Billy told me that forty-one Paras were stationed there and that the threat level was judged to be so high that they were in ‘lockdown’-they went nowhere except to collect ammo and provisions from their Chinook replen flights using their quad-bikes and WMIK all-terrain vehicles-stripped down Land Rovers fitted with a Weapons Mounted Installation Kit that allowed a GPMG and a .50 cal to hang from its frame.
All the inhabitants to the west of the road were friendly towards the Brits and had a good relationship with us. Everyone to the east had taken to their heels as the Taliban moved in.
A few hundred metres to the south-west, just outside and a couple of hundred feet above the town perimeter, was a hill, easily
identifiable from the air, occupied by the ANP and known to us as ‘the Shrine’ because the slope facing Now Zad was a burial ground, full of fluttering flags and streamers.
If the Shrine went down, Now Zad would too. From here, the ANP and a few British troops kept a watchful eye on the area and directed fire out of the DC onto the Taliban. The DC was too small to accept a Chinook within its compound, so flights landed to the south-west of the Shrine, under its garrison’s protective gaze but out of sight of the town.
The landing site (LS) was approached across flat desert and through a wide opening in the mountains. The town extended for a further 500 metres north-west of the DC, and was occupied mainly by Afghans intent on living a normal life.
‘They bring no bother to this area,’ Billy said, ‘so we try to patrol out that far to reassure them we’re friends.’
The town stopped abruptly at the western edge of the built-up area and turned to desert. Two kilometres further on, steep hills rose to form the edge of the Now Zad basin.
The dodgy area of town stretched a few hundred metres east of the main road before entering a small wadi, used as a route out through the Green Zone, filled with orchards, crop-fields and tree-lined groves and bordered by a huge mountain ridge, only a few hundred metres wide, but climbing a thousand feet above Now Zad and stretching north as far as the eye could see.
The so-called Green Zones were christened by the Russians in the late seventies. Southern Afghanistan was not naturally fertile but the mountains were so high they generated their own microclimates. Clouds often obscured the tops of the ranges and produced rivers that meandered during the summer months and thundered down in winter. The Helmand was the largest of these, stretching for hundreds of miles through the southern deserts.
The Afghans had mastered irrigation, and the river banks were lined by fields that spread back from ten metres to a couple of kilometres on each side.
The Taliban lived in and where possible fought from the Green Zones. They didn’t have the numbers, equipment, weapons, logistics or support with which to do so in the open.
The richly fertile area provided a latticework of concealed approaches and escape routes. It was so dense in some areas that you could barely see thirty metres. They built hides and underground tunnels, disguising the entrances so they couldn’t be seen from the ground or air, and the irrigation system, channelling water from field to field, made their movements virtually impossible to detect. In many places, the only way through was on foot. The soft-earthed labyrinth was often inaccessible to tanks, APCs and vehicles of any description.
The Taliban didn’t want us anywhere near Now Zad, and saw the DC as a big threat. The Paras had come under intense fire, morning, noon and night the entire time they had occupied it. In the recent upsurge of violence the town had been mortared by what the threat-briefers called a ‘hard core’ of Taliban. The Green Zone on the eastern edge of the town was the place to watch; it was where they’d mounted their last attack-principally with rockets and mortars.
Simon’s voice came over the radio. ‘Widow Seven Three, Widow Seven Three, this is Wildman Five Zero, how do you read?’
Widow Seven Three was the JTAC who coordinated all air-to-ground activity in this area.
With no acknowledgement from him, Simon tried again. I suddenly spotted blue smoke below. I checked Billy’s TADS image. It was coming from the grid-reference we’d been given for the LS. Billy increased the zoom and I was able to make out a couple of vehicles at the base of the Shrine-a quad-bike and a WMIK. Blue smoke meant that the LS was secure.
The Chinooks were beating their way across the desert approaches from the south-east. Jon was already wheeling his Apache above the streets just north of the Shrine to allow Simon an unrestricted top-down view of activity in the alleyways and the compounds below. I was doing the same above the area of Green Zone to the east. The danger was a mortar strike on the LS during the few brief seconds that the Chinooks would be on the ground. My responsibility was to keep an eye on them as well as on my wingman.
The Chinook with the underslung load disappeared in a pillar of whirling dust; the second went to land just outside this cloud and promptly disappeared as well.
Seconds later, we heard a double-click on the radio and first one machine then the next reappeared.
The Cows veered away to the south, keeping low, then pulled up to join us at altitude. Within moments we were back over the desert, cruising at a safe height en route to Musa Qa’leh, our last RV before heading back to Bastion.
The Musa Qa’leh drop-off went without incident. We saw one of the Chinooks descend into a wadi to deliver a vital supply item, the identity of which was on a need-to-know basis (which meant we had no need to know), to an American patrol operating in the area, and then we turned for home.
As we flew high over the desert towards Bastion, I thought back to the ROE brief and, for the umpteenth time since I’d heard the CO deliver it, how crazy it was.
What if I went down in this hell-hole? How would I protect myself?
I glanced across at my SA80. I had three magazines with thirty rounds of 5.56 mm each, and an unusually short mag packed with twenty 5.56 mm tracer rounds in case of emergency. It jutted out from my carbine in the seat frame to my right. Strapped to my right
thigh, inside an Uncle Mike’s Sidekick holster, was my 9 mm pistol for which I had four magazines, thirteen rounds in each, with one inserted-ready-into the grip.
Three days earlier, I’d visited some Para mates. In exchange for some AAC patches and badges, I’d been given two hand grenades. Needless to say, it was absolutely verboten to fly with grenades-I’d be drummed out of the corps, most likely, if they were discovered in the aircraft. But the way I saw it, they were only dangerous to those unfamiliar with them. They sat in my grab bag to my right-hand side with my spare magazines and two smoke grenades. I was out there flying against the Taliban and the rule-makers weren’t, so the grenades flew with me.
If it ever came to my
Black Hawk Down
moment, the grenades would allow me to take as many of the bastards down with me as I could-my final two-fingered salute to the ROE.
We cleared Highway Zero One and prepared for our landing at Bastion.
The patrol commander always landed first and I saw Jon’s nose drop as he readied to take us in. I lowered the collective, ensuring that I retained a bit of power to keep the clutch from disengaging, and kept the nose up, bleeding speed. Then I lowered the nose, accelerating and jinking left and right-shades of the lessons I’d learned as a young Para when trying to shoot down drones on the range at Larkhill. I could hear Captain Mainwaring shouting at me now. It was damn difficult to hit an aircraft that was manoeuvring unpredictably…
‘Jon’s going to dust-out massive,’ Billy said. ‘I know it looks like he’s heading for a hardened landing site down there, Ed, but trust me, in a moment he’s going to disappear from view.’ He paused. ‘Do you want me to take this one for you?’
I grinned. ‘I’m going to have to do this at some point. Just follow me on the controls in case I fuck up.’
I’d already been told that landing at Bastion was a nightmare. Helicopters hated hot and high-that had been drummed into us from Lesson Number One. Add dust to the mixture and everything threatened to turn to ratshit.
To get around this problem at Bastion, they were planning on building a hardened aircraft landing strip (HALS); a short runway, in effect, that would allow us to do rolling takeoffs and landings. Rolling takeoffs not only allowed us to get airborne with more ordnance, they also ensured we didn’t get lost in our own sandstorm.
The trouble was, the HALS hadn’t yet been built at Bastion; instead, we had to land on a square pad-there were two of them-a raised area built from builder’s rubble that the Chinook and Apache boys had robbed from the engineers constructing the camp.
The pads had originally been built as a vehicle park. This was all well and good, except that the omnipresent dust settled in among the rubble. Only ‘dust’ didn’t really do this stuff justice-at Bastion, apparently, it was like talcum powder, and it went fucking everywhere. The makeshift landing pad I was heading for, Billy had warned me, was barely safe to use.
Terrific.
‘Billy?’
‘Yes, mate?’
‘You still there?’
‘Following your every move.’
‘Good. Just checking.’
I continued towards the pad. I needed to carry out a ‘zero-zero’ landing. I didn’t want to end up in the hover, because I’d find myself still in the air in a dust-out and that’s where crashes begin; and I didn’t want any forward speed when I hit the ground either or I’d roll into the two Apaches that were already parked ahead of my landing spot. The only way to crack this was to fly forward and
down, forward and down, in one steep smooth approach, until we banged onto the pad.
My fears were confirmed when I saw Jon bringing his Apache into land ahead of me. One moment I could see him, the next he just vanished along with the whole pad and the two Apaches already on it. There was no room for error. If I drifted left, I’d collide with Jon and Simon. If I drifted right, we’d hit uneven ground and roll over. If I rolled forward, I’d hit the two stationary aircraft.
Oman had been bad, but at least it had been sand, not dust, and there’d been nothing else to hit.
I continued towards the pad bringing back the speed with the ground 100 feet below. Billy advised me to slow down some more to allow the dust from Jon’s landing to settle.
‘Yeah, copied mate.’ I did as he said. Trouble was, dust was also blowing in from the two Chinooks that had landed a hundred metres or so to the south; a roiling, billowing cloud of dust, 150 feet high and hundreds of metres wide, was blowing across the camp.
I began my zero-zero descent. The world as I knew it immediately disappeared.
‘Fuck me.’
‘Don’t worry, just trust your symbology.’
Suddenly, through the dust, I saw the dim silhouettes of aircraft-two directly in front of me and one forward and to my left. I was bleeding speed off and dropping down towards them, forward and down, forward and down…
‘You’re doing good, doing good,’ Billy said. ‘Trust your symbology…’
If I bottled it and attempted to go around again, I’d hit the aircraft in front of me. I was getting to the point of no return.
I glanced left and saw two faces-Simon’s and Jon’s. You always watched somebody coming in to land because there was every
chance it would go wrong. It wasn’t a morbid curiosity, it was just plain dangerous, and they were watching me like a pair of hawks.
Any second now and I’d have to commit.
‘Stand by,’ I said. ‘Three…two…one…committed!’
The aircraft was slowing, the ground still rising to meet me. I fought the instinct to pull power, but in the end I couldn’t help myself. I tweaked some on-just a fraction-and the dust came up. Oh God, I thought, here we go…
‘I’ve got the toe-brakes, mate,’ Billy said.
Thank fuck-one thing less to worry about. Billy would pop the brakes the moment we hit the ground.
We passed through sixty feet and I made the big mistake of glancing down to my left.
The dust was blowing away from me in rivulets-the ground, wherever it was, looked as if it had turned to liquid. I had lost all sense of terra firma below me. Anything and everything that represented solidity had disappeared from view and been replaced by a rippling carpet of liquid mush. This sea of dust moving left made me feel like I was side-slipping right at speed. I fought to trust my symbology.
The Apache on my left began to disappear from my peripheral vision and then, wham, the dust started recirculating down through my rotors, and my peripheral vision disappeared entirely. I was still fifty feet off the ground and totally blind.
‘Forward and down,’ Billy continued. ‘Forward and down…’
I kept my head still, not moving a muscle, as I stared into the monocle. It was in hover mode. The velocity vector line moved ever so slowly back from the top of the monocle towards the centre; I knew I was doing six knots. I had to get the vector back to the centre-zero speed across the ground-at exactly the same time as the height also hit zero.
I didn’t know for sure if I would hit my point on the pad and took a quick peep out of the right-hand window.
Mistake…
The line drifted to the left.
‘No further left!’ Billy yelled.
‘I’ve got it, I’ve got it…’ I shouldn’t have fucking looked. I was concentrating so hard to fight the urge to stop a drift that wasn’t even there.
I brought the stick back to the right to compensate for my error and-smack!-we hit the ground and I felt a reassuring lurch as the struts stroked downwards and the undercarriage took our full weight evenly.
I had no idea if I’d landed where I was supposed to, but was ecstatic that I’d not rolled over or hit anything. I looked to my left. After a few minutes the dust thinned and I caught sight of Jon and Simon, arms above their heads, giving me a slow theatrical handclap. I should have acknowledged with a little bow, but I was too damned drained to do anything. I slumped back in my seat.
I glanced up and saw Billy’s face in his mirror. He gave me a cheeky smile and a thumbs-up.
‘Fucking hell, that was scary,’ I said.