On the ground, the troops in the convoy were taking no chances. They’d spread out into defensive positions as soon as I’d started counting down the distances as the vehicle approached them, and the moment it rumbled into view they opened up with everything they had. From the air the tracer rounds were quite evident in the dark, and we could hear their .50-calibre machine-gun blatting away in the background while one of the troops talked to us on the radio. They didn’t aim at the vehicle itself, because there was still a possibility that it was entirely innocent, but they laid down a wall of fire directly in front of it.
The result was exactly what they’d hoped. As bullets chewed into the ground ahead of them, the vehicle slammed to a halt, did an immediate about-turn and got the hell out of it. We never found out who the driver was, or what his intention had been. It might have been the suicide bomber, who changed his mind when he saw the firepower the patrol could muster, or perhaps it really was just a lost delivery driver or someone looking for a particular address, who would at the very least have needed to go home and change his trousers.
That was the first hurdle overcome for the convoy, but they still had a long way to go. A little further on we were steering the convoy vehicles around the edge of a village when I spotted something we couldn’t identify. What I was looking at simply didn’t make sense.
‘It’s the weirdest thing,’ I radioed the troops in the leading vehicle in the convoy. ‘About five hundred yards in front of your position, as you go round the next bend in the road, we can see what looks like something burning. It’s like a burning disc, and it’s spinning round very quickly. I can’t work out what it is.’
As soon as I passed the warning, the convoy slowed as the men on the ground tried to decide what the hell this thing could be. Risking attack from the ground, I flew lower – a lot lower – to try to identify the object and what it was being used for. The overriding fear was that it was some kind of a trap, perhaps something to attract the troops’ attention while a suicide bomber attacked them from a different direction. And all the time the convoy, which simply had to keep moving, was getting closer and closer to this object, with no way to avoid passing close to it. But when I contacted the convoy again I was none the wiser.
‘I’ve just dropped right down to low level to take a look,’ I radioed, ‘but it still doesn’t make sense. It looks just like somebody swinging a burning tyre round on the end of a rope.’
Somebody in the convoy responded almost immediately. ‘That’s it, then,’ they drawled, suddenly unconcerned. ‘It’s a burning tyre on a rope. We’re good to go.’
‘What?’ I demanded.
‘You’re right. You’ve identified it. This is the start of the festival of Eid ul-Fitr. This must be just the locals enjoying their celebration.’
Eid ul-Fitr marked the end of Ramadan and is a major cause for celebration. What I’d picked out from the cockpit of the Harrier was a whole gang of Afghan locals setting light to tyres and swinging them round on the end of ropes. To us, not the most obvious way to mark the end of a fast, but clearly it suited them. We had known about Eid, but not that the celebrations involved such a bizarre activity.
So all the consternation, both in the air and on the ground, had been caused purely because, in a battle environment, anything out of the ordinary raised immediate suspicions and the safest reaction was to assume that what we were looking at was some kind of highly sophisticated and lethal trap.
It was another reminder to all of us that, just because a bloody war was being fought in the country, life for most of the locals carried on pretty much as normal. As far as they were concerned, Ramadan was over, so they could get back to their normal diet, and that was something worth celebrating. The fact that a noisy convoy of trucks full of heavily armed troops was rumbling past the mud walls of their compound was completely irrelevant to them.
And for the people in the convoy no doubt there were sighs of relief as they realized they weren’t going to have to fight their way out of yet another ambush.
My satisfaction at a job well done didn’t last long. Back on the ground, a handful of my pilots were waiting outside the Ops building after we landed. A couple of them walked round to the front of my Harrier and ostentatiously counted the stores bolted to the wings, and as I climbed out the bantering started.
‘He must be saving them for something special.’
‘Perhaps he’s a Talib in disguise?’
‘A bloody good disguise if he is.’
‘Right, you two, knock it off,’ I said. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re only supposed to drop bombs on legitimate targets. This time the most exciting thing we saw was a burning tyre.’
‘A what?’
As we walked over to Ops I explained what we’d seen from the air and the deduction that it was part of the festivities marking the end of Ramadan.
‘Hm,’ said one of the pilots. ‘I still think you’ve turned into a pacifist, or a war-dodger, boss. I mean, look at the evidence. We’ve had three sorties today. In the first two, both pilots cleared their wings. You take off, and it’s like the Taliban simply aren’t there any more. We get called to TICs – you get called to check out a burning tyre. I mean, something’s not right.’
I smiled as I walked inside. I could pretend that it was all water off a duck’s back, but the truth was I was getting a little fed up with the ‘war-dodger’ stuff. And it wasn’t as if there was the slightest truth in it. It just seemed to be Sod’s Law that whenever I was airborne either nothing at all happened or I was carrying the wrong weapons.
If I got airborne carrying five-forties, that day the Taliban would all be firing from inside buildings, and my wing-man’s 1,000lb stores would be the weapons of choice. If I was carrying the heavier munitions, all the TICs would be in the open air, and the five-forties or CRV-7s used. And I was fairly certain that if I got airborne with both five-forties and 1,000-pounders, the Taliban would all decide to stay at home. In short, the ‘war-dodger’ tag was looking more and more justified, and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it. I gave it one last roll of the dice.
‘What you have to realize,’ I said, ‘is that everyone’s got a fixed allocation of bombs they can drop, and I used up most of mine over in Iraq, during TELIC. Oh,’ I added, to try to pop the youngster back in his box, ‘I forgot that this is only your first war, isn’t it? What you should do is try not to deliver too many munitions out here, so you’ll still have some of your allowance left over for later.’
‘No, no, I’m not buying that, boss. Let’s face it, you’re almost a non-swimmer.’
Ouch! That one stung. ‘Non-swimmers’ was what we called people or nations who contributed little or nothing to the coalition effort. And with the number of countries involved there were always going to be wildly different opinions of the value of some people’s efforts. Even among those who were, indisputably, pulling their own weight.
13
The Harrier squadron was a part of a wide range of air assets based at Kandahar Airfield, but, when we arrived and took over from IV (AC) Squadron, 800 NAS was the only fixed-wing combat squadron on the base. A few months later, at Christmas 2006, we were joined by a squadron of Dutch F-16s which came down south from Kabul, and currently there are also French Mirages based at Kandahar. American AV-8Bs would sometimes drop in at the base and spend a week or so operating out of Kandahar before returning to their Wasp-class carriers holding off the coast.
One of the issues that frequently came up was the way the Americans seemed to always get the juicy tasking. That’s the way it seemed and it was definitely the case when the carrier was in town. They always took the prime windows when there was likely to be any action from the Taliban.
There are two ways of looking at this. At that time the Harrier didn’t have a sniper pod which would provide a video down-link to the troops on the ground. If the F-18s were around, and had that kind of equipment, why wouldn’t you put them in the programme at prime t
imes during the day and let them use it, because it would provide good interaction? So, from an operational point of view, this was a smart move. It just slightly pissed us off because we were there seven days a week, and the moment the carrier appeared, its aircraft would come in and take the juicy slots.
The Dutch detachment commander, who was a major, phoned up the CAOC and ended up speaking to a three-star USAF general about this. The Dutchman asked him why during Operation BAAZ TSUKA – the Pashto name means ‘Falcon’s Summit’, but I strongly suspect some staff officer with too much time on his hands picked it mainly because it sounds remarkably like ‘bazooka’ – the F-15s had been drafted in during the heavy fighting periods.
The American general slammed him and told him that the campaign wasn’t some kind of coalition love-in. He had a job of work to do, with a pre-planned operation running for two weeks, and he was bringing in the F-15s because they were the best aeroplanes for the job. This wasn’t, the general said, some kind of pleasant task-sharing event I’ve got going on, and you’ll get what you’re given. And, of course, he was absolutely right.
The Dutch were flying F-16s with a laser-guided bomb and a gun and that was all. The general wanted an aircraft like the F-15, equipped with a data link, a range of weapons including a small-diameter bomb, a gun, JDAMs, GBUs, two people on board and plenty of time on station. So he pretty much told the Dutch officer to get back in his box and shut the fuck up.
Given the commitment and skill of the Dutch, it was, to say the least, an unfortunate reaction, especially as some of the nations involved in the coalition really do attract the light-hearted label of ‘non-swimmers’. But even these countries that, on the face of it, didn’t bring a huge amount to the party often contributed valuable niche capabilities.
Of the few countries that made a significant contribution to the air campaign, the French, like the Dutch, flew Close Air Support. If the French Navy were involved, flying from the deck of the FNS Charles de Gaulle steaming in the Arabian Sea, they would often fly in mixed pairs. As the RAF operated Buccaneers and Tornados during the first Gulf War, the former providing laser designation for the latter, so the French would fly Super Etendards and their new Rafales. The French Air Force also operated different types together, in their case, the Mirage F1 and the newer twin-seat Mirage 2000 delta-winged strike aircraft. Both flew out of Dunshabe in Tajikistan, meaning longer transit times than for the British Harriers at Kandahar.
You could never call the Americans non-swimmers. Quite the opposite. What really struck you was the sheer volume of ordnance they would drop in comparison to us. This was partly, I suppose, because they could. Each of their big B-1 swing-wing heavy bombers could carry the same load as the entire force of British Harriers in theatre. But the B-1 didn’t have a targeting pod and often put down sticks of four or five bombs to obliterate a target. And in almost every case the job could have been done by a tactical jet like the Harrier, fitted with a targeting pod and able to place one bomb exactly where it was wanted. But there was more to it than just the relative capabilities of the aircraft. When the US wages war, protection of their own forces is less an overriding priority than an obsession. But given that they’ve lost some 4,000 personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, this is a powerful argument. The sometimes overwhelming force used by US forces may raise eyebrows here, but it’s understandable, legitimate and undeniably effective. In the end there’s no right or wrong about it – it just boils down to a difference in approach.
We worked very effectively with the Canadians, and a number of their troops were based in an outpost some distance to the north of Kandahar, in a pretty grim FOB called Martello. It was in the back of beyond, at least a two-day drive from Kandahar, and with the kind of terrain the drive involved and the near certainty of Taliban ambushes, they might just as well have been on the moon. They were completely cut off.
They were routinely attacked, and always very aggressively, by the Taliban. Early on in the detachment one of the younger pilots from the squadron got involved in a pretty hectic firefight up there. The base was being attacked from two sides, with groups of insurgents firing both mortars and machine-guns, and this pilot did an absolutely brilliant job of identifying the very small target that was presented and engaging it with CRV-7s. His attack took out that group of Taliban – he managed to either kill them or destroy their weapons, but, whichever was the truth, the firing stopped.
Then he repeated the process, identifying the location of the second group of insurgents and detonating a five-forty airburst weapon above them. Again, it wasn’t clear if he’d completely destroyed the site or killed the Taliban there, but it certainly stopped them engaging the Canadians.
After that our Harriers were there almost every night, providing overwatch for the Canadians, identifying any Taliban mortar positions we could, and then taking them out as comprehensively as possible. And every day the Canadians thanked us for being up there, because our Harriers managed to suppress the Taliban so well that for forty-three consecutive days they didn’t have to endure a single attack.
It became a routine. The pilots would make a point of always trying to fly past Martello, whether they were just leaving Kandahar or returning to the airfield – although because Martello was so far to the north we couldn’t always achieve this – or were actually tasked with patrolling in that area. The noise of the aircraft was a constant reassurance to the marooned Canadian troops and a reminder to the Taliban that not only had the Harriers already done a lot of damage to them, but were still around in case they wanted to try their luck again.
Then there was the ANA. While we were at KAF, members of the Afghan National Army were being trained by the coalition troops to do the job themselves, so a lot of the time the patrols were mixed, with ANA soldiers accompanying either British or American forces to learn the techniques first-hand. But, as the ANA soldiers became more experienced, the emphasis shifted from a few of them tagging on to a patrol composed of coalition troops, to a handful of coalition advisers accompanying a patrol of ANA soldiers. It was classic on-the-job training, conducted in the environment the ANA will eventually be working in, if the Taliban ever give up, which looks unlikely.
And the ANA were as welcome to the aerial firepower provided by 800 NAS as any of the NATO members of the coalition. When the scramble rang we didn’t discriminate. Dunc Mason, and Nath Gray, who was one of the younger squadron pilots, roared into the air to help out a mixed group of about a dozen ANA soldiers and the two American marines who were mentoring them.
Nath was fairly short, very slender – one of my officers described his figure as being like a racing snake – and extremely fit, having done both the Green Beret (Royal Marine Commando) and the Peak Company (Parachute Regiment) courses. When they got back to Kandahar he told me what had happened.
The patrol had been ambushed by the Taliban, which was by no means an unusual event. But in the confusion of the assault, as the coalition troops scattered to find the best defensive positions, three of the Afghans somehow got separated from the main group of soldiers, and all contact with them was lost. Of the nine ANA troops remaining, one of the Afghans was killed outright when the Taliban opened up on them, and another was badly wounded.
When Dunc and Nath arrived overhead, they got good two-way contact with one of the American marines, and once they knew that three of the ANA soldiers were missing, saw that finding them had to be their first priority. They couldn’t drop weapons on the Taliban until they knew exactly where the three Afghans were – whether they were dead or alive – to avoid a blue-on-blue incident. And of course they wanted to find the three missing soldiers before the Taliban did.
The only information the patrol members could supply was that they thought the three ANA soldiers had broken away to the north. That didn’t give Dunc and Nath much to go on, so they immediately began running a logical search pattern, starting from the ambush position and working their way up towards the north.
It
sounds straightforward, but Nath was using a target reconnaissance pod that he hadn’t had very much training in, and this was far from the easiest piece of kit to use. But, calmly and efficiently, he performed a very thorough search, following the route that he thought the escaping Afghans might possibly have taken if they were heading north. Using the pod was a bit like looking through a drinking straw, he told me. For ages all he seemed to be able to see was ‘lots and lots of shit-brown sand and bits of scrubby bush, all at really high magnification’. His diligence was rewarded, though, when he finally located the three men, who had taken cover beyond a group of buildings.
Nath called the US Marine radio operator to let the patrol know where they were. The problem was there were no convenient reporting points anywhere close, so he had to describe the position as best he could. The moment he did, the marine told him, with some frustration, that they had already seen the Taliban heading that way, so it was possible that they had spotted the three ANA men. As the Americans were already advancing to that position, he asked, could the two of them try to hold off the bad guys until they got there?
But Dunc and Nath had a problem. When they swung round to begin the attack, they both saw at once that the Taliban were so close to the three Afghan soldiers that they couldn’t use a bomb, not even a five-forty, without a high risk of killing or injuring the ANA men. So they decided instead to use CRV-7s in an attempt to scare off the Taliban. While rockets wouldn’t be as accurate or do as good a job as a bomb, they were the only weapons they were carrying that they could use safely, and would inflict little collateral damage.
The Afghans were close to a cluster of buildings, probably abandoned, and Dunc and Nath could see that the Taliban were searching through the compound, clearly looking for them.
Joint Force Harrier Page 12