Simon had popped his screen out one field of view, expanding the image so he could see the whole of the white building. He could now push the crosshairs onto whatever target he wanted, steady them, and pull the trigger as and when.
I scanned the area for anyone taking a pop at my wingman. The gun wouldn’t do anything until it was slaved to my eyes. But the moment I saw something it would be: ‘My gun!’-bang-gone. As I made the call, I’d flick up with my thumb and pull the trigger. Within a split second, rounds would pour off the aircraft.
We were running in, but still slowly. Jon was hammering down. When he passed the target he was going to have to climb and turn back as soon as possible to cover our attack run. I was holding back to give him the time to do this; he’d be doing the same on our attack run. We didn’t want two aircraft with their tails towards the target.
‘Firing,’ Jake called.
I saw a grey smudge appear under the nose of their Apache, either side of the barrel, as the cannon’s propellant hit the air after being spat out by the muzzle break. Simon scoured the building for leakers. I was primarily looking out for Jon.
‘Breaking,’ Jon called.
They broke off their run and I watched the rounds impact all along the top of the northern wing. He broke south-west, as we’d done. I watched him climb away and waited until he came up level. Their gun was smack on too. Jake’s shooting was spot on; this was going to be our day.
‘Stand by.’ This time I wasn’t going to dive. I didn’t want to drop my height. With an accurate gun and TADS Simon would cope with deadly precision. I flew level, Simon’s cannon aiming progressively lower.
Again, Simon had his crosshairs on the junction between the roof and the wall.
‘Covering.’ Jon was letting us know they were in a position to attack if we should be fired at.
‘Wildman Five One, running in with twenty rounds of thirty mike mike,’ Simon responded on the JTAC frequency.
I accelerated and as Simon pulled the trigger I called on the inter-aircraft. ‘Wildman Five One, engaging, twenty rounds, thirty mike mike.’
Rounds thumped along the wall and the roof.
Jon came on the inter-aircraft radio: ‘Not sure we’re having much effect on it.’
I said, ‘Small holes on the roof mean they’re penetrating before exploding. It’ll be devastating in there.’
‘Copied.’
The HEDP rounds were exploding against the wall. That was okay, but the frag was on the outside. The ones that hit the roof looked innocuous, but they were penetrating. I wouldn’t have wanted one joining me in the room with a thousand shards of frag and a big flame and shock wave.
‘Breaking!’ I pulled up as hard and fast as I could, flying southwest, straining to find my wingman as I came round. They were all set up.
Wildman Five Zero thundered in once he saw we were ready. He fired all over the roof. There was still nobody out in the street. They must all have been inside.
We turned back in. Simon aimed his crosshairs up a little from where he’d fired last time. As he went to pull the trigger, he called, ‘Engaging!’ and moved his line of sight slowly upwards as he pulled off a twenty-round burst. The thirty mike mike stitched their way along the roof.
No one had left the building yet.
Widow Seven One called: ‘We can hear screaming. Keep it up!’
It would have been Armageddon inside those walls.
Wildman Five Zero said, ‘I’m going for the doors and the windows-you go for the other wing.’
That made sense to me. If I’d been hiding in that first wing, I knew where I’d be trying to run. We’d repeat what we’d just done on the last run, the length of the other roof. Jake had the doors and windows covered in case they were thinking about making a break for it.
Jon and Jake drove in. I didn’t see their rounds as they ripped across the far elevation.
We ran in seconds behind and blasted another twenty-round burst along the second roof.
Smoke curled from the entrance holes and billowed from the doors and windows.
Jon and Jake fired another twenty-round burst into the main elevation of the second wing.
After several of these attack runs we’d stripped both tops and both exposed sides. The only bit we hadn’t engaged was the central, linking span of the H.
Simon said, ‘The final hiding place.’ He aimed his crosshairs at the central section of roof. Below it was a steel door. He pulled the trigger and punched rounds through the roof, the door and down to the base of the building.
Jake said, ‘Watch and shoot and look for leakers. Copy.’
We were heading west, within 1,000 metres of each other. We wheeled around, looking for movement. The only thing coming out of that building was smoke.
‘Widow Seven One, this is Wildman Five Zero. How are things now?’
‘Widow Seven One, the grenades and shooting stopped when you started attacking. And the screaming’s stopped. Did anyone escape?’
After a brief pause Jon clicked his mic. ‘Did you see anyone?’
I said over the intercom, ‘Simon, you see anything, buddy?’
‘Negative. Not a soul.’
‘One hundred per cent no from this aircraft.’
Jake replied, ‘Widow Seven One, this is Wildman Five Zero-that’s 100 per cent negative. We’ll stay around for as long as we can.’
We didn’t want to leave them. If anyone had survived, they were going to have to run out of this building at some point, and when they did, we were going to nail them. Either that or they would choke to death.
We swarmed and waited for a breakout. They would have to run across the main road or head for the Shrine.
‘Widow Seven One has now got our men in the sangars again.’ The watchtowers could now see and kill any leakers themselves.
A Harrier turned up, callsign Topman, and we spoke to the Widow.
‘Widow Seven One, this is Wildman Five Zero. With Topman on station, we’re sorry, but we’ve got to break off.’ We were under orders to save aircraft hours.
‘Thank you very much. I’ll see you tonight.’ He sounded 100 per cent more cheerful than he had when we’d turned up.
‘If it was down to us, we’d be here every night. Good luck,’ Jake replied and he meant it too.
‘Wildman Five Zero…this is Topman…You got anything for me?’
‘Negative, the place looks quiet. Speak to Widow Seven One for AOR update,’ Jake said. ‘We’re breaking for homeplate.’
We couldn’t tell Topman any more. All we’d done was turn up and hammer the white building, and we were now about to clear off. We didn’t really know anything else.
After the JTAC read out the AOR brief-what had happened and what the threat was-we headed back to base.
We fuelled up and taxied into the bays. After shutting down the engines, the lads went to work replenishing the 30 mm and the techs checked the aircraft.
We were loaded up and ready to close down before Jon and Jake so I got on the radio.
‘Saxon this is Wildman Five One, permission to close down?’
‘Saxon. Close down.’ This was a good sign. It meant that Now Zad had calmed down for the time being. Otherwise we would have been told to stay on the APU ready to take over from Topman.
Jake’s grin stretched from ear to ear as we walked into the Ops room. ‘Hey, guys! How
you
doin’?’ He was quite proud of his Joey impression.
Everyone looked up. There were no smiles.
‘Oh look, it’s the murderer.’ Chris shook his head.
Jake was always having the piss taken out of him royally, but not this time. This time, something was badly wrong.
‘President Karzai wants to know why we’ve slaughtered innocent Afghan nationals.’ The OC glared. ‘You do know what that building was, don’t you?’
Jake looked worried.
‘Did it look nice?’
‘Well…Yes…’
‘Nice white building? Didn’t see any red crosses on it, did you?’
‘What?’
I trawled my memory at warp speed. I suddenly felt very uncom-fortable.
‘You shot up the fucking hospital.’
‘No!’ Jake went white as a sheet and glanced anxiously at the rest of us-his flight.
‘It’s called The Clinic. It’s a hospital.’
Our jaws dropped.
Jake leaned forward and pressed his hands on the Ops table to steady himself. The room remained deathly quiet.
I piped up to give him a bit of support. ‘You complied with ROE, mate. I saw Taliban running out with mousehole charges too.’
Chris burst out laughing, followed quickly by everyone else.
‘It is a clinic,’ he said. ‘But everyone left ages ago.’
We had a quick brew after the debrief, in place of the lunch we’d missed. We seemed to have lost our appetites.
‘Do you know what was worrying me most when they told me it was a clinic?’ Jon said. ‘They heard loads of screaming.’
I nodded.
‘I pictured little kids and all sorts,’ Jon said.
‘My stomach did a Fosbury Flop,’ I said.
The Taliban went to town before we’d even got our wheels back on the ground. They sent a message to Kabul to say that the Apaches had shot up a clinic and killed scores of sick and injured people. Karzai had swallowed it.
We passed the clearance issue straight to Widow Tactical Operations Cell. The JTAC said he had no choice, and that we’d done what he’d asked. Everyone who’d been to the Now Zad DC knew the building was empty and that it posed a threat to them but it didn’t stop the shit from Kabul.
There was a big debate. It went back to the ROE.
Could he see the target? Yes he could. Was that it in his sphere of influence? Yes it was. Could he have stopped the attack using a much softer approach by escalating the level of force to match the attack? No he couldn’t; they were about to go Broken Arrow. Our Charlie Alpha JTAC was off the hook, but the buck didn’t stop with him.
Kabul still wanted answers and that meant sending the tapes to the CO in Kandahar so he could judge for himself before answering up the chain of command.
With the UK government breathing down his neck, Lieutenant Colonel Felton needed some answers and fast. He rang up and made it perfectly clear that he trusted us, and if something was amiss he would still defend us when the time came. He wanted to know if we had seen anything that could have prevented the attack on the clinic, and did we use proportionality?
We saw everything and it was perfectly clear that the Taliban were using the building as a vantage point to attack the DC. They were not afraid to continue their assault in full view of us and used the building as a refuge between attacks. If we hadn’t fired and ended up leaving Now Zad after running low on fuel, they would have continued their attack.
Any fast air on call could not have dealt with a target this close to the DC. Our men there had a one-shot chance of survival. Their
final chance was an Apache attack-no other airframe would have worked-to destroy all of the Taliban in the adjacent building before they either broke into the DC or we ran out of fuel.
The CO thanked us and the tapes were to be dispatched by Lynx to Kandahar for him to look at later on.
For weeks afterwards, Jake still shuddered when people walked up to him and muttered the word clinic. And many did.
SUNDAY, 16 JULY 2006
Camp Bastion
I wanted an immediate debrief with our Hi-8 tapes. I gathered Simon, Jon, Jake and the Ops Officer round the little Sony hand-held to go through them and review the rules of engagement. I wanted to make a particular point about our rounds.
Jake and Jon knew by now that we hadn’t fired into the compound, but I still felt it was important to show them exactly what I’d seen.
All weapon engagements seemed to play out in slow motion to me. I’d been watching gun tapes over and over since 2003. I no longer tried to see if rounds were hitting. I looked at where the line of sight was moving, to see if the range was stable. I looked at all the tiny little things that others didn’t take in because they were too focused on the excitement of targets exploding inside the crosshairs.
On the tiny 4x3-inch screen we saw exactly what we had described to the CO. I pressed the slow motion button as soon as I saw the counter change from 300 to 299. Simon had been recording his TADS image and we were looking at what we’d seen in the
Apache, only frame by frame. The round eventually struck and exploded. I let it continue frame by frame for all five rounds.
You couldn’t see the individual rounds, just their heat swirls-and then the explosions. They were separated by 1/10th of a second. It took half a second for all five rounds to impact on the building. Not one of them landed inside the compound.
‘Look at the splash here.’ I repeated the film of the rounds hitting the roof. There was a small hole where each of the shaped charges had gone clean through. ‘Hardly anything,’ I said. ‘But look where this one hit the wall. An impressive splash, but it didn’t penetrate the side of the building.’
I pressed fast-forward and there was a wisp of smoke through the holes in the roof, but nothing from the holes in the walls. Smoke billowed from windows and doors nearby.
‘When you fire at something look at the effect it’s having; only then will you know if your weapons are—’
The canvas curtain parted and the Chinook boys rushed into the Ops tent. They’d just had a call out. They came over to join us at the bird table. The flight had been saved from me rewinding once again.
The Ops Officer ran in from next door, shaking his head. Dickie Bonn was normally so cool I wondered whether he had a pulse. But normal had flown out of the window. ‘It’s Now Zad,’ he said.
The Chinook boys stared at him in disbelief. On their last outing, the Taliban had only missed them by a whisker. They didn’t let it show, but they must have been shitting themselves.
‘Is there a time frame?’ one of the pilots asked.
‘We don’t know that yet.’
Nichol Benzie, on a navy exchange with the RAF, looked at us and grinned ruefully. ‘Here we go again.’
We knew them all by name and got on well, but didn’t really socialise. Everyone pretty much kept themselves to themselves. We’d have a bit of banter when we saw them at Ops, but they tended
to stay in their tent and we stayed in ours, even though they were right next to each other.