Spare

Three times we were called to this same forlorn place: a string of bunkers overlooking a busy highway. We had intel that Taliban fighters were routinely gathering there. They came in three cars, jalopies, carrying RPGs and machine guns, took up positions and waited for lorries to come down the road.

Controllers had seen them blow up at least one convoy.

There were sometimes half a dozen men, sometimes as many as thirty. Taliban, clear as day.

But three times we flew there to engage, and three times we failed to get permission to fire. We never knew why.

This time we were determined things would be different.

We got there fast, saw a lorry coming down the road, saw the men taking aim. Bad things were about to happen. That lorry’s doomed, we said, unless we do something.

We requested permission to engage.

Permission denied.

We asked again. Ground Control, request permission to engage hostile target—!

Stand by…

Boom. A huge flash and an explosion on the road.

We screamed for permission.

Stand by…waiting for ground commander clearance.

We went screaming in, saw the lorry blown to pieces, saw the men jumping into their jalopies and onto motorbikes. We followed two motorbikes. We begged for permission to fire. Now we were requesting a different kind of permission: not permission to stop an act, but permission to address an act just witnessed.

This kind of permission was called 429 Alpha.

Do we have Four Two Nine Alpha to engage?

Stand by…

We kept following the two motorbikes through several villages, while griping about the bureaucracy of war, the reluctance of higher-ups to let us do what we’d been trained to do. Maybe, in our griping, we were no different from soldiers in every war. We wanted to fight: we didn’t understand larger issues, underlying geopolitics. Big picture. Some commanders often said, publicly and privately, that they feared every Taliban killed would create three more, so they were extra cautious. At times we felt the commanders were right: we were creating more Taliban. But there had to be a better answer than floating nearby while innocents got slaughtered.

Five minutes became ten became twenty.

We never did get permission.

57.

Every kill was on video.

The Apache saw all. The camera in its nose recorded all. So, after every mission, there would be a careful review of that video.

Returning to Bastion, we’d walk into the gun tape room, slide the video into a machine, which would project the kill onto wall-mounted plasma TVs. Our squadron commander would press his face against the screens, examining, murmuring—wrinkling his nose. He wasn’t merely looking for errors, this chap, he was hungry for them. He wanted to catch us in a mistake.

We called him awful names when he wasn’t around. We came close to calling him those names to his face. Look, whose side are you on?

But that was what he wanted. He was trying to provoke us, to get us to say the unspeakable.

Why?

Jealousy, we decided.

It ate him up inside that he’d never pulled a trigger in battle. He’d never attacked the enemy.

So he attacked us.

Despite his best efforts, he never found anything irregular in any of our kills. I was part of six missions that ended in the taking of human life, and they were all deemed justified by a man who wanted to crucify us. I deemed them the same.

What made the squadron commander’s attitude so execrable was this: He was exploiting a real and legitimate fear. A fear we all shared. Afghanistan was a war of mistakes, a war of enormous collateral damage—thousands of innocents killed and maimed, and that always haunted us. So my goal from the day I arrived was never to go to bed doubting that I’d done the right thing, that my targets had been correct, that I was firing on Taliban and only Taliban, no civilians nearby. I wanted to return to Britain with all my limbs, but more, I wanted to go home with my conscience intact. Which meant being aware of what I was doing, and why I was doing it, at all times.

Most soldiers can’t tell you precisely how much death is on their ledger. In battle conditions, there’s often a great deal of indiscriminate firing. But in the age of Apaches and laptops, everything I did in the course of two combat tours was recorded, time-stamped. I could always say precisely how many enemy combatants I’d killed. And I felt it vital never to shy away from that number. Among the many things I learned in the Army, accountability was near the top of the list.