On the ground, small moments of progress occurred as the front lines around Misrata and Brega moved in favour of the rebels, now loosely organized as the Free Libyan Forces (FLF). We had contributed to this, but the big breakthrough had not happened. The regime and the FLF still faced each other across no-man’s-land, and the coast west of Tripoli was firmly in Gaddafi’s hands.
To compound my grumpiness I was aware of some scathing comments from the UK concerning our reaction to the SA-24 shots. Our Mission Reports had made readers back home unhappy and some were questioning our methods. One missive – an outright criticism of how we had approached the operation – made particularly painful reading. But I didn’t recognize any of the signatories – no helicopter pilots there, I thought – and we were justifiably indignant, given that we were the only people who had survived an SA-24 shot in the history of military aviation.
We were given defined speeds and heights to fly at, precise timings not to exceed at targets and specific direction to run away if we were shot at. This had fast-jet fingerprints all over it. Printed in four pages of well edited, crisp English was a desk-bound opinion on how not to get shot. This was old-school risk aversion. I could imagine the meeting: experts in missiles, one or two jet pilots, some agenda-driven cynics and a sorrowful staff officer charged with formulating their groupthink.
But we kept away from the debate and the CO went into bat. Some engaged in predictable finger-waving and tutting, but others were more reasonable – they needed to understand how it was. The team in Ocean and the CAOC sent it all back and told them we were in a war and they needed to be constructive and helpful; after all, that was the point of serving on the staff. Trials were conducted, data was analysed and evidence was produced; and after a brief clearing of the throat and some staring at the shoes their thesis got repackaged and sent back to us.
Video conferences were held, and while the aircrew slept the risk-holders talked it through. When the critics offered up their opinions the CO asked them what they could do to help. I watched from the sidelines and was pleased that we had a central team who were trying to keep us safe and were managing to persuade the ‘experts’ to do something useful about it. We were in a new type of combat, helicopter pilots weaving to avoid hitting houses and wires while being shot at. We Apache aircrew and the close team, the people who had lived those criticised missions, knew the threat, how to cope and how to keep going.
The London wailing and gnashing of teeth was the backdrop to our own very real angst at the start of July. On our last mission in June, John and I evaded an SA-5 radar lock-on. SA-5 is designed to shoot down high altitude bomber aeroplanes. Its missiles are huge, 10m long, Mach 7 monsters, but there weren’t any of those left; the jets had dealt with them right at the start of the campaign. But we knew the radar was out there, and although there were no missiles associated with it, we still had to evade it because the radar operator could guide other weapon systems on to our position. The SA-5 was, in effect, a highly accurate early warning device for whatever pro-Gad wanted to aim and shoot at us. With the American lady in the wing telling me all sorts of bad news about the SA-5, we had to break the lock and get away. We were horribly exposed, over the sea about 500m from the shore, had nowhere to hide and had to trust the chaff shredding in the tail rotor as we manoeuvred and descended to evade.
Chaff and turn, chaff and turn, descending all the while. Chaffing and evading – there is no more tantalising experience of fear and control than conducting the deliberate degree-perfect angle of bank turn, descending to almost nothing, watching the crests of gentle waves settle to smooth sea massive in your infrared right eye, while firing chaff into the tail rotor to escape the lock-on of Gaddafi’s air defence radar systems. Wild and chaotic, but controlled. Controlled, because otherwise you will be shot or you will crash. Anything other than pinpoint accuracy, black of night over the sea and hell unleashed just beyond the beach, will leave you dead. One-nil to Gaddafi and Campaign Catastrophe for Cameron. Dead British soldiers entombed in shot-up and ditched helicopter swaying with the tide on the seabed. Pinpoint accuracy and lethal aggression in the fight. That is how we kept ourselves alive, and no amount of advice from the distantly concerned in London on how to do it better and run away was going to persuade us otherwise.
The fear I had experienced in June had started to gnaw away at my tolerance of criticism. I took it as a personal attack by people who did not appreciate the fight we were in. The criticism seemed to rest on a theoretical matching of Apache and missile-seeker. But we knew of no one else who had been shot at by these systems, so naturally assumed we knew best.
I knew I had the best team available to succeed in this fight. I believed that their combined advice was all we needed, because they had experienced the fight at first hand; they were our Apache experts, both at sea and over Libya. They were highly experienced combat operators. In their own discrete fields they were also experts in the kind of knowledge and skills we collectively needed to stay ahead of the regime. The ‘punch-in, sit-down, pontificate, punch-out’ staff opinion was not needed where we were. We ten knew best. On reflection, our attitude to the advice we were given could have been more conciliatory. Running away was, perhaps, the right thing to do. But it didn’t feel right, particularly as we had been successful in prosecuting everything that had shot at us. Part of our response was based on confidence and selfbelief and part was meeting staff hostility with the operator’s sense of higher knowledge.
In any case, I was experiencing another frustration from the UK that bewildered and angered me – the denial of the Operational Allowance.
We had expected to receive the Operational Allowance: a sum of money paid daily, we thought, to recognize the sacrifice of our people on operations. We were wrong. The allowance, we were told, was about proximity to risk, not commitment to an operation. As such, HMS Ocean was deemed physically too far away from Libya to attract the money for those who remained inside the vessel. Only people who got within twelve nautical miles of Libya would get the pay, and then only on the days they made the journey.
If the men and women in Ocean had been conducting clerical work in the fortified centre of Camp Bastion in Afghanistan they would have received the allowance. But our soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen in Ocean got nothing, not a penny. It was a baffling, parsimonious and divisive decision. Hard-working men and women committed to an operation with little notice and much uncertainty saw the irony in their plight and concluded they were not valued. My mother mentioned the folly in writing to her MP. The MP for Gosport since 2010, a large naval constituency, wrote back expressing her sympathy and reassured her constituent that she would write to the Defence Secretary on the matter, adding that we were doing essential work in support of RAF pilots. Mum responded, pointing out that we were soldiers and sailors at sea supporting Royal Navy and Army pilots in demanding circumstances and that our experience of risk and rigour was valid and ought to be better appreciated. She also made the point was that HMS Ocean was not an Italian hotel.
First admonished by the experts and then trivialized by the beancounters, our morale took a dive. From the most junior soldier to the squadron headquarters we felt alone in a dangerous place with only criticism, pressure and zero appreciation of our work from outside. The CAOC understood it, the Commodore, the Captain, the ship’s company and the CO with us in Ocean understood it, and we most definitely knew it. But it seemed this understanding was limited to us and it had not percolated to London. The irony was that, despite everyone watching us, we were alone.