Apache

Hold the dam, and you controlled the livelihoods of half a million Helmandis. To lose it would have been a strategic disaster. If the Taliban destroyed it, they’d wreak havoc, plunge the province into darkness – and blame the atrocity on a US bombing raid.

A 3,000-metre-long ridgeline towered over the south-eastern side of the dam. The tallest of its three peaks had been fortified by the Paras and was occupied by a troop of thirty marines. It was an excellent vantage point from which to spot any approach. It was given the codename Arnhem.

The marines were skirmishing daily as the Taliban probed towards the hydroelectric dam. The marines held them off, but the Taliban had them surrounded – and took out their frustrations by giving them a fair kicking.

HQ Flight took over the IRT / HRF role from 2 Flight at the height of the Taliban’s Kajaki-thon; 2 Flight had gone up there twice. It was a racing certainty we’d follow suit.

‘Ten quid says we’ll have to go all the way up to bleeding Kajaki and back every day of the shift,’ Carl grumbled. The longer flight meant a greater chance of him missing a meal, which alarmed him almost as much as it did FOG. But none of us took his bet.

The IRT / HRF handover always took place after the morning brief. Since the task was all about getting airborne as fast as we could, every aspect of our existence for those three days was tailored to that objective. Two aircraft were on permanent standby to scramble at all times, their pilots’ kit out of the lockers and ours already in them. To ensure someone was always ready to power up, we even went down to the flight line with 2 Flight. While they took their stuff out of the Apaches, we put ours in.

My ammo-bag went beside my seat and my other running clobber went in the boot with my go-bag as usual. Perched on the seat was my helmet, leads plugged in. I left my Flight Reference Cards and gloves on the dash, stowed my carbine in its bracket and hooked my survival vest on top of it – open and ready to slip into.

Carl and I – the two back-seaters again – signed out our aircraft.

‘A very saucy little Lolo Ferrari for you today, Mr Macy, and the one and only Taylor Rain for you, Staff.’ The crew chief just loved his new fleet of sex goddesses. ‘Lolo’s sucking beautifully today – fuel, that is.’

There was no time to load up a specific weapons load on an emergency shout. So the IRT / HRF aircraft were given a routine Load Charlie. Each Apache normally went out with 300 cannon rounds, twenty-four rockets and two Hellfires. We used the rest of the takeoff weight allowance on extra fuel in a specially fitted second tank. It gave us between ninety minutes and two hours more time over the target, depending on where we went.

For the duration of the shift, the flight moved out of our normal accommodation tents and into one set aside for the IRT / HRF by the JOC compound. The emergency Chinook crews slept in another alongside it.

We would be summoned for a call-out on insecure radios we carried everywhere. For the same reason we had tactical callsigns, emergency shouts came to us in code. We didn’t always want the Taliban to know that Big Brother was on his way. The codewords had a theme – pop stars, football teams, literary classics, whatever the Ops officer fancied – and they changed every few weeks.

The IRT / HRF tried to stay together as much as possible during the shift. We ate together, washed together and worked together. There were only two radios, so if one of us had to go for a dump, we’d do so as a pair.

We didn’t lift on every scramble, only on half the shouts that came in. Our commanders were reluctant to throw us up unless they were sure it was necessary. They might need our limited pilot and aircraft hours later. It was a tricky balance.

I once sat in a powered-up Apache cockpit for four hours on the flight line while Sangin took a pummelling. They didn’t want us to go up there and risk running out of combat gas only for the real assault on the DC to kick off.

‘You’re our ace card,’ the brigadier had told us. ‘It’s a game of poker with these bastards. And a good poker player hangs on to his aces as long as he can.’

The order for us to launch always came from the brigade air cell at Lashkar Gah. Only they had full sight of the whole battle space, and knew best how to allocate their paper-thin resources. The truth was, they desperately needed more aces. To help them, our Ops Officer listened in to the ground net to get us the earliest heads up he could. He’d often scramble us down to the flight line before the brigade’s call arrived. When it did, all we had to do was pull up the collective.