Joint Force Harrier

by Adrian Orchard

  ‘Because of that, I landed long, and had to go into a full PNB stop to slow the Harrier down.’

  ‘PNB’ means ‘power nozzle braking’, or rotating the vectored thrust nozzles fully forward to slow down the aircraft.

  Wedge crossed the raised cable at forty knots – which the aircraft definitely wasn’t cleared for with a recce pod fitted – and finally came to a stop. He cleared the runway and quickly told Flatters what to look for so that he was able to make a much better approach.

  ‘Once we’d both landed and taxied clear, I shut down my aircraft and opened the canopy. That let in the cold, wet air. It felt great and I sat there calming down for a good few minutes before climbing out of the aeroplane. On the wet tarmac Flatters and I shook hands solemnly. During that sortie I’d used up all of my counter-measures down at low level, and I suppose I had the privilege of being one of the few pilots who could claim they’d done low-level CAS for real, and that when only medium-level combat ready qualified!’

  Flatters was the formation leader, so he left the dispersal and went to A-10 Ops to sort things out. That left Wedge to do the turnarounds on both jets in the pissing rain. He was soaked to the skin and hasn’t let Flatters forget it. Needless to say, both men slept very soundly in their beds that night after refuelling and flying back to Kandahar.

  The following day Wedge was still on a bit of a high after the rocket attacks, but what had taken place was still a real concern to me. Not what Wedge and Flatters had done – they’d shown cool heads and presence of mind – but this was a really close shave. If we’d had nine lives to start with, I reckoned we were probably now down to our last three or four. And with the pace of operations we faced, the odds were that we’d get through them pretty quickly too.

  The tempo remained relentless. We were dropping ordnance every day, and the squadron’s tiredness was beginning to reveal itself in the lines on people’s faces and the occasional flash of anger.

  The near-constant flying also placed a huge strain on our maintainers and engineers – the people who had the awesome responsibility of getting the Harriers ready for every sortie – and who up to now had miraculously achieved almost 100 per cent availability.

  Because we were on the front line at Kandahar, we were very well supported, with all the spares we needed, so our serviceability rate was exceptionally high. This was helped by the fact that the maintainers were a captive audience, just like being on a ship. Instead of working eight hours, they worked twelve-hour shifts, and teams were available twenty-four hours a day, so we had very good service.

  The squadron arrived there at the end of the summer and stayed through most of the winter. Most of the time it was cold, with very unpleasant conditions outside and, although each aircraft lived in its little rubberized hangar, these structures weren’t particularly well heated. Two of them were known as Cobb hangars and the others were really just sand shelters – old-style metal frames with a tarpaulin roof, and we couldn’t close the fronts of those.

  If a jet did break, for whatever reason, the engineers generally got it fixed pretty quickly. Most maintenance problems were caused not by any inherent failures in the system, but simply because of the tempo of operations. Surge periods were always more tense because we needed more aeroplanes available at any one time, but usually the flying programme allowed us to take aeroplanes away for routine maintenance. Surge days didn’t allow that, however.

  The Harriers are cleared for 720 flying hours between major maintenance schedules, and you consume around 60 hours per aircraft per month, so every ten months or so an aircraft would have to come out of Afghanistan and fly back to the UK before going into the big maintenance cycle there, so we planned on each aircraft being in theatre for ten months at a time.

  Aircraft that came out from the UK took time to bed in, and we never knew exactly why that was. Every aircraft had its own little quirks, and they certainly had their own personalities.

  It was slightly disconcerting that when aircraft number 13 came out it was an absolute bag of nails. Nothing on it seemed to function as it should: the radios didn’t work properly, the expendable system didn’t work, the stores management system kept failing, and it took weeks to get that jet functioning reliably. Some jets just seem to enjoy testing people’s patience.

  We inherited aircraft number 61 when we arrived, and its navigation system had failed so many times that the IV (AC) Squadron pilots had come to expect that whenever it got airborne the nav system was going to fall over during the sortie. This is a fundamental part of the aircraft and is an important part of the weapon-aiming system as well, so it was potentially a very serious fault.

  When our maintainers got out there, they fixed it permanently within two days. It was just a classic case of a fresh set of eyes looking at the problem from a new angle. ‘Have you tried this?’ they said. Nobody had, so they replaced that component and the system gave no more trouble.

  Without exception our engineers had a genuine pride in getting the aircraft ready in time and maintaining a high serviceability rate. They took a very proprietorial view of ‘their’ Harriers, and would frequently admonish us not to break them.

  Around the aircraft, the plane captains – the individuals who were responsible for the before-flight servicing of the aircraft – would walk round the Harrier with us as we were doing our external pre-flight checks. And they were always desperate to find out what our sortie consisted of, where we were going and what we were programmed to do when we got there. And when we returned to the dispersal all the engineers usually turned out, especially if we’d expended some or all of our ordnance. Then they all wanted to know what we’d done, how we’d done it and what the effects of the weapons had been on the ground and, obviously, on the Taliban.

  But with most of the pilots in the squadron delivering bombs against the Taliban almost daily, I still wasn’t getting my fair share. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt my Harrier lurch as a bomb left the wing. The most I normally managed to do was fire off a few CRV-7s.

  I just never quite seemed to be in the right place at the right time. The ‘war-dodger’ epithet was now happily being applied to me by almost everyone in the squadron, as far as I could tell. It was time I did something to vent my frustration, and Mick Trafford, of all people, came up with a temporary solution.

  Mick had good contacts with some of the no-name, no-rank, no-razor outfits on the base, and in early November this resulted in a session of firing some weird and wonderful weapons on the range at Kandahar.

  Our hosts were late in arriving, as usual – that seems to be almost traditional where their sort are concerned. Apparently they were often late for their ops as well. Eventually a Toyota Hilux turned up and three scruffy bearded blokes – real hairy oddballs – hopped out. Their clothes were dirty, possibly even slept in, their long hair uncombed, and they didn’t look as if they’d been anywhere near a shower for weeks.

  In short, they looked like the kind of people you’d expect to see standing on a street corner somewhere and dealing drugs, instead of the highly skilled products of the most intensive specialist military training courses yet devised. And one of their tasks in Afghanistan was trying to stop the flow of opium out of the country, so their appearance really was deceptive but, I knew, necessary for the covert operations they were involved in out in the badlands.

  In the back of the Toyota were three big haversacks. These they hauled out, opened them up and emptied out whole piles of weapons, all covered in crap and corruption, on to the ground. One of the bearded wonders dragged them over to the firing point, laid each weapon on its side so that the bolt was open and facing upwards, then took a big drum of oil and poured some into the action of each one. That, apparently, was the ‘cleaning phase’ completed.

  ‘Come on, then, get on with it,’ another beardie instructed, dropping piles of appropriate ammunition beside each weapon, and so we all hunkered down and started firing. I had one of the machine-guns, dripping with
oil, and I noticed immediately that one in five of the rounds in the ammunition belt was tracer, which I was fairly sure we shouldn’t be using on the Kandahar small-arms range. But I wasn’t prepared to argue the toss with dangerous-looking operators, just in case he decided to kill me with his bare hands, so I just started firing. That wasn’t such a good idea as the moment the first round fired I was sprayed with hot oil from the action, and each subsequent round showered me again. But what the hell. It was bloody good.

  As the British contingent at Kandahar looked forward to commemorating Remembrance Day, I couldn’t help but be struck by how the anti-drugs effort being waged by the coalition was about to become a little confusing. To many Afghans at least. The irony certainly wasn’t lost on me.

  On the one hand, the US were flying choppers full of soldiers into the badlands to try to locate the Afghan poppy fields and destroy them. At the same time the ISAF forces were doing their best to persuade the Afghans not to continue cultivating the crop, explaining that it was an evil thing to do.

  On the other hand, the British were shipping boxes of artificial poppies out to the country every November for Remembrance Day.

  During the morning of 11 November I put it to Colonel Taylor and the one-star officer at Kandahar Airfield: ‘Don’t you think there’s a certain amount of irony in the way that the Americans are doing their best to cut down the Afghan poppy crops, and telling the farmers that growing them is illegal, a bad thing to do. And then, once a year, all the Brits appear wearing fake poppies on their jackets?’

  ‘Possibly, I suppose.’ Taylor sounded undecided. ‘But of course they won’t know the significance of the date.’

  No, I thought, and nor would they care. All the Afghans would be aware of was that the foreign soldiers who had established a major presence in their country were forbidding them to grow about the only cash crop the poor soil would sustain and then, on one particular day of the year, a whole bunch of them appeared wearing a copy of that same flower. They probably wouldn’t even think it was ironic. They’d just assume that the British were taking the piss, and that’s not necessarily an impression I personally thought the coalition forces should be fostering.

  But this seemed to be lost on the colonel.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It might seem a bit odd to the locals, I suppose, but there’s nothing we can do about it, Orchard. It is our Remembrance Day.’

  What followed didn’t have quite the solemnity normally associated with the ceremony at the Cenotaph. Trying to get a bunch of soldiers to sing in tune – or indeed to sing at all – was amazingly difficult. I saw far more people miming than singing, and those who did try to join in only occasionally seemed to be singing the same verse of the same song as the majority. It was like being at a church service with a really reluctant congregation. With all due respect to the Fallen, it was bloody awful.

  Later that evening, sitting in the air-conditioned cool of the Ops building, I mulled over the threat posed by poppies to a successful outcome in Afghanistan. The whole question of the poppy crop and opium production is complex. Many Afghan farmers had grown poppies for decades. The poppies grew well in the area, were easy to farm and attracted a good price. For them it was an ideal crop.

  The ‘hearts and minds’ aspect of the Afghan campaign was the bedrock upon which success or failure in the country ultimately rested, and ruining the livelihood of the farmers – who made up the bulk of the country’s population – by simply destroying the poppy crops would clearly be non-productive.

  The other side of the coin was the absolute determination of the Afghan government to stamp out the trade in illegal drugs.

  Some have argued that the best option might be to legalize and regulate poppy production. The idea is that farmers continue to grow their poppies, then sell to pharmaceutical companies for the manufacture of opium-based prescription drugs, for which there is a continuing worldwide demand. On the face of it, it seems ideal, but Afghanistan’s a country that seems to confound easy solutions. And at such a relatively early stage in the war-ravaged country’s reconstruction, it’s hopelessly unrealistic to imagine that a workable legal infrastructure could yet be set up and managed.

  So a multi-pronged approach remained the only way forward for the foreseeable future. Along with education, incentives for regional governors to reduce cultivation and support for farmers trying to grow alternative crops and targeting traffickers, the cat-and-mouse game of ‘hunt the poppy’ on the plains of Afghanistan will continue unabated. The scale of the task was immense and while progress was being made at many levels, poppy production was still going up. It seemed clear that gaining the upper hand wasn’t going to happen overnight.

  ‘Boss!’ I was called out of my reverie. ‘We’ve got company.’

  I walked outside to see a motley bunch of troops clustered around one of the Harriers and chatting to a couple of the pilots. As I walked across to join them, I could see immediately that they weren’t British or American, and when I got closer I realized they were Canadians. We quite often received visitors at the det, but usually we knew in advance who was coming and what they wanted to see. Very few people just turned up on spec.

  ‘Can I help you?’ I asked on reaching the group.

  ‘No, thanks. You already have.’ A somewhat enigmatic reply, but a few seconds later the officer qualified it and immediately we all knew exactly what he was talking about. ‘We’re from FOB Martello,’ he explained. ‘We’ve just been relieved out there, and it’s mainly thanks to you guys that we’re here now.’

  Martello was the remote firebase where we’d beaten off a serious Taliban attack against the garrison, the men standing in front of us. We’d used CRV-7s and five-forty airburst bombs, and since then we’d made a point of overflying the place whenever we could, just to remind the insurgents that we could do it all again if we needed to.

  ‘We just wanted to drop by and say thanks in person, and to shake your hands. If you guys hadn’t been on the ball when we had that first attack, we don’t reckon any of us would have survived the day. We were that close to being overrun.’

  It was a humbling moment for me and the rest of the officers to meet a group of people who had spent a long time inside a firebase – a place that we had only seen from the air – in very unpleasant conditions. And to realize that a major reason they were still alive and had survived the experience was that we were flying the Harriers around and had delivered some pretty aggressive violence to the enemy.

  For us it had just been a part of the job, another attack by the Taliban that we’d managed to foil, but for the guys on the ground, the Canadians surrounded by dozens of square miles of Taliban-occupied territory, it was a life or death situation. And their gratitude for our efforts – and the fact that they’d detoured via Kandahar to track us down and shake our hands – meant a hell of a lot to us.

  However bizarre the combination of frantic and deadly action we experienced in the air and the comparative peace of Kandahar Airfield, this incident again hammered home the vital importance to the troops on the ground of our getting the job done.

  And, at last, I was about to properly play my part.

  17

  ‘Recoil Four Three, this is Crowbar. TIC India Bravo declared. Stand by for position.’

  ‘Crowbar, Recoil Four Three, roger.’

  I felt the familiar surge of adrenalin as I hauled the Harrier round into a hard turn to open out on a new heading, and started looking ahead towards the mountains. But we’d barely begun tracking towards the TIC when Crowbar updated us, and it wasn’t good news.

  ‘Recoil Four Three, Crowbar. Expedite. We’ve lost radio contact with Victor Two Seven.’

  Bernard and I were already travelling pretty much flat out, at well over 500 knots, but I gave the throttle a firm push forward.

  ‘Crowbar, Four Three. We’re at full chat now. Request SITREP.’

  If the patrol had suddenly stopped talking to Crowbar, the C2 controller at Camp
Bastion, it could just mean that their radio had broken or been hit by a Taliban bullet. Or it could mean that they’d been overrun and were all dead or wounded. So we needed as much information as possible before we reached the location of the TIC.

  ‘Four Three, Crowbar. We don’t know a lot. The patrol was moving through a high mountain pass when they came under fire from a large group of Taliban from one side of the pass, and they’re pinned down in the location I gave you. That’s all we have. Oh, and there’s no JTAC or FAC in the patrol.’

  ‘Roger.’

  That complicated the situation even more, because it meant that none of the people on the ground – at the other end of the radio link – had been trained to control aircraft. They were just a bunch of soldiers carrying a VHF set.

  To make matters worse, as Crowbar had already reported, now there was no radio link at all because we couldn’t raise any of the patrol members.

  ‘Victor Two Seven, this is Recoil Four Three. Request SITREP.’

  Total silence. There was no response to this or to any of my subsequent calls as we ran in towards the mountains.

  Moments later I pulled back the throttle as we reached the location of the ambush and dragged the Harrier round into a hard left-hand turn. The ‘g’ increased, pushing me back into the ejection seat as reassuring pressure from the g-suit tightened around my lower body. With the jet standing on its port wing, I looked out to my left, staring straight down at the ground about 10,000 feet below me.

  The terrain comprised a ridgeline with a mountain on either side, another ridgeline and then a col through which the pass descended down the valley on one side of the mountain before continuing to the nearest town. From what Crowbar had reported, the patrol had been near the top of the second ridgeline when a large group of Taliban opened up on them with RPGs, heavy machine-guns and assault rifles in a classic ambush situation.

  ‘I can see their vehicles,’ I radioed to Bernard, as I dipped lower, trying to assess the situation. ‘Right at the top of the second ridge.’