and Jim head straight for the aircraft to get her spun up, while Bob and I head for the JOC to get the details. There is no need for us to wait for the Apache on IRT duty to escort us; the crew is already overhead at Inkerman helping out the beleaguered guys inside with some close air support. As per usual, by the time Bob and I reach the cab, we’re pretty much good to go. The MERT is already on board, busily sorting kit out and hanging up IV drips. The QRF sit ready and waiting, their weapons resting between their legs, business ends pointing downwards – that way, any negligent discharges aren’t going to take out vital systems.
Back at RAF Odiham on a routine tasking, it takes us around forty-five minutes to start the aircraft and get airborne. On the IRT, we’ve got it down to just a few minutes. There are lives at stake and every second counts; we do everything we can to make a difference, and in the dynamic, constantly changing environment that is a war zone, getting airborne in the shortest time possible is one thing we can influence. I brief the crew as soon as I don my helmet and connect the pigtail.
‘It’s a bad one, guys. FOB Inkerman. We’ve got two T1s, four T3s and a walking wounded to pick up. The LS was still hot when I left the JOC and the Apache was letting loose with everything it has, so it could get interesting on the way in. Everyone okay?’
‘All good, Frenchie,’ the crew come back. German fires up the engines and with the all clear from Jim at the ramp, we lift into the afternoon sunshine and turn north.
‘OK, same drill as usual,’ I say as we climb to height. ‘No rank bollocks on my cab. I’m Frenchie or Alex, this is German, you’re Bob and you’re Jim. You have my authority to engage without reference if you identify a firing point. Clear?’
‘All clear, Frenchie,’ from the back.
Before we climb to height on the transit north of Bastion, there’s a linear feature which we know as the deconfliction line. With that in our six o’clock, the guys in the back can test fire the guns – aside from the Apache, they’re our last line of defence, so if they’re going to fail, you want to know before things heat up, not at a crucial life-or-death moment. Hence, on every sortie, the aircraft’s weapons are test fired.
‘Checking weapons,’ says Jim at the ramp.
‘Checking weapons,’ says Bob on the Crowd Pleaser.
‘Work away, fellas.’
Jim opens up with the ramp-mounted M60. It’s a gas-operated, air-cooled, belt-fed, automatic machine-gun with a maximum rate of fire of 550 rounds per minute; on its own, it’s pretty impressive as it fires a line of rounds out into the sky over Helmand. Then Bob lets fly with the door-mounted M134 Minigun – compared to that, the M60 sounds like an X Factor loser against Whitney Houston. The noise the Crowd Pleaser makes as it spits out up to four thousand 7.62mm rounds a minute has to be heard to be believed. A spout of flame erupts from the front as the six barrels rotate and fire a line of red-hot rounds earthwards. It’s a great weapon to have.
We come in through the Sangin Valley and fly a holding pattern over the western side, waiting to be called in by the AHs. The site is still hot as hell and we wait for a lull in the fighting so we can put down. The Apaches are doing everything they can to speed that moment along and are directing a huge weight of fire at the Green Zone. The 30mm cannon fire a stream of High Explosive (HE) shells earthwards and then they let loose with their flechette rockets. These weapons are truly awesome in their destructive power, especially against multiple personnel out in the open; once in flight, each rocket releases eighty six-inch tungsten darts travelling at 2,460mph. They’ll shred anything within a 50m spread and if they hit a human target, their supersonic speed creates a vacuum that will suck up everything in its path. They are just the thing for the fuckers who are causing all the misery at FOB Inkerman.
The site is still hot, but we know there are seven casualties down there who are depending on us. The AHs are raining fire down to suppress the enemy below in an effort to get us in, so it’s in our hands.
‘Guys, we could wait ’til the end of tour for this LS to go cold. Are we all happy to make a move with it still hot?’
All three of them agree. We’re going in. ‘Ugly Five Two, Doorman Two Four, request you keep the pressure on. We’re going in,’ I advise.
‘Roger that, Doorman. We’ll keep their heads down,’ I hear against a deafening live soundtrack of 30mm cannon fire.
‘Okay, Rich. There are two or three triangular-shaped hills there that are almost like the pyramids at Giza. They’re your marker for a left-hand turn to end up on a north-west track. That’ll put us a mile and a half out from the LS.’
‘Got it.’
Rich flies fast, aggressive and dirty as we make the approach at low level. His favourite technique to arrest our speed is a series of steep, acute turns and he’s expert at it; the tail goes left, right, left, right as our speed drops. I’m ‘eyes out’, looking out t
he window, but I look at the engine instruments briefly to scan the Ts and Ps and that’s when I notice the NR is at 114%! In all my hours of flying, I’ve never seen it that high. 110% is the limit, and I’ve never even seen it that high, let alone 114%!
It’s weird because normally once you get above 104% – still within limits – the gearbox protests by making a noise that sounds like God shouting, and you feel a shed-load of vibration in the aircraft caused by the blades slapping the air. Normally, push the aircraft this hard and you know all about it. This time? Nothing. The aircraft is flying with NR of 114% and it’s as smooth as a baby’s bottom. There’s no time to tell Rich to correct it, so I pull on the collective to create some lift to bring the NR back within limits.
Rich looks at me. ‘Fuck, Frenchie! Thanks for that.’ He’s as stunned as I am.
‘No worries. Twenty seconds to go. HLS is on the nose. You visual? Speed is good, good rate of descent. Everyone secure?’ I ask.
As Rich sets us up in the gate at 100ft and 30kts, the LS is still taking fire. Suddenly the Defensive Aids Suite detects a threat. Some sort of weapons system has engaged us and the DAS has picked it up.
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! It fires out a series of flares.
‘60ft, 30kts,’ I say as Rich brings the nose up.
Jim and Bob take over the talk-down and within seconds I feel the rear wheels land on.
‘Two wheels on . . . six wheels on,’ from the back.
The ramp goes down and the doctor heads out to meet the troops who are already with the casualties and heading for the aircraft. At the front, Rich and I are busy scanning everything and doing all the checks we can so that as soon as we get the nod, we can lift; we know the crewmen are busy and they’ll signal to us to get the hell out of Dodge the minute they can.
The threat from incoming mortars is a real worry for me. How much longer can our luck hold? The casualties take longer than I’d like to load but, with seven of them, that’s to be expected. I look down and see a pair of feet in the 2ft narrow ‘corridor’ that leads from the rear of the cab to the cockpit. Something’s wrong though; they belong to an ANA who is laid on his back and his toes are pointing down towards the floor, not up as they should be. Both ankles are broken.
I catch Jim’s eye. ‘This guy’s in a bad way, mate,’ he says. ‘I’m just putting a tourniquet on him and it’s my tourniquet cos we’ve run out of them in the back.’
Fuck me, it must be bad; I’ve never heard of that happening before. I look towards the ramp and a scene of absolute bedlam greets me: six wounded British casualties and a wounded Afghan soldier on board – two T1s, four T3s and a walking wounded. I can’t ever remember a time before when we had that many casualties in the cab. There are stretchers taking up every spare inch of floor space and almost nowhere for the QRF guys to go. IV drips hang from every point, the floor is awash with blood; I can almost smell it. It’s a scene of utter devastation – broken bodies and medics working like crazy in the dark, cramped dusty cab.
‘Ramp up, clear above and behind.’
That’s all we need to hear. ‘Lifting,’ says Rich, pulling up the collective. He pushes forward on the cyclic to get the nose down and we disappear, as low and fast and dirty as we can, manoeuvring all the while to make ourselves as difficult a target as possible. We’re engaged again; the DAS fires flares off to tempt away whatever threat it’s detected headed towards us.
The number one priority on lifting is to get the aircraft out of the engagement zone. Rich turns an immediate left as we depart, along the wadi at low level – Sangin’s to the right and we don’t want to get too close to that without getting some speed up.
The team are trying to stabilise Captain Hicks. I ask Bob how he is.
‘He’s taken a head wound, Frenchie. They’re doing CPR on him at the moment.’
They manage to revive him, but I’m in awe of the crewmen. Already overworked with running the cab and managing the aircraft, they’re up to their elbows in all of the worst aspects of conflict – the bloodied, battered bodies of young soldiers. It’s hard enough for us looking in the mirror and seeing the guys working on them, but there’s no escape for the crewmen – they’re up close and personal. I look at the MERT team working on Capt Hicks; he has multiple arrests but each time they perform CPR he comes back. I will him to hang on. We all want him to live.
We run down as fast as we can down the east side of Sangin, along the east side of FOB Robinson, and once we clear that we do a right turn towards the south-west, north of Gereshk and a straight run for Bastion, avoiding all the danger areas. With the nose dipped, we are wringing every single ounce of power the cab has, flying at the aircraft’s VNE or Velocity Never Exceed. The ASI shows us at 160 knots – even more at times.
The engine is temperature-limited rather than torque-limited in theatre, so there are certain temperature bands that govern how hard you can push it. Continuous does what it says on the tin, as does thirty-minute power. Ten minutes means you can push hard for ten minutes but then have to come back into thirty minutes. Finally, there is ‘Emergency’ – you can push the engines to the max for five minutes but doing so starts a countdown timer. Once you exceed that, the engine’s ready for the bin.
We literally can’t fly the aircraft any harder to get it back. We are flying at the top of ten-minute power for nine minutes fifty-nine seconds, and then we lower the lever, get the engine back into thirty minutes and then yank the power back up to the ten-minute band. We try everything we’ve got. We’re flying faster than I’ve ever done before in a Chinook and it’s shaking like a bastard. We can’t fly a straight line back – the risk to the cab from ground fire is too great. We have to weigh up the options: save thirty seconds and risk losing the seven casualties, the crew, the medics and the cab, or go the longer way round? It’s a no-brainer. We can’t go as the crow flies so we take the quickest route we can. It adds maybe thirty seconds to our journey, but it feels like an age. I feel like we’re watching an hourglass and the sand’s about to run out.
Bastion’s in sight now. I can see the wire. Nightingale and the HLS are on the nose. We’re seconds away. Rich is working it like a madman; we’re digging deep to give everything we can.
‘How are things in the back?’ I ask.
‘I’m sorry mate, I think it’s over. He’s had a heart attack and they’re stopping CPR,’ says Bob.
I feel like the bottom has dropped out of our world. It’s absolutely heart-wrenching. But there’s still a chance, so we don’t stop. We don’t ever stop until we’re on the ground and we’ve done everything we can. We rip the aircraft all the way to Nightingale and the team are waiting for us. Rich stops the cab on a sixpence, we land on and the ramp goes down. The casualties are off, but we’re too late for David Hicks – sadly, he doesn’t make it.
We’re gutted. All of us. The aircraft is deathly quiet, everyone gathering their thoughts. I’ve never seen a cab so trashed in the back; there’s equipment strewn everywhere, the detritus of the frantic fight to save lives. But we’ve no time to wallow; we have to prep the cab in case we’re scrambled again. We have a great relationship with the MERT because we fly with them all the time. When we drop the casualties at Nightingale, it’s only the surgeon who goes off with them – the nurses stay on the aircraft. They clean up the cab, prepare it. Jim and Bob are part of the team – they’re all involved. They put on the white all-in-one forensic suits and gloves to protect against contamination and get to work cleaning out the cab and mopping up the blood.
The MERT worked so hard to save those guys. We did everything we could. The aircraft couldn’t have given any more. All that, and it wasn’t enough. Fuck it! Everything we know, all that medical knowledge and it’s not enough. He still died, and what’s worse is, it was within sight of the hospital.
I feel powerless; totally powerless. I feel an intense sadness, but it’s mixed up with anger. Sat on the HLS you have time to think, to replay events. Did we do all we could? Could we ha
ve done more? Would it have made a difference? What did we fail to do?
As pilots, we’re tested constantly. We take three or four tests every year, simulator sessions; an off day, one fail, and that’s it. Game over. It’s the end of your flying career. We don’t fail, ever. But suddenly, we’ve given everything and yet we failed.
The death of Captain David Hicks really hit me hard. I’ve picked up the bodies of British soldiers who have died before; I’ve had people die in the cab before, but I’ve not known their names or seen their faces. This is different because David Hicks wasn’t a faceless, nameless person. I knew his name, I saw his face.
Captain David Hicks was twenty-six when he died and, to me, a real hero. He was the acting company commander in charge of fifty men at FOB Inkerman and when an RPG hit the tower that he was in, he received multiple shrapnel wounds. Those wounds made him a candidate for immediate medevac, but he chose to stay even while five others were evacuated, and carried on in command of the outpost.
He reportedly tore off his oxygen mask and refused a morphine injection on the grounds that it might cloud his judgement. He was still insisting on getting back to his men when he lost consciousness. For his actions, he was posthumously awarded the Military Cross. For me, he displayed total leadership all the way to the end. I think he was a rare human being and when you learn all this stuff about him, you question yourself again and again. Did I do everything I could to save him? However much you know that the answer is yes, you still feel responsible; it’s human nature. You take ownership because your two worlds collided.