Fire Strike 7/9

by Paul 'Bommer' Grahame

  ‘Widow TOC, Widow Seven Nine. Sitrep: troops in contact, request immediate CAS.’

  ‘Widow Seven Nine, Widow TOC. Wait out.’

  It was still thirty minutes away from my first ASR (Air Special Request) that I had booked for the mission. Widow TOC had to be checking what platforms they had available and in the air.

  ‘Move out,’ said Chris. ‘We need to get to the demarcation line asap, to get eyes on the contact. Fuck the mines, if there are any!’

  Throp wrung the Vector’s neck, and we bounced and cannoned our way into the open desert. En route we got a sitrep from the OC. The enemy must have clocked the 2 MERCIAN lads as they moved in towards Rahim Kalay. By the time our platoons had reached the line of departure, they were well ready. From out of nowhere the enemy had opened up with a savage mortar barrage. In the time it took our wagon to hare its way across the desert, they’d got the fifth round in the air and zeroed in on our positions in the Green Zone. It was mayhem.

  The lads were shit scared of those mortars. At the same time they were being hit by automatic weapons and sniper fire, and RPG rounds. The OC made it clear that he wanted us up on the high ground, so we could start smashing the enemy from the air.

  Two minutes after setting out from PB North we pulled up on the ridge line. Luckily, Throp hadn’t driven over any mines – or not ones that had exploded, any road. I stuck myself out of the Vector’s turret to get eyes on the battlefield. As I did so, the first thing I noticed was the howl of an incoming mortar. Throp hadn’t even managed to find a parking space when the round smacked into the desert a hundred metres beyond us. It wasn’t bad for a first shot. From the howling of the mortar rounds there had to be more than one tube in action. And with the firefight raging right below us the battle noise was deafening.

  ‘Widow TOC, Widow Seven Nine, where’s my air?’ I yelled into the TACSAT.

  ‘Widow Seven Nine, Widow TOC. Dude One Five and Dude One Six in your overhead in eight minutes.’

  I had a pair of F-15s inbound. The F-15 can achieve two and a half times the speed of sound at altitude. That was how I was getting the jets overhead only ten minutes after they’d been scrambled.

  I put a call through to the jets. ‘Dude One Five, Widow Seven Nine, do you copy?’

  ‘Widow Seven Nine, this is Dude One Five, I have you loud and clear. Inbound your position seven, repeat seven minutes. Standard loads and ninety minutes’ playtime.’

  ‘Standard loads’ meant a regular ordnance package for an F-15, and I had them overhead for ninety minutes. That should be more than enough bombs and time to knock seven bales of shit out of the enemy. Now we just had to find them.

  ‘Sitrep: I have three platoons in the Green Zone at grid …’

  BOOM! The last words were lost in the roar of an explosion as a mortar ploughed into the dirt not twenty metres short of us. Time to get moving. As Throp reversed like a lunatic across the barren terrain, Sticky was holding on to me to stop me flying out of the Vector’s turret. I tried to continue briefing the F-15s.

  ‘Repeat – friendly grids are 98057238 …’

  ‘Break! Break!’ came a voice on the net. ‘Widow Seven Nine, Nine One Charlie. I have a grid for you of that mortar that just fired: 3748567389. Repeat: 3748567389. It’s firing from the south side of the Helmand River.’

  ‘Roger, enemy mortar grid is: 3748567389,’ I repeated to Mikey.

  Mikey Wallace and his mortar-tracking gizmo had come up trumps. It wasn’t a moment too soon. The enemy mortars were bracketing Butsy and his HQ element. The OC and his lads were having to sprint for a new patch of cover every third round that slammed into the dirt, or else they were going to get splatted. Mortars were smashing into the bush twenty metres from them, and Butsy was complaining that trying to command whilst eating dirt wasn’t very easy. There was nothing those poor bastards down in the GZ could do about the enemy mortar teams, for they were well out of their range. Only we could hit them.

  He came up on the net, yelling above the deafening crack and thump of battle: ‘Bommer – you need to sort those mortars! Like now!’

  ‘Roger. Dude One Five, Widow Seven Nine, I want you to search for a hot mortar tube at grid: 3748567389. Readback.’

  The pilot confirmed the tasking and the grid. No sooner had he done so than there was a faint boom in the distance, and another mortar came howling down. This one slammed into the Green Zone just metres from our troops.

  There was another boom, and a second shell tore into the thick bush around our lads. A third went up, this one tearing into the rock and sand where the Vector had just been sitting.

  ‘Widow Seven Nine, Charlie One Zero,’ came Mikey’s voice on my TACSAT. ‘I have two more grids for you. Repeat, two more enemy mortar grids.’

  Mikey passed me the coordinates. We now had three enemy mortar teams in action. One was targeting us lot, whilst the other two were dropping rounds on top of the lads below. It was complete carnage, and the platoons hadn’t even crossed their line of departure.

  With two fast jets to control, Mikey muscling in on the net, three enemy grids to plot plus our friendlies, I had my hands full. I left Sticky and Chris to liaise with the OC, whilst I concentrated on finding and smashing the enemy. The OC had told us to crack on and get the bloody job done, and we knew he had every confidence in our abilities.

  I decided to split the aircraft. ‘Dude One Five, I want you searching for enemy forces around our forward line of troops. Dude One Six, I want you overhead those three mortar grids, to find ’em and smash ’em.’

  ‘Dude One Five, affirmative.’

  ‘Dude One Six, roger that, sir.’

  A tense few seconds followed as the F-15s began their searches, their sniper optics scanning the terrain below. Dude One Six was the first to come back to me.

  ‘I got a PID on three males around a straight heat source, three metres from the last ten-figure grid you gave me. It’s 2.7 kilometres from your nearest friendlies.’

  ‘Roger. Wait out.’

  Before I’d said a word Chris was clearing it with the OC. ‘OC says he’s pinned down as are all platoons,’ Chris yelled over to me. ‘They need fucking space to move out from under those mortars …’

  BOOOOOM! Another mortar round slammed into the dirt fifteen metres from the wagon. It rocked the Vector like a ship caught in a hurricane, shrapnel and rocks pounding into the wagon’s steel sides. No doubt about it, the enemy mortar operators were bloody good. They were close and getting closer.

  ‘Dude One Six, Widow Seven Nine,’ I yelled, above the echoing noise of the explosion. ‘Attack from whatever line is fastest, your choice ordnance!’

  ‘Roger. I’m banking up now to do a vertical dive on to target.’ A pause. ‘Tipping in and requesting clearance.’

  ‘You got clearance,’ I yelled. ‘Clear hot! Proceed with the attack!’

  Bugger the procedures – we and the lads were getting smashed. Plus I needed my frequency clear to talk to Dude One Six’s wing.

  ‘Dude One Five, Widow Seven Nine – I need a sitrep.’

  ‘Sitrep: visual four armed pax with RPGs and small arms three hundred metres from the lead element of your troops. Visual …’

  The pilot’s last words were lost in an enormous crack, as whatever ordnance it was that Dude One Six had dropped slammed into the earth on the opposite side of the river. Get in! Hopefully, that was one less bastard mortar team to deal with.

  ‘Dude One Six, BDA,’ I asked, as a mushroom cloud of smoke billowed above the impact point.

  ‘BDA: two pax killed, mortar tube is fucked. But one pax fled, ten metres from bomb impact point and got away.’

  I was about to retask the pilot to join his wing searching for enemy fighters in around our platoons. But instead he had this for me.

  ‘I’m watching four armed males run away from that first mortar grid you gave me. I’m visual with them going into a tiny mud hut, two metres by two metres, more like a garden shed.’

  ‘
Confirm the four pax are armed, and no civvies are in the target vicinity,’ I asked.

  ‘Affirmative. I have PID’d them with weapons, and I am happy under rules of engagement to proceed to attack.’

  ‘Roger,’ I confirmed. ‘Wait out.’

  ‘Chris!’ I yelled. ‘Get the OC. Do we hit ’em or what?’

  Chris got clearance from the OC, and I passed it up to the pilot. ‘Confirm enemy pax are still at the target.’

  ‘Affirmative. There are no other doors to the building, and I’ve been watching it like a hawk. Sir, no one’s come in or out of there.’

  ‘Right, I want a GBU-12 dropped on target using a south-to-north attacking run.’

  ‘Affirmative. Tipping in. Call for clearance.’

  ‘Dude One Six, you’re clear hot.’

  ‘In hot,’ came the pilot’s reply. Then, ‘Stores.’

  There was a thirty-second delay as the arrow-shaped munition streaked through the air. I hoped and prayed that the enemy mortar team didn’t decide to leave their garden shed. There was a stupendous crack as the eight-hundred-pound bomb hit, throwing up a dense cloud of dust and smoke on the horizon to the east of us.

  ‘Dude One Six, BDA,’ I requested.

  ‘ BDA: mud hut and occupants obliterated. They’re all dead, sir.’

  I figured, that was two mortar teams taken out, plus one mortar tube. There was one team left to hunt for, but it looked as if they’d been warned that I was smashing their buddies from the air. The blokes were still in contact, but no more mortars were going up now. Plus we’d just received some intercepts suggesting the enemy knew exactly what the lads and I were up to.

  ‘Look for the man with the stubby black antenna,’ a Taliban commander kept yelling over his radio. ‘He controls the aeroplanes. Target him, and the tank on the high ground. The tank speaks to the jets that are hitting our brothers.’

  There was nothing we could do about it. I got the F-15s flying low-level shows of force over our forward positions, as they probed for the enemy. Dude One Five came back on the air to me.

  ‘Widow Seven Nine, I’m visual with four male pax at the second, ten-figure grid you gave us. They’re gathered around a tube that I’m sure is a mortar.’

  Result! We’d found the third mortar team. Chris radioed the OC, and the message came back to attack.

  I felt a burst of adrenaline. ‘Dude One Five, Widow Seven Nine. I’m clearing you in. Ordnance and attack line of your choosing.’

  ‘Affirmative. Tipping in.’

  I watched the dart-shaped form of the F-15 banking around in a fast but graceful turn, its twin vertical tail fins slicing through the sky, the gaping intakes to either side of the fuselage sucking in the air.

  ‘Widow Seven Nine, Dude One Five,’ came the American pilot’s voice. ‘Sir, we got a problem. I’m visual four kids in the vicinity of the mortar tube. And sir, one of the mortar team is holding a kid right beside the tube.’

  Shit! The pilot was tipping in and I had seconds to make the call. What the fuck did I do? If I cleared the bomb, I was as good as murdering four innocent children. If I aborted, the mortar team would send up more rounds to smash our lads.

  ‘Dude One Five, Widow Seven Nine, wait out.’

  I yelled down the hatch into the Vector’s interior, ‘Chris, the fucking pilot’s got four kids at the mortar tube! I can’t fucking do it! That bastard will play tricks with my head for the rest of my life …’

  I didn’t bother completing the sentence. ‘Dude One Five, Widow Seven Nine. What d’you reckon?’ I asked the pilot.

  ‘Widow Seven Nine, it’s you who buys the bomb,’ the pilot replied.

  ‘Then I can’t fucking do it. I got two kids at home. I can’t do it. Abort! Abort!’

  ‘Affirmative: aborting the attack. And many thanks for that call, Widow Seven Nine. I wouldn’t have done the run for you anyway. I got kids back home.’

  Barely moments after I had aborted that airstrike, the call came up on the net that every soldier dreads.

  ‘Man down! Man down! MAAAN DOWWNN!’

  The instant we had that ‘man down’ call it all went horribly quiet on the net.

  It was the first ‘man down’ call we’d had of the deployment, and no one could quite believe it. For several seconds the entire company seemed to hold its breath, and the jets I was controlling went completely out of my mind.

  A voice broke into the silence. ‘Charlie Charlie One, roger, go firm.’ It was the OC. As always, he was right in the thick of it. ‘All stations: win the firefight. Orders two minutes.’

  The OC’s words unleashed all my pent-up emotion. I felt the red mist of animal aggression rising. There were enemy fighters out there using kids as human shields, whilst our lads were getting smashed. But I had to hold my anger in check, or I’d lose the ability to do my job properly. All I knew at this stage was that we had a badly injured lad somewhere down in the Green Zone. And right now, we had to get him the hell out of there.

  TEN

  MAN DOWN

  ‘Widow TOC, Widow Seven Nine,’ I yelled into my TACSAT. ‘We’ve got a man down! Repeat: man down! We need immediate IRT.’

  IRT was the Incident Response Team, a Chinook with medics and an Apache escort on permanent standby at Camp Bastion. They sat on the flight line 24/7 waiting for emergencies like this one. It was the JTAC’s role to get the IRT in the air.

  ‘Roger that. What’s the severity of the injured?’ the Widow controller asked me.

  ‘No position to tell you,’ I snapped back. ‘But I need IRT right now.’

  By the time the platoon commander had got me the casualty report, with the soldier’s ZAP number – his unique British Army ID – I knew this lad was in a very bad way. He was classed as a T1, the severest casualty level possible.

  Time seemed to slow to a crawl as I waited for the IRT to launch. The horrific thought crossed my mind that it might have been a mortar round that had taken our man down. If so, had my saving those four Afghan kids’ lives resulted in one of our lads getting smashed?

  Major Butt had always told us that if we had a man down, the focus of the company would immediately switch to extracting the casualty and getting the lads out of the shit. In the carnage that was going on all around us the net went berserk. Win the firefight. Those had been the OC’s words. Everyone knew that we’d lost someone, and the fire from our side was targeted now with a burning anger. The lads were using accurate shots to put the enemy down.

  ‘Charlie Charlie One, all stations,’ Butsy’s voice came on the net again. ‘Orders: 6 Platoon, extract with casualty. 5 Platoon, move to river to give covering fire. 4 Platoon, secure river crossing. Sergeant major to recce route back to LZ. Somme Platoon to provide rear security and secure LZ. FST no change.’

  It was a kick-arse set of orders. Under heavy fire the 2 MERCIAN lads had pushed across the river that lay to the north of the Green Zone. To extract the casualty they’d have to cross back over, and Butsy’s focus was on securing that river crossing. The Landing Zone (LZ) for the Chinook was set in the open desert halfway to PB North, and the lads from Somme Company would secure it.

  The Czech unit were to stay on the high ground, hitting the enemy’s northern flank. They were driving Toyota jeeps, complete with DShKs – pronounced ‘Dushkas’ – a monster piece of kit. The Dushka is a Soviet-era 12.7mm anti-aircraft gun. It can fire only in automatic mode, putting down six hundred rounds a minute. Those rounds can chew their way through walls and trees, and hopefully they were doing just that to the enemy positions right now.

  It was my job to get the Chinook into that LZ, plus I still had my jets to control. At the same time I had at least one active mortar team, and I couldn’t bring the helicopter in with that still firing. One mortar down on the Chinook, and we would be in a world of pain. There was a squelch of static, and I grabbed the TACSAT.

  ‘Widow Seven Nine, Widow TOC. Ugly Five Three is bringing in the heavy call sign. Expect IRT to be with you in two-f
ive, repeated two-five minutes.’

  ‘Roger that,’ I replied. The casevac Chinook was twenty-five minutes away.

  I put a call through to the F-15s. ‘Dude One Six, Widow Seven Nine. Sitrep: we have a man down and platoons are extracting. I want you to fly repeated shows of force over the enemy positions. If you spot any enemy fighters, you’re to smash ’em.’

  ‘Affirmative,’ came the US pilot’s reply. ‘Commencing shows of force now.’

  ‘Dude One Five, Widow Seven Nine. I want you overhead that mortar grid, looking mean and nasty. If there’s a moment when those fuckers aren’t holding kids around the tube, I want you to smash ’em.’

  ‘Affirmative. They won’t be gettin’ any second chances, Widow Seven Nine.’

  It took an agonising sixty minutes for 6 Platoon to fight its way to the borders of the Green Zone. At times the lads were crawling along ditches carrying the casualty, under intense sniper fire. At others they were chest-deep in the river, passing the wounded man from shoulder to shoulder as machine-gun rounds whipped and snarled overhead. In the process, two more lads were wounded.

  For the last thirty minutes I’d been arguing fiercely with the Chinook pilots to remain on station orbiting over the desert. They were running low on fuel and getting anxious, but we were desperate to get our wounded men out.

  ‘We’re nearly there!’ I kept telling the pilots. ‘We’re nearly there!’

  Finally, with the Chinook sipping air, the 2 MERCIAN’s sergeant major, a real champion of a bloke called Jason ‘Peachy’ Peach, decided some drastic action was required to get the wounded blokes out. He was in a WMIK and volunteered to go in and get them. Along with Corporal Hill, his driver, and one of the medics, he set off from the high ground into the Green Zone.

  The trouble was, a sharp ravine bisected the ridge line, and it lay between their position and the wounded. The only way to skirt round it was for Peachy to drive into the Green Zone, passing in front of the entire company and heading into the enemy guns. The lads were still taking massive fire, and as soon as Peachy’s WMIK pitched up in the jungle it became the focus of the enemy attack.