by Ed Macy
Scottie took over the flying so I could use the camera.
‘One Zero Alpha has just entered Lismore,’ I said, ‘and taken up positions by the first house on the right. One Zero Bravo is behind them on the Dundalk Road covering the rear to the north.’ I gestured for him to look out of the window again. ‘One Zero Charlie has moved forward on the Dundalk Road to cover the south.’
One Zero Charlie was on both sides of the road, with an RUC policeman, looking along a straight stretch with good avenues of approach.
‘One Zero Charlie is in the most vulnerable position,’ I continued, ‘because a vehicle can approach from the south, take a shot and scoot off. You need to keep an eye out along the Dundalk Road in both directions. If you see any vehicles, yell, because I’ll need to warn the multiple commander. Large vehicles like covered tipper trucks and lorries could contain an IED. Keep a watch for them.’
‘Okay, Ed.’
Before the multiple moved off again, I needed to scout ahead to find its vulnerable points-areas of particular threat in the vicinity.
‘One Zero Alpha, this is Gazelle Five. I have identified all of your men. Can you send me your VPs for this area, over?’
A broad Ulster accent responded. ‘One Zero Alpha, aye, we only have the one. Once we move forward up Lismore we’ll cross a junction on our left leading south along Lismore Park. Can you see it, over?’ The multiple commander was clearly a guy with local knowledge.
I could see the junction he meant. I told him it was clear.
‘Gazelle Five, roger, over.’
‘That’s a bad crossing for us, mate,’ the Ulsterman said. ‘We’ve been shot at from that road before and the bastards have escaped onto the Dundalk Road and got away to the south, over.’
‘Gazelle Five, roger, wait out.’
All of this was new to Scottie, although it shouldn’t have been. Not that I blamed him. There had been a procedural breakdown in the way Gazelles had been supporting multiples in Northern Ireland and without remedial action I knew that more of our boys on the ground were going to die.
The threat level was high. Aside from IEDs and ambushes, it was the era of the South Armagh Sniper, a guy armed with a .50 calibre sniper rifle who’d taken out seven of our lads in the past five years. He was still out there. Our job was to provide top-cover, to scout ahead for anything that constituted a potential threat to the multiple on the ground. The Gazelle was an ideal platform for this role. Thanks to its powerful high-resolution, thermal-imaging camera system, we could stare down the throats of anyone down there, even from this altitude.
‘Look along this road on my TV monitor, Scottie, and you’ll see a lone vehicle at the dogleg bend facing south. That’s a good shooting position, and the car is facing in the escape direction.’
‘How do you know if it’s a threat?’
‘You don’t yet. You need to see if the engine is warm on the thermal camera and to see if anyone is in the car or ready to jump into it.’
I pointed at the screen. The car was stone cold, with no occupants and nobody nearby. Had it been used recently, I would have detected the white heat glow of the engine block, even through its bonnet.
Scottie was quick to chip in. ‘Do we give them the all clear?’
‘No mate, this is what we do.’ I got on the radio again. ‘One Zero Alpha, this is Gazelle Five. I have a white Ford Capri at the dogleg halfway down the road on the left-hand side. It is cold, no occupants and no one hanging around, over.’
‘One Zero Alpha, wait out.’
I turned to Scottie. ‘We don’t know the threat here, buddy. All we can do is let him know what’s around the corner. He decides what to do about it.’
‘How’s that going to help him?’
‘He’ll be talking to base now; they’ll pull a file on all Ford Capris and also check out the colour in case of a respray. If it’s reported stolen, they won’t go anywhere down that road, because it’s likely to have an IED in it.’
‘Gazelle Five, this is One Zero Alpha. That vehicle is registered to the house that it’s parked outside, but thanks anyway. Are we cleared to move, over?’
‘Gazelle Five, I’ve not quite finished looking around. Wait out.’
I looked at Scottie again. ‘Okay, buddy, now that their VP appears clear I need to check the area they’re about to move into.’
At the edge of the town there was a small close, shaped like a sickle, with an alleyway leading off it. The multiple would move past it in the next thirty metres or so.
‘Look into every place a bomb could be left, or where trouble could come from, because you don’t want the multiple split up, Scottie. If you look on the monitor now, you’ll see a known trouble-spot called The Crescent.’
Scottie peered at the screen. ‘There are three kids playing football down there.’
‘What do you think we should do?’
‘Tell the multiple commander. They need to know what’s at the end of the alleyway.’
‘Right. Paint the picture to the guys on the ground, so they’re ready to respond.’ He was picking it up fast.
After they set off, I explained to Scottie that he was responsible for the rear and the periphery of the multiple and should warn me of any vehicles-or anybody, for that matter-approaching from blind positions.
‘Okay, what next?’ he asked.
‘I’m looking into Lismore. There’s a little cul-de-sac down there where they’re scheduled to do a house search.’
I scanned forward, letting the Gazelle’s powerful thermal-imaging camera do its thing. Lismore was just forward of the area the multiple was patrolling. The ability of the camera to stare into people’s living rooms, from this height and far higher, never ceased to amaze me. I let the camera rove through the streets and alleyways. It was a warm, late spring day. Wild flowers bloomed in the neighbouring fields. I could see it all. It was strange, then, that apart from the three kids playing football, no one was around.
A movement at the edge of the screen caught my eye, a curtain billowing in the breeze. The window on the first floor was wide open.
I scanned to the next house and noticed that its windows were open too. It was the same all along the street…
Fuck.
‘One Zero Alpha, this is Gazelle Five. Go firm, go firm now! I have large combat indicators in Lismore, wait out.’
‘What is it, Ed?’
I pointed at the screen. ‘The bins are out in this cul-de-sac, but not in any of the others. They don’t do bin collections in just one street. And take a look at the windows. What do you see?’
‘It is almost summer, Ed.’
‘Do you leave all your windows wide open when you go out to work? Look at the other houses in the area. Only a couple have theirs open.’
‘I know a bin can have an IED in it, but what’s the significance of the windows?’
‘The IRA won’t piss off the locals. They’ll tell them there’s a bomb in a bin. That’s why the place is deserted. The windows are open so the pressure from the blast doesn’t blow them in. I may be wrong, but this stinks of a set-up.
‘It couldn’t be a booby-trap bomb because our guys won’t even touch a twenty-pound note on the floor in Crossmaglen and the IRA know that. The bomb would have to be set off by a command wire or remote control. I couldn’t see any wires, but I didn’t see a living soul down there either, except for the lads and their football. Stand by, Scottie, I’m about to transmit again.’
I told One Zero Alpha the form. There was a pause, then he came back to me; he didn’t want to go near the place, but did want to question the three lads.
I told him how to corner them by moving a brick out onto the Dundalk Road first and another down the alleyway.
Scottie watched One Zero Charlie by the Dundalk Road and I surveyed the three lads as the men of One Zero Alpha moved towards them.
‘One Zero Charlie, this is Gazelle Five. The lads are headed your way.’ I could see them break into a run towards the D
undalk Road.
‘This is One Zero Charlie cutting them off.’ I could hear his breathing quicken as he ran.
I turned to Scottie. ‘And that’s why you need to know where everyone is and what their callsigns are.’
The lads ran back into the cul-de-sac and were promptly confronted by the men of One Zero Alpha.
Zero One Bravo was covering the alleyway and Zero One Charlie the entrance to the Dundalk Road. The three lads were cornered.
‘It’s making sense to me now,’ he said.
‘You don’t need to gawk at our boys,’ I told Scottie, ‘because they’re not going to shoot themselves. You need to be looking ahead of them and on their flanks. That’s where trouble’s going to come from if it’s out there. Take a look, for instance, across the Dundalk Road and across that first field there. There’s an inverted T-shaped tree line. Do you see it?’
‘Got it,’ Scottie said.
‘Keep an eye on that place, buddy, because that’s an awesome sniping position.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s got a good clear shot, cover from above and a great escape route, making it hard for us to follow anyone who bugs out of there.’
‘How do you know this shit, Ed?’
‘Because I’ve been a foot soldier. I see things from up here. But I also see them from down there.’
The radio crackled. ‘Gazelle Five, this is One Zero Alpha. The three lads are local teenagers and the way they’re behaving makes our copper suspect there is an IED in the area. He knows these guys. They’re usually pretty gobby, but today butter wouldn’t fucking melt…Our job’s done, Gazelle Five. We’re heading back out onto the Dundalk Road and back to the station, over.’
‘Wait out.’ I explained to Scottie that we now had to go through the routine all over again, covering them on the journey back.
‘One Zero Alpha, Bravo and Charlie, this is Gazelle Five. Your only threat is from a wood line to the east of One Zero Charlie. It’s across the field on the other side of the Dundalk Road. We’ll keep an eye out for any snipers, over.’
‘Thanks, mate, over.’
‘No worries, buddy, out.’
We turned and headed back the way we’d come.
It was my second tour of Northern Ireland. My first had been in 1993-not counting the time I had deployed there on the ground as a Para in 1987-and this time it was a very different ball of wax. In 1993, when I’d been in Belfast as part of City Flight, covering foot patrols in and around Belfast, I’d flown with ex-infanteers, AAC guys who like me had previously been soldiers. They’d all had a natural feel for the tactical picture on the ground and it showed in the way they flew. Somehow or other, this skill had been lost in the four years I’d been away.
My first unit after graduating from Middle Wallop, 664 Squadron, 9 Regiment Army Air Corps, was located at Dishforth in Yorkshire. With it, I’d been on exercises in Belize, Kenya and the United States.
In the five years I’d been an operational pilot I was having the best fun it was possible to have with my clothes on.
As a newly qualified AAC helicopter pilot, there were two platforms I could aspire to: the Gazelle or the Lynx. Most elected for the Lynx because it was armed and as aggressive a flying machine as the army possessed at the time, though that wasn’t saying much. I went for the Gazelle because it formed the heart of the AAC’s covert ‘Special Forces Flight’.
I loved the Gazelle. It was the sports car of the skies while the Lynx was the family saloon. The Gazelle, being a two-seater, could sneak in almost anywhere, which is why the Special Forces liked it. And it had excellent performance; it could get up to 13,000 feet-quite a height for a helicopter-no problem.
Because it was small and made of ‘plastic and Araldite’ it was extremely hard to detect on radar when it was down in the weeds. It was also an extremely useful surveillance platform, because you could hang things off it-Nightsun searchlights and thermal-imaging cameras for starters-and at stand-off ranges, because of its size, it was pretty difficult to detect from the ground.
I’d been doing everything I could to tick the boxes that would get me selected for the Special Forces Flight. I’d done my Aircraft Commander’s Course, which allowed me to fly in the left-hand seat, and I’d racked up as many flying hours as I could. A couple of tours in Northern Ireland couldn’t hurt either, I figured.
The second time I got out there, in December 1996, I’d found the place in a mess.
Someone who’s new in-theatre, who doesn’t know the callsigns or the flying regulations, is usually put through a routine known as ‘supervised duties’ until he or she is proficient with the set-up. Although I didn’t need to sign up to supervised duties because I’d previously been in-theatre, I did so nonetheless, because the place we were flying out of, Bessbrook Mill, was extremely tight-it was the busiest base in the province-and had very strict flying procedures. I wanted to be sure I knew the ropes. I reckoned a stint of supervised duties couldn’t hurt.
I flew out on my first sortie with a qualified commander. Tully sat in the left-hand seat; I sat in the right. We were called out to Crossmaglen to assist in a ‘P-Check’: a multiple on the ground had gone into a staunchly Republican area to haul in a suspect for questioning; we were to provide top-cover for them. We’d barely arrived over the suspect’s house when the radio sparked and I heard the multiple commander’s voice.
‘One Zero Alpha, leaving Crossmaglen now.’
I glanced at Tully. No reaction. I picked up the ‘patrol trace’-the map that indicated the route the multiple would take. There was nothing marked, no tasking; merely a callsign, the one we’d just heard. When I looked at the image on the TV screen in front of Tully’s knees, I realised that he wasn’t scouting ahead or to the sides of the multiple for possible threats; he’d got the camera trained on the multiple itself.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘I’m filming the multiple. Why?’
‘Filming their deaths more like,’ I said under my breath. I got on the radio. ‘One Zero Alpha, this is Gazelle Four. Go firm, go firm.’
I watched on the screen as fifteen men dropped to the ground.
Tully looked horrified. ‘What are you doing?’
I told him and in no uncertain terms. Now we could see where our multiple was, we were at least able to identify who the good guys were.
As I circled above them, I asked One Zero Alpha to point out his VPs for me. He immediately said they were approaching Sniper Alley, a known hot-spot. I spent several good, long moments studying the street for things that shouldn’t have been there: bins, skips, tipper trucks, command wires and suspicious-looking vehicles. I saw nothing that raised my hackles and signalled as much. Afterwards, he thanked me for what I’d done, saying it had been an ‘awesome patrol’. In my book there was nothing awesome about it at all; it was supposed to be routine.
The problem was confirmed, when, over the next week or so, I flew with several other pilots who were every bit as lax as Tully had been in the way they covered multiples on the ground. It wasn’t their fault; they didn’t know any better. Realising I wasn’t going to make myself popular by sticking my nose in, I decided to speak to the RQHI-the regiment’s qualified helicopter instructor, the guy who defined the way we flew. James told me he was aware of the problem and said it was a knowledge-based deficiency; it’s why we had supervised duties. I told him the best, perhaps the only, thing to do was to write a document that standardised air-ground-air procedure. James told me to ‘crack on’.
So I wrote it all down: how a multiple functioned and what it might be called upon to do (P-checks, vehicle checkpoints, ambushes, searches, whatever). I then calibrated the threat it faced in any given situation and put the two together. The final ingredient was what we could supply in our Gazelles-how we could detect and alert them to IRA command wires, dustbin bombs, snipers, ambushes and so on. I then combined the ground and air pictures and came up with a set of procedures-kind of a ‘how to provide mul
tiple support by numbers’ that anybody arriving in-theatre for the first time could pick up, read and follow.
When I’d finished, I ran it past some infanteer mates. They had no idea how much support our helicopters were able to provide them with.
Heartened by their reaction, I took my draft document to the squadron’s 2i/c.
‘Very good,’ he said, flicking through it as I stood in front of his desk. ‘But if you’ll allow me to say so, Sergeant Macy, it needs a bit of a polish-i’s dotted and t’s crossed, that kind of thing. You don’t mind, do you, if I…?’
‘Be my guest,’ I said. I’d written it as a functional document, not a piece of Pulitzer Prize-winning literature. If someone wanted to tart it up for the brass, I was delighted.
A few weeks later, when I was due to go back to the UK, I’d asked the 2i/c if he’d finished tarting it up; he told me he still needed to do some work on it. He’d let me know when it was done.
That was the last I thought about it until we were practising multiple support procedures over Yorkshire a few months later and my co-pilot mentioned that there was an excellent document on the subject he’d read while deployed in Northern Ireland. ‘It covers all this stuff, Ed. I’ll give you a copy.’
As I flicked through it, I was delighted to see that 95 per cent of what I’d written had been left alone-it really had just had its i’s dotted and t’s crossed. Then I saw the 2i/c’s name and signature at the bottom.
I gave a rueful smile. The important thing was that it was out there.
It would have a particular resonance almost ten years later in the dusty wastes of Afghanistan.
Then the UK MoD went and ordered the Apache.
It had won out against its rivals in a massive procurement deal-for a cool £4.13 billion, the Army Air Corps would acquire sixty-seven AgustaWestland-built machines, simulators and equipment to operate them. They’d look the same as their American counterparts, but would be very different on the inside. Instead of the standard General Electric turboshaft engines of the Boeing-built originals, the WAH-64D, as the British variant was known, would be equipped with RTM322s-built by Rolls-Royce-with almost 40 per cent more power. The Apache that Chopper Palmer had organised for me to sit in at the International Air Tattoo, which was impressive enough, had been revamped as a total thoroughbred.