‘Oh you prize arse,’ Geordie greeted him.
Most of us had turned up in our camouflage smocks – which were clean, uncreased and unfaded as they were seldom used and rarely washed. But not Billy; desperate to show off his wings, he was standing there shivering in his flying suit. In case any passing head of state was in doubt, he was an Apache pilot.
It was 7.09am and there we all were – a sizeable chunk of the Helmand Task Force’s firepower – lined up like prunes with nothing to do for the next fifty-one minutes. Only Nick and Charlotte were missing, air testing in Kandahar. It would have been valuable experience for Nick; he would probably be Prime Minister one day.
‘Come on Ed.’ Billy gave me a nudge. ‘Let’s check out the croissant tent.’
‘The what?’
‘Over there. I spotted it on my way down.’
A posh-looking marquee had been erected at one end of the runway. Its front flaps had been pinned open to reveal an urn of piping hot water, tea bags and jugs of filter coffee on a wooden picnic table. On a second table was the biggest tray of croissants I’d ever seen: hundreds of them, with mouth-watering fillings, steaming in the early morning air.
A couple of senior officers stood in the tent’s entrance, so a frontal assault was never going to work. Billy and I tried our luck round the back.
‘Sorry guys,’ said the master chef. ‘Definitely no one allowed in here.’
‘Come on mate, give us a croissant.’
‘I can’t. Nobody’s allowed any until Tony Blair has been in there.’
‘Why, is he going to eat all 300 of them?’
‘Look, it wasn’t my idea… Oi!’
We left him to apprehend a pair of marines trying to sneak in behind him. One was holding up the far corner of the tent while his mate tried to slide underneath it.
Back at the squadron’s place in the line, Geordie and Darwin had opened a book on who could get the longest handshake with the PM. It would mean holding on for as long as you could, even if he tried to tear himself away. They were also challenging the rest of the team to see who could ask him the oddest question and still get an answer.
‘Just make sure it’s all respectful, please. I still want a career in the army.’ The Boss hated every second of this.
‘I’ve got a belter,’ said Darwin. ‘Who’s got a camera?’
A few of the boys had brought one down.
‘Right, here’s what Geordie and I are going to do. We’ll ask Mr Blair if he doesn’t mind a picture. When he says, “Yeah, sure, chaps, where do you want me?” we’ll say, “Just there’s fine thanks, sir,” and hand him the camera. I bet he’ll be so embarrassed he’ll take the picture anyway.’
The PM’s Hercules arrived a few minutes early and he emerged from the pilot’s door to be greeted by the brigadier. A forty-strong travelling circus of TV cameramen, photographers and reporters poured off the rear ramp and glanced around, looking a little confused. Our desert wilderness wasn’t the Afghanistan of the Tora Bora Mountains you saw on the news.
The entourage of senior brass and clipboard-wielding subordinates led him to the end of the line furthest from us. The PM insisted on stopping and chatting to every group while the TV cameras did their stuff. Finally, he reached the marine mortar team alongside us. A balding bloke in a suit with an A4 pad strolled on ahead.
‘Gentlemen, before the Prime Minister gets to you, I could do with a few details. What do you all do?’
The Boss turned to him. ‘Who are you?’
‘Oh, I’m Bob…’
‘Bob who?’
‘Bob Roberts. From the Daily Mirror.’
The revelation provoked all-round merriment; we’d thought the guy was some kind of Downing Street flunky.
‘Fuck off, baldy,’ and ‘Get out the way, will you?’ the Groundies chorused from behind us.
The poor bloke scampered off in the other direction, looking quite hurt.
‘Hi guys.’
And there was Tony Blair, standing right in front of us. We’d been so busy hurling abuse at the man from the Mirror that most of us hadn’t seen him approach.
‘Gather round the Prime Minister please,’ the RSM instructed.
Tony Blair was in official Prime Ministerial war zone kit: blue slacks, a navy blazer and a dark blue shirt, open at the neck. He looked tired and old. The famous blue eyes still twinkled, but huge crow’s feet spread from each corner of them and his hair was more salt than pepper. He was a different man to the one I remembered walking into Downing Street nine years before.
The squadron wags had gone quiet now; everyone was a little bit star-struck. Trigger must have breathed a sigh of relief; it was immediately obvious that all the big talk wasn’t going to come to anything.
Blair thrust his hand forward to each of us. There was no chance of holding onto it, even if someone did have the balls. We were given a quick, forceful shake, up and down, a momentary fix of the eyeballs and then it was onto the next bloke. Two seconds each, max. He moved incredibly quickly, clearly well drilled in how to avoid the ‘I’m going to hold onto his hand the longest’ game. No surprises there; he’d been shaking squaddies by the hand for years.
‘Prime Minister, this is 656 Squadron, Army Air Corps. They operate the Apache AH Mk1.’
‘Ah yes.’ The trademark grin stretched from ear to ear. ‘So you must work with the locals.’
None of us knew how to answer that, so none of us did. That kind of killed the conversation.
Someone did ask for a photograph, but instead of pulling Darwin’s cheeky prank we all gathered sheepishly round Blair instead – Darwin included. The most rebellious we got was slipping the odd thumbs-up to the camera behind Blair’s back as we posed up for the group snaps.
Then, just as quickly as he’d arrived, he was ushered away to the medics, the next group in line.
Billy couldn’t conceal his disappointment. ‘I thought he might ask us one question about the aircraft. He did buy the bloody thing, after all.’
Geordie was still as confused as the rest of us.
‘Hang on, did you hear what he said to us, like? “So you must work with the locals.” What the fuck does that mean?’
It was obvious Blair had no real idea of who we were or what we did. Sadly, scaring the locals half to death was about the closest we ever got to working with them. Since we spent most of our lives 3,000 feet up, he couldn’t have been further from the mark. Maybe he’d offered everyone down the line the same catch-all remark. I suppose it saved having to think of twenty different ones.
The procession finished and, 200-odd hands shaken, Blair was whisked across to the croissant tent. A dais had been erected at the opposite end of it, with a loud speaker on either side. After Blair had downed his coffee, we were ordered to gather round for his speech.
A bank of raised platforms had been thrown up for the travelling media. They offered the best view, so Billy and I jumped up on one of them. It earned us an evil look from its occupier, a man with thick black glasses later identified to me as the BBC’s Political Editor Nick Robinson. He didn’t seem totally thrilled about sharing his platform with us. Billy and I gave him a grin.
‘Here, in this extraordinary piece of desert, is where the future of the world’s security is going to be played out… The only way we can ensure security is being prepared to fight for it… We will beat the Taliban by having the determination and courage to stand up to them… You defeat them not just on behalf of the people here in Afghanistan but in Britain, and the wider world… People back home are very proud of the work you do, whatever they think of the politicians who sent you…’
He went on for about fifteen minutes, and finished with ‘a huge debt of thanks from a humbled nation’. For that, he got a spontaneous cheer and a generous round of applause as he was swiftly channelled back to the waiting Hercules. It was an upbeat, crowd-pleasing performance and went down very well with the younger soldiers. Pride, support, courage; he knew all the buzz words twenty-year-old squaddies wanted to hear.