by Ed Macy
‘What do you call the desert on the east side of the Green Zone, then?’
‘The Red Desert.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it looks red from up here.’
The Boss peered at our right horizon. ‘It’s actually worse. Makes the GAFA look like Kent.’
The Red Desert stretched all the way to Kandahar: 10,000 square miles of thin, Arabian-style sand, whipped by the wind over thousands of years into an endless succession of dunes. From 5,000 feet up, its surface looked like a sea of rippling red waves. Except by two well-known routes, the Red Desert was completely impassable, even by tracked vehicles. If you went in there, you didn’t come out again. That’s why nobody ever did. Not even the nomads.
As we moved further north and nearer to Sangin the topography ahead of us began to change. We could see the outlines of great ridges of rock rising from steep valleys to form the foothills of the Hindu Kush. Their peaks were as sharp as knife-blades and coloured seams cut through them as they climbed, indicating the different eras of their evolution. The mountains stretched all the way to Kabul, 300 miles to the north-east. They were almost impassable in the winter snows and boasted only one road flat enough for most vehicles to make the arduous journey during the rest of the year.
Many of the foothills had been tunnelled into, originally for protection from the wind and sandstorms and somewhere to store crops, but then, in the last few thousand years, for war. They provided an excellent defence against invaders since the time of Alexander the Great, and most recently, a haven to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.
Conventional British forces tried to stay out of the mountains. Our lesson had been learned 164 years before we got there, when General Elphinstone’s 16,000-man garrison was wiped out during the retreat from Kabul in 1842.
‘That’s Sangin ahead of us now, Boss.’
Sangin sat at the confluence of three green zones, and the District Centre was sited at the point the Helmand was joined by another river flowing from the northern hills. The Taliban had three different covered approaches from which to attack it.
It was no coincidence that the SBS team had got so badly whacked here. The town was the scene of the most intense fighting of our first tour and accounted for half of 16 Air Assault Brigade’s body bags. For years it had been a centre of Taliban activity, as well as the market town where all of the opium grown in the north of the province was traded. The traffickers hadn’t been too happy about the Paras’ arrival either. We dropped down to get a better look.
‘Wheel,’ Billy called. ‘We’ll start east, you start west.’
A wheel was a regular Apache combat manoeuvre over a target. We’d circle on the same axis but at different heights, one clockwise, one anticlockwise. It gave the flight 360-degree visibility at all times. We liked to keep between 1,000 and 4,000 metres away from the target, out of small arms range but well within engagement range of our weapons, and close enough for us to see whatever we needed through our optics.
As I slipped us into the gentle circle, I pointed out areas of interest for the Boss to zoom into with the Day TV TADS camera and examine on his screen. It had three fields of view – narrow, wide and zoom. Zoom offered 127-times magnification. If you looked at a guy in the zoom field while standing off at 2,000 metres, you could tell how many fillings he had. The camera was housed in the nose pod, so we could see up to sixty degrees downwards; as if we were looking straight through the Kevlar shell beneath our feet.
Sangin was a maze of mainly single-storey brown and beige buildings connected by dust tracks. I centred my monocle crosshairs on the wadi.
‘My line of sight. The wadi.’
‘Looking.’ The Boss zoomed in.
The second set of crosshairs in his monocle told him where I was focusing. All he needed to do was line up his with mine and slave the TADS to his eye.
‘Seen.’
‘Come due east from it and the first building is the District Centre.’
‘Okay. Hang on a minute, let me have a look at the map. Yup, I’ve got it.’
I glanced down at my right-hand MPD, which I’d set on the TADS image, relaying everything the Boss was seeing.
‘Bloody hell, they’ve built the place up a bit.’
The three-storey adobe-clad structure had been vigorously reinforced. A massive Hesco Bastion wall now ran all the way around the building, and the Paras had added wooden planks, sandbags and junk – anything they could lay their hands on – to the rooftop defences. A 300- by 200-metre field alongside it had also been ringed by Hesco Bastion, giving them a permanently protected helicopter landing site. It was a proper fort now, and a fine feat of engineering.
‘How they managed to stay alive long enough to build that, I’ve no idea …’
I’d heard the dit from 664 Squadron. The DC’s complement of Royal Engineers had affectionately renamed it Sangin Built Under Fire. Every man, bar one, had fired his weapon on the job; the only engineer who hadn’t was their sergeant major, who’d been too busy lobbing ammunition to the rest of the guys.
‘My line of sight – that’s the market place.’
The souk was 700 metres east of the DC. On the TADS screen, I could see broken wooden frames hanging off its stalls and shredded curtains flapping in the wind. It had been heavily shot up over the summer, but never stopped being a hive of activity. There was money to be made in the opium business.
Old rice sacks were piled high outside several stalls – the favoured receptacle for opium poppy sap – and dozens of locals crowded around them under the watchful gaze of the marines in the DC. Busting the drugs industry wasn’t their job. We’d get to that later, once the Taliban had been defeated. Otherwise, we’d be banging up 80 per cent of the local population.
‘My line of sight now – that’s Wombat Wood.’ I was looking a kilometre north of the DC. ‘The Taliban use it regularly to shell the guys.’
A wombat was a Weapon Of Magnesium Battalion Anti Tank; the generic slang the army gave to recoilless rifles. They were around eight feet long and fired shells up to a diameter of 120 mm. Nasty.
‘Wombats aren’t the only sinister things lurking in that wood, Boss. They fire 107-millimetre Chinese rockets from there too.’
A 107-mm Chinese rocket had killed two signallers in a blockhouse that covered the stairwell to the roof of the Sangin DC in July. Corporal Peter Thorpe died alongside his comrade Jabron Hashmi – the first British Army Muslim killed fighting the Taliban.
‘Okay, let’s show you Macy House.’
A few months before, I’d found a building 200 metres to the south which the Taliban had occupied, giving them good arcs of fire onto the DC. They’d knocked a series of firing ports into its walls. The Apache crews had named it after me as a way of identifying it to each other. I searched for it in vain.
‘Forget it, it’s gone.’
Where Macy House once stood, there was now nothing. It had obviously been bombed to oblivion while we’d been away. I looked at the clock.
‘We’d better be moving on, Boss.’
We wanted to get in all four DCs, so we only had time for a whistle stop tour. Four minutes in Sangin was enough.
‘Okay. Billy, let’s move on to Kajaki.’
‘Copied, Boss.’
We broke out of the wheel, slipped east of the Green Zone and pointed our noses north-east again. Kajaki was thirty-eight kilometres further up the Green Zone. My monocle said we’d be there in ten minutes.
Two minutes into the flight, an urgent message was broadcast over the JTAC net for Widow TOC – the JTACs’ central hub in Camp Bastion’s JOC Ops Room.
‘Stand by.’ The Boss cut across my chat with Billy about the fate of Macy House.
‘Widow TOC, this is Widow Eight Four. We are north-east of Gereshk; we have come under sniper and mortar fire. Requesting immediate air support. Repeat, requesting immediate air support.’
Gereshk was only forty klicks south-west of us. The Boss stepped on the pressel by
his left foot to fire up his radio mike.
‘Widow TOC, Widow TOC; this is Ugly Five One. We are two Apaches; we have just left Sangin on a familiarisation flight and we’ve got plenty of gas. We’re available for tasking if required.’
I pushed the cyclic forward and right, throwing the Apache into a tight bank.
‘Ugly Five One, Widow TOC. Copied. Stand by.’
Widow TOC needed a senior officer’s authority from the JHF to deploy us.
‘Wait Widow TOC, I am Zero Alpha of all Ugly callsigns. I am authorising if you want us to do it.’
‘Widow TOC, Roger. It’s yours.’
‘Eight minutes, Boss.’
‘Ugly Five One, affirm. Widow Eight Four, we’ll be with you in eight minutes; stand by.’
BACK IN THE HOT SEAT
The familiarisation flight was out of the window.
We were tanking it down to Gereshk at maximum speed, 120 knots per hour; we were heavy. It would take forty minutes for the Apache pair on standby at Camp Bastion to launch and get to the marines. We’d be there in a quarter of the time. It was a no-brainer.
I needed to get as much juice out of Ugly Five One as I could; cyclic forward to push the nose down and pick up speed, topping up the collective to keep our height. Cyclic with collective, again and again – my eye constantly on the torque. It edged past 95 per cent.
The Boss got back on the net to talk to the marines directly.
‘Widow Eight Four, this is Ugly Five One. Send sitrep.’
‘Ugly Five One, Widow Eight Four; we are pinned down on the north-western edge of the Green Zone, at grid 41R PQ 5506 2603.’
The boss read back the grid.
‘They’re hitting us with mortars. Rounds are landing in and around us as I speak.’
‘Copied all. Do you have a grid for the mortar team?’
‘Negative. They’re firing from the Green Zone, approximately 200 to 300 metres east-south-east, but we’re struggling to find them at the moment.’
‘Roger. I’ll call in the overhead.’
Our brains crunched the JTAC’s information as we tried to build up a picture of what we could expect. We had to find that mortar team before they put a shell right on top of our guys, but Objective Number One was always to locate the friendlies or we simply couldn’t engage. The last thing we needed was a blue-on-blue, the military term for soldiers killed or wounded by friendly fire.
The Boss tapped the marines’ grid reference into the keyboard and the TADS swivelled in their direction.
‘Okay Mr M, I’m starting to see some thin puffs of smoke on the ridgeline, my line of sight. Confirm you can see them.’
The mortar rounds’ point of impact.
‘Negative, Boss. We’re still eight klicks off.’ I couldn’t see them with my naked eye. ‘I’ve got the smoke on my MPD though.’
‘Okay, keep an eye out for them; I’m going into the Green Zone to see if I can get a bead on the mortar team.’
We were 3,000 feet higher than the rapidly approaching Green Zone, with Billy and Carl 500 feet beneath us, to the left and slightly back. We were leading now because the Boss was back in command.
I pushed the weapons button under my right thumb between ‘M’ for missile and ‘R’ for rocket up to ‘G’ for gun and the cockpit juddered beneath my feet as the cannon followed my line of sight. I flicked up the guard and rested my forefinger lightly on the trigger. The Boss could fire far more accurately with his TADS image, but if I needed to take a snap shot, I was ready.
‘My gun, Boss.’
I thought about what lay ahead. My grip on the controls tightened, my heartbeat quickened; I just adored the sensation of flying into combat. I could taste metal. I did so before every fight, as far back as my dust-ups in the school playground. The taste of adrenalin; my body was physically, chemically and mentally preparing itself for battle.
Four kilometres off I shuffled my arse into a more comfortable position, checked my harness was tight and the extendable bullet-catching Kevlar shield by my right shoulder was completely forward.
Exhilaration coursed through my veins. I could see the smoke plumes with my naked left eye now, just to the right of the Green Zone. They were rising out of a gully that led down into the trees. As we closed on the gully, I saw an empty compound on either side of it, then a couple of camouflage-painted vehicles sheltering behind the nearside compound’s back wall. A Pinzgauer and a WMIK Land Rover. The marines. Two more vehicles stood at the back of the far compound. Eight or nine puffs of smoke spiralled upwards before being carried away by the wind.
Carl set up a circuit over the Green Zone. I headed towards the marines.
‘Got the friendlies in the wadi, Boss. It’s 42 Commando.’
‘Copied. Let me know if they move.’
I wanted the Taliban to know that Big Brother had turned up to help out Little Brother.
The marines’ JTAC came back with a grid for the enemy mortar position: a compound 200 metres in, behind some trees. At the edge of the Green Zone was another line of trees, hiding anyone inside it completely. A good place for an ambush. But it was a false lead.
‘We’ve just been over that compound,’ Billy reported. ‘Couldn’t see anyone in it.’
It wasn’t the mortar tube we needed to find first anyway. They’d have no direct line of sight onto the marines. We needed to find their controller. Take him out, and the tube men would be firing blind.
The Taliban’s spotters often positioned themselves in trees and reported the necessary corrections back to the tube via walkie-talkie. The Boss searched along the outer treeline, flicking constantly between the Day TV camera and the Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) thermal camera.
Billy beat him to it. ‘I’ve got a man hiding.’
‘Where?’
‘From the marines’ wadi, follow the treeline to its most southerly end.’ He paused to let the Boss follow his talk-on.
‘On the ground, under trees, lone man … Don’t think there are any weapons on him. Looking for a radio.’
A scruffy bloke with a beard, dressed from head to toe in black, walked out into the field, flapping his dishdash as he went to show us he wasn’t armed and didn’t have a single walkie-talkie stuffed down his trousers. With two gunships overhead, cannons pointing directly at him, he’d got the message we were onto him. Cunning sod. He knew we couldn’t engage him. He moved slowly in the direction of Gereshk, still looking up at us and flapping away. I didn’t see his face, but I knew he’d have a grin plastered right across it.
‘Ugly callsigns, Widow Eight Four. We’ve just seen two puffs of smoke east of the previous target grid.’
Were they still engaging? There was no chance of hearing the mortars launch inside our sealed cockpits. But we did hear the first round impacting through the JTAC’s open mike. The rounds were now landing alarmingly close to the marines, fired onto coordinates supplied by the smart arse spotter just before he came out to give us the dishdash dance.
Not all the Taliban were running. The carefully hidden mortar tube team were fighting on with the full knowledge we were swarming above them. That did take brass. We’d surely find them now.
Carl and I tracked east, deeper into the Green Zone from the empty compound. Thirty seconds later, Billy spoke up again. Skill fade from the break in Blighty was firmly behind Billy as he got to grips with the sights. He was having a good afternoon.
‘I’ve got ’em. Three hundred metres east of the compound is a triangular-shaped copse. Men moving inside it.’
‘Request laser spot.’
Billy pointed his crosshairs at the copse and squeezed his trigger. The Boss flicked his TADS onto Laser Spot Tracker mode, and the lens jumped towards the spot where Billy was aiming his laser energy.
‘Where are they in there?’
‘Under the trees. At least three of them on my FLIR, and this lot have got weapons on them.’
The copse was only fifty metres long but its foliage provided dens
e cover. We were 2,000 metres south-east of it, and all we could see was forty-foot trees. Billy had gone round the opposite side where, for a few metres, the trees were shorter and the bushes less thick; he’d picked up moving bodies through their heat signatures in his FLIR lens. I banked right to circle the northern edge too. To engage, we needed to be sure. The Boss got a perfect view through the window.
‘Look at this heat source, Mr M.’
I looked down to the MPD above my right knee displaying the TADS image in FLIR mode. A long thin rectangle, ten inches wide, chest height and angled in the direction of the marines was practically burning a hole in the camera lens.
‘Yup. That’s definitely a mortar barrel in there.’
It was a good spot by Billy. And he wasn’t going to let them get away.
‘Confirmed as Taliban. Engaging with thirty Mike Mike.’
Mike Mike was military air slang for millimetre. Flame licked out of Billy’s cannon as it spat HEDP rounds at a rate of 600 per minute and an initial muzzle velocity of 805 metres per second from his stand-off position 1,500 metres from the copse. Less than two seconds later, their shaped charge heads exploded with a blinding flash. Then the incendiary charges inside the 87-mm-long projectiles threw out jets of flame large enough to torch a car, igniting everything within a two-metre radius, and the fragment charges blasted out thousands of red hot shards of metal casing. Billy had set his gun to bursts of twenty. Three or four more of those, and the copse would be neutralised. But he’d only pumped off fifteen.
‘Gun jam, gun jam! Your target. Pulling off.’
Our orbit had taken us past the marines again to watch for any leakers while he prosecuted the target. I brought our Apache round to face the copse as another two mortar rounds shot straight out of it. This time I caught a glimpse of their shock wave as they penetrated the treetops. They still weren’t running.
‘Necky little bastards.’