Fire Strike 7/9

team on it.

The Apache was to shadow them in.

Twenty Three THUNDERBOX MAYHEM

Every time you went for a piss you had to do ten pull-ups. That was the law. I reckoned it was a bit harsh on me, ’cause I drank so much tea, but there it was. All the lads at PB Sandford had agreed to it, and woe betide anyone who shirked.

We’d already been hit by something that morning — maybe a 107mm barrage from Qada Kalay. We’d been in the middle of a cricket-off, which the Sky crew were filming. Suddenly, there was a yell of ‘Incoming!’, and everyone went scrambling for body armour and helmets, not to mention some cover.

Now we were at the pull-up bar. We’d cobbled together a gym from old ammo crates, steel pickets and black nasty. It did the job. The pull-up bar was a beam slung between two walls. It was getting a bit competitive, as we had the Sky cameraman filming us.

The pull-up king in the FST was Chris. He wasn’t called Johnny Bravo for nothing. He’d just managed twenty- four. Sticky had followed with a miserly eighteen. The most I’d ever done was twenty-two, but I was determined to beat Sticky. I got on the bar and reached sixteen, when suddenly the lads started going wild.

‘Come on, Bommer! Come on, Bommer!’

‘You can do one!’

‘Come on, you fat fucker!’

I did another — seventeen — and the lads were going crazy. They were doing just about anything they could think of to make me laugh. I was trying not to, but as I went for number eighteen — making me evens with Sticky — I lost it. I gave up and dropped off the bar.

I turned around to find the Sky cameraman filming me. He’d only started shooting when I was on number sixteen, so it looked as if I’d managed just the one pull-up. I have a giant Angel tattooed across my shoulders, and it isn’t exactly a common tattoo. Anyone seeing that on the news would know instantly that it was me. The Sky cameraman was pissing himself. The lads were laughing their rocks off. I waited until they’d calmed down a bit, then tried giving the Sky bloke one of my looks. But I couldn’t help the silly grin that kept twitching at the corners of my mouth.

‘If you put that on Sky News, I’ll batter you and hand you over to the Taliban,’ I told him.

We cut a deal that the footage would never be shown, as long as I pulled in some class airstrikes whilst the Sky crew were with us.

Sadly, that morning we were losing the OC. The resupply convoy was setting off for FOB Price, taking Major Butt with it. He was devastated to be leaving his lads, and before the end of their tour, but orders were orders. He’d done his allotted stretch in command, and a new guy was taking over.

It was hard to see Butsy go: he’d been like a father to us. He did a little speech, which was all about how he didn’t want to leave after all we had been through together. But he had to let the new OC come in and do his job. Major Butt had been fucking brilliant. He was a fantastic OC. As he spoke, a few of the lads were close to tears.

I was gutted to see Butsy go, but I warmed to the new OC quickly. Major Stewart Hill was a tall, dark-haired rake of a guy, and he was to prove himself to be a top bloke. He was the kind of officer who wouldn’t ask his lads to do anything he wouldn’t do — a bit like Butsy, really. We couldn’t have wished for a better replacement in the new OC.

We got orders from Major Hill to push a patrol down to Alpha Xray. The Sky team were going to try a night down at the Alamo. Much that I might want the cameraman to get captured and that tape destroyed, I reckoned I might need some air on hand. After all, we were going to have a High Value Target (HVT) — the Sky cameraman and correspondent — deep in bandit country.

I was told that no aircraft could be spared, not unless we had a TIC. So I put a call in to Widow Eight Seven, a fellow British JTAC who was the nearest to me in the area. A new base — PB Arnhem — had been established to the south-west of us. Widow Eight Seven was the JTAC there, and most days we’d have a chat on the air about what we’d been up to. He told me that he had a pair of F-15s flying air recces for him, but that nothing much was happening. PB Arnhem was about seven kilometres away. If I needed air, I could borrow Widow Eight Seven’s F-15s.

At 1745 the patrol set out. There were sixteen-odd lads, plus the Sky cameraman and the correspondent, Alex Crawford, who looked vaguely familiar from the news. They crept down Route Crow into the dusk valley. A hundred metres short of Alpha Xray, the darkened bush exploded in gunfire and the fiery trails of RPG rounds. In seconds, the patrol was pinned down and deep in the shit. They were being hit from fire points all along Golf Bravo Nine One, the enemy’s favourite point of attack. I radioed my fellow JTAC, to see if I could rustle up some air.

‘Widow Eight Seven, Widow Seven Nine: patrol in contact. Can I borrow one of your Dude call signs?’

‘’Course you can, mate,’ the JTAC replied. ‘Dude Zero Seven, Widow Seven Nine is now your controlling ground station.’

‘Roger that,’ came the pilot’s reply. ‘Widow Seven Nine, Dude Zero Seven: what can I do for you, sir?’

‘I’ve got a patrol down at Alpha Xray in heavy contact. Enemy are firing from treelines running south to north and west to east, forming a cross at Golf Bravo Nine One.’

‘I know your area well, sir,’ the pilot replied. ‘I was with you a couple of days back dropping danger-close to you boys.’

It was one of the pilots from the Saving Private Graham patrol. It was good to have him with us again.

‘I want that enemy position strafed with 20mm, on a north to south run,’ I told him.

‘Roger that. Inbound two minutes. Stand by for sixty-seconds call.’

I double-checked my coordinates on the maps. It was a couple of days since I’d controlled a jet doing a live drop on live targets. Happy that all was as it should be, I turned to the new OC who was standing at the Vector’s open door.

‘Sir, I’ve got an F-15 coming in to strafe the treeline to the north-east of the patrol.’

‘Happy with that,’ the boss confirmed.

‘Prepare to give the sixty-seconds call, sir.’

I was asking him to put out the all-stations sixty-seconds warning. For an instant the OC stared at me, as if to say — How on earth have you managed that? It was barely three minutes since the start of the contact, and CAS would never normally be with you in under fifteen. There was no time to explain.

The pilot came up on the TACSAT. ‘Sixty seconds out.’

‘Give an all-stations sixty-seconds warning, sir,’ I repeated. Then I cleared the pilot in. ‘Friendlies one-twenty metres west of target. You’re clear hot.’

‘Tipping in.’ A beat. ‘Engaging.’

‘Bbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrzzzt.’

The strafe echoed across the darkened valley, as the 20mm rounds hammered the north–south woodstrip. Just as soon as the roar of the gunfire had died away, I got the pilot to bank around and do a second strafe to hit the west to east treeline.

‘Tipping in,’ the pilot confirmed. ‘Visual two pax with weapons in woodline.’

‘Hit ’em,’ I told him. ‘No change friendlies. Clear hot.’

A second burst of cannon fire echoed across the Green Zone.

‘BDA: two dead,’ the pilot confirmed.

I banked him around again, and did a third run of 20mm. Then I asked him to do a recce of the terrain at Golf Bravo Nine One.

‘Visual three pax with weapons and muzzle flashes in a ditch just north of Golf Bravo Nine One,’ the pilot told me.