Sweating the Metal

by Alex Duncan

  None of that detracted from our preparations before deployment – or our stomach for the fight ahead. Being a summer deployment it’s hotter, so the physical toil is harder but that’s not the issue – mid-May tends to be when everything kicks off because it’s when the Taliban finish the poppy harvest, so we knew we’d be busy. The tempo was ramping up, so I think we knew it was going to be tough, although I don’t think any of us realised just how tough.

  On the plus side, I don’t think we could have been more ready. JP had worked us exceptionally hard in the run-up, with by far the best pre-Det training (PDT) I’d ever done. We’d been based out of RAF Leuchars in Scotland and were using RAF Boulmer and RAF Spadeadam as radar units.

  RAF Spadeadam isn’t a conventional RAF Base, but a unique facility spanning almost 10,000 acres of forest and mire on the border of Cumbria and Northumberland. It’s the only facility in Europe where aircrew can practise manoeuvres and tactics against the variety of threats and targets we face in contemporary warfare, and it attracts aircraft from the RAF, Army, Navy and NATO Forces. The survival of aircrews over Afghanistan, as well as the soldiers on the ground who depend on the air support they provide, all benefit from the training provided by RAF Spadeadam.

  The training was just so realistic. We’d take off, speak to Boulmer – they’d been given a script by the training staff on what to say and, depending on what sortie we were doing and what mission number we’d give them, they would read a different script which might be them calling ‘Troops in contact’ or ‘Weapons systems in place’. It was brilliantly well organised – we even had a Hawk fast jet to work with us to provide emergency close air support.

  Afterwards, we felt completely ready – I think once you get to this point, you want to get away, get the Det done and come home. It’s like a boxer coming up to a fight – he gears himself up and works harder and harder to peak at just the right time. That was us – we were really ramped up at that point. The difficulty is though, we don’t just need to peak on one night; we need that peak to last for two months. That’s a big ask! We worked very hard on the PDT, but not too hard, as we’d have ended up too tired. It left us on a high and at just the right level.

  We marked our departure differently, too. We had a night out as a Flight at a local pub – it’s a place that 27 Squadron frequents a lot and they know that when we book a room there it’s time to run for cover! We play this game called Tequila Darts – the object is to throw the lowest number on the dartboard. If you do this you come out of the round. If you score the highest number, you drink a shot of tequila. If you score a 7 (as in 7 Squadron) you drink a shot of tequila; if you score 18 (18 Squadron) you drink a shot of tequila; if you score a triple 9 (i.e. 27) everybody else drinks a shot of tequila! So that’s the game.

  As it progresses, everyone is more drunk, new rules appear and it’s a bit of a mess. You have ten seconds to make your way up to the dartboard, but after a while people are talking and don’t make it, so they have to drink a shot of tequila. People are counting you down ‘7, 8, 9 . . . 10!’ and somebody grabs the dart and throws it at the board, people are falling over . . . It’s absolute carnage.

  I’d phoned Alison to come and pick up German, Paul Farmer (otherwise known as ‘Piggy’) and me, but as soon as I put the phone down, I forgot I rang her and the three of us started walking. She eventually found us zigzagging our way up this unlit, winding country road. She stopped the car and was met with what constituted a train wreck; I tried to sit on her lap, German fell in a ditch, and Piggy just carried on walking. When we got back to the Mess I had to carry German up to his room – he was useless. To be fair, I wasn’t much better. I lost my balance in the toilets and did a straight body flop onto my back, taking a framed picture of an old F4 Phantom on the way down with me. I woke up with a cracked head, lying on my back staring up at the ceiling!

  Hannah fell asleep in the Ladies and locked herself in; she told her boyfriend she’d be sober by the time he came to get her but she was absolutely wankered! It was a great night – lots of shared memories, bonding as a Flight. This was about a week before we deployed. We went straight off on leave that night and didn’t see each other again until the morning we flew out to KAF.

  Alison dropped me off for this Det but we treated it as if I was just going off to work for the day – neither of us wanted to prolong the goodbye, so it was just a quick kiss, ‘See you in a couple of months; look after yourself.’ She drove away and as soon as I turned around, there were all my mates, all of us with our detachment haircuts – short and easy maintenance! All our kit went into a four-tonner, we got on the coach and off we went to Brize Norton. Next stop – Kandahar.

  I don’t quite know what I was expecting, but it surprised me when I arrived at KAF and found that nothing had really changed. It was the same old dusty hole except on a larger scale, with a far greater number of REMFs and senior officers stronzing – that’s a metaphor we used for people who were strutting and bronzing at the same time – around. The base was now home to as many as 14,000 multinational personnel commanded by an RAF officer, Air Commodore Bob Judson. We were taking over from ‘B’ Flight, 18 Squadron, so after the usual clusterfuck of admin – filling in forms, reclaiming weapons etc. – they helped us load our kit into the same old dusty vehicles and drove us to our accommodation. We roomed as formed crews and the lads we were taking over from had all moved into other rooms, so ours were clean and ready for us. I’d be flying for the first part of the Det alongside Pete Winn, with Mick Fry and Barry Fulton in the rear. Mick’s a great bloke – a very experienced flight sergeant with a wickedly dry sense of humour who was a qualified crewman instructor at the OCF. Barry, known by everyone as ‘Jay’, was a brand new crewman.

  We ramped up quickly, so after the usual drawing of morphine, zeroing weapons, and a couple of days of lectures about how life on the ground had changed, I did my TQ – with my good mate Aaron ‘Tourette’s’ Stewart again. Then we hit the ground running, crewing the IRT.

  Things were fairly quiet initially; we picked up a British soldier classified as a T1 who was suffering from heat stress. There were a lot of heat stress casualties around at that time because the winter temperatures can be quite harsh in Helmand – below zero at night – and the rise in summer is both brutal and sudden, so there’s little time for them to acclimatise. We lifted a couple of civilian T1s from Lashkar Gah too and took them to the local hospital in Lash, and I even managed to get Pete Winn TQ’d so that was him all ticked up to handle the aircraft.

  April 13th saw me flying as Hannah’s wingman for a day’s tasking, which ended up with us back at KAF. We’d just made radio contact with the tower for permission to land, when Hannah noticed a couple of RAF Regiment vehicles carrying out a stop-and-search on a vehicle and its occupants a few miles outside the perimeter fence. She’d made contact with them and offered to provide overwatch, so we flew an orbit above them with the rear crewmen watching events down the barrel of the Miniguns. Eventually, the patrol waved us off and we rejoined the circuit to land on at KAF.

  An hour or so later, we were in the JHF (A) ops room debriefing when information started coming in about a major incident involving KAF’s resident RAF Regiment Squadron, just outside of the base. Information was sketchy at first; all we knew was that there’d been an explosion, there were several casualties and we were on standby to lift.

  The RAF Regiment is the Royal Air Force’s own infantry corps, responsible for force protection, airfield defence, forward air control and parachute capability. 3 Sqn RAF Regt was the resident unit at KAF. Their 420km² Area of Operation began outside the perimeter fence and stretched up to ten miles from the airfield, including Three Mile Mountain – the most prominent feature in an otherwise rugged and barren landscape.

  As more information started coming in, we were able to put a picture together of what happened. Basically, a soft-skinned Land Rover Wolf – that’s the British Army’s primary utility vehicle – had been blown up w
hile crossing a wadi on a routine patrol, just a few klicks outside of KAF. Two of its crew – SAC Gary Thompson (‘Tommo’), who was a reservist, and SAC Graham Livingstone (‘Livvy’) – had died, and there were two survivors – Flt Lt Andy Costin, who was the Flight Commander, and Stu Smalley, the driver.

  In the event, we weren’t scrambled because the incident happened so close to KAF and the guys on the ground decided to drive one of the casualties straight there. They got there far quicker than we would have done, but sadly it was too late for both Tommo and Livvy. Although severely injured, Andy Costin showed remarkable determination to regain fitness and was sitting up and talking just three days later. I was intrigued by the story, so I sought him out later in the tour and this is what he told me:

  ‘We were on an early evening patrol to the west of Kandahar to ensure the ground was free of Taliban insurgents who might threaten any aircraft due to land. A normal patrol consists of a flight – usually six vehicles and twenty-four men. We patrol in WIMIKs, which are the platform for the heavy weapons like the .50 calibre; Vectors, which are normally used as a command vehicle; and Snatches, old Land Rovers which were used extensively in Northern Ireland.

  ‘We’d completed the first element of the patrol without incident and it was dusk – about 18:30 – when we heard that the next aircraft we had to protect had changed its course and was due in from the east. I diverted the patrol and, by about 18:45, we reached a river we needed to cross. The two vehicles at the head of the patrol crossed safely; I was in the third. We never made it.

  ‘As we drove down the near bank to cross the water, we ran over a mine, which detonated at the rear left-hand side of the vehicle with astonishing force. Tommo was thrown approximately 25m from the vehicle to the far side of the stream. I never actually heard a bang. One minute we were just about to go through the river and the next thing I remember is water across my face. I thought at first that Stu had gone through too quickly. But then I realised I was on all fours with my rifle in my hands, in the stream with my eyes open – I was actually in the water. My rifle had to be destroyed because I’d bent it with the force of landing on it!

  ‘As I was lifting my head clear of the water, I looked left and right of me. To the right was our mangled Land Rover. Livvy was hanging out of the back of the vehicle facing towards me; then I looked to my left and saw Stu – both he and I had been blown out of the vehicle. Looking back on it now, it was actually quite funny because he looked like Eric Morecambe with his glasses at an angle. At that point, it was quite dark because the explosion had just happened and all of the dust and muck and everything was just coming back down again. There seemed to be an extraordinary tranquillity and silence but I guess that was more my hearing being affected by the force of the explosion.

  ‘My Land Rover was the main comms vehicle, so we’d lost most of our means of communication. The vehicle was a wreck – it’s hard to believe we got out of it alive. The rear looked as though it was a tin can that had been crushed. It was literally bent in half and the driver’s seat was rammed forward, so how Stu got out I’m not quite sure. My side of the vehicle was a mess – the roof canopy had been shredded and the metal frame was twisted beyond recognition.

  ‘My immediate concern was for Livvy – to get him out of the vehicle – which two of the guys did. They put the fire out in the back of the Land Rover and cut him free, brought him round the back of me and started administering first aid. Oz – one of my corporals – was one of our team of medics along with Owen Hughes. We also had SAC Caterill (‘Cat’) who was one of the drivers; he was assisting too. Both Owen and Oz worked tirelessly on Livvy. He had no broken bones but the force of the explosion had mortally wounded him. They brought him back to life three times with CPR and mouth-to-mouth.

  ‘With Livvy being taken care of, I needed to locate Tommo because, at that stage, we couldn’t immediately see where he’d been thrown. I shouted across to the guys who were crewing the two vehicles that had crossed the stream ahead of us – a WIMIK led by Corporal Wood, and another Land Rover Wolf commanded by Corporal Hodginson – and they set about searching for him. They found Tommo on the other side of the stream using one of the big Dragon Eye torches that we carry; he’d been thrown almost 30m by the force of the explosion. John Toghill, one of our battlefield medics, got to work on him the minute they found him. He was in a bad way.

  ‘We established that it would take at least fifty minutes before you could scramble from Bastion and land on to casevac us. The patrol was split by the river, and the two vehicles that had crossed ahead of mine were only 1km away from KAF’s western gate, so I made the decision to put Tommo in the back of one of those and take him straight to the hospital. Once I’d made the decision, he was at the Role Three hospital in KAF within fifteen minutes. Sadly, both Livvy’s and Tommo’s injuries were too severe and despite the very best efforts of everyone who’d fought so hard to save them, they died. The full force of the explosion was taken by the rear left of the vehicle, which was where Tommo was sitting – they found what was left of the wheel the next day some 200m away from our vehicle.

  ‘Obviously, the usual thing in an incident like this is for your next of kin to get the knock – you know, the full Monty; uniformed officers turning up at the house – but I couldn’t let that happen to my wife Yvonne. People always assume the worst, don’t they? I knew that she’d open the door, see them standing there and that’d be it. Why go through that when there’s no need? So I fought to do it my way and rang her from hospital a couple of days after the incident. Hannah, our five-year-old, was the only one who wasn’t told what had really happened. Yvonne just said that Daddy had fallen out of the Land Rover and Hannah’s response was, “Well, Daddy should’ve had his seatbelt on, shouldn’t he?”

  ‘I was initially immobile and somewhat banged up. I’m deaf on my left side as a result of the blast; I injured my right shoulder and back, literally from the lower back to my neck, just from the force of the explosion and landing on all fours wearing the Osprey armour, my webbing, rifle, plus a full load of kit and the radio as well. I remember lying in the hospital when I first got there, and everything had been completely cut off me – that was quite entertaining. I couldn’t move because of my back.

  ‘I felt so frustrated immediately afterwards because the only place for a commander is on the ground leading, but I couldn’t get back out with my troops. Within forty-eight hours of the incident, they were back out patrolling, and that’s where I should’ve been – with my guys out on the ground.

  ‘The squadron had a ceremony for Livvy and Tommo at Bridge Lines, our base at KAF, twenty-four hours after the event and I was adamant that I was going to be there for it. I was aided and abetted, so to speak, by a couple of the nurses, and brought there in a wheelchair. I was assisted in standing up towards the end, and once the dedication ceremony was finished I was sat back in my wheelchair again, whisked away by the nurses and injected with some more morphine. But almost two weeks after the event, I felt I couldn’t do anything else out here and I needed to go home to Yvonne because, as you can imagine, she was beside herself.

  ‘I was able to go to the boys’ funerals too, and pay my respects – that was obviously very important to me. Yvonne was an absolute brick because she came up to Scotland with me – she was my chauffeur as well. The funerals were back-to-back. And then I spent another four weeks at home. I found both of the funerals really upsetting because I felt very close to the guys; we were a close-knit team. And I remember saying to Yvonne before I deployed that my main objective was to come out here with twenty-four guys and to bring them all home again – every one of them – and looking back on that, I feel that I’ve failed in that respect. That is by far the hardest thing for me. You always think, what if?

  ‘Hindsight is absolutely brilliant, isn’t it? But I always think to myself, would we have done anything differently? Well no, probably not. There was a strike op happening to the north, and my main objective was to move acr
oss to the east of the airfield to actually get out into where we were required. Ultimately it was my decision that we went the way we did, so obviously the responsibility rests with me.

  ‘I found talking to the Padre out here really helped and I also think – in true regiment style – there’s a lot of black humour that would be lost on a lot of people. We talk of it after the event but obviously no disrespect is meant. I’ve earned the nickname of Panther now, which is quite bizarre because the Italians built a new vehicle a few years ago called a Panther and it can survive the blast of a TC/6, which is the mine that did for our vehicle. It’s that sort of humour that actually brings you through it and helps you deal with it.

  ‘I was offered counselling but I turned it down and chose to speak with the Padres instead, although I wouldn’t say I was a religious person. I still found it beneficial to talk to them though. Padre Peter, or ‘the mad Scotsman’ as we call him, was great. We’d sit down, have a cup of tea – several actually – myself and Stu Smalley, and we’d just talk. I suppose in some respects Stu and I now have a bond that transcends rank and any other consideration. I know the road ahead isn’t going to be easy, but I’m determined to get to the end, regardless of what it takes. My aim is to redeploy out here again as soon as I’m fit.’

  25

  LIGHTING THE WAY

  Our first couple of weeks in theatre didn’t really produce any surprises; we flew a steady routine of taskings and rotations on the IRT/HRF down at Bastion. It was a good way to acclimatise. Although we flew a couple of minor pre-planned ops, nothing happened to get the hairs on the back of my neck standing up, and I was even beginning to believe that the whole Det might prove uneventful.

  Towards the end of April, I was involved in an operation called ‘Jnu Brishna’ or ‘Sudden Thunder’, which I was quite excited about because it meant us providing support to Easy Company of the 101st Airborne. On our downtime in theatre, one of the most popular DVD box sets was Band of Brothers. In the crew tent, killing time waiting for a shout on the IRT, it was back-to-back Band of Brothers as we followed Major Dick Winters and his men through France, Belgium and into the Berchtesgaden in Germany. Now we were tasked to fly their latter-day successors into battle; what a privilege.