After a while, perhaps a few months, the excitement begins to wane and we yearn for home. At home, life has established a new way to fill the space. Phone calls are matter of fact, seldom private and often finished without saying enough of what we feel. Then we edge towards the end. The tour comes to a close, planned or surprise, and we head home.
HMS Ocean came alongside in Chania, Crete on 24 September and the job was done. Ocean and the Apaches had completed their part in Operation Ellamy. It was time to go home, and the departure was rapid – no time for ceremony or celebration. I wanted to mark it somehow, but there wasn’t time, apart from a quick gathering and my words of praise to the eighty-three men and women who had changed the way we operated and carried us to success.
This composite team, put together in part due to availability and in part because of their skills, could not last beyond the success of the operation. We should have gone our separate ways in June 2011, but extraordinary circumstances in North Africa created an opportunity to test us operationally and kept us together to see it through.
The squadron gathered in the galley. I was sad inside, proud on the outside. I was louder than normal. I told them they’d made history, they’d been brave, they’d defied the odds in combat. I asked them to hold their heads up high but wear it modestly. I warned that sceptics would come their way, sometimes out of envy, sometimes accompanied by malice; but whatever they encountered, good or bad, they knew the truth of their industry and they should be proud. I knew this was it, the last time we would be together. The work was done, and finally they were heading home. Our six-week exercise had stretched to twenty-two weeks of an unscheduled operational tour in a new environment for everyone on the team. No one had done this before; they were the only ones. The Sergeant Major brought everyone to attention; I thanked them all and walked away. This was the end of command. The end of unusual conflict. The end of my team, my unique, complicated and courageous team.
That night a last blast in the wardroom, the rec rooms, the quarterdeck and wherever else blurred into panic packing, printing, copying, shredding and readying. By breakfast on 25 September all were ready to move, packed, Post-Operational Report drafted, guntape secured and all longing for home.
They stood on the quayside and waited for coaches to take them to the airport. A rugby ball was passed about, some lay on their bags in the sun. The smokers smoked. The on-ops smokers smoked. Sunglasses and smiles all round. Phones on ears.
I leant on the quarterdeck with Little Shippers, Charlie, Mark and Doug, our eyes on the homebound team. Our bags weren’t packed. We didn’t leave. We five, ten of our ground crew and a fresh team of engineers stayed.
On the quayside three coaches arrived, bags were hauled upon shoulders and they were gone.
‘Let’s go make a plan,’ someone said. And we went down to the flip-flop and unrolled a new set of maps. We sailed east the same night, but that’s another story.
The rest of the squadron flew home. Those who remained on board followed about a month later, and Ocean, having sailed 24,000 nautical miles, eventually came alongside in Plymouth on 9 December. Her 310-strong crew had spent 279 days at sea in 2011 carrying another 300 personnel with them. Just 87 of those days were spent on the line committed to the Libya operation; such is the extent and diversity of the tasks our ships conduct at sea. That year Wings managed 13 helicopters and safely brought back almost 3,000 deck landings; and, if there is another statistic worthy of historical record, it is that the ship’s dentist performed 256 fillings!
When December came and HMS Ocean neared Plymouth Sound, I flew out to be part of her homecoming, spending the day on board when she came into port. Her crew lined the decks in their best uniform, tugboats blasted water, aircraft flew past and the band of the Royal Marines played loud. It was an emotional return, and the prize for the best shore-side placard went to the brave girl who had written ‘Dad I’m Pregnant!’ on a four-square-metre declaration.
The task was done. Five attack helicopters had proved their worth at sea. Our engineers had kept them flying. Our soldiers had delivered a deck tempo that meant our pilots kept doing what was asked of them. Ocean had kept us going. And we had succeeded. We had hit every target allocated to us. And we had not been hit ourselves, despite the unprecedented incoming fire and sophistication of the weapon systems used against us.
I have often been asked about people – pro-Gaddafi soldiers – ‘How many were killed on those missions?’ Somehow we have become interested in a body count, that most banal statistic of war. A clean and easy answer is: those who shot at us died. Of course this is not the whole answer. There were many pro-Gaddafi soldiers actively threatening the civilian population. They were on our targets, doing their best to keep Libya as it had been for 41 years. And we stopped them with Hellfire and rockets and 30mm. We killed them as we destroyed their tanks and guns and hiding places. And the ones who didn’t die told their friends about it and steadily stopped going to work. Cognitive effect must be demonstrably persuasive. There will never be a body count. I think I know the number, but I’ll never tell.
Then there were all the constraints of the targeting process and launch criteria; the layering of jets and drones that make responsible people feel better about our risk; the complexity of the Apache and the technology of its weapons. Given all these factors, this was small, agile, adaptable and comparatively inexpensive contribution to a huge air campaign in support of the tens of thousands of Libyans taking back their freedom. We joined the war when it was at stalemate, with civilians being slain daily and having nowhere to hide. The clear delineation of friend and foe made our missions easy to direct, but also put us in harm’s way as soon as we got in sight of the coast. In assisting the FLF breakout and getting pro-Gad on the run we completed our task.
It had certainly been an unexpected adventure and one that carried with it the very real danger of coming unstuck. Those early weeks weaving among the triple-A and bracing for the impact of the SA-24 remain hard subjects for all of us to discuss beyond our small group. I feel the dryness in my mouth, the tension in my voice and the grinding of my teeth when the memory is provoked. The view out of the right-hand window of a missile streaking upwards while the American lady in the wing tells you it’s happening and flares are pumping out is ever vivid, has not faded. And the memory of the same missile being taken by the flares and then exploding in a final attempt to complete its task remains bright too.
In those moments the fear was huge. Our vulnerability, the fragility of life measured in seconds and centimetres, the instinct and desperation to survive – all these were acute. We all feared, but somehow death did not choose us. Perishing under the sea or being shot to pieces over the land were our clearest fears. In the moments of combat we all had that clarity and so we fought to kill the man and the weapon that was attacking us. A man who fires a shoulder-launched missile at a helicopter is a trained operator, a skilled soldier. If he misses he will adjust his aim and try again or reassess the shot and do better next time. We knew that. He had to die.
Just as I was afraid for my own life in those brightly lit, chaotic battles, I was seized by fear when I sat in the Operations Room in HMS Ocean when not the lead for a mission. There I could only follow the battle as far as the radios would reach and then read the JCHAT to catch a glimpse of information as the patrol commander relayed his actions to Matrix, and Matrix JCHATted it to everyone else.