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Arrow was the US Apache’s call sign. Bloody fantastic. That was two Apaches, an A-10, a pair of Harriers and a B-1B — and none of them had seen a sausage. Somehow, the enemy had crept in right under our noses without being detected. So much for the sound commander ruse, and our eyes in the sky.
‘Is that the best you bunch of women can manage?’ Sticky’s Bro bawled into the microphone. ‘Instead of howling like dogs, why don’t you come out and fight us?’
We carried on abusing them for a while, but all we got in answer were those wolf cries. If we couldn’t beat ’em, maybe we should join them. I started howling into the microphone. Sticky’s Brother stared at me for a second, and then he was laughing his wheels off.
The rest of the lads on the rooftop got right into it, and soon we were all howling away. So there we were — them barking at us and us barking at them. It truly was barking. After a while the enemy still hadn’t opened fire, and we realised that our howls weren’t cutting it. I reckoned we should’ve brought Woofer with us, and given him a go on the sound commander.
Woofer had stuck with us through thick and thin. No matter how many times PB Sandford got hammered by mortars, 107s or RPGs, Woofer never deserted us. The lads appreciate real loyalty, and we had warmed to Woofer as only British soldiers can. He was fat and sleek and healthy, in spite of all the running for cover from the bullets and bombs.
In fact, PB Sandford was getting to be a right zoo. A flock of ducks had colonised the pool of dirty water next to the well. The lads were forever going and feeding them bits and pieces from the ratpacks that they didn’t much fancy. The ducks were as happy as pigs in shit, and they’d recently been joined by a bunch of noisy, nosey chickens.
Plus there were all the stray cats that the lads were feeding with their leftovers. I’m not such a cat man myself, but I did kind of warm to the chickens. But what won top prize had to be Throp’s donkey. One day he’d turned up at the gates riding bareback on a donkey, a set of makeshift reins gripped in the one hand. Throp’s a big lad, and as he trotted back and forth on the ridge line his toes could touch the ground. He had the lot of us killing ourselves. What made it all the funnier was that Throp never once so much as smiled, or lost his composure. You’d have thought he was riding the Grand National, the way he carried on.
But no matter what animal noises we tried down at Alpha Xray, not a thing seemed to do it: we just couldn’t get a rise out of the enemy. It never got close to kicking off, and by 0300 I’d lost all my air. There was nothing for it: along with the rest of the lads I dossed down on the dirt at Alpha Xray and slept like a lamb.
With Woofer to keep fed, Sticky had one more mouth to cater for. He’d taken to boiling up job lots of meals- in-the-bag in the empty GPMG ammo tin. The day after our warped night’s howling at the enemy, Sticky went to hoof the lid off the tin to check on his cordon bleu cooking. As he did so, the pressure blew up in his face.
The ammo tin let rip and Sticky was left soaking wet and howling. The lot of us couldn’t help it — we were rolling around on the dirt with laughter. That was until we realised how badly he’d been hurt. His face was blistering up, as were his forearms. Sticky was so bad he had to be casevaced to Camp Bastion. Word was that he’d be out of action for a couple of days at least, and the medics were worried that he’d have permanent scars. Still, the show had to go on.
Twenty Five
JASON’S MAD MISSION
At stand-to the following morning I had an A-10 check in to my ROZ. As per usual, the airwaves were going crazy, with Commander Hadin urging his men to ‘ignore the jet, and prepare to attack the main camp of the enemy’.
We’d heard it all before, and most of the 2 MERCIAN lads went back to their pits to get some extra kip. But the intercepts were as good an excuse as any to give those lads a second early-morning wake-up call.
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‘Yes, sir. Commencing my run-in now for a show of force.’
I stood on the roof searching all around me for the Warthog. I could hear the growing whine of its jet engines as it swooped in towards us. All of a sudden the squat, ugly black form of the jet reared out of the sunrise, wingtips just over the HESCO walls.
The pilot screamed over the compound, banking around the sangar, the tidal wave roar of his passing smashing into the base. From JTAC Central the pilot was level with me, he was that low.
I was just getting on my TACSAT to congratulate him on a firstclass show of force, when the lads came tumbling out of their beds, fully tooled up and ready to rumble.
Everyone was screaming all at once: ‘What the fuck’s going on?’
Then they noticed me on the roof doubled up.
‘What the fuck?’ someone started yelling.
‘What’re you up to, you wanker?’ another cried.
‘We’re TIC-imminent,’ I managed to choke out. ‘I had to do a low-level…’
‘Fuck off we are!’ one of the lads cried.
‘All the fucking terps are asleep!’ roared another.
‘You crazy fucker!’ yelled a third.
‘We are, lads,’ I insisted. ‘We’re TIC-imminent. It was all for your own good.’
Later that morning some elders turned up at the gates. The top news was that we’d smashed a lot of enemy with the air missions over the last few days. It was amazing how much Intel we could get off the locals. They wanted the Taliban out of the Triangle just as much as we did, and would risk brutal reprisals against them or their families. More often than not we’d be wandering about in the Green Zone, stop to have a chat with someone, and there’d be a peachy bit of information passed over.
Whenever we were out on patrol and it wasn’t kicking off, the kids would gather round. The local nippers were fascinated by us lot of pasty-faced foreigners carrying all this space-age kit. We’d hand out the sweets, and as we did so I’d try and whip the caps off the nearest boys’ heads. The locals wore these skull caps beaded in all different colours. A lot of the boys looked to be around seven or eight years old, the same kind of age as my Harry. Like him, they were cheeky and curious, and they loved playing that dodge-the-crazy-foreigner-hat-grabber game.
It was crap for security, of course, for any one of those kids could have been a suicide bomber. But it was great for hearts and minds. It was obvious you couldn’t win over the locals without having contact with them, and there was no better point of contact than the kids.
The locals wanted the Taliban out of The Triangle just as much as we did. And once they were gone, the elders wanted things to go back ‘to normal’, which meant they wanted pretty much the same as we did. With things ‘back to normal’ we’d all return to a life at home with our folks. We’d be reunited with wives and kids and girlfriends, and put Helmand behind us. And here in the Triangle the locals could plant their crops, feed their families and put their kids through school, in the hope that life might improve in the future.
But not with the Taliban holding sway. Those bearded lunatics wanted to force the country back into the Dark Ages. In some warped, pseudo-medieval throwback, girls would be banned from school, women treated like cattle, and non-Muslims declared the eternal enemy. Under their rule, the most a young lad like my Harry could aspire to was to blow himself up, with the promise of seventy-two virgins to follow.
With the elders warning us that Commander Hadin was shipping in new fighters, the fight looked to be far from over. Sure enough, that evening Alpha Xray got whacked. It was 1900 hours when a volley of RPGs smashed into the base walls. With each new hit the cracks in the rooftop were getting ever wider, and new splits in the walls
