Apache (15 page)

All three types of SAMs were believed to be kicking around Afghanistan. The principal threat came from Man Portable Air Defence Systems – SAMs fired from shoulder launchers that a couple of blokes could carry around on foot. There was no shortage of them. At Dishforth, we had been briefed to expect Russian SA7s and SA14s, Chinese HN15s – and the US Stingers and British Blowpipes that the CIA and MI6 had flooded into the country during the Soviet occupation.

The good news was that although we knew the Taliban had ManPADs, we didn’t believe they had many of them left that actually worked. Their biggest problem – our greatest advantage – was that their battery system decayed. This was especially the case with Stingers, and the Taliban had no means of replacing them. Even the world’s most unscrupulous arms dealers thought twice about dealing with Islamic extremists because of the heat it brought down on them.

‘Working SAMs are a highly prized commodity to the Taliban,’ an Int Corps briefer told us. ‘We reckon that the few they retain will be used only as a last ditch defence for very senior people; they’ll only be fired if a Taliban or al Qaeda leader’s life is under imminent threat.’

No SAMs had been fired at Coalition aircraft in Afghanistan for quite a while, so while we remained cautious, we hadn’t been taking the SAM threat too seriously. Then, four weeks into the tour, they did fire a SAM at us – in Helmand, at a Dutch F16 jet bomber, callsign Ramit.

I was in the JHF at the time, watching some gun tapes on the computer. The news came through on the MIRC. There was a Military Internet Relay Chat in every HQ across the four southern provinces – a giant TV screen / video printer pumping out one line sitreps as they came in about operations ongoing over Regional Command South; a running ticker tape on the whole war.

‘Jesus, have you seen this?’

All eight of us in the tent crowded around the MIRC.

‘KABUL: RAMIT ENGAGED BY SAM. SOUTH SANGIN. SAM DEFEATED …’

‘Bloody hell. What’s going on at Sangin? Are Special Forces lifting some big player we don’t know about?’

They weren’t. A quick call to brigade confirmed there were no arrest operations going down in the Sangin area. In fact, troops weren’t even out on the ground.

The next day, the full report came through. Lookouts in Forward Operating Base Robinson, a support base seven klicks south of the Sangin DC for the marines in the Green Zone, had heard some sporadic shooting from the west. They’d put in a call to the brigade air cell to ask if any passing aircraft might be able to take a quick peek.

The cloud base was fairly low that day. To see through it, the F16 had to drop down below it, to 3,000 feet. The shooting had stopped, so the jet tootled around for a minute or two as a show of force. A corkscrew trail of grey smoke rose from the Green Zone as the missile arced towards the F16. It passed just behind the jet, diverted by a flare, and disappeared into the clouds.

Arcing meant it was guided – a SAM. Corkscrew and grey smoke meant SA7b – a tail chaser that locked onto engine heat. It wasn’t just a pot shot. It took a fair few minutes to set up an SA7. It bore
all the hallmarks of a deliberate trap. Ramit had been lucky.

The incident shook the air community. It told us two things. One, the Taliban had SAMs that worked; and two, they were now very happy to attack opportunity targets. We didn’t enjoy hearing either. It was a major break from their previous operating pattern.

Ramit’s SAM escape threw a different perspective on an intelligence hit we’d picked up recently. Some days before the launch, a radio intercept heard a Taliban commander saying, ‘Fetch the rakes and spades to hit the helicopters.’ Initially, the Int cell had assessed rakes and spades meant Chinese rockets and a launcher. Now, we had to assume they meant SAMs.

Alice then delivered a series of different snippets of bad news about SAMs over the next week’s morning and evening briefs.

‘We believe they’re planning to move a Stinger to Sangin or Kajaki.’

‘What do you mean,’ the Boss asked. ‘Where did this information come from?’

‘I can’t tell you sir, sorry.’

That normally meant HumInt; human intelligence – aka: a spy. I and every other pilot in the room mentally crossed our fingers not to get the next IRT call-out to Sangin or Kajaki.

We were told that a specific Taliban commander in the north of the province, had boasted that he could listen in on all our movements. ‘I have a British radio frequency and I know everywhere they go.’

It was certainly possible. Perhaps he’d taken it from the dead SBS pair in June. He couldn’t hear Apaches on it as our radios were secure and codes regularly changed. But the ones in the Chinooks weren’t.

Alice also told us that some bright desk officer had discovered
that there were no less than five Stingers in the valley between Sangin and Kajaki.

But a second Taliban radio intercept in Now Zad a couple of days afterwards picked up the most worrying SAM intelligence of all. A commander was overheard saying, ‘When the helicopters arrive, if the professional man brings his thing, fire from a distance.’

A ‘professional man’ and a ‘thing’ weren’t SAM-specific, but ‘fire from a distance’ certainly was. It was good advice, too. It identified the ‘thing’ as a heat-seeking SAM. The longer the missile had in the air, the better its chance of homing in on the aircraft’s engines: as the gap closed, the heat source became clearer to the missile’s seeker. Translation: they were anticipating the arrival of some bloke who knew what he was doing, and then they were going to fire another heat-seeking SAM specifically at one of us.

A huge amount of SAM activity and intelligence had come in over a short period. How much of it was true and how much bluff we had no idea. That was always the problem with the intelligence game; it was a world of smoke and mirrors. All we knew was that the bastards were up to something. The ante had been upped, big time.

The feeling of foreboding with which I’d started the tour had lessened after a few successful enemy contacts. Now it was right back again. I was in no hurry to become the first British Apache pilot to get shot down by a SAM.

I decided to have a quiet chat with Carl the next time I got the chance. He wasn’t just our Electronic Warfare Officer – he was one of the most clued up guys in the Army Air Corps. Only a few people in Britain would have known more about Electronic Warfare with regard to the Apache’s Helicopter Integrated Defensive
Aid System than Carl. The EW manual was his Book at Bedtime, for Christ’s sake. I thought I could do with a few of his reassuring stats.

‘Sure Ed, where do you want to start? HIDAS is a beautiful thing …’

‘Just keep it simple and pretty, please buddy.’

Most of it I already knew, but it was good to hear it again. There was no escape from a SAM in Afghanistan. You couldn’t go and hide behind a tree or a rock, and if you climbed it was worse. Instead, HIDAS took the SAM on. The Apache’s Helicopter Integrated Defensive Aid System had been painstakingly constructed to defeat all known SAMs. What’s more, it did it automatically.

HIDAS detected every missile threat – any laser beam that tried to track the aircraft, any radar attempting a lock onto it, and any missile that was fired at us – from a huge distance, with a web of sensors that picked up a specific UV plume generated by the missile’s propulsion. Then Bitching Betty, the Apache’s female cockpit warning system, passed on the message. The moment the aircraft came under threat – from air or ground – she gave us the good news, telling us what it was and where it was coming from.

When a missile was fired against you, HIDAS would automatically launch the necessary countermeasure. For a radar-tracking SAM, the Apache threw out clouds of chaff that appeared as large-sized aircraft to confuse the radar. If it was a heat-seeker, it would spray out a shower of flares – hotter than our engines – to divert it. If the missile was being manually laser-guided, Betty would issue a series of rapid (and highly classified) instructions for violent manoeuvre: ‘Break right’, ‘Break left’, ‘Climb’ and ‘Descend’. When we were out of danger, she would say, ‘Lock broken.’ It was
the closest she got to a compliment. What a woman.

HIDAS had never really been tested on operations. The boffins had done everything they could in the labs and on the ranges. But until you sent up a couple of guys and fired a ManPAD at them, you wouldn’t know for sure how well it could cope.

‘So what do we do in the meantime?’ I asked.

‘Just trust in the aircraft.’

Just when I’d started to feel a little better …

SAMs weren’t the only threats we faced. HIDAS could do nothing to defeat conventional ‘line of sight’ weapons. We were just as vulnerable to old-fashioned bullets as anyone else. Rifle and RPG fire wasn’t necessarily a big concern for us. An AK47 had an effective range of 800 metres. RPGs were timed to explode at 900 metres or on impact, though they could be doctored to achieve twice the distance. We generally stood 2,000 metres off enemy targets because the power of our weapons and sensors allowed us to.

Higher calibre anti-aircraft guns were a different matter. The Taliban had a lot of them, mostly ex-Soviet stuff. Anti-aircraft guns were single-, double-or quadruple-barrelled and put down a phenomenal rate of fire. Afghans used them as ground weapons, firing them horizontally at each other.

We liked the 14.5-mm Soviet ZPU the least. Each barrel could crack out 600 rounds of ammunition per minute, lethal up to 5,000 feet in the air. Luckily they were prized pieces of equipment, and not in limitless supply.

DShK’s, or Dushkas as they were nicknamed, were more common than ZPU’s. Firing a slightly smaller round, a 12.7-mm, they had a range of 4,000 feet. Every tribal chief normally had access to a Dushka for his tribe’s protection – they were that common. And they caused us a lot of grief. Only good flying – and a sizeable
helping of luck – had stopped a British helicopter from being shot out of the Helmand skies thus far.

It was rare for a full day to go by without at least one helicopter getting some incoming. It had been like that ever since we’d arrived in Helmand; the statistics defied belief.

By the time of their departure in September, the Joint Helicopter Force had counted more than fifty close calls from enemy ground fire on Apaches, Chinooks and Lynxes. 16 Air Assault Brigade saw a lot more than we did: rounds had passed through or bounced off all three machines. A Dushka bullet went straight through the tail boom of Darwin’s Apache on his very first combat engagement in May – he hadn’t known until he landed. Another large calibre round had hit a second Apache’s rotor head, bouncing straight off it. If the rotor head had broken, the aircraft would have fallen out of the sky.

During the first month of fighting in June, a Chinook’s fuselage had been riddled with bullets while coming into land to insert Paras north of Sangin, and one of its passengers seriously wounded. And a young female Chinook pilot – on her very first combat sortie – had a bullet enter through her side door and pass through her seat, inches behind her chest.

Nobody had yet been killed by ground fire. That had amazed us on our return. And as the year drew to a close, it was a living miracle that it was still the case.

From the generals in Whitehall who read the damage reports all the way down to the young pilots who just got on with their daily flights, everyone was in full agreement: it was no longer a case of
if
a helicopter got shot down in Helmand, but
when
. And now that the Taliban seemed to have got their hands on a shed-load of working SAMs that moment seemed an awful lot closer.

But something was being done to address the Taliban’s ever more proficient supply of men and arms. The brigade had a plan. And it was one hell of a good one.

Smashing the Taliban’s supply chain to smithereens was 3 Commando Brigade’s first objective with Operation Glacier. Five days into December, we had a ringside seat at the second.

Things in Garmsir had gone from bad to worse. The Taliban still believed they could dislodge the Brits, as they had done before. And they were giving it their all. The fighting had deteriorated at times to hand to hand combat; it was like something out of the Zulu War.

The marines’ every movement in or out of the DC compound drew withering sniper fire. The Taliban also launched daily attacks on the commandos’ lookout post on a neighbouring hill to the south.

The compound was at the edge of the town. Its western flank was protected by the north–south running Helmand River and the Green Zone narrowed to a funnel point to the north, so the Taliban hit it from the east – from the cover of Garmsir’s five-or six-street grid – and, even more vigorously, from the farmland to the south. The fields and orchards offered the enemy excellent natural cover. With its regular treelines and deep irrigation ditches, they could
move with impunity to within 100 metres of the British compound, then open up with AK47s and RPGs, supported by WOMBATs and mortars.

Barricaded inside the DC and on the top of JTAC Hill (as they’d christened it), the marines replied with air strikes, heavy machine guns and 105-mm artillery called in from a gun line set up for them in the desert. Every enemy shooting position in the few square kilometres around them had been pummelled five times over.

Garmsir used to boast a busy high street and bustling bazaar, but all the locals had moved out to escape the Taliban regime. After the schools were closed and rebellious farmers beheaded, its shabby streets were deserted. Skeletal buildings lay derelict amongst the debris. Whenever the shooting lapsed, an eerie silence fell. ‘Even the birds have left,’ its defenders said.

Every so often, when Colonel Magowan’s southern battlegroup could cobble together the resources, the marines would push the Taliban back from their ramparts. And that’s where we came in. HQ Flight was rostered on Deliberate Taskings, so the job of giving close air support to one such counter-attack fell to us. It was the best kind of mission; going in dirty, shoulder to shoulder with the troops, was what made flying an Apache such a joy.

The objective of the attack was to clear a square kilometre of farmland to the DC’s immediate south, up to a long east–west treeline. The marines couldn’t hold the ground; they didn’t have the spare men. But in the process they’d learn about the enemy’s routes of approach, kill those who were well entrenched, destroy their fortified positions, and perhaps buy the garrison a few days’ breathing space.

Two Royal Marine companies were moved in covertly overnight, and the objective area was heavily bombed and shelled. At 10am,
the two companies stretched along the main road and advanced slowly south. An RAF Harrier was on station to give them initial air cover. We were tasked to arrive forty-five minutes later.

Trigger hogged the front seat of our Apache again. I didn’t put up a fuss. He was enjoying himself so much I didn’t want to take the smile off his face. We checked in with their JTAC, Widow Eight Three, and he told us it was going well. The enemy were not standing and fighting. Caught out by the size of the marine contingent and with no time to reinforce, they were falling back, offering only sporadic ‘shoot and scoot’ fire as they did so. The JTAC gave us the positions of all the friendly forces.

‘Ugly callsigns, we believe Taliban might be infiltrating a large compound 300 metres to the south of our limit of exploitation. I would like you to fix them there and destroy them.’

I took us three klicks straight south on the western side of the river, and banked hard left to hook us in behind the target.

‘Okay, I’ve got five Taliban entering the compound now.’

The Boss started to get excited again. ‘Looks like they’re trying to get into cover before the marines reach the treeline and catch them in the open.’

‘Weapons?’

The Boss zoomed in his TADS.

‘Yes. The last bloke’s got an RPG. And they’re running.’

I looked down at the MPD by my right knee. All five were now running diagonally through an orchard within the compound’s outer wall. They must have heard our rotor blades; we were only 1,500 metres off. Sunlight glinted off the working parts of their AK47s.

‘Affirm boss. They’re enemy all right. Get ’em.’

‘Five One, firing with thirty Mike Mike.’

Trigger put three bursts of twenty rounds into the group. The RPG man and the guy in front of him were torn apart by the shrapnel, but the three leaders made it into a reinforced adobe hut in the south-east corner. The Boss put another two bursts onto the front wall, gouging great chunks off it, but these things were built to last and we weren’t sure how much was getting through.

Billy had come round from the north. ‘Five Zero, I saw men running in the direction of that hut before you engaged the orchard. I reckon there could be quite a few of them in there.’

‘Copied, thanks. Let’s get a bomb on it.’

Topman, the Harrier pilot, said it would be a few minutes before he could set up a run, so the Boss delivered a Hellfire through its letterbox whilst Billy pinned the Taliban inside it with harassing cannon fire. The missile collapsed half the roof, and we got the Harrier to stick a 500-lb GBU in there for good measure. By the time we’d finished, there wasn’t anything left of it.

The marines had reached the treeline, clearing all enemy from the target area. Widow Eight Three told us to look into a few more isolated compounds south of them for any enemy movement. There was none. True to form, the Taliban had gone to ground in a plethora of well-prepared hiding places.

‘Ugly callsigns, come north-east of the treeline and hold there. We’re going to drop all the compounds with 105-mm.’

Salvo after salvo of artillery rounds would dislodge the Taliban from their hideouts. They’d break for better cover and the fast air and Apaches could bomb the merry hell out of them; good old-fashioned scorched earth tactics – as effective for the marines today as they were for the Carthaginians 2,200 years earlier.

There wasn’t a civilian within ten miles of the place; we could see that ourselves from the unkempt state of the fields – so the marines
were keen to make the most of the firepower they had that day, and give the Taliban a licking they wouldn’t forget. I checked our fuel level. Ten minutes left on station.

‘Boss, we’re not that far off chicken. Might be a good time to RTB for a suck of gas, and to bomb up the aircraft again …’ Going chicken meant you only had enough fuel to get back to base within the legal limit. The marines were under good cover in the irrigation ditches, and it would take an hour or two to bring in all the artillery fire missions they wanted. The Harrier was pulling off, to be replaced by a US F18 Hornet, and an A10 had just come on station too. It was a perfect time for us to break off.

Widow Eight Three agreed. ‘The commander wants all ground callsigns to go firm for a few hours while we fix as many enemy as we can. Can you come back down to cover their withdrawal?’

We agreed with the JTAC that we’d stay on thirty minutes’ notice for his call to return. We’d go back to Camp Bastion, refuel and rearm, and wait in the JHF for his shout.

The boys in Garmsir deserved to get the chance to give the Taliban what for. Until today they’d been in a living hell, just like the Paras had in Sangin during the summer. Siege warfare: their sole aim was survivability; pounded, probed, shot and wounded day in, day out, night in and night out. I smiled as I looked out of the window and saw them in the long treeline whacking the Taliban. It was a pleasure to help.

We were sitting in the loading bays midway through the 30-mm upload when an urgent voice came online from the Ops Room.

‘Ugly Five One Flight, Zero. Rearm as quickly as possible. Do not close down. You are going back down to Garmsir immediately.’

We didn’t want to clutter up the Apache net by asking why.
We’d find out when we needed to. A more detailed order followed as we taxied onto the runway.

‘Ugly Five Zero, Ugly Five One; you are to escort a CH47, callsign Doorman Two Six, on a Casevac to collect a T1 and a T3. Then remain in support of Widow Eight Three, who is receiving very effective enemy fire.’

A T1, a T3
and
they were still getting nasty incoming? Jesus. Carl didn’t want to speculate over the radio so he sent a text.

WHAT WENT WRONG … ALL CALM WHEN WE LEFT …

A casualty was given one of four initial gradings by the medics on the ground. It allowed the recovery chain to know how best to prioritise their resources in response. T1 meant the casualty’s life was in grave danger; he had to be recovered by air immediately. Get him to the operating theatre at Camp Bastion’s field hospital within an hour and his chances of survival were significantly increased. It was what we called the golden hour. T2 meant the casualty could be stabilised but was in a serious condition and needed to get to hospital before he ran the risk of becoming T1. T3 was commonly referred to as the walking wounded – every other conceivable injury that was not life-threatening within twenty-four hours and required extraction. T4 was the least time-pressing, because T4 meant he was dead. It was hard-nosed military risk management – designed to send a clear signal about whether the recovery chopper should risk jeopardising its crew, surgeons and medics to pick up our injured.

The mighty Chinook’s blades began to turn.

We still couldn’t make sense of it. When we’d left, the Taliban were in disarray and it was a turkey shoot for the marines. How could the tables have turned so quickly?

MUST HAVE BEEN A LUCKY MORTAR BOMB … BOSS

OR VERY UNLUCKY … BILLY

There was no other way the Taliban could have got through the marines’ arcs of fire.

We escorted Doorman down. The Chinook tanked it, low level at top speed, the quickest line from A to B. It landed in the cover of a berm north-west of the Garmsir bridge as we scoured the approaches. The two casualties were loaded on board and Doorman lifted again less than thirty seconds later. We checked in with Widow Eight Three.

‘Ugly, Widow, we are being engaged heavily from the east–west treeline, the original limit of our exploitation.’ The treeline? Wasn’t that where the marines were?

‘Copied. Send friendly forces’ positions.’

‘Friendly forces are falling back from the treeline towards the main road now.’ He gave us their grids.

‘Also, confirm you can see an oval-shaped series of compounds on the western side of the farmland, halfway between the treeline and the main road.’

‘Affirm, I see friendlies.’

‘That is the location of the tactical headquarters. That’s where we were hit and took the casualties.’

The casualties in the tactical HQ seemed to have brought a swift end to the scorched earth artillery plan. If the marines now thought the Taliban had accurate grids to mortar them, they needed to move out of there fast. As they exfiltrated, the initiative inevitably swung back to the enemy.

The Boss and Billy swept the treeline with their TADSs, pouring long bursts of cannon at any glimpse of Taliban. They could see very little; these people were good. They used the trees and bushes over the irrigation ditches to follow-up unseen. The marines
reported one new firing position after another as they withdrew; the Taliban had infiltrated the whole of the kilometre-long treeline and were harassing them all the way back to the main road.

It called for some scorched earth tactics of our own. As soon as we were satisfied all the marines had pulled back far enough, we put pair after pair of Flechette rockets into the trees. The two Apaches took it in turns to run in, again and again, following up each time with cannon. We saw the Flechette darts strip through the higher branches, but the undergrowth was so thick we couldn’t see where they landed. It was impossible to confirm any kills.

After half an hour of our bombardment, Widow Eight Three reported the two companies of marines had reached the relative safety of the main road without any further casualties. Our suppression seemed to have worked, and we were released to return to base.

They would like to have stayed out for longer, but the marines had achieved all they could in the circumstances. The attack hadn’t been a failure by its own standards – despite the complete lack of territorial gain. It had been bitter and bloody stuff, with every metre of ground passionately contested then handed right back to the enemy. But this was business as usual in the hell that was Garmsir.

It is extremely hard to measure success when we take casualties. Their aim was to clear the ground to the treeline and flatten the firing points that the Taliban used beyond it. This was achieved but at a high cost. This was technological warfare on a par with World War One: Tommy over the top after the guns and Tommy falling back to his original trench. It did allow Magowan to test the resolve of the Taliban and they were most certainly up for the fight. They were strong, well armed, well trained and ferocious. It was a costly
but vital mission to know where the Taliban routes were, and where their firing points in the treeline were. It would now give the marines some breathing space in the DC whilst Magowan concentrated on the big plan.