now, mind, and Nicola’s dad and I were spot on. But I had no illusions as to how tough it was on a young wife with two kids when her man went off to war.
After finishing JTAC school I’d been sent for six months of continuous training and exercises, to get me combat-ready. I’d been all over the UK, Canada and the US, doing drops with dummy bombs and then live ones out on the ranges. In that six months I’d had two weeks off at Christmas with the family. Then I’d had my final JTAC exams, passed, and that was it — I was off to Afghanistan.
I’d first gone to a real war — as opposed to a ghost war like Northern Ireland or Bosnia — in 2003. The night I was leaving for Iraq I’d gone into my son’s bedroom to say goodbye. It was 3am and he was fast asleep. I went to give him a kiss, and suddenly I was all choked up. I couldn’t stop crying. Christ, I thought, this could be the last time I ever see him.
By the time I got to The Light Dragoons’ base, I was still all red-eyed.
‘What’s up with you, mate?’ one of the lads had asked.
‘Nothing. I’ve just been saying goodbye to the nipper. I ended up blubbering.’
Well, that was it — a load of the other lads came right out and admitted the same. They’d been crying too, when saying goodbye to their women and their kids. They’d been standing outside the gates for twenty minutes chain-smoking fags to try to dry their eyes out.
It wasn’t easy on relationships, being away fighting a war. But as far as I was concerned that’s what I’d signed up for at age seventeen, when I’d joined up. All I’d ever wanted was join the British Army. Since the age of four when I was given my first Action Man soldier, soldiering was all I’d ever been interested in.
At first I’d done pretty well at school. I’d got nine O-levels, and my parents were chuffed as nuts with me. Trouble was, school just wasn’t for me. I was the only one in my class with tattoos, and with the burning desire to be a soldier. I left school and got a job with a local locksmith, to kill time until I was seventeen and could sign up. I did a lot of work assisting the police breaking into cars that had been stolen and abandoned. That was pretty handy — learning how to nick cars at age sixteen.
But the owner of the locksmiths was having trouble with his marriage, and one day he came into work drunk and tried to take it out on me. Being a punchy lad I floored him and was given the sack. I was on the cusp of my seventeenth birthday, so I told my dad I was off to join the Army. He told me that I’d never last two weeks. ‘Two weeks and you’ll be out,’ was what he said. My dad’s words were like a red rag to a bull.
The Light Dragoons are based in the north-east of England, so lads from my neck of the woods automatically went into them. When I went to sign up the recruiting officer told me that the regiment operated behind enemy lines, in tanks. I’d always wanted to drive a tank, so that was me in.
I lasted the first two weeks of basic training, and after that there was no looking back. I joined The Light Dragoons on 14 February 1996. On my first day one of the lads, a bloke called Gary ‘Baldy’ Wilkinson, nicknamed me ‘Bommer’. It was pretty obvious how Baldy had got his nickname: he had alopecia, a disease that makes the hair fall out. But I didn’t have a clue why he’d decided to call me ‘Bommer’.
When I asked, he said he’d named me after Herol ‘Bomber’ Graham, a black British boxer. His career had peaked in the late 1980s, but he was trying to make a comeback. After that the name just stuck. A year later and if you asked the lads for Paul Grahame, they’d not have a clue who you meant. Everyone knew me as plain ‘Bommer’.
The Light Dragoons are a Formation Recce regiment. Their role is to forge ahead of the main battle group in small units, gathering intelligence on the enemy. Troop positions, areas of special interest, high-value targets — those were the kind of elements that interested us. In formal Army speak, our role was to enable a ‘done-by- recce-pull’ — pulling the main battle group through, with its big tanks, convoys and troop numbers.
But that was conventional war fighting, and originally designed to combat a Soviet threat. In Iraq and Afghanistan we were waging a totally different kind of warfare. We were up against insurgents who wore no uniforms and did their best to hide amongst the local population. In Afghanistan in particular, The Light Dragoons formation recce concept had to be radically redrawn.
In Helmand the new soldiering ethic was to work as small, highly mobile units independent of resupply for days at a time. We’d carry all of our food, water, fuel and ammo with us, using CRVT (Combat Recce Vehicle — Tracked) vehicles for cargo-carrying and mobility. We’d be a recce and strike force, with sniper teams, Javelin missile units, and Scimitar light tanks providing firepower.
The role of the JTAC was central to this new concept of war fighting. Working behind enemy lines, we’d have eyes and ears prior to other units, placing JTACs in an ideal position to smash any targets of opportunity. The JTAC could call in airstrikes where the unit didn’t have the firepower, or the reach, to hit. That’s how I’d ended up being put up for training as a Light Dragoons JTAC. By then I’d been ten years in the Army, and I was a qualified crew commander, which meant I’d been trained how to command and fight my own Scimitar light tank. It was rock-hard to get on to the JTAC training, and I was dead happy to be put up for it.
Prior to Afghanistan, a lot of soldiers had trained as JTACs, but they’d never really got to use their specialist skills. Even in Iraq, commanders had failed to use the JTACs properly, or to integrate them into battle plans. Few understood the JTAC’s capabilities or role — that of being integrated with the fighting troops, and calling in danger-close air missions on the front line.
But my course was specifically tailored to Afghanistan, and there was a feeling that in Helmand, the JTACs were really going to come into their own. I started at JFACTSU (Joint Forward Air Control Training and Standards Unit), based at RAF Leeming in north Yorkshire. JFACTSU has a winged tommy gun and pair of rockets as a cap badge.
My instructor was a Corporal Grant ‘Cuff’ Cuthbertson, and he’d been out in Helmand serving with the Gurkhas, and doing the job for real. He told me that as a JTAC, I’d get to see action for sure in Afghanistan. But first, there was the best part of a year’s training ahead of me, for which Cuff would be my mentor and guide.
Being a JTAC, the instructors explained, was about bringing the biggest and the best weapons systems to any party with pinpoint precision and accuracy. It made perfect sense to me. It was the mechanics of it that were so challenging. We started with the fundamentals — learning the theory of bringing in low-, medium- and high-level air attacks, and what munitions to choose for which target.
Then we moved on to map-reading, and how to plot targets. My dad was big into hill walking, so my compass and orienteering skills weren’t all bad. I’d pretty much mastered them in the Army. But working to latitude and longitude grid references was all new to me, and a real mind game. We were tested every week, on the dreaded Friday afternoons. Fail those Friday tests, and the instructors would bin you.
You could pass all the exams, but that still didn’t mean you’d make it as a JTAC. It was the instructors’ role to ensure we trainees had those certain, intangible qualities that were required of a fully combat-ready JTAC: you had to have the gift of the gab, and to be able to think on your feet, whilst splitting your mind into many different dimensions all at once.
This was how the instructors put it:
They taught us big, medium and small — as the priority of features to talk the pilot on to. You’d start big, choosing a distinctive woodstrip, white building or a yellow field between two green ones. Once you’d got the pilot visual with that, you’d go smaller, and finally to pinpoint detail. With each talk-on you had to ‘see’ it all from the pilot’s perspective. You had to put yourself in the cockpit, and imagine his view of the battlefield over the nose cone of the aircraft. From there you’d use the clock-distance-object method for the talk-on. For example:
That aspect — doing the talk-on from the pilot’s perspective — was what most of the trainees failed on. JFACTSU is purely an intellectual course, with no physical aspect to it. With most of the lads having come from elite units, it was taken as read that we were up for the physical side of things.
There were twelve on my course, and at the end I passed out ‘limited combat-ready’. I was given a certificate, a team photograph of the lads on the course, plus a black leather-bound logbook, for entering my controls. Months of dry-run training and exercises would follow before I could take my new skills to war.
Cuff coached me over the months ahead, becoming my Sub-FAC, or mentor. He watched over me in the UK as I did dummy runs on the ranges, using aircraft dropping concrete bombs. Then in Canada and the US he ‘daddied’
