Fire Strike 7/9

pilot’s voice. ‘Sir, we got a problem. I’m visual four kids in the vicinity of the mortar tube. And sir, one of the mortar team is holding a kid right beside the tube.’

Shit! The pilot was tipping in and I had seconds to make the call. What the fuck did I do? If I cleared the bomb, I was as good as murdering four innocent children. If I aborted, the mortar team would send up more rounds to smash our lads.

‘Dude One Five, Widow Seven Nine, wait out.’

I yelled down the hatch into the Vector’s interior, ‘Chris, the fucking pilot’s got four kids at the mortar tube! I can’t fucking do it! That bastard will play tricks with my head for the rest of my life…’

I didn’t bother completing the sentence. ‘Dude One Five, Widow Seven Nine. What d’you reckon?’ I asked the pilot.

‘Widow Seven Nine, it’s you who buys the bomb,’ the pilot replied.

‘Then I can’t fucking do it. I got two kids at home. I can’t do it. Abort! Abort!’

‘Affirmative: aborting the attack. And many thanks for that call, Widow Seven Nine. I wouldn’t have done the run for you anyway. I got kids back home.’

Barely moments after I had aborted that airstrike, the call came up on the net that every soldier dreads.

‘Man down! Man down! MAAAN DOWWNN!’

The instant we had that ‘man down’ call it all went horribly quiet on the net.

It was the first ‘man down’ call we’d had of the deployment, and no one could quite believe it. For several seconds the entire company seemed to hold its breath, and the jets I was controlling went completely out of my mind.

A voice broke into the silence. ‘Charlie Charlie One, roger, go firm.’ It was the OC. As always, he was right in the thick of it. ‘All stations: win the firefight. Orders two minutes.’

The OC’s words unleashed all my pent-up emotion. I felt the red mist of animal aggression rising. There were enemy fighters out there using kids as human shields, whilst our lads were getting smashed. But I had to hold my anger in check, or I’d lose the ability to do my job properly. All I knew at this stage was that we had a badly injured lad somewhere down in the Green Zone. And right now, we had to get him the hell out of there.

Ten MAN DOWN

‘Widow TOC, Widow Seven Nine,’ I yelled into my TACSAT. ‘We’ve got a man down! Repeat: man down! We need immediate IRT.’

IRT was the Incident Response Team, a Chinook with medics and an Apache escort on permanent standby at Camp Bastion. They sat on the flight line 24/7 waiting for emergencies like this one. It was the JTAC’s role to get the IRT in the air.

‘Roger that. What’s the severity of the injured?’ the Widow controller asked me.

‘No position to tell you,’ I snapped back. ‘But I need IRT right now.’

By the time the platoon commander had got me the casualty report, with the soldier’s ZAP number — his unique British Army ID — I knew this lad was in a very bad way. He was classed as a T1, the severest casualty level possible.

Time seemed to slow to a crawl as I waited for the IRT to launch. The horrific thought crossed my mind that it might have been a mortar round that had taken our man down. If so, had my saving those four Afghan kids’ lives resulted in one of our lads getting smashed?

Major Butt had always told us that if we had a man down, the focus of the company would immediately switch to extracting the casualty and getting the lads out of the shit. In the carnage that was going on all around us the net went berserk. Win the firefight. Those had been the OC’s words. Everyone knew that we’d lost someone, and the fire from our side was targeted now with a burning anger. The lads were using accurate shots to put the enemy down.

‘Charlie Charlie One, all stations,’ Butsy’s voice came on the net again. ‘Orders: 6 Platoon, extract with casualty. 5 Platoon, move to river to give covering fire. 4 Platoon, secure river crossing. Sergeant major to recce route back to LZ. Somme Platoon to provide rear security and secure LZ. FST no change.’

It was a kick-arse set of orders. Under heavy fire the 2 MERCIAN lads had pushed across the river that lay to the north of the Green Zone. To extract the casualty they’d have to cross back over, and Butsy’s focus was on securing that river crossing. The Landing Zone (LZ) for the Chinook was set in the open desert halfway to PB North, and the lads from Somme Company would secure it.

The Czech unit were to stay on the high ground, hitting the enemy’s northern flank. They were driving Toyota jeeps, complete with DShKs — pronounced ‘Dushkas’ — a monster piece of kit. The Dushka is a Soviet-era 12.7mm anti-aircraft gun. It can fire only in automatic mode, putting down six hundred rounds a minute. Those rounds can chew their way through walls and trees, and hopefully they were doing just that to the enemy positions right now.

It was my job to get the Chinook into that LZ, plus I still had my jets to control. At the same time I had at least one active mortar team, and I couldn’t bring the helicopter in with that still firing. One mortar down on the Chinook, and we would be in a world of pain. There was a squelch of static, and I grabbed the TACSAT.

‘Widow Seven Nine, Widow TOC. Ugly Five Three is bringing in the heavy call sign. Expect IRT to be with you in two-five, repeated two-five minutes.’

‘Roger that,’ I replied. The casevac Chinook was twenty-five minutes away.

I put a call through to the F-15s. ‘Dude One Six, Widow Seven Nine. Sitrep: we have a man down and platoons are extracting. I want you to fly repeated shows of force over the enemy positions. If you spot any enemy fighters, you’re to smash ’em.’

‘Affirmative,’ came the US pilot’s reply. ‘Commencing shows of force now.’

‘Dude One Five, Widow Seven Nine. I want you overhead that mortar grid, looking mean and nasty. If there’s a moment when those fuckers aren’t holding kids around the tube, I want you to smash ’em.’

‘Affirmative. They won’t be gettin’ any second chances, Widow Seven Nine.’

It took an agonising sixty minutes for 6 Platoon to fight its way to the borders of the Green Zone. At times the lads were crawling along ditches carrying the casualty, under intense sniper fire. At others they were chest- deep in the river, passing the wounded man from shoulder to shoulder as machine-gun rounds whipped and snarled overhead. In the process, two more lads were wounded.

For the last thirty minutes I’d been arguing fiercely with the Chinook pilots to remain on station orbiting over the desert. They were running low on fuel and getting anxious, but we were desperate to get our wounded men out.

‘We’re nearly there!’ I kept telling the pilots. ‘We’re nearly there!’

Finally, with the Chinook sipping air, the 2 MERCIAN’s sergeant major, a real champion of a bloke called Jason ‘Peachy’ Peach, decided some drastic action was required to get the wounded blokes out. He was in a WMIK and volunteered to go in and get them. Along with Corporal Hill, his driver, and one of the medics, he set off from the high ground into the Green Zone.

The trouble was, a sharp ravine bisected the ridge line, and it lay between their position and the wounded. The only way to skirt round it was for Peachy to drive into the Green Zone, passing in front of the entire company and heading into the enemy guns. The lads were still taking massive fire, and as soon as Peachy’s WMIK pitched up in the jungle it became the focus of the enemy attack.

As rounds slammed into the vehicle and RPGs roared overhead, Peachy and the medic blatted away with the WMIK’s 50-cal and Gimpy machine guns. Crashing over ruts and with Corporal Hill driving the race of his life, the open-topped Land Rover somehow made it through without being blown up or anyone being killed. The wounded were loaded aboard, and now Peachy and his lads had to return the way they’d come.

The enemy knew it. They’d set a series of RPG ambushes on the route, and as the WMIK thundered back