Sweating the Metal

by Alex Duncan Frenchie

  I’m captain, so Rich and Jim head straight for the aircraft to get her spun up, while Bob and I head for the JOC to get the details. There is no need for us to wait for the Apache on IRT duty to escort us; the crew is already overhead at Inkerman helping out the beleaguered guys inside with some close air support. As per usual, by the time Bob and I reach the cab, we’re pretty much good to go. The MERT is already on board, busily sorting kit out and hanging up IV drips. The QRF sit ready and waiting, their weapons resting between their legs, business ends pointing downwards – that way, any negligent discharges aren’t going to take out vital systems.

  Back at RAF Odiham on a routine tasking, it takes us around forty-five minutes to start the aircraft and get airborne. On the IRT, we’ve got it down to just a few minutes. There are lives at stake and every second counts; we do everything we can to make a difference, and in the dynamic, constantly changing environment that is a war zone, getting airborne in the shortest time possible is one thing we can influence. I brief the crew as soon as I don my helmet and connect the pigtail.

  ‘It’s a bad one, guys. FOB Inkerman. We’ve got two T1s, four T3s and a walking wounded to pick up. The LS was still hot when I left the JOC and the Apache was letting loose with everything it has, so it could get interesting on the way in. Everyone okay?’

  ‘All good, Frenchie,’ the crew come back. German fires up the engines and with the all clear from Jim at the ramp, we lift into the afternoon sunshine and turn north.

  ‘OK, same drill as usual,’ I say as we climb to height. ‘No rank bollocks on my cab. I’m Frenchie or Alex, this is German, you’re Bob and you’re Jim. You have my authority to engage without reference if you identify a firing point. Clear?’

  ‘All clear, Frenchie,’ from the back.

  Before we climb to height on the transit north of Bastion, there’s a linear feature which we know as the deconfliction line. With that in our six o’clock, the guys in the back can test fire the guns – aside from the Apache, they’re our last line of defence, so if they’re going to fail, you want to know before things heat up, not at a crucial life-or-death moment. Hence, on every sortie, the aircraft’s weapons are test fired.

  ‘Checking weapons,’ says Jim at the ramp.

  ‘Checking weapons,’ says Bob on the Crowd Pleaser.

  ‘Work away, fellas.’

  Jim opens up with the ramp-mounted M60. It’s a gas-operated, air-cooled, belt-fed, automatic machine-gun with a maximum rate of fire of 550 rounds per minute; on its own, it’s pretty impressive as it fires a line of rounds out into the sky over Helmand. Then Bob lets fly with the door-mounted M134 Minigun – compared to that, the M60 sounds like an X Factor loser against Whitney Houston. The noise the Crowd Pleaser makes as it spits out up to four thousand 7.62mm rounds a minute has to be heard to be believed. A spout of flame erupts from the front as the six barrels rotate and fire a line of red-hot rounds earthwards. It’s a great weapon to have.

  We come in through the Sangin Valley and fly a holding pattern over the western side, waiting to be called in by the AHs. The site is still hot as hell and we wait for a lull in the fighting so we can put down. The Apaches are doing everything they can to speed that moment along and are directing a huge weight of fire at the Green Zone. The 30mm cannon fire a stream of High Explosive (HE) shells earthwards and then they let loose with their flechette rockets. These weapons are truly awesome in their destructive power, especially against multiple personnel out in the open; once in flight, each rocket releases eighty six-inch tungsten darts travelling at 2,460mph. They’ll shred anything within a 50m spread and if they hit a human target, their supersonic speed creates a vacuum that will suck up everything in its path. They are just the thing for the fuckers who are causing all the misery at FOB Inkerman.

  The site is still hot, but we know there are seven casualties down there who are depending on us. The AHs are raining fire down to suppress the enemy below in an effort to get us in, so it’s in our hands.

  ‘Guys, we could wait ’til the end of tour for this LS to go cold. Are we all happy to make a move with it still hot?’

  All three of them agree. We’re going in. ‘Ugly Five Two, Doorman Two Four, request you keep the pressure on. We’re going in,’ I advise.

  ‘Roger that, Doorman. We’ll keep their heads down,’ I hear against a deafening live soundtrack of 30mm cannon fire.

  ‘Okay, Rich. There are two or three triangular-shaped hills there that are almost like the pyramids at Giza. They’re your marker for a left-hand turn to end up on a north-west track. That’ll put us a mile and a half out from the LS.’

  ‘Got it.’

  Rich flies fast, aggressive and dirty as we make the approach at low level. His favourite technique to arrest our speed is a series of steep, acute turns and he’s expert at it; the tail goes left, right, left, right as our speed drops. I’m ‘eyes out’, looking out the window, but I look at the engine instruments briefly to scan the Ts and Ps and that’s when I notice the NR is at 114%! In all my hours of flying, I’ve never seen it that high. 110% is the limit, and I’ve never even seen it that high, let alone 114%!

  It’s weird because normally once you get above 104% – still within limits – the gearbox protests by making a noise that sounds like God shouting, and you feel a shed-load of vibration in the aircraft caused by the blades slapping the air. Normally, push the aircraft this hard and you know all about it. This time? Nothing. The aircraft is flying with NR of 114% and it’s as smooth as a baby’s bottom. There’s no time to tell Rich to correct it, so I pull on the collective to create some lift to bring the NR back within limits.

  Rich looks at me. ‘Fuck, Frenchie! Thanks for that.’ He’s as stunned as I am.

  ‘No worries. Twenty seconds to go. HLS is on the nose. You visual? Speed is good, good rate of descent. Everyone secure?’ I ask.

  As Rich sets us up in the gate at 100ft and 30kts, the LS is still taking fire. Suddenly the Defensive Aids Suite detects a threat. Some sort of weapons system has engaged us and the DAS has picked it up.

  BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! It fires out a series of flares.

  ‘60ft, 30kts,’ I say as Rich brings the nose up.

  Jim and Bob take over the talk-down and within seconds I feel the rear wheels land on.

  ‘Two wheels on… six wheels on,’ from the back.

  The ramp goes down and the doctor heads out to meet the troops who are already with the casualties and heading for the aircraft. At the front, Rich and I are busy scanning everything and doing all the checks we can so that as soon as we get the nod, we can lift; we know the crewmen are busy and they’ll signal to us to get the hell out of Dodge the minute they can.

  The threat from incoming mortars is a real worry for me. How much longer can our luck hold? The casualties take longer than I’d like to load but, with seven of them, that’s to be expected. I look down and see a pair of feet in the 2ft narrow ‘corridor’ that leads from the rear of the cab to the cockpit. Something’s wrong though; they belong to an ANA who is laid on his back and his toes are pointing down towards the floor, not up as they should be. Both ankles are broken.

  I catch Jim’s eye. ‘This guy’s in a bad way, mate,’ he says. ‘I’m just putting a tourniquet on him and it’s my tourniquet cos we’ve run out of them in the back.’

  Fuck me, it must be bad; I’ve never heard of that happening before. I look towards the ramp and a scene of absolute bedlam greets me: six wounded British casualties and a wounded Afghan soldier on board – two T1s, four T3s and a walking wounded. I can’t ever remember a time before when we had that many casualties in the cab. There are stretchers taking up every spare inch of floor space and almost nowhere for the QRF guys to go. IV drips hang from every point, the floor is awash with blood; I can almost smell it. It’s a scene of utter devastation – broken bodies and medics working like crazy in the dark, cramped dusty cab.

  ‘Ramp up, clear above and behind.’

  That’s all we need to
hear. ‘Lifting,’ says Rich, pulling up the collective. He pushes forward on the cyclic to get the nose down and we disappear, as low and fast and dirty as we can, manoeuvring all the while to make ourselves as difficult a target as possible. We’re engaged again; the DAS fires flares off to tempt away whatever threat it’s detected headed towards us.

  The number one priority on lifting is to get the aircraft out of the engagement zone. Rich turns an immediate left as we depart, along the wadi at low level – Sangin’s to the right and we don’t want to get too close to that without getting some speed up.

  The team are trying to stabilise Captain Hicks. I ask Bob how he is.

  ‘He’s taken a head wound, Frenchie. They’re doing CPR on him at the moment.’

  They manage to revive him, but I’m in awe of the crewmen. Already overworked with running the cab and managing the aircraft, they’re up to their elbows in all of the worst aspects of conflict – the bloodied, battered bodies of young soldiers. It’s hard enough for us looking in the mirror and seeing the guys working on them, but there’s no escape for the crewmen – they’re up close and personal. I look at the MERT team working on Capt Hicks; he has multiple arrests but each time they perform CPR he comes back. I will him to hang on. We all want him to live.

  We run down as fast as we can down the east side of Sangin, along the east side of FOB Robinson, and once we clear that we do a right turn towards the south-west, north of Gereshk and a straight run for Bastion, avoiding all the danger areas. With the nose dipped, we are wringing every single ounce of power the cab has, flying at the aircraft’s VNE or Velocity Never Exceed. The ASI shows us at 160 knots – even more at times.

  The engine is temperature-limited rather than torque-limited in theatre, so there are certain temperature bands that govern how hard you can push it. Continuous does what it says on the tin, as does thirty-minute power. Ten minutes means you can push hard for ten minutes but then have to come back into thirty minutes. Finally, there is ‘Emergency’ – you can push the engines to the max for five minutes but doing so starts a countdown timer. Once you exceed that, the engine’s ready for the bin.

  We literally can’t fly the aircraft any harder to get it back. We are flying at the top of ten-minute power for nine minutes fifty-nine seconds, and then we lower the lever, get the engine back into thirty minutes and then yank the power back up to the ten-minute band. We try everything we’ve got. We’re flying faster than I’ve ever done before in a Chinook and it’s shaking like a bastard. We can’t fly a straight line back – the risk to the cab from ground fire is too great. We have to weigh up the options: save thirty seconds and risk losing the seven casualties, the crew, the medics and the cab, or go the longer way round? It’s a no-brainer. We can’t go as the crow flies so we take the quickest route we can. It adds maybe thirty seconds to our journey, but it feels like an age. I feel like we’re watching an hourglass and the sand’s about to run out.

  Bastion’s in sight now. I can see the wire. Nightingale and the HLS are on the nose. We’re seconds away. Rich is working it like a madman; we’re digging deep to give everything we can.

  ‘How are things in the back?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m sorry mate, I think it’s over. He’s had a heart attack and they’re stopping CPR,’ says Bob.

  I feel like the bottom has dropped out of our world. It’s absolutely heart-wrenching. But there’s still a chance, so we don’t stop. We don’t ever stop until we’re on the ground and we’ve done everything we can. We rip the aircraft all the way to Nightingale and the team are waiting for us. Rich stops the cab on a sixpence, we land on and the ramp goes down. The casualties are off, but we’re too late for David Hicks – sadly, he doesn’t make it.

  We’re gutted. All of us. The aircraft is deathly quiet, everyone gathering their thoughts. I’ve never seen a cab so trashed in the back; there’s equipment strewn everywhere, the detritus of the frantic fight to save lives. But we’ve no time to wallow; we have to prep the cab in case we’re scrambled again. We have a great relationship with the MERT because we fly with them all the time. When we drop the casualties at Nightingale, it’s only the surgeon who goes off with them – the nurses stay on the aircraft. They clean up the cab, prepare it. Jim and Bob are part of the team – they’re all involved. They put on the white all-in-one forensic suits and gloves to protect against contamination and get to work cleaning out the cab and mopping up the blood.

  The MERT worked so hard to save those guys. We did everything we could. The aircraft couldn’t have given any more. All that, and it wasn’t enough. Fuck it! Everything we know, all that medical knowledge and it’s not enough. He still died, and what’s worse is, it was within sight of the hospital.

  I feel powerless; totally powerless. I feel an intense sadness, but it’s mixed up with anger. Sat on the HLS you have time to think, to replay events. Did we do all we could? Could we have done more? Would it have made a difference? What did we fail to do?

  As pilots, we’re tested constantly. We take three or four tests every year, simulator sessions; an off day, one fail, and that’s it. Game over. It’s the end of your flying career. We don’t fail, ever. But suddenly, we’ve given everything and yet we failed.

  The death of Captain David Hicks really hit me hard. I’ve picked up the bodies of British soldiers who have died before; I’ve had people die in the cab before, but I’ve not known their names or seen their faces. This is different because David Hicks wasn’t a faceless, nameless person. I knew his name, I saw his face.

  Captain David Hicks was twenty-six when he died and, to me, a real hero. He was the acting company commander in charge of fifty men at FOB Inkerman and when an RPG hit the tower that he was in, he received multiple shrapnel wounds. Those wounds made him a candidate for immediate medevac, but he chose to stay even while five others were evacuated, and carried on in command of the outpost.

  He reportedly tore off his oxygen mask and refused a morphine injection on the grounds that it might cloud his judgement. He was still insisting on getting back to his men when he lost consciousness. For his actions, he was posthumously awarded the Military Cross. For me, he displayed total leadership all the way to the end. I think he was a rare human being and when you learn all this stuff about him, you question yourself again and again. Did I do everything I could to save him? However much you know that the answer is yes, you still feel responsible; it’s human nature. You take ownership because your two worlds collided.

  I still live in mine. I wish the same could be said for Captain Hicks.

  21

  THE TWILIGHT ZONE

  After the IRT shift where FOB Inkerman dominated so much of our time, we flew back to the weird hinterland of KAF for some downtime. There was no question that the conditions were better at KAF – the accommodation was brick-built, properly air-conditioned, and the ablutions were much better than the converted ISO containers at Bastion.

  The trouble was, living at KAF was like living in the Twilight Zone. While Bastion was all about purpose, KAF felt more like a work in progress that would never quite get to the end state. Aside from the astonishingly large number of REMFs for whom it was a permanent base, almost everyone else there was in transit – either on their way home or on their way to be deployed forward, whether to Kabul, Bastion, a FOB or a Patrol Base somewhere in Helmand Province.

  On the plus side, it did have a decent gym we’d sometimes hang out at, there was the Green Bean Cafe, and then there was the boardwalk, the manufactured ‘heart’ of the base. Constructed of raw, unfinished timber, it played host to a range of takeaways and shops, such as Pizza Hut, Burger King, Subway and Tim Horton’s – a Canadian coffee and doughnuts franchise. There were also shops selling local crafts, rugs and ice cream. You could almost forget you were in a war zone at the boardwalk – aside from the background noise of fighter jets screaming overhead, helicopters and transports taking off and the sound of sporadic gunfire. Oh, and the fact that every diner was armed.


  Then there was the BX, a gargantuan US-run retail outlet. Rich and I would often look around there, if only to laugh at the bizarre assortment of goods that they sell and see if there was anything new on offer. There never was, of course. It was just the same strange assortment of big fuck-off knives, tactical vests and other gear for Special-Forces types and SF wannabes, near-beer, strangely flavoured ‘potato chips’ and Hershey Bars, that funny-tasting excuse for chocolate that Americans love. We could never work out who bought most of the stuff on offer. I mean, sure, buy all the ‘gung-ho-look-at-me-I’m-Johnny-Rambo’ stuff that some Americans on Det love to buy. Yeah, buy a flat screen 42” TV for your tent, and a PS3 and kit yourself up like Sergeant Rock, but what the fuck to do you do with it all at the end of your tour?

  Everything about working and living alongside the Americans was bizarre. I know Winston Churchill said we’re two nations divided by a common language, but nowhere is this more evident than on military ops. Our SOPs, working practices, autonomy on ops – everything is different. A couple of days later, Rich and I were crewing one of the task lines and we had a US AH-64 Apache flying with us.

  We were just transiting out across the deconfliction line and they called us over the radio, ‘Ah, Hardwood Thirteen, Destruction One Five. Be advised we are going to test fire the guns,’ so we dropped back behind them expecting to see a bit of 30mm fire from their cannon. That’s one aspect of US military culture I love – their call signs. Ours are all sober and dull – ‘Hardwood’ or ‘Beefcake’, for the Chinooks, ‘Ugly’ for the Apaches. But their Apaches have call signs like ‘Destruction One Five’ or ‘Barbarian One Zero’. Legend!