A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (24 page)

The enemy's weapons systems were also improving all the time. That summer a suspected SAM-7 – an Iranian-made shoulder-launched heat-seeking surface-to-air missile – was reportedly launched at a Chinook. Another was apparently fired at an American Hercules the following July. Neither missile found its target. In the Chinook's case, the SAM was thrown off by a sophisticated on-board defensive aid suite, said by the RAF to be the finest in the world. The Taliban were not discouraged. In early 2007, intelligence sources suggested that they were considering obtaining more missiles from Iranian agitators keen to stir up trouble for the Great Satan to their east. At first the Iranians had tried to sell the weapons to the Taliban; now they were willing to give them away. This was eerily reminiscent of the campaign against Soviet air power in the 1980s, when the US covertly supplied the Mujahidin with portable Stinger missiles. The results then were devastating; in 1987 alone, 512 Soviet helicopters and aircraft were lost. Flight 1310 responded with traditional British pluck, and even made up some jocular shoulder-patches depicting a missile spiralling past the tail of a Chinook above the legend 'It
is
rocket science!'. They had tremendous confidence in their state-of-the-art defensive aid suites, which were packed with technology unavailable to the Soviets in the 1980s.

Even so, when Brigadier Butler disclosed in October that he had come within thirty-six hours of ordering the abandonment of the platoon-house at Musa Qala, one of the reasons he gave was the 'unacceptable' threat to Chinooks. The missile threat was small compared to the risk of a successful RPG strike. Chinooks had experienced ten near-misses by RPGs in eight weeks. Politically as well as militarily, in other words, the big machines were by far the weakest link in Herrick 4's over-extended chain – and once again it was largely through luck that the chain was never broken.

There was, though, as Butler recognized, some 'phenomenal flying' from the pilots. In contrast to Jamie Loden's first impression that the RAF were 'utterly, utterly useless', the Paras were so pleased with the Chinooks' performance that Stuart Tootal was later moved to initiate a formal 'bond of friendship' between the Paras and the Chinook wing, with the official endorsement of the Prince of Wales. One unit alone, 18 Squadron, was awarded three Distinguished Flying Crosses – the most any RAF squadron had received in one go since World War Two. Four other Chinook crew were Mentioned in Dispatches, and there were also four Joint Commanders' Commendations, or JCCs.

Their job was difficult even when they were not under fire, mainly because of the dust in Helmand, which was as fine as talcum powder and lay eighteen inches deep in places. It was particularly bad at Bastion, where it had been ground and re-ground by the tracks and wheels of hundreds of heavy vehicles. One pilot likened it to Fuller's earth, a super-absorbent, clay-like compound used as a decontaminant in chemical warfare. It got into everything: food, air-conditioning units, tents with all the zips down. Sensitive avionics could be badly affected, but the real danger came from the clouds thrown up by helicopter rotors. Few machines have a greater downdraught than a Chinook. Each of its rotors is sixty feet across, and powered by an engine generating 3,750 horsepower. There were times, over landing sites, when it was impossible to see as high up as a couple of hundred feet. 'Brownouts', as they were called, were the norm. Landings often had to be performed entirely on instruments, even in daytime – a manoeuvre compared by one pilot to 'parallel-parking a car with your eyes closed'. Brownouts had been blamed for numerous fatal Chinook crashes in Iraq, and the conditions in Helmand were worse. 'Iraq is O-level,' said a Chinook crewman who had served in both theatres, 'but Afghanistan is a master's degree.'

One DFC was awarded to Flight Lieutenant Chris Hasler for, among other actions, an extraordinary resupply run to Sangin in July 2006. The day before, a Para had been killed trying to secure the regular helicopter landing site. It was too dangerous to land there, but the garrison were desperate. Hasler, who was twenty-six, responded by putting his machine down in an area never previously used, and which was surrounded by buildings on three sides. Actually, he did not fully put down: the space was so tight that there wasn't room. Instead he put the aft wheels down and kept his nose in the air, with the forward rotors spinning a few feet above a single-storey building. The margin for error was tiny; to strike the rooftop would have been catastrophic. The resupply was a complete success.

Another DFC went to Major Mark 'Sweetcorn' Hammond, a pilot on exchange from the Royal Marines, who on the night of 6 September was involved in three separate casevac engagements, all of them under fire. Sweetcorn was a big man for a pilot; they tend to have the physiques of fly-halves rather than prop forwards. He had already won a QCVS, the Queen's Commendation for Valuable Service, in Iraq in 2002. On his second call-out, to Musa Qala, the drop zone was so hot that he was forced to abort, weaving off with his crewmen blazing away Vietnam-style on the machine-guns mounted in the rear. The crew of an Apache hovering in support witnessed a pair of RPGs pass only ten metres above and below the fuselage. Back at base, four rounds were found to have hit the machine, one of which had caused 'almost catastrophic damage to a wing blade root', according to his citation – the closest a British Chinook had yet come to being shot down by small-arms fire in Afghanistan. Undaunted, Sweetcorn immediately returned to Musa Qala in another helicopter. He and his crew again came under fire, but this time he was able to land and the casualty was rescued.

The Chinooks were pushed hard in Helmand, and never more so than on Operation Augustus on 14 July. This was the biggest 'deliberate op' the battle group had yet attempted, a classic airborne assault on a much grander scale than Operation Mutay at Now Zad the previous month. The target was a cluster of compounds about three kilometres north of Sangin. The two main compounds, code-named 'Claudius' and 'Tiberius', were thought to be a Taliban stronghold – possibly a training camp – and a key command post in the continuing siege of the district centre further south, where the garrison had been trapped for sixteen days, their ammunition running low. The Paras hoped to neutralize the area before fighting southwards into the district centre where they would relieve their besieged colleagues. En route they intended to capture a senior Taliban commander, a designated HVT or high-value target, who was known to be based in one of the compounds. The plan was to take the compounds one by one using combat engineers to blow holes in the inter-connecting walls, while a company of Canadians in eight-wheeled LAVs (light armoured vehicles) protected their flanks.

A successful troop insertion was obviously critical. A suitable landing site was identified in advance – a dry river bed close to the target compounds. With twenty-four hours to go, reconnaissance photographs showed that the target area was all quiet. At two a.m. on 14 July, therefore, five Chinooks took off from Bastion, each one fully packed with Paras, some of them accompanied by a quad bike and trailer – about two hundred men in all. They were protected from above by a Predator drone equipped with Hellfire missiles, a Spectre gun-ship, another plane carrying sophisticated electronics to block Taliban radio traffic, Harriers, A10s, Apaches and an American B1 bomber from Diego Garcia – the full panoply of air cover, operating at the Coalition's impressive maximum strength.

It was not until the flying circus was airborne that there was any indication of trouble. The target area, it seemed, was no longer all quiet. Footage from the Predator showed people moving about on the rooftops overlooking the landing site, and in a ditch that ran alongside it. Tootal, on board an American Black Hawk command and control helicopter, was unable to see the video feed for himself and radioed back to the Joint Operations Centre for clarification. But the Predator could only pick up so much at night. The footage wasn't clear enough to identify the people on the ground positively as enemy, which ruled out a suppressive air or artillery strike. Tootal had to decide whether or not to abort the mission – and time was not on his side. The heavily laden Chinooks were already over the target area and running low on fuel. They had taken a decoy route from Bastion, flying low with their lights out, and had expected to land and unload their human cargoes as soon as they arrived. Instead they were put into a holding pattern in a nearby valley while the intelligence from the Predator drone was weighed up.

'That was when it started to go wrong,' said Flight Lieutenant Adam Thompson. 'We were stacked up for twenty-five minutes, waking up the entire region and losing any element of surprise. And we were fast coming up to our "Bingo" level: the point when you'll run out of fuel if you don't go home immediately.'

Thompson was thirty, a married man from Yorkshire, and relatively new to the Chinook wing. As a member of 27 Squadron, which replaced 18 Squadron midway through Herrick 4, he had only been in Helmand for five days at the time of Augustus. He had begun his piloting career on search-and-rescue Sea Kings based at RAF Boulmer in Northumberland, where he spent four years rescuing fishermen and oil-rig workers in the North Sea, or 'fallers' who had lost their way in fog and snow in the Lake District. He was unaccustomed to combat flying and had never been in a contact before. Tonight he was co-piloting for Chris Hasler, the daredevil resupplier of Sangin, who as a member of 18 Squadron was just a day from the end of his rotation in Helmand. Hasler, suspecting that some spare 'chicken fuel' might be useful in this operation, had loaded an extra 200kg of it before leaving Bastion. The weight was so great that when they took off the rev meter needles briefly surged into the red band of emergency power, more than twelve seconds of which can cause the engines to burn up. Thompson privately thought Hasler's precaution had put their mission in jeopardy, but now he conceded that the younger but more combat-experienced pilot had been absolutely right.

Tootal desperately needed a clearer picture of what was happening on the ground, and ordered an Apache to sweep the area for better clues. The job fell to Major Andy Cash, the OC of 656 Squadron. 'That was the hardest,' Cash told me. 'Time was critical, and I knew it was basically my call. I looked and looked but I couldn't see anyone moving down there. Not a thing.' He reported in, and Tootal gave the order for Augustus to go ahead.

The first Chinook broke from its holding pattern and clattered down on to the wadi, where it was immediately ambushed. The dykes on either sides were filled with hidden gunmen. They had dug themselves in and kept utterly still as Cash's Apache swept over them, and he had missed them. The airwaves were suddenly filled with urgent yells of 'Ice! Ice!' – the code-word for the command to abort – but it was too late: a wave of Paras was already charging down the ramp into a hail of tracer fire.

The fourth and fifth Chinooks, carrying most of the Para 'C' Company, did in fact hold off, but the second and third ones in the flight had been ordered to land at any cost once the first one was down: without the extra support, the point unit on the ground risked annihilation. In the back of the second Chinook, controlled by Wing Commander Mike Woods, were thirty-seven Paras, a quad bike with a trailer full of Javelin anti-tank missiles, and Sergeant Graham 'Jonah' Jones, the loadmaster.

Jones was thirty-three, from the fishing port of Grimsby, and married with teenage children. He was another ex-search and rescue man who had done ten years on Navy Sea Kings before joining the RAF in 2001. 'I only transferred to get me third tape,' he said in a homely Lincolnshire accent. He had been a Leading Hand in the Navy, the two-stripe equivalent of a corporal. There were only 120 Sea King crewmen in the Navy, he explained. 'They only employ you until you're forty, and promotion is mostly a case of dead man's shoes.'

He had done three tours in Iraq but he had never seen anything like this operation. 'We were straight on behind the first Chinook, a couple of seconds,' he recalled. 'Their crewmen had already opened up with the port and starboard M60s, so our crew did the same.' The Chinooks were normally armed with three swivel-mounted machine-guns for defensive use on hot landing zones, one on each side and another in the centre of the loading ramp to cover the vulnerable rear, although on this occasion the ramp gun had been removed to allow the quad bike and trailer a speedy exit. In any case, there was a limit to what the crew could shoot at once the Chinook had landed, because the elevation of the side guns was restricted to prevent the crews from damaging their own rotors, and the enemy were on higher ground at the tops of the dykes.

With the cargo bay so full, Jones was perched on top of the loading ramp, and he had nothing to shoot with but his standard issue SA80, stowed in a sling on the wall. As the Chinook landed he pushed the ramp control switch and then the toe ramps off, and ran out with his rifle to make way for the quad bike. In the safety of Bastion the Paras had rehearsed the unloading procedure countless times. The quad was always carefully reversed on board last so that it could be driven off fast and first. In practice sessions the Paras could get all thirty-seven men out in under thirty seconds; but this wasn't a drill. Jones watched in horror as the quad rolled to the bottom of the ramp, and stalled. 'We were taking rounds through the fuselage. There was a guy on the quad, desperately trying to start it, with the rest of the guys all stuck behind him and the trailer, all scrambling over . . . there were rounds coming in past the ramp. I've never experienced anything like that before, it was just outrageous.'

Through his night vision goggles, Jones could see gunmen running down a ditch to a firing point fifty metres away, firing as they went. His job was to supervise the unloading. Instead, in an action that later won him a Mention in Dispatches, he crouched behind the starboard wheel and began to return fire with his rifle.

Reconnaissance photographs had suggested that the wadi would be flat and dry, yet the Paras found themselves stumbling in a bog, and had a hard time extricating themselves. The place had become a war zone, the darkness spectacularly latticed by tracer fire, the air filled with flashes and deafening explosions. The Apaches and A10s were blasting the dykes and compound roofs with 30mm cannon; RPGs and heavy machine-gun fire were coming the other way.