It’s Just an Exercise, Home Soon
26 April 2011. K’s Journal
The morning Will went away he was up early. This is unusual for him. He’s always been a student and he loves his bed. But today he was busy, like he always is when he’s off on some exciting trip. I didn’t share his excitement. Six weeks of being alone with a newborn baby and a three-year-old and a dog and two hens and a house and bills and cars and monotonous routine counting down to phone calls. I looked out of the bedroom window. One hen, only one left now. I could see the white one, which had been ailing and refused to roost the previous night, was now quite dead. The black one did similar while W was in Afghanistan a couple of months earlier and I’d been rather irritated then, eight months pregnant, dealing with the fallout of another one of his ‘Good Life’ projects. Behind me slept two tired girls, one delicate and inquisitive the other now established in a 2 hours sleep/30 minutes feed/noise and sewage cycle mothers everywhere are familiar with. Inside I knew six weeks was doable and then the summer together to help build a family.
I was tired. W going to Arizona right after our second daughter arrived and just a few weeks after he’d got back from Afghanistan which he’d gone to just after coming back from sea which he’d gone to immediately after another couple of months in Arizona and at sea again, which he’d… you get the picture. They don’t spend much time at home. It’s one exercise or deployment quickly followed by another.
When our first daughter was born W was in Baghdad. He’d saved his R & R and made it back just in time for the birth, but a week later he was back in Iraq. The inquisitive, delicate one was eight weeks old by the time he came home. That was the start of this really. He got back from a long stay in Iraq and barely got to know his baby before getting on with the Apache course. Once that course starts it gathers a momentum. You just have to go with it. You give up control when they get into that line of work. Dealing with dead hens when you just want a cuddle, well that’s part of the lack of control.
So he was off again.
Sometimes I can’t help feeling that it is all a selfish indulgence. He’s excited, I’m struggling. Where’s the team in that? We didn’t get married to live apart and I didn’t get married to live an isolated life on some windy airfield with one bar on my phone reception and miles away from my friends. Him poking off to sea to play with helicopters seemed an utter self-indulgence, and the dead hen was an extra insult. Still, six weeks, just six weeks…
I made plans to see friends; my parents would come and visit too. It was spring and the Easter weekend had been glorious. We lazed in our hammock in the garden, all four of us, hens free ranging, dog snoozing, with W telling us that the summer would soon be here and we’d have a super time in the Lakes. I also remember him pacing up and down the garden the day before Good Friday, mobile phone pushed against ear and serious faced. ‘Just work, someone telling me how they wanted me to deal with risk if it gets… well, bigger, and a message of good luck,’ he said.
He’d also disappeared into work on his only day off. He came back all frustrated and really got me annoyed when he said the sooner he got in the ship the better. ‘Thanks,’ I said, hurt and tired and about to be alone again.
‘Sorry, it’s just… well you know, the ship want us and they want this to succeed, it doesn’t always feel like that here.’
I knew he was passionate about his project, that he understood it so well and that he’d bashed his head against a brick wall repeatedly along the way dealing with people who, it seemed, would rather see him fail. I knew all of that and was angry for him. I was also angry because he gave up some of our last day together to bash that wall again.
Despite all that, there was a slim chance that this Arab Spring may make their grey-line-cruise a little longer. I could just imagine them sailing around the Med looking all tough on the telly to put the pressure on some dictator while I enquired whether we would lose the deposit on our cottage in the Lakes if he didn’t get back in time.
He was very careful to speak to all the families in the Community Centre about this and I went along to hear what he had to say.
‘We have not been warned off for operations, but we could end up playing some small part if we are asked to,’ he said. All rather vague, but what else could he say?
‘Where might you go?’ an understandably concerned wife enquired.
‘Not sure, but we will be in a ship and there are four or five countries in the Med with political unrest right now.’
‘What might you do in any of those countries?’ Another concerned wife.
‘Anything from a specific mission to strike a target to the much more likely show of force or deterrence in support of an evacuation operation,’ came the answer.
The Welfare Officer said he would keep us all up to date if anything changed. He and W were both at pains to explain that the facts will come from them, not from Facebook or the neighbour or the girl in the NAAFI, or the telly or the newspaper.
So, a meeting in the Community Centre where the squadron commander told the families he was off on exercise, but, just in case, he thought he might tell us he was ready for anything… we were reassured and perplexed all at once.
On Tuesday, 26 April 2011 the Arab Spring, Afghanistan, a NEO (whatever that is), the recession, patch-politics and all the rest was just white noise in my head as I scooped a dead hen into a bag and tearfully asked my neighbour what to do with it. W was off again.
The day after Easter, the squadron embarked. We were nervous. Nervous because we were flying over the sea again, and nervous because we half expected a diversion somewhere in the Mediterranean. We flew three Apaches in formation from Suffolk, through London following the Thames westward, and then south-west out over the coast to meet HMS Ocean. We found her in the Channel, ten miles from her home port of Plymouth. She cut an impressive figure, 21,500 tonnes and 667ft long, battleship grey and stuffed full of sailors and Royal Marines, blue sky behind and sea state two.
With Little Shippers tutoring my approach and saving our embarrassment on the radios, I led the patrol into the starboard wait, and one by one we filtered in to land.
Our three Apaches joined the Lynx and Sea Kings from the Commando Helicopter Force to make up the Tailored Air Group supporting Royal Marines from 40 Commando. This was all about training with the Royal Marines, and making the Apache work at sea. We knew how many flying hours we had (enough), how much ammunition we were allowed to fire (very little, and permission was required from home to fire each time) and where we would get a run ashore (Crete and Malta, with perhaps Gibraltar on the way home). Six weeks and we would be done. We numbered only nine aircrew, with the tenth, Josh ‘JB’ Charles, still completing his Apache refresher training ashore and scheduled to fly out and join us in Crete in a few weeks.
On board Ocean it was the usual Army meets Navy meets Royal Marines standoff. All Royal wanted to do was get ashore; all we wanted to do was avoid getting caught on the wrong side of the thousands of rules yet to be learned; and all the Ship’s Company wanted was to have their ship back. The scene in the wardroom said it all. There were two and a half corners with seating fixed around the walls, the rest being the bar. The largest, most comfortable corner, the one where the biscuits got put out at ‘stand easy’, belonged to the Ship’s Company. They sat in a tight group, all known to one another, understood seats, pecking order and all. No one else was allowed in. We had invaded, they were disappointed. The other corner, the one with all the car magazines and the best view of the telly, was dominated by Royal. He didn’t care who anyone else was, he was Royal and that was that. Sleeves up, guns and ink, they were the tough guys. The half corner and the bar (standing room only) was left to the Air Group, which included us. Everyone sneered at the WAFUs. It didn’t matter which Service the aircrew were from; they were aircrew, enough said.