Apache

Within a few weeks, they were converted. So much so that 3 Para’s Commanding Officer often refused to allow his men out of their platoon houses unless they had an Apache above them.

We proved the aircraft was phenomenally good at close – sometimes very close – air support, swiftly overtaking the Harrier as the troops’ aircraft of choice. We were the Paras’ big brother; we turned up and immediately turned the tables on the bullies picking on them. Soon, the lads on the ground began to refer to us as ‘the muscle’. ‘Things were looking pretty shitty until the muscle turned up,’ was a regular refrain in the cookhouse.

For us, the mad summer was one constant rush between one under fire platoon house to another besieged district centre. At times, the job felt like playing the Whack-A-Mole game at the fair; the one where you never know which of the multiple holes the little bugger will pop out of first. You have to thump it quick with a mallet, but as soon as you have, another pops up from another hole. If you don’t keep on smashing them hard, you lose.

On a few occasions we almost did lose. I was on the phone home when we got the Broken Arrow call from Now Zad. Broken Arrow is an emergency call for assistance from any available aircraft. It meant the platoon house was in the process of being overrun. We got up there to find the company of Royal Fusiliers in a grenade fight with the Taliban at their walls.

Our major weakness was a limited play time. Our fuel and weapons load would always run out eventually, and then we had to go back to base or get relieved by another Apache pair.

Sometimes all we had to do was turn up. The enemy had learned to fear us. ‘When the Mosquitoes come, stay underground,’ Taliban commanders were overheard telling their men. But most of the time they fought on regardless.

I must have been in twenty different battles on that first tour; some a few minutes long, others lasting for hours. Yet despite all of that, there I was, sitting on my cot at the start of the second tour pondering my destiny.

It wasn’t that I was afraid of dying. After twenty-two and a half years of close scrapes all over the world, I’d come close to rolling a number seven several times – not least in Aldershot. And I’d believed for a long time that if your number was up, it was up – there was no point in fussing about it. What I was really bothered about was dying now.

I’d got away with the first tour, and that was supposed to be it for me. I just couldn’t help thinking that it would be a crying shame if I checked out now, minutes before I was about to leave. I’d been a bad boy in my past, and got away with all of that too. Maybe it was my turn next: fate, karma, Sod’s Law, Murphy’s Law; or just plain old tough shit – call it what you will. All I knew was that one bloke only gets a certain amount of luck in any one life, and my lucky bag should have been nigh on empty.

I didn’t tell Emily about any of this. Instead, I quietly upped my life insurance to the maximum, updated my will and ensured everything was in order for her and my kids if I didn’t come back.

But Emily had her own worries. Not long before I left for the second tour, we’d agreed to start a family together. We’d been together for years, she was thirty-four and the time felt right. I hadn’t realised how much the decision had affected her.

On my last night, Emily made me promise not to do anything stupid. It was a promise that I told her I had every intention of keeping – and I meant it. Then she gave me a tiny little good luck charm, a silver angel the size of a postage stamp.

‘Have it on you always, it’ll keep you safe,’ she said.

I burst out laughing. She burst into tears.

So I carried it in my top right breast pocket which was double sealed with buttons and Velcro. It went everywhere I went – as much from guilt as superstition… to start with, anyway.

3. HANDOVER

There was an awful lot to be done in the five days before 664 Squadron left. Our handover had to be seamless. It was vital that the quality of Apache support to the guys on the ground wasn’t affected. There were lessons to be learned from their tour; we had to adapt to all the procedural changes and familiarise ourselves with any aircraft issues that might have cropped up after three more months of hard combat.

There were some nervous people in London. An awful lot of money had been spent on the Apache and the last thing they wanted was for us to break one in less than a year of ops. Because it was so new, the procurement pencil-necks back at the MoD watched us like hawks.

The MoD had given us an encyclopaedic document known as the Release to Service which told us what we were and were not allowed to do with the aircraft. If any pilot broke any of the RTS rules – in the air or on the ground – he would be investigated. If he was found to have broken them deliberately, he would be removed from flying duties – permanently.