It was the same with the Apache, but on a grander scale. Halfway through the first tour, whatever I wanted to do in the aircraft, I did. From that moment onwards I didn’t need to think how to fly and shoot because my fingers, arms and legs were already working in perfect harmony with my mind. I was no longer strapped to the Apache; the Apache was strapped to me.
Almost all of the pilots were there by the end of the tour. But none of that meant that we had lost respect for the daunting reality of having so much firepower at our finger tips. Not for one moment, then or since. Nobody in that war had more potential to do as much damage to human life. With that power came an equal amount of responsibility. We were fearful of being seen as gung-ho; US Apache pilots had that reputation and we didn’t want to follow suit. Every single round we put down we put down with good reason; killing someone was a serious business.
As we flew, I watched the Boss’s head dart from side to side as he fought to take everything in. ‘Amazing…’ he’d murmur every now and then. Occasionally, a swift question. ‘Jeez. What the hell do you call that?’
There were no more inspiring places to fly than in southern Afghanistan. It was unlike anywhere I had ever seen before and I was still captivated by it too. The landscape was both epic and primeval; everything about it was extreme. When it was flat, it was flat as a pancake. When it was hot, it was unbearably so. The rivers were never babbling streams but vast raging torrents, and the mountains climbed straight up to the heavens, often from a standing start.
The plan was to do an anticlockwise circuit of the four northern platoon houses where we’d spent most of the first tour: Sangin first, then Kajaki in the far north-east, Now Zad in the far north-west, and finally Gereshk, twenty kilometres shy of Camp Bastion, on the way back.
We stuck to the safety of the desert on the way up, keeping the Green Zone to our right. Immensely fertile before the Soviet invasion in 1978–79, Helmand province had been known as Afghanistan’s breadbasket. A decade of bitter fighting against the Red Army ended that. Russian bombers smashed much of Helmand’s irrigation system to smithereens. Yet the year-round supply of melted snow off the Hindu Kush was sufficient to keep the river valley’s fields and orchards lush enough for two full crops of opium poppies a year.
The vast majority of the province’s intensely conservative, desperately impoverished, million-strong, largely Pashtun, population were farmers – or worked the farmers’ land. The majority lived in single-storey houses fashioned from adobe and stone, often without electricity or piped water. It was an existence that hadn’t changed in a millennium.
The Green Zone only amounted to a tiny central slice of the province. It was bordered by two great deserts. To its west was the Desert of Death and Camp Bastion.
‘Dasht-e-Margo…’ The Boss practised his fledgling Pashtun.
‘Yeah. But aircrew generally call it the GAFA, Boss.’
‘GAFA?’
‘The Great Afghan Fuck All.’
The GAFA was an ancient, rocky seabed with a thick covering of sand as fine as dust. Nomads set up temporary shelters on it in the winter so their goats and camels could feed on the odd bush. In the summer it remained the exclusive preserve of the drug traffickers. They criss-crossed it south to Pakistan, or west to Iran, moving raw opium or freshly processed heroin to their consumers in the Middle East or Europe, leaving an endless mesh of tyre tracks behind them. It was so barren that you couldn’t tell if you were at 100 feet or 10,000.
‘What do you call the desert on the east side of the Green Zone, then?’
‘The Red Desert.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it looks red from up here.’
The Boss peered at our right horizon. ‘It’s actually worse. Makes the GAFA look like Kent.’
The Red Desert stretched all the way to Kandahar: 10,000 square miles of thin, Arabian-style sand, whipped by the wind over thousands of years into an endless succession of dunes. From 5,000 feet up, its surface looked like a sea of rippling red waves. Except by two well-known routes, the Red Desert was completely impassable, even by tracked vehicles. If you went in there, you didn’t come out again. That’s why nobody ever did. Not even the nomads.
As we moved further north and nearer to Sangin the topography ahead of us began to change. We could see the outlines of great ridges of rock rising from steep valleys to form the foothills of the Hindu Kush. Their peaks were as sharp as knife-blades and coloured seams cut through them as they climbed, indicating the different eras of their evolution. The mountains stretched all the way to Kabul, 300 miles to the north-east. They were almost impassable in the winter snows and boasted only one road flat enough for most vehicles to make the arduous journey during the rest of the year.
Many of the foothills had been tunnelled into, originally for protection from the wind and sandstorms and somewhere to store crops, but then, in the last few thousand years, for war. They provided an excellent defence against invaders since the time of Alexander the Great, and most recently, a haven to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.
Conventional British forces tried to stay out of the mountains. Our lesson had been learned 164 years before we got there, when General Elphinstone’s 16,000-man garrison was wiped out during the retreat from Kabul in 1842.
‘That’s Sangin ahead of us now, Boss.’
Sangin sat at the confluence of three green zones, and the District Centre was sited at the point the Helmand was joined by another river flowing from the northern hills. The Taliban had three different covered approaches from which to attack it.
It was no coincidence that the SBS team had got so badly whacked here. The town was the scene of the most intense fighting of our first tour and accounted for half of 16 Air Assault Brigade’s body bags. For years it had been a centre of Taliban activity, as well as the market town where all of the opium grown in the north of the province was traded. The traffickers hadn’t been too happy about the Paras’ arrival either. We dropped down to get a better look.
‘Wheel,’ Billy called. ‘We’ll start east, you start west.’
A wheel was a regular Apache combat manoeuvre over a target. We’d circle on the same axis but at different heights, one clockwise, one anticlockwise. It gave the flight 360-degree visibility at all times. We liked to keep between 1,000 and 4,000 metres away from the target, out of small arms range but well within engagement range of our weapons, and close enough for us to see whatever we needed through our optics.
As I slipped us into the gentle circle, I pointed out areas of interest for the Boss to zoom into with the Day TV TADS camera and examine on his screen. It had three fields of view – narrow, wide and zoom. Zoom offered 127-times magnification. If you looked at a guy in the zoom field while standing off at 2,000 metres, you could tell how many fillings he had. The camera was housed in the nose pod, so we could see up to sixty degrees downwards; as if we were looking straight through the Kevlar shell beneath our feet.
Sangin was a maze of mainly single-storey brown and beige buildings connected by dust tracks. I centred my monocle crosshairs on the wadi.
‘My line of sight. The wadi.’
‘Looking.’ The Boss zoomed in.
The second set of crosshairs in his monocle told him where I was focusing. All he needed to do was line up his with mine and slave the TADS to his eye.
‘Seen.’
‘Come due east from it and the first building is the District Centre.’
‘Okay. Hang on a minute, let me have a look at the map. Yup, I’ve got it.’
I glanced down at my right-hand MPD, which I’d set on the TADS image, relaying everything the Boss was seeing.
‘Bloody hell, they’ve built the place up a bit.’
The three-storey adobe-clad structure had been vigorously reinforced. A massive Hesco Bastion wall now ran all the way around the building, and the Paras had added wooden planks, sandbags and junk – anything they could lay their hands on – to the rooftop defences. A 300- by 200-metre field alongside it had also been ringed by Hesco Bastion, giving them a permanently protected helicopter landing site. It was a proper fort now, and a fine feat of engineering.