Apache

I liked Nick a lot. It was hard not to. We trained on the Apache together – he was another of the sixteen originals and we’d been through the first tour together too. As a newish pilot, Nick was always bursting with enthusiasm and bounding around the place like an overexcited spaniel. He’d take the odd risk in his constant drive to better himself – which landed him in a few scrapes – but he always got away with it.

‘Rover?’

‘Lassie?’

‘How about Bonnie?’ Charlotte piped up. ‘As in Bonnie Tyler. Remember I Need a Hero?’

During the first tour, Nick just happened to be the first pilot that visiting Sun journalist Tom Newton Dunn collared for an interview. An article and photo duly appeared in the next day’s paper under the headline ‘Hero Nick’. He’d got a shed-load of abuse for that. We made sure it lasted weeks, but it didn’t faze Nick for a second.

‘You know, Mr M,’ he told me one day. ‘Some of us have got the looks, and some haven’t. I didn’t see The Sun chasing you too hard…’

Nick became Bonnie. Charlotte came next.

There had always been a strong suspicion that some of the blondeness came out of a bottle.

‘This might be a bit close to the bone,’ one of the other pilots began. ‘But what about Cuffs?’

There was a baffled silence.

‘Come on you lot. First because she’s, you know… Posh.’

‘Very clever. And?’

‘Well, it’s just possible that her collar doesn’t match them…’

That brought the house down. The Boss plumped for Posh, but she was always Cuffs to the rest of us.

Geordie was Vidal, on account of the fact that he had always driven hairdressers’ cars, a convertible Saab or an Audi TT – and that he was also slightly thinning on top.

Geordie was an honorary member of HQ Flight really. He often filled in for the Boss when he was called away to meetings. Everybody liked him. He was a typical Newcastle lad with a quick wit and a razor-sharp tongue. All of his sentences ended with ‘like’, and as far as Geordie was concerned, everyone was a ‘canny lad, like’.

Despite being a staff sergeant and well into his thirties, his lifestyle hadn’t changed since he was nineteen. Commitment wasn’t his bag – he never had a girlfriend for more than five minutes. He loved nothing more than pissing it up with his mates and pulling birds in the Toon on a Saturday night. And he’d cane it up the motorway to Newcastle in his soft top every weekend to do exactly that, music blaring and his thinning blond hair blowing in the wind. He was one of life’s perennial good blokes and we’d been mates for ever.

In the air, though, Geordie was as serious as they came, and one of the very best pilots in the Army Air Corps – his long-held place on the Blue Eagles Display Team testified to that.

Geordie’s sidekick was Tony. They were close buddies and spent every spare minute shooting out wisecracks as a double act. A cheeky chappie cockney, Tony was just as quick-witted as Geordie, and a staff sergeant too. He was also the shortest pilot on the squadron and had big ears, closely cropped dark hair and a small forehead. Not even Tony would deny that he looked uncannily like a chimp. It wasn’t hard to crack his callsign.

‘Spank, as in Spank the Monkey,’ someone suggested.

The OC rejected it as too crude, so he was renamed Darwin, because he was the missing link.

The final member of 3 Flight was Jim, a WO1 well into his forties. He was the granddad of the squadron. He’d also flown for the SAS, and was a quiet and unassuming man who often kept his own company. Out of work, he had two obsessions. The first was eating healthily and regularly. If Jim missed a meal, he’d go man down. It was that serious. When he checked in to order up a rearm on a sortie, he was often heard to say, ‘One Hellfire, 60 thirty Mike Mike, and five late meals with fruit please,’ so he could have an extra one for himself.

He was also the Grand Master of the Internet – to the point that it would send people mad because they could never get on the terminal. God knows what he did online for so long, but he loved it.

‘How about FOG?’ Tony said. ‘Food or Google. If he’s not doing one, he’s doing the other.’

‘And?’

‘Well he’s a Fucking Old Guy isn’t he?’

Billy and I came up with ‘Trigger’ for the Boss. He was the fastest in the squadron and had the MBE to prove it. He was also completely incompetent when it came to texting. His replies always carried half of the original message – possibly because his fingers were too big for the keyboard. But we knew he hadn’t found the ‘Clear Text’ button and that made him as thick as Trigger from Only Fools and Horses.

They christened me Elton. ‘Rocket Man’, after my disaster at Gereshk – I was never going to be allowed to live that down.

The tactical callsigns were so good that some became immediate nicknames. From that night onwards, Trigger, Darwin and FOG were seldom known as anything else.