Apache

Blue-on-blues from the air were nothing new. For every offensive aircrew, intiating fire on friendly troops was the worst nightmare of all. That day in Garmsir, the American pilot had been trying to save Coalition lives. But close air support was a dangerous and complex business, supplied in circumstances of great pressure for both ground troops and pilots. It was often very fucking close. The tiniest mistake – a number on a grid reference, the briefest lapse in concentration pulling the trigger, or the slightest movement of the TADS – meant the difference between hitting your enemy and your friend.

By nightfall that day, the Union Flag over the JOC had been lowered to half mast. The T1 had become a T4. Marine Jonathan Wigley was pronounced dead in Camp Bastion’s field hospital; a mem-ber of Zulu Company, 45 Commando, he was twenty-one years old.

The Apache force was brought in on Operation Glacier two days later. We hadn’t heard about it before, because we hadn’t needed to. Like all covert operations, it was kept very hush hush. The brigade were only bringing us into the loop now because they needed our help.

Colonel Magowan’s southern battlegroup had been doing a lot more than just holding Garmsir. And they’d be doing it for a month already.

‘They’ve got a few jobs for us.’ Our Ops Officer briefed out the basics of the plan. ‘And they will take priority over all other Deliberate Taskings.’

Everything was being thrown at Operation Glacier, because it was the most ambitious plan the Helmand Task Force had drawn up since our arrival. As far back as early November, it had been decided that Garmsir could not be held successfully by British grit alone – however steely it was proving. The periodic counter-attacks were only cutting off a few Taliban snakeheads, and they soon grew back.

We needed to put a 7.62-mm high-velocity bullet straight through Medusa’s temple. That meant hitting the Taliban where it really hurt: smashing the long underbelly of their southern supply chain. They came to have a crack at us from Kandahar in the east, and the mountains of Uruzgan in the north. But the Taliban’s main supply route into Helmand was from the Pakistani border in the south.

Not only would severing it reduce the pressure on Garmsir, it would also reduce the flow of men and arms to the other four contested locations, impairing the Taliban’s operations across the province: up to five birds killed – or at least badly winged – with one big stone. Of course, the Taliban would eventually recover and establish a new MSR, but that would take them time – and time is what the Task Force was most keen to buy. The harder the enemy MSR was hit, the longer it would take to rebuild.

Operation Glacier had two stages: quiet and then noisy. The first was a thorough and painstaking reconnaissance of the roads they used, the places they stopped to rest, their supply dumps and command centres. Their entire southern logistical structure had to be analysed piece by piece. Concentrations of enemy fighters were the most prized targets. Only once the main concentration points had been acquired would Brigadier Jerry Thomas give the order for them to be destroyed; methodically, one after the other, and with a massive display of force. The quiet reconnaissance stage was expected to take around two months. Nothing was likely to go noisy until January. Or so we were told.

It had been no coincidence that Magowan’s Information Exploitation Battlegroup had been given Helmand’s southern stretch as their area of operations. The brigadier had obviously had a pretty good idea of what he wanted to achieve down there from the moment he arrived. The battlegroup was structured as a highly advanced recce unit, pulling together under Colonel Magowan’s command all the intelligence gathering formations the brigade had: 45 Commando’s lightly armed and highly mobile Recce Troop, C Squadron of the Light Dragoons in their armoured Scimitars, the Brigade Reconnaissance Force – the marines in-house Special Forces – and Y Troop, the expert signallers who eavesdropped on the enemy’s communications. As his muscle when he needed it, he also had two regular Royal Marine rifle companies: 42 Commando’s India Company and 45 Commando’s Zulu Company.

The units had been discreetly sent out to track even further south of Garmsir. They would come off the desert into the Green Zone’s fringes, and probe for any reaction. Some areas were quiet, others a hive of Taliban activity. They would never stay in one place long enough to give the enemy the impression they had any special interest in it. Instead, everything they witnessed was logged. If the Taliban had engaged them or they had spotted sentries, it was pinged as a hot spot and an eavesdropping station was set up to intercept all radio transmissions and phone calls.