Fire Strike 7/9

Five. I had him for an hour, and it left me in no doubt as to the value of that Rover screen. I gazed in to the blue-green glow, seeing everything the pilot saw as he viewed it, in up-close detail. As he talked me through the terrain, I was right there with him. It was an awesome bit of kit, and I couldn’t wait to see how it performed in a combat situation.

There was a well nearby, and that afternoon I’d washed all my kit. After doing the Op Loam convoy, and the journey in here, everything was minging. The well water came from a good twenty metres down, and for the split second that I chucked it over myself I was cool, in spite of the 46°C heat. I put my combats back on soaking wet, in an effort to keep the heat down.

Butsy was camping out with us at MOE, and he came over to have a quiet word at the well. The OC told me he was chuffed as nuts to have us back again. We weren’t from his regiment, but we’d become like his boys. It was good to have the A-Team back together again. We were B Company’s FST, and I was their JTAC.

That night I dossed down on my blow-up bedroll on the dirt floor. It was mid-summer, and there was no chance of rain. No one bothered with mozzie nets, although there was something that kept biting. I drifted off to sleep with the Afghan stars for company, and feeling pretty damn happy to be back where I belonged.

At 0430 the enemy hit us. Everyone was up at stand-to and ready to rumble. From out of nowhere, our position was raked with small arms fire. I heard the crack that high-velocity bullets make — a sound that had become so familiar over the last few weeks — as rounds went whining over the wall of the compound and slamming into the open desert beyond. At the same time I could hear PB Sandford getting smashed, so it was a two-pronged assault. I had an F-15, Dude One Three, overhead, but there was nothing to be seen. Via the Rover terminal downlink, I could appreciate the problem the pilot was facing. Wherever the enemy were hitting us from, they were well hidden in the dense bush of the Green Zone.

Once we’d beaten off the enemy attack, Sticky and I headed out to get a feel for the lie of the land. The compounds to either side of us were deserted, but in one we discovered these bulging hessian sacks. Inside each was a sticky, dark sugary substance — so-called ‘brown’ — the first step in refining opium poppy into heroin.

On the windowsill above the sacks was a string of Muslim prayer beads. It struck me as pretty rich the way the Talibs combined their hard-line version of Islam, and heroin. Somehow it was wrong to drink beer, but OK to bankroll a war via hard drugs. The contents of those sacks had to be worth a mint. We took the sacks, sliced them open with our bayonets, and emptied the contents into the river that ran past our position. I felt good doing it. That way, no one would be using that brown shit to buy bullets or bombs to mess up any of our lads.

A shura was in the offing. The OC wanted to explain to the local elders — blokes like the one whose compound we were camping out at — what we were doing here. As per usual we had Intel that the enemy would attack, just as soon as the shura was over.

I had a pair of A-10s and a pair of F-15s overhead. I cleared it with the OC that I’d get them to fly a low-level show of force over the meeting, then bank them up high so those at the shura were free to talk. I got all four aircraft in low and fast with flares, then banked them off flying air recces all around. It was an awesome show of force, and it must have put the wind up the enemy. Our team got in and out unmolested, but we had picked up some interesting enemy chatter. Commanders were ordering their men to stay in their ‘hidden positions, to avoid getting seen by the aircraft’. They were telling their men to await orders to attack and kill the ‘infidels’. I guess that was us, then.

The first, probing attack came at the enemy’s favoured time — first light. Overnight, a raging sandstorm had blown up to the south of us. I didn’t have any fast jets, for nothing was able to get airborne. All I had was a Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) orbiting above. The MQ-1 Predator does carry one Hellfire missile under each of its glider-like wings, but it is basically designed for surveillance tasks. At eight metres long, it orbits at 20,000 feet, the propeller to the rear of the aircraft driving it along at a cruising speed of around 130 kilometres per hour. The UAV is invisible from the ground, and totally silent. As a stealthy spy-in-the-sky it was an awesome piece of kit, and it had a fantastic downlink to my Rover terminal. But a ground attack aircraft it was not.

At 0530 all hell broke loose down at Alpha Xray. First came the angry crackle of small arms fire, as the enemy opened up on our version of the Alamo. Then came the swoosh-boom of RPG rounds slamming into the base. An instant later the platoon were returning fire, with their 50-cal heavy machine guns chewing into the enemy positions. The thump-thump-thump of the big guns was interspersed with the noise of SA80s firing off on single shot, and the boom of grenades from the lads’ underslung launchers. The battle noise rose to a climax, as the platoon down at AX went apeshit trying to repel the attack.

The lads knew that I had no air, for I’d given an all-stations warning just as soon as I’d got word of the sandstorm. Via the Predator downlink I could see the enemy pouring in a barrage of fire on to AX. Tracer rounds and RPGs were streaking through the air and slamming into the sandbagged position on the compound roof. With the GeoCell map I could pinpoint exactly where the enemy were hitting us from: it was a position codenamed Golf Bravo Nine Two. If only I had some proper warplanes overhead, I could well and truly smash them. We needed some air power badly, for the platoon down at Alpha Xray looked in danger of being overrun.

I could feel my frustration levels boiling over. But just as quickly as the contact flared up, it died down to almost nothing. As it did so the enemy chatter started going wild.

‘We have tested their defences, brothers, and now we know where to hit them,’ a Commander Jamali was telling his men. ‘Remain in your hidden bunkers and trenches: await the order for the main attack. But if the infidels come out on foot, open fire and kill them.’

It looked as if that was just a skirmish, then. The big battle was still coming. I lost Overlord Nine Three — the Predator — which was out of flight time. With the sandstorm raging I had no more aircraft, and the airspace above the Triangle remained empty.

That airspace — my airspace — had the codename ROZ Suzy. ROZ Suzy covered a 7.5-nautical-mile square box of air encompassing Adin Zai, Rahim Kalay and all terrain in the Triangle. I had to declare ‘ROZ Suzy hot’ if it all went noisy, and ‘ROZ Suzy cold’ when the contact was over. Right now ROZ Suzy had gone cold, but it was anyone’s guess as to how long it would stay that way.

At stand-to that morning we’d discovered a mangy old mutt asleep under the Vector. It was like he’d blown in with the sandstorm. He looked a bit like a Labrador, but he was in a seriously bad way. Every one of his ribs was showing; his fur was hanging off in big clumps; he was full of fleas and mites; and his two front feet were all askew, as if he’d had his legs broken.

I’m a self-confessed dog-lover with two British bulldogs — Trevor and Honey — cluttering up the living room at home. Once the fighting was over, we took the stray to the well and scrubbed him down with British Army hand wash. That dealt with the parasites. He was so weak we thought he was a goner, but we did our best to get some food into him.

Bully beef turned out to be a real favourite, and in no time he was perking up. We named him ‘Woofer’, after The Worcester and Foresters — ‘The Woofers’ — one of the regiments recently amalgamated into 2 MERCIAN. Woofer was adopted as the FST’s mascot, and he took up residence lying by the open door of the Vector.

From somewhere Sticky found Woofer a genuine metal dog’s bowl, and tucked it away under the wagon’s rear axle. Woofer quickly developed a liking for sausage and beans, and there never seemed to be any shortage of lads who wanted to unload some on him. Every now and then Woofer would wander off, but he was always back at feeding time.

Over the next twenty-four hours there was a growing sense of impending menace in the Triangle. At Monkey One Echo we had a ‘walk-in’ — a local elder who came to the base offering up Intel. He told us that the enemy had shipped in two hundred extra fighters, and that they’d resupplied themselves with shedloads of weapons and ammo. We asked him where the enemy were positioned, but he just shook his head. He had no idea exactly. He pointed downhill into the Green Zone.

‘Two hundred metres that way,’ he said. ‘Down there by two hundred metres.’

The enemy were preparing for the ‘big push’, he told us, to force us out. I was getting more and more frustrated. What were the enemy waiting for? If there was going to be a shitfight, let’s get it on was my attitude. But it was often like this in the Army: hurry up and wait.

In the burning heat of the afternoon Sticky, Chris, Throp and me decided to have a swim. There was a tributary of the Helmand River some fifty metres into the Green Zone. It was pretty insane to take a dip in the midst of fighting a war, but we needed to do something to defuse the tension. We were going spare with the heat and the waiting, and we needed to cool down.

Somebody had blown up the bridge over the river. The locals had improvised a new one using a gnarled old