The tribes were set. All three groups were busy enough with their own work, and establishing a convivial relationship didn’t matter. Royal could roll up his sleeves and push weights around in the gym. The Ship’s Company could carry on thinking they were the only people who knew how to break into the beer fridge. And the aircrew, who had worked out how to break into the beer fridge on day two, could sneak a quick postnight-flying drink as long as no one from the Ship’s Company was there to find out.
The usual land grabs on spare compartments were made and they were then reallocated. Computers were in short supply, so they were reallocated too. The hangar was stuffed full of Apache, Lynx and Sea King helicopters, and the engineers from all three embarked squadrons had a real-time game of 3D Tetris to manage the priorities under the fixed crane as well as the up-lift and down-lift and the whole flight deck spotting of the aircraft. Soldiers and sailors rushed about folding blades, moving aircraft, refuelling, de-fuelling, arming and de-arming, while the engineers worked on the deck and in the hangar. Ocean wasn’t full, but she had a lot of aircrew, soldiers and engineers who were new to her and to the sea. Her crew were right to be aghast at the newcomers. We were shabby, ignorant and slow and we had to grasp maritime philosophy quickly if we were to remain welcome beyond the normal two-week tolerance period.
The man charged with bringing all this together and making aviation sense of it was ‘Wings’. As luck would have it, Wings in HMS Ocean was a Royal Marine. He had flown Cobra AH-1 with the United States Marine Corps, run the aviation show in Helmand, spent years at sea and understood all the tribes. He had grown up in Glasgow in the seventies and eighties, run the gauntlet of the bully boys in his green school blazer and carried a savvy intuition and ability to resolve any human fault lines with him to Lympstone. Hugely welcoming, with impeccable manners, the man with the smile and the answers ran the hangar, the flight deck and everything that flew. He was our critical link to the ship, an aviator on the Ships’ Company.
On my team the uncluttering of the flight deck and the management of the engineers fell to Doug Reid and his 25 Army Air Corps ground crew soldiers and to Charlotte ‘CJ’ Joyce with her 35 Aviation Technicians of the REME.
Doug had been in the squadron almost a year and he’d been thrashed, mostly by me. He arrived straight out of Sandhurst, full of enthusiasm, mild eccentricity and big talk about how he was all set for Afghanistan. I had met him in Arizona the previous summer and after listening to him tell me about himself and where he wanted to go, I asked him if he knew the difference between a ship and a boat.
‘You can fit a boat on a ship, but you can’t fit a ship on a boat,’ was his reply.
‘Outstanding, you’re in! We’re going to sea, not Afghanistan, and I have no idea what we’ll do when we get there, but trust me we’ll have a laugh.’
I gave him all I knew on the maritime role. He had served to the rank of corporal before commissioning and knew the Army and soldiers well enough. But he was new to aviation, and I had spent the last ten months scrutinising his team and encouraging the senior NCOs to bring on the new boy in whatever way they thought best. His programme lacked the structure of the Afghanistan squadrons and he had to battle hard to keep me from getting into his business. He had the bulk of the squadron soldiers directly under his leadership, and every stress and pain they felt had to be managed by him. Six weeks in Ocean in the Med looked like a pretty tough working holiday, not one that many of his team would volunteer for.
In the hangar CJ had a different set of issues. She had enough engineers and they were very experienced on the aircraft, but again Ocean was new and they had the culture shock of Army meets Navy to get over. Hers was an excellent team. This embarkation was supposed to be a respite from the Afghanistan rotation and the high tempo that forms the baseline of the Attack Helicopter Force. The embarkation would be hard work, but at least it was different to what they normally did. At the end of the summer they would rejoin the Afghanistan cycle, hopefully a little refreshed. CJ herself was in her last eight months in the Army. She had spent six years as an officer in the REME, completing a tour of Afghanistan, and now it was time to move to Cumbria, get going with her smallholding and perhaps do a little lecturing in engineering if time allowed. Coming to sea was her last task and she had postponed some of her resettlement courses to fit it in.
During the early May Bank Holiday, Ocean turned to port, presenting us with a geography lesson that Africa is indeed very close to Europe as we entered the Mediterranean through the Strait of Gibraltar. After the early training sorties and charge south through Biscay we had a brief period of maintenance before completing the rest of our flying training and then getting into the exercise proper – escorting Royal as he gets ashore and then supporting him once he’s on the beach. This is the stuff of helicopters in amphibious operations, and we were embarked to prove we could do it with the Apache. The plan was to fly formation sorties, practise our own procedures and then get to Cyprus, where we would conduct all manner of joined-up training with Sea King and Lynx, with Royal in boats and helicopters hitting the beach and fighting. This was all training and part of the Royal Navy’s demonstration that it had an agile amphibious capability. As well as being part of that, I needed to prove we could fire all our weapons; the exercise planners had identified an opportunity to do this in early June, after the important validation of Royal, boats, helicopters and big ship manoeuvres had been ticked.
At the 10.00 a.m. stand-easy on the day after the Royal Wedding I got chatting with Wings. A calm intensity settled into his conversation: ‘How about we organize a Hellfire range south of Gib? It would de-risk the training requirement in case we run out of opportunities later?’
This was a surprise. We did want to fire Hellfire at sea, but we had not even begun to think about it. Why now? We hadn’t talked about this before, it was not in the programme. We could do it but we needed an explosives safety man – an Ammunition Technical Officer, known to all as ‘ATO’. We didn’t have one because we didn’t need one for another few weeks. Anyway it was a Bank Holiday, so what was the rush?
Wings had the answers. He knew a man who knew a man who knew an ATO in Germany, as it happened. ‘The Army are on side, so is the Navy. We’ll fly him out to Gib, send the Lynx over to pick him up and get him on the ship. Fire, fire, fire. All happy, he goes home, big training objective done. Sit back.’
He made the logistical challenge sound easy, but he wanted this and he could make it happen.
This was our final objective. If we could load, launch, fly, fight, land back on the ship and do it all again, we would be ready for combat. The whole ship would be ready. We would become an option. Perhaps staff capacity back in England would be made available to cover some of our other clearances like low-level flight over water and landing armed aircraft facing fore and aft at night.