Fire Strike 7/9 Read online

  The morning of the patrol I had a bit of a problem. I didn’t know about it until I broke wind, and then I had it all down my legs and in my boots. There were several cases of diarrhoea and vomiting in the base, and now I’d got a dose. I had two more bouts that morning, and eventually I had to accept that I wasn’t going anywhere.

  I perched in the back of the Vector, from where I was in sprinting distance of the shitters. I had another attack, but failed to make the bogs in time. I stripped off and crouched in the wagon in my undies and flip-flops. It wasn’t a pretty sight and I smelled rank, but I was more concerned about controlling the air, and making sure the lads on the patrol were all right.

  They left PB Sandford at 1345, and pushed down Route Crow towards Alpha Xray. Just as they neared the base there was an eruption of small arms and RPG fire. The enemy were in the sawn-off trees at Golf Bravo Nine One. I got on the air and requested immediate Close Air Support (CAS).

  As I did so, there was a massive, punching blast from the direction of Monkey One Echo. I glanced at Sticky, who’d opted to stay with his JTAC, despite the fact that I’d shit myself. He was hanging by the door of the wagon, where I guess the smell was a little less lethal. He was on his radio immediately, calling for a sitrep from MOE.

  ‘They got a man down!’ Sticky relayed to me. ‘A lad’s been hit by an RPG!’

  ‘Widow TOC, Widow Seven Nine. Sitrep: we’re under twopronged assault and we’ve got a man down. We need IRT stood up right away.’

  ‘Widow Seven Nine, Widow TOC. Roger that: stand by.’

  My mind was fucking racing. If a lad had taken a direct hit from an RPG, he was more than likely spread across several acres of desert. So we’d more than likely lost another one. I felt the rage sweeping over me. In spite of my compromised state, I felt this irresistible urge to grab my SA80 and go out and smash some enemy. Even from inside the Vector, the crack and thump of battle from both our bases was deafening.

  ‘Widow Seven Nine, Widow TOC. Recoil Four One and Recoil Four Two are inbound into your ROZ. Ugly Five Four is bringing in the IRT heavy.’

  The call from Widow control brought me back to my senses. I was hardly in a fit state to go out fighting. I got Sticky to get the casualty in to PB Sanford. We’d then do the casevac from an LZ just to the north of the base in the open desert. The Harriers came on station, and I got them flying an immediate low-level show of force, screaming over the walls of Monkey One Echo.

  The casualty was loaded into a Vector, which hurtled across the high ground to us. The RPG had impacted a metre away from the injured lad. It had ploughed into the wall before exploding, which had kept the frag down. He was in a bad way, but the medics reckoned we could save him, as long as the Chinook got him out in time.

  I got Apache Ugly Five Four inbound with the Chinook. I got the Harriers banked up high, so I could get the heavy in. We got the massive helicopter down on the LZ, the injured lad was rushed aboard, and then the Chinook was on its way again.

  Ugly Five Four stayed with me, and I got it hunting for that bastard RPG team. But it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. As soon as the Apache was overhead, it all went dead quiet. On the airwaves enemy commanders were ordering their men to: ‘Remain in ambush positions, then the helicopters won’t see you.’

  The lads came back from patrol, but once they heard that we’d had one smashed by an RPG they went wild. They wanted to get right back into the Green Zone in full battle rattle, and find the enemy. They calmed down a bit when they learned that the medics reckoned he’d make it through all right.

  I got allocated an Ugly call sign for the following morning. It was unprecedented to be given an Apache without a TIC. I soon found out why I’d got it. We had a convoy coming in on a resupply, and there was a Sky News team on it.

  The Apache was to shadow them in.

  Twenty Three

  THUNDERBOX MAYHEM

  Every time you went for a piss you had to do ten pull-ups. That was the law. I reckoned it was a bit harsh on me, ’cause I drank so much tea, but there it was. All the lads at PB Sandford had agreed to it, and woe betide anyone who shirked.

  We’d already been hit by something that morning — maybe a 107mm barrage from Qada Kalay. We’d been in the middle of a cricket-off, which the Sky crew were filming. Suddenly, there was a yell of ‘Incoming!’, and everyone went scrambling for body armour and helmets, not to mention some cover.

  Now we were at the pull-up bar. We’d cobbled together a gym from old ammo crates, steel pickets and black nasty. It did the job. The pull-up bar was a beam slung between two walls. It was getting a bit competitive, as we had the Sky cameraman filming us.

  The pull-up king in the FST was Chris. He wasn’t called Johnny Bravo for nothing. He’d just managed twenty-four. Sticky had followed with a miserly eighteen. The most I’d ever done was twenty-two, but I was determined to beat Sticky. I got on the bar and reached sixteen, when suddenly the lads started going wild.

  ‘Come on, Bommer! Come on, Bommer!’

  ‘You can do one!’

  ‘Come on, you fat fucker!’

  I did another — seventeen — and the lads were going crazy. They were doing just about anything they could think of to make me laugh. I was trying not to, but as I went for number eighteen — making me evens with Sticky — I lost it. I gave up and dropped off the bar.

  I turned around to find the Sky cameraman filming me. He’d only started shooting when I was on number sixteen, so it looked as if I’d managed just the one pull-up. I have a giant Angel tattooed across my shoulders, and it isn’t exactly a common tattoo. Anyone seeing that on the news would know instantly that it was me. The Sky cameraman was pissing himself. The lads were laughing their rocks off. I waited until they’d calmed down a bit, then tried giving the Sky bloke one of my looks. But I couldn’t help the silly grin that kept twitching at the corners of my mouth.

  ‘If you put that on Sky News, I’ll batter you and hand you over to the Taliban,’ I told him.

  We cut a deal that the footage would never be shown, as long as I pulled in some class airstrikes whilst the Sky crew were with us.

  Sadly, that morning we were losing the OC. The resupply convoy was setting off for FOB Price, taking Major Butt with it. He was devastated to be leaving his lads, and before the end of their tour, but orders were orders. He’d done his allotted stretch in command, and a new guy was taking over.

  It was hard to see Butsy go: he’d been like a father to us. He did a little speech, which was all about how he didn’t want to leave after all we had been through together. But he had to let the new OC come in and do his job. Major Butt had been fucking brilliant. He was a fantastic OC. As he spoke, a few of the lads were close to tears.

  I was gutted to see Butsy go, but I warmed to the new OC quickly. Major Stewart Hill was a tall, dark-haired rake of a guy, and he was to prove himself to be a top bloke. He was the kind of officer who wouldn’t ask his lads to do anything he wouldn’t do — a bit like Butsy, really. We couldn’t have wished for a better replacement in the new OC.

  We got orders from Major Hill to push a patrol down to Alpha Xray. The Sky team were going to try a night down at the Alamo. Much that I might want the cameraman to get captured and that tape destroyed, I reckoned I might need some air on hand. After all, we were going to have a High Value Target (HVT) — the Sky cameraman and correspondent — deep in bandit country.

  I was told that no aircraft could be spared, not unless we had a TIC. So I put a call in to Widow Eight Seven, a fellow British JTAC who was the nearest to me in the area. A new base — PB Arnhem — had been established to the south-west of us. Widow Eight Seven was the JTAC there, and most days we’d have a chat on the air about what we’d been up to. He told me that he had a pair of F-15s flying air recces for him, but that nothing much was happening. PB Arnhem was about seven kilometres away. If I needed air, I could borrow Widow Eight Seven’s F-15s.

  At 1745 the patrol set out. There were sixteen-o
dd lads, plus the Sky cameraman and the correspondent, Alex Crawford, who looked vaguely familiar from the news. They crept down Route Crow into the dusk valley. A hundred metres short of Alpha Xray, the darkened bush exploded in gunfire and the fiery trails of RPG rounds. In seconds, the patrol was pinned down and deep in the shit. They were being hit from fire points all along Golf Bravo Nine One, the enemy’s favourite point of attack. I radioed my fellow JTAC, to see if I could rustle up some air.

  ‘Widow Eight Seven, Widow Seven Nine: patrol in contact. Can I borrow one of your Dude call signs?’

  ‘’Course you can, mate,’ the JTAC replied. ‘Dude Zero Seven, Widow Seven Nine is now your controlling ground station.’

  ‘Roger that,’ came the pilot’s reply. ‘Widow Seven Nine, Dude Zero Seven: what can I do for you, sir?’

  ‘I’ve got a patrol down at Alpha Xray in heavy contact. Enemy are firing from treelines running south to north and west to east, forming a cross at Golf Bravo Nine One.’

  ‘I know your area well, sir,’ the pilot replied. ‘I was with you a couple of days back dropping danger-close to you boys.’

  It was one of the pilots from the Saving Private Graham patrol. It was good to have him with us again.

  ‘I want that enemy position strafed with 20mm, on a north to south run,’ I told him.

  ‘Roger that. Inbound two minutes. Stand by for sixty-seconds call.’

  I double-checked my coordinates on the maps. It was a couple of days since I’d controlled a jet doing a live drop on live targets. Happy that all was as it should be, I turned to the new OC who was standing at the Vector’s open door.

  ‘Sir, I’ve got an F-15 coming in to strafe the treeline to the north-east of the patrol.’

  ‘Happy with that,’ the boss confirmed.

  ‘Prepare to give the sixty-seconds call, sir.’

  I was asking him to put out the all-stations sixty-seconds warning. For an instant the OC stared at me, as if to say — How on earth have you managed that? It was barely three minutes since the start of the contact, and CAS would never normally be with you in under fifteen. There was no time to explain.

  The pilot came up on the TACSAT. ‘Sixty seconds out.’

  ‘Give an all-stations sixty-seconds warning, sir,’ I repeated. Then I cleared the pilot in. ‘Friendlies one-twenty metres west of target. You’re clear hot.’

  ‘Tipping in.’ A beat. ‘Engaging.’

  ‘Bbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrzzzt.’

  The strafe echoed across the darkened valley, as the 20mm rounds hammered the north–south woodstrip. Just as soon as the roar of the gunfire had died away, I got the pilot to bank around and do a second strafe to hit the west to east treeline.

  ‘Tipping in,’ the pilot confirmed. ‘Visual two pax with weapons in woodline.’

  ‘Hit ’em,’ I told him. ‘No change friendlies. Clear hot.’

  A second burst of cannon fire echoed across the Green Zone.

  ‘BDA: two dead,’ the pilot confirmed.

  I banked him around again, and did a third run of 20mm. Then I asked him to do a recce of the terrain at Golf Bravo Nine One.

  ‘Visual three pax with weapons and muzzle flashes in a ditch just north of Golf Bravo Nine One,’ the pilot told me.

  ‘Bank west, and hit them with a GBU-38.’

  I warned Chris and the OC that I was dropping a five-hundred-pounder, and for the patrol to get their heads down. It was a hundred and twenty metres danger-close at night, and a couple of months back I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing such a drop. But I had my favourite pilot above me, and this was the only way to fight the enemy in Helmand.

  ‘Tipping in,’ the pilot radioed.

  ‘No change friendlies. Clear hot.’

  ‘In hot.’ A beat. ‘Stores.’

  In the thirty seconds it took for the smart bomb to come snarling down on us, I had Chris and the OC yelling over the net for the lads to get on their bloody belt buckles. A hollow thump ripped apart the night as the bomb hit, the white heat of the blast throwing angry red shadows across the walls around the Vector.

  ‘BDA: three pax dead. No further movement around Golf Bravo Nine One.’

  The contact had died down to nothing. I thanked the F-15 pilot, and pushed him back across the river to Widow Eight Seven.I got on the air and sent a sitrep to Damo Martin, in the FOB Price air-planning cell.

  ‘I’ve just done three 20mm strafing runs, and dropped one GBU-38,’ I reported. ‘At least five Taliban killed.’

  ‘Good work,’ Damo replied.

  Then this: ‘Widow Seven Nine, Widow TOC: what platforms were you using?’

  ‘I pinched a Dude call sign from Widow Eight Seven.’

  ‘Roger. Wait out. Stay on these means.’

  The duty officer at Widow TOC was asking me to stay on this frequency. He’d sounded a bit confused. Maybe even annoyed. A minute later he was back.

  ‘Widow Seven Nine, what were you doing pinching aircraft?’

  ‘We had an HVT out on patrol and pinned down in the Green Zone. I needed air.’

  ‘There’s a set procedure for getting air. You’ve broken every rule you could have broken, as we knew nothing about the contact.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter, ’cause there’s no contact any more: I’ve killed them all.’

  ‘You are not — I repeat not — to do that again.’ The guy on the other end was fuming. ‘Widow Seven Nine, you are to stick to set procedures.’

  That was that. End of my bollocking over the air.

  That F-15 control was the fastest I’d ever done in theatre. It was eight minutes, from start to finish. I got a brew on, and then we got a call from Alpha Xray. The patrol had got safely in to the base, and the Sky team were bird-happy. They’d got the whole of the contact on film, and were wowed by the speed and power of the airstrikes. Needless to say, the lads under siege at AX were chuffed as nuts too.

  Stewart Hill came and found me. He was fuming at what had happened with Widow TOC. As far as he was concerned, we’d had a patrol plus HVT under attack, and his JTAC had pulled a blinding move to relieve them. And I’d been bawled out for doing so. I appreciated the OC’s support. He was clearly 100 per cent there for his lads. But I didn’t really give a shit that Widow TOC had chewed me out over the air.

  I had a brew and a fag, and got to bed with Alpha Xray safe as houses, and the Sky crew well happy. What could be better than that? Enough said.

  After stand-to the following morning the patrol returned with the Sky crew in tow. Sticky and I were having a chat, when I felt a rumbling in my stomach. I still wasn’t right after my attack of the runs. I warned Sticky I was off for a crap, and made a dash for the shitters.

  The thunderboxes were a pretty basic affair — a plywood wall wrapped around with HESCO, with holes cut in a plank bench to do your business. The HESCO was shoulder-high, so you could sit there having a crap and chat to your mates outside.

  Being a bit of a petrol-head, I’d grabbed a copy of Auto Trader. I was looking forward to having a good read whilst I was on the throne. I sat on the middle of the three holes, and buried my head in the magazine.

  A few moments later I noticed a figure coming towards me from the main compound. It was the Sky reporter, Alex Crawford, and for a moment I was a bit embarrassed. But I thought: I’m only having a crap, and there’s nowt wrong with that.

  ‘Morning,’ I said.

  ‘Morning,’ she replied.

  Then she walked in, pulled down her hoggers and perched on the hole next to me. There were eight inches on my left separating us, as she proceeded to have a dump right next to me. I had my feet on a sandbag and my combats around my ankles, and I tried desperately to bury my head deeper in the magazine.

  She started going on about what a fantastic job I’d done with the air the night before. I felt so awkward I didn’t know what to say. I tried to quieten down my doings, but there was a sudden breech explosion and I let rip. It was like you’d do after havi
ng a kebab with chilli sauce and after a night out on the beers.

  I could feel myself going bright red in the face. I stuck the Auto Trader higher in an effort to hide my discomfiture. As soon as I could I finished off. I was out of there like a shot, leaving Alex Crawford alone on her throne. No way could I talk to her whilst we were both having a dump and only eight inches separating us.

  I went to the chill-out room and threw the Auto Trader on the pile, then made for the privacy of the Vector. Major Hill was standing at the wagon’s open door.

  ‘Fuck me, Alex Crawford has just had a dump right next to me on the thunderboxes,’ I remarked. ‘And I mean, it’s just not ladylike.’

  The OC cracked up laughing. ‘Bommer, she reports from all over the Middle East. She’s hardly going to stand on ceremony if she needs a quick crap, is she?’

  ‘It wouldn’t have been so bad if it was just a dump she was having,’ I complained. ‘It was the way she was trying to have a cosy chat about my air from the night before. Think about it,’ I went on. ‘Some bird you’ve seen on the telly sits next to you and starts having a dump — well, it’s fucking weird.’

  The OC and the rest of the lads were killing themselves.

  A few minutes later Alex Crawford wandered past the wagon. I could feel myself going red as a beetroot. Chris, Throp, Sticky and Jess were torturing me. Three hours later they were still winding me up, and I was still hiding in the wagon.

  All of a sudden there was a yell from Mikey Wallace, followed by a long, deafening: ‘BWAAAAAAARP!’

  Mikey was giving a blast on the air horn, meaning there was a mortar round in the air. Mikey Wallace had the worst job in the Triangle. He sat in a bunker about the size and shape of a toilet cubicle, staring into his mortar-locating radar screen all day long. When a round went up he got his moment of glory, and punched the air horn. He was doing a blinding job of it too.

  The lads ran around grabbing body armour and helmets and taking cover. Alex Crawford started to film what looked like a live report. She was stood before the cameraman in blue helmet and matching body armour, looking very much the part. I shook my head: I doubted if I’d ever be able to watch Sky News again without blushing.