Apache

He went on for about fifteen minutes, and finished with ‘a huge debt of thanks from a humbled nation’. For that, he got a spontaneous cheer and a generous round of applause as he was swiftly channelled back to the waiting Hercules. It was an upbeat, crowd-pleasing performance and went down very well with the younger soldiers. Pride, support, courage; he knew all the buzz words twenty-year-old squaddies wanted to hear.

As far as I was concerned, the Blair magic began to fade as the Prime Minister and his flying circus trundled down the runway. Despite his well-crafted phrases and emotional expressions, he hadn’t actually told us anything we didn’t already know. There was no big announcement, no addition to the defence budget, no deadline for the end of the conflict, no council tax rebate for our families at home. He’d had nothing new to say. I wondered why he’d bothered to come all that way. Still, the bacon croissant had been nice.

As November became December, Alice’s first situation brief proved increasingly accurate. Not only were the Taliban getting better, they were coming after us.

Close air support had changed the outcome of a lot of battles in our ground troops’ favour, so the Taliban hated all Coalition offensive aircraft – but they still hated Apaches the most.

If you wanted to go after aircraft and had none of your own, you needed surface-to-air missiles. SAMs had been the preserve of the world’s superpowers, but by the 1980s they had become a global phenomenon.

The missiles employed one of three different systems to track and hit moving targets: radar-tracking, heat-seeking, or laser-guided. They varied in quality, but most could detect any aircraft flying in the SAM belt – between 1,000 and 20,000 feet – from about six miles, and engage it from four.

All three types of SAMs were believed to be kicking around Afghanistan. The principal threat came from Man Portable Air Defence Systems – SAMs fired from shoulder launchers that a couple of blokes could carry around on foot. There was no shortage of them. At Dishforth, we had been briefed to expect Russian SA7s and SA14s, Chinese HN15s – and the US Stingers and British Blowpipes that the CIA and MI6 had flooded into the country during the Soviet occupation.

The good news was that although we knew the Taliban had ManPADs, we didn’t believe they had many of them left that actually worked. Their biggest problem – our greatest advantage – was that their battery system decayed. This was especially the case with Stingers, and the Taliban had no means of replacing them. Even the world’s most unscrupulous arms dealers thought twice about dealing with Islamic extremists because of the heat it brought down on them.

‘Working SAMs are a highly prized commodity to the Taliban,’ an Int Corps briefer told us. ‘We reckon that the few they retain will be used only as a last ditch defence for very senior people; they’ll only be fired if a Taliban or al Qaeda leader’s life is under imminent threat.’

No SAMs had been fired at Coalition aircraft in Afghanistan for quite a while, so while we remained cautious, we hadn’t been taking the SAM threat too seriously. Then, four weeks into the tour, they did fire a SAM at us – in Helmand, at a Dutch F16 jet bomber, callsign Ramit.

I was in the JHF at the time, watching some gun tapes on the computer. The news came through on the MIRC. There was a Military Internet Relay Chat in every HQ across the four southern provinces – a giant TV screen / video printer pumping out one line sitreps as they came in about operations ongoing over Regional Command South; a running ticker tape on the whole war.

‘Jesus, have you seen this?’

All eight of us in the tent crowded around the MIRC.

‘KABUL: RAMIT ENGAGED BY SAM. SOUTH SANGIN. SAM DEFEATED…’

‘Bloody hell. What’s going on at Sangin? Are Special Forces lifting some big player we don’t know about?’

They weren’t. A quick call to brigade confirmed there were no arrest operations going down in the Sangin area. In fact, troops weren’t even out on the ground.

The next day, the full report came through. Lookouts in Forward Operating Base Robinson, a support base seven klicks south of the Sangin DC for the marines in the Green Zone, had heard some sporadic shooting from the west. They’d put in a call to the brigade air cell to ask if any passing aircraft might be able to take a quick peek.

The cloud base was fairly low that day. To see through it, the F16 had to drop down below it, to 3,000 feet. The shooting had stopped, so the jet tootled around for a minute or two as a show of force. A corkscrew trail of grey smoke rose from the Green Zone as the missile arced towards the F16. It passed just behind the jet, diverted by a flare, and disappeared into the clouds.