Apache

As Mr Sky Cop, the flying regs were poor old Billy’s bag. I didn’t envy him the responsibility, but it was good wind-up material.

‘I take it looping the Apache is still out this tour is it, Billy?’

‘Don’t even think about it. You’re only an average pilot, remember.’ Then, under his breath but loud enough for us to hear: ‘Unlike me.’

‘I suppose a barrel roll or two is out the question too?’

While Billy exchanged notes with 664’s QHI, I ironed out the weapons systems’ nuances with their Weapons Officer. I also signed for the gun tape laptop, on which recordings of all our weapons releases were stored. The gun tape laptop was kept in a special safe in the Joint Helicopter Force Forward office. A lot of the material on it was highly classified. ‘Kill TV’ could be really damaging to us if it fell into the wrong hands. Something stuck on YouTube under a provocative headline could make us look like war criminals.

You only needed to look at the infamous gun tape of the US Apache slaughtering the ‘Iraqi farmers’. US intelligence intercepted a plan to bring down an aircraft with a surface-to-air missile. The Apache was launched and dispatched every member of the insurgent team. The tape was leaked, cut and restructured to show the brutal servants of the Great Satan routinely wiping out innocent Iraqi farmers. It didn’t show the SAM being drawn from its bag and put in position.

The JHF was the squadron’s nerve centre, right next door to the Joint Operations Cell – a central Ops Room from where the three battlegroups based at Bastion (42 Commando, 45 Commando and the Information Exploitation Battlegroup) were managed.

The JHF and JOC compound consisted of as many tents, flags, masts and antennae as you could cram into fifty square metres. It was encircled by razor wire, and Minimi machine-gun-toting guards manned the only entrance twenty-four hours a day. It was the most secure area in the camp, and everyone who went in and out had to state their official purpose. Traffic was frequent between the JHF and JOC – each had to know what the other was up to at all times if operations were to be smoothly dovetailed.

The JHF was a large air-conditioned and sound-insulated khaki tent, five metres wide and fifteen long. A huge map table stood at its centre, with desks for the Boss, squadron ops officers, watchkeepers and signallers lining the four sides. We and the Chinook pilots planned our missions, gave briefings and ran the sorties from here.

There were eight CH47 Chinooks in theatre by then, upped from the original six in an emergency reinforcement over the summer. There were only ever two emergency response choppers in Bastion at any one time, with the rest of the CH47 force at the Coalition’s giant southern air hub, Kandahar Airfield.

The Chinook’s five-man crews – two pilots and three loadmasters – usually only came into the JHF for briefs. If we needed to make detailed plans with them before they left Kandahar, we’d generally do it over a conference call. Kandahar housed our rear echelon elements as well, and it was where we’d take the Apaches for heavy maintenance or repair. There was neither the spare equipment nor the capacity at Bastion. Thankfully, this handover only involved a changeover of personnel. All the equipment and airframes were staying where they were.

The Apache was a very hungry beast: it chomped through ammunition, fuel and spare parts at an alarming rate. A squadron of eight aircraft needed a massive logistics footprint to support it in the field: eighteen four-ton trucks for parts and ammunition, seven articulated lorries, five fuel tankers, three forklift trucks, two motorcycles, five technician vans, one eight-ton engineers’ lorry and a fire engine.

The machine was hugely labour intensive at the best of times, and Afghanistan was the cruellest place on earth to operate helicopters. It cost £20,000 for every hour in the air and needed thirty-two man hours of maintenance on the ground for every hour flown – and that wasn’t just a couple of hairy-arsed blokes in boiler suits sharing a wrench. Our Apaches needed REME avionics and airframe technicians, armourers, arming and loading teams, drivers, refuellers, signallers, IT specialists, Intelligence officers, clerks and storemen – ninety-eight people in total; more than six of them to every one pilot, and every one of them an expert.