The JTAC responded: ‘Clear hot.’
I knew Squid would be dropping the weapon automatically, so at about this moment he pressed the small, red weapon-release button – the WRB or ‘pickle button’ – on his control column. But this didn’t drop the weapon. Instead, it authorized the computer to do so at the optimum moment. Then Squid flew along the track that represents the ideal approach to the target, as accurately as possible following the azimuth steering line displayed in the head-up display. As Squid bore down on the target, the jet’s computers calculated the bombs ballistic release point.
I watched as Squid streaked straight over the target compound. The five-forty he was carrying was unguided – dumb – but the energy from my laser was hitting the compound and bouncing back up to his aircraft to provide him with a very accurate firing solution. Then the bomb dropped from beneath his wing, bobbling a little before settling into a steep ballistic dive towards the ground. It speared straight into the target, eliminating – or, to put it more crudely but far more accurately, killing – the enemy gunmen in an ugly cloud of billowing brown dirt.
‘Recoil Four One, Widow Zero Two. Direct hit, thank you, and the firing’s stopped.’
‘Roger that. If you’re happy, we’ll RTB.’
‘Four One, Zero Two, that’s affirmative.’
Squid changed radio boxes. ‘Ade, Squid, let’s call it a day and head for home.’
‘Roger.’
So, within half an hour of getting airborne on my first sortie in Afghanistan, I was already providing laser tracking for a weapon to be delivered into the first target of the day. It was a real eye-opener, but entirely typical of the intensity of operations we would encounter over the weeks that followed.
What was also typical, though I didn’t know it then, was that I was going to land at Kandahar carrying precisely the same ordnance as when I had taken off. I also didn’t know then what a source of personal irritation this habit would later become.
Squid, by contrast, had finished his last sortie before heading home by clearing his wing.
7
Given its understandably low priority, the living accommodation at Kandahar was pretty basic. The Nissen-type huts had shared rooms, but the sleeping quarters were single-sex. After all, not every young girl wants to wake up first thing in the morning to the unedifying sight of a hairy-arsed sailor pulling on his underpants.
Essentially, though, it was dual-sex accommodation, but some of our personnel didn’t realize this on the first day in theatre. The washing and ablution areas were combined. Even though there were individual shower cubicles, immediately outside them was a communal area. The idea was that people would hang their clothes and towel outside, step into the cubicle and shower, reach out and grab their towel and clothes when they’d finished, then leave the cubicle fully dressed.
Unfortunately, nobody told the squadron members this when we arrived at Kandahar. That evening the team sorted out their accommodation and settled in, and one of the marines decided it was a good opportunity to wash off the dust of the journey. He grabbed a towel and wandered off, whistling, to the ablution block at the end of the sleeping quarters.
He showered, emerged from the cubicle and began to dry himself, more or less oblivious to his surroundings. The squadron’s accommodation block had a large number of female operations assistants, and two of these girls just walked in, to be confronted by the sight of a naked man bent over in front of them drying his legs.
To their credit, they didn’t bat an eyelid, but just walked across to the sinks which were next to the showers and started doing whatever they had come in to do. The marine continued drying all his various bits and pieces, then turned round in complete shock as he heard the unmistakable sound of two women talking together and giggling.
He didn’t bat an eyelid either.
‘Sorry, ladies,’ he said without too much concern, then, ‘Good evening,’ and carried on sorting himself out.
Our handover lasted for two very busy days. The most important thing for the squadron members was to find out where they were sleeping, where they could stow their gear, where they could eat and where the loos were. After that we were able to start the handover proper.
The squadron formed a part of 904 Expeditionary Air Wing, an administrative construct for Afghanistan, as part of Operation HERRICK, the codename of all the British operations in that country.
The allocated two days turned out to be barely long enough, for Harrier operations didn’t stop just because our new squadron had arrived. So, as well as finding out where weapons, tools, spare parts and all the other odds and ends were stored, and checking the maintenance history of the aircraft they were assuming responsibility for, our ground staff still had to keep the Harriers properly maintained and get them prepped, armed and into the air, assisted by the outgoing RAF engineers.
It was no easier for my pilots. They were of course familiar with the aircraft they were flying, but the whole area was new to them and they had to learn the reference points and the procedures very quickly, and in the unforgiving environment of an active battle zone. We had arrived at a time when operations were proceeding at a very high tempo, and almost all of my pilots dropped weapons on their first sorties in theatre, which probably wasn’t what most of them had expected. And life inside the wire, it turned out, wasn’t much less intense.
The relative silence in the Ops building was suddenly shattered by the atonic screeching of a siren.
‘What the hell’s that?’
‘Missile attack! Hit the deck and grab your armour!’
It was 29 September, our second day in theatre. As I pulled on my helmet I glanced through the windows to the Harrier dispersal. My immediate concern was the squadron engineers maintaining the Harriers, which were totally exposed. Kandahar has a dedicated radar system specifically designed to detect incoming rockets or mortars, and this was the first time we’d heard it in action.
Outside, the maintainers reacted instantly, hitting the deck and dragging on their body armour. Inside Ops we all did exactly the same.
Most of the weapons used by the Taliban were Russian-built BM-12 107mm unguided free-flight rockets. These weighed 42lb, were thirty-three inches long, carried 3lb of explosives in their warheads and had a range of about three and a half miles. They were intended to be fired from a launcher in salvoes of up to a dozen to maximize the chances of hitting something, and could realistically only be used against a large static target like an opposing army or a centre of population. Or, of course, an airfield.
These weapons had a flight time of about thirty seconds, and the procedure on hearing the attack warning was simple enough. You threw yourself to the ground with your body armour on, because the best place to be, offering the least chance of being hit, was flat on the ground. Once the first salvo had landed, you scrambled up and got to the nearest air-raid shelter as quickly as possible because that provided an additional layer of protection should another salvo be launched.
We all waited, and seconds later a salvo of rockets landed about 100 yards from the maintenance site, with three deafening explosions, but fortunately on the other side of the blast wall.
‘Holy shit,’ said one of the chief petty officers, standing up and looking out of the window. ‘They were fucking close.’
If the Taliban had elevated the launchers by even as much as a degree or two, the rockets could have landed on the other side of the blast wall, among the Harriers and the men working on them – with disastrous results.
‘Is that it?’ someone asked, as we looked around cautiously.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, then raised my voice. ‘Right, everybody get to the shelter, just in case there’s a second salvo on its way.’
Everybody got up and scrambled to the nearest shelter. After a few minutes, when the all-clear had sounded, we emerged and looked around cautiously. I walked over to the dispersal to check that all the maintainers were uninjured and that our aircraft had suffered no d
amage in the attack. As far as I could tell, although a fair amount of shrapnel from the exploding warheads had flown over the wall and landed on the aircraft pad itself, none of it seemed to have hit either the men or the machines.
It’s drummed into everyone who flies or works on aeroplanes that FOD, foreign object damage, is a major but usually avoidable problem for modern aircraft, and particularly for those with jet engines, which can suck small solid objects into their huge intakes with a potentially disastrous result. And the pan was littered with small bits of twisted, smoking metal from the exploding warheads.
‘Everything OK, chief?’ I asked as I looked around the pan.
‘Yes, no problem, sir. Once that stuff’s cooled down, we’ll get it shifted. I don’t think any of it hit the cabs.’
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a few of the junior ratings bending down to start picking up the bits of shrapnel, reacting instinctively to clear the area of FOD. What they didn’t realize was that the fragments were still red hot because the rocket warhead had exploded only a few minutes earlier. Almost immediately there were howls of pain as they dropped the twisted lumps of metal, clutching at their burnt fingers and hands.
The chief petty officer was less than sympathetic.
‘You muppets!’ he shouted. ‘Use your bloody heads. That stuff’s just been blown out of a fucking rocket’s warhead, so it’s bound to be a bit warm, isn’t it? Leave it for twenty minutes.’
‘Right, chief,’ I said. ‘I can see you’ve got everything under control.’
Although that attack caused no damage – apart from leaving a few of the junior men with minor burns and some embarrassment – it was an immediate wake-up call for us all. After that, nobody in the squadron had the slightest doubt that we were all at risk of life and limb, even though everybody except the pilots would be spending the entire detachment behind the blast walls.
Kandahar is a big airbase with a 12,000-foot runway – that’s over two miles long – and you would have to be pretty unlucky to be close to one of the rockets when they hit, because they’re not particularly accurate.
But, after that first attack, knowing this didn’t make me sleep any easier. My main concern, just as it would be for any CO, was to make sure I brought all my people back. I wasn’t expecting any of my aircrew to be shot down, although I always knew that this could happen. I thought that they were well enough trained, and flying a sufficiently good aircraft, to be able to fly and fight their way out of most situations. But if I were to lose one of my pilots in theatre in their aeroplane, whether as a result of mechanical failure or enemy action, I thought I could accept it because we all knew the risks, and flying a combat aircraft in a war zone was the job we had all signed up to do.
Even before we’d arrived in theatre, one of my biggest fears was that somebody could be killed or maimed by a rocket attack on the base. That, somehow, would have been more difficult to reconcile. My very worst nightmare was one of my squadron members being killed or getting their legs blown off by a 107mm rocket as they walked back from the gym to the accommodation block.
The following day one of our SE maintainers approached me in Ops.
‘We were attacked yesterday,’ she said.
‘I know we were.’
‘With rockets,’ she added.
‘Yes, I was there. You do remember the briefings we had back in the UK before we came out? They told us we would be likely to experience rocket attacks almost daily.’
‘I know. It’s just that hearing those rockets land made it all so much more real, if you know what I mean. It’s one thing for some officer to stand up in front of us and say that we would be attacked by rocket and mortars, but actually hearing the things explode all around you, and having to run for the shelters, that really brings it home to you.’
I knew exactly what she meant. For her, and probably for many of the personnel who were out in Afghanistan for the very first time, the attack had been an instructive experience. Because of it, they knew that the briefers hadn’t been lying to them. What they’d been told was real, and I felt the more that young woman and everyone else was able to talk about it, and acknowledge that we were all in the same boat, the less of a drama it was for them.
Squid’s squadron would be glad to see the back of it all. Despite the intense level of operations they’d been involved in, the IV (AC) Squadron personnel did an excellent handover, doing everything they possibly could to ensure that we settled in as quickly as possible. Everything was in the right place, and the RAF guys all knew exactly what they were doing. It was one of the most seamless, easy and satisfactory handovers I’ve ever experienced.
‘Good luck,’ Squid said, shaking my hand, then turned to walk away towards the waiting Hercules.
‘Have a good Christmas,’ I called after him.
At that he stopped and turned back to look at me, a grin spreading slowly across his face. ‘I’ll bet my Christmas will be better than yours.’
‘I should bloody well hope so,’ I told him as I waved him off.
One of the first things we did after we arrived at Kandahar was request permission from the First Sea Lord to fly the battle ensign from the flagpole, on the reasonable grounds that, the lack of some kind of a warship notwithstanding, the detachment was involved in front-line offensive operations in Afghanistan.
But the squadron personnel decided that wasn’t enough. We were members of a Royal Navy squadron and therefore, they decided, we really ought to be provided with an aircraft carrier, or something similar, to operate from. As Afghanistan is landlocked, we couldn’t get a real vessel anywhere near the airfield, so they looked around to see what else they could do.
Everywhere on the airfield were things called Johnson barriers. They were preformed concrete slabs measuring about twelve feet by ten, with a kind of dumb-bell shape at the base to allow the barriers to slot together to form blast walls. Quite a number of these had been erected around the engineers’ compound, to provide a safe working environment for them.
A sort of tradition had grown up in the Harrier det that every squadron would select one of the barriers and paint a design or a pattern on it for the period that the squadron was there. In 800 Squadron there was one guy who was an excellent artist, and he’d done a really good design, but they decided they wanted to do more than that.
The first step was to modify the air-raid shelter that was right outside the engineers’ accommodation. They created a decked area at its base so that they could sit out or play ping-pong when it was quiet. On top of the shelter they built a sun deck that provided a good vantage point in the evening to watch the sun go down behind Three Mile Mountain.
One of the enduring mysteries about Three Mile Mountain was that it was actually four miles away. It was perhaps three miles distant from the extreme western edge of the airfield boundary, but from the living quarters on the east side it was at least four. Possibly there had originally been a datum of some sort on the western side of the airfield, or maybe the distance had simply been measured incorrectly. But, whatever the reason, nobody really knew, or frankly cared, and Three Mile Mountain became a standing joke on the base.
The air-raid shelter sun deck became a good place to sit out and watch the world go by. But the engineers decided that instead of being a sun deck, it should become a poop deck, so they set about turning the shelter beneath it into an aircraft carrier.
They found some wood from various places and created a ski jump at one end. The whole top of the shelter then became the flight deck, which they marked out just like the deck of a CVS, albeit rather smaller than the real thing. Directly in front of the shelter was another one of the Johnson barriers, in exactly the right position to become the ‘sea’. So they painted the concrete to make it look as though the ‘ship’ was ploughing through the waves. And thus HMS Kandahar was born, or rather launched.
‘What the bloody hell is that supposed to be?’ asked Dunc Mason when he walked round the corner and saw the ‘aircra
ft carrier’ in front of him.
Neil Bing, who always joked with Dunc about ‘crabs’ – the Navy’s nickname for the RAF – was standing looking at the structure. He immediately explained.
‘That,’ he said proudly, ‘is HMS Kandahar. A proper Navy carrier for a proper Navy squadron. Just a shame we have to have a bunch of crabs with us here at all!’
‘You need us crabs,’ Dunc replied amicably, ‘because we’re the only pilots round here who know what they’re doing flying Harriers.’
The two of them walked away, still sniping good-naturedly at each other.
And our Naval presence was noted in Ops as well. On the back of the door that separated the Harrier squadron room from the C-130 Ops room was a sign that read: ‘Do not enter – here be dragons.’ Within a couple of days of our arrival at Kandahar somebody from the Hercules squadron had amended it to read: ‘Do not enter – here be sea dragons.’
I sat under a brightly coloured umbrella outside one of KAF’s – Kandahar Airfield’s – many coffee shops. I was amazed at the facilities that had grown up so fast in this barren corner of the Afghan desert. In those early days I made every effort to get to know my way around to try to figure out how it all worked. Most services provided on Kandahar Airfield were firmly under the control of a major American contractor, but there were a few independent outlets. One of these was the Green Beans Coffee House, which soon became my home away from home. The café worked on a debit-card basis whereby you bought, say, $50 of credit and then each purchase was deducted from the balance on your card until you topped up your credit. You find Green Beans throughout the war zones, because they deploy with the American troops. Their relaxed and welcoming atmosphere is down largely to the staff, who, in Afghanistan, were mainly Indian and lovely guys to talk to, not only unfailingly polite but cheerful too.
For our main meals we had a choice of three dining facilities, or DIFACs, with food available in all of them 24/7. The British one served good old British fare – like chicken tikka masala – but traditionalists weren’t hard done by, for puddings at least, with old favourites like treacle sponge, spotted dick and jam roly-poly on the menu.
Joint Force Harrier Page 7