‘Thanks, mate, over.’
‘No worries, buddy, out.’
We turned and headed back the way we’d come.
It was my second tour of Northern Ireland. My first had been in 1993 – not counting the time I had deployed there on the ground as a Para in 1987 – and this time it was a very different ball of wax. In 1993, when I’d been in Belfast as part of City Flight, covering foot patrols in and around Belfast, I’d flown with ex-infanteers, AAC guys who like me had previously been soldiers. They’d all had a natural feel for the tactical picture on the ground and it showed in the way they flew. Somehow or other, this skill had been lost in the four years I’d been away.
My first unit after graduating from Middle Wallop, 664 Squadron, 9 Regiment Army Air Corps, was located at Dishforth in Yorkshire. With it, I’d been on exercises in Belize, Kenya and the United States.
In the five years I’d been an operational pilot I was having the best fun it was possible to have with my clothes on.
As a newly qualified AAC helicopter pilot, there were two platforms I could aspire to: the Gazelle or the Lynx. Most elected for the Lynx because it was armed and as aggressive a flying machine as the army possessed at the time, though that wasn’t saying much. I went for the Gazelle because it formed the heart of the AAC’s covert ‘Special Forces Flight’.
I loved the Gazelle. It was the sports car of the skies while the Lynx was the family saloon. The Gazelle, being a two-seater, could sneak in almost anywhere, which is why the Special Forces liked it. And it had excellent performance; it could get up to 13,000 feet – quite a height for a helicopter – no problem.
Because it was small and made of ‘plastic and Araldite’ it was extremely hard to detect on radar when it was down in the weeds. It was also an extremely useful surveillance platform, because you could hang things off it – Nightsun searchlights and thermal-imaging cameras for starters – and at stand-off ranges, because of its size, it was pretty difficult to detect from the ground.
I’d been doing everything I could to tick the boxes that would get me selected for the Special Forces Flight. I’d done my Aircraft Commander’s Course, which allowed me to fly in the left-hand seat, and I’d racked up as many flying hours as I could. A couple of tours in Northern Ireland couldn’t hurt either, I figured.
The second time I got out there, in December 1996, I’d found the place in a mess.
Someone who’s new in-theatre, who doesn’t know the callsigns or the flying regulations, is usually put through a routine known as ‘supervised duties’ until he or she is proficient with the set-up. Although I didn’t need to sign up to supervised duties because I’d previously been in-theatre, I did so nonetheless, because the place we were flying out of, Bessbrook Mill, was extremely tight – it was the busiest base in the province – and had very strict flying procedures. I wanted to be sure I knew the ropes. I reckoned a stint of supervised duties couldn’t hurt.
I flew out on my first sortie with a qualified commander. Tully sat in the left-hand seat; I sat in the right. We were called out to Crossmaglen to assist in a ‘P-Check’: a multiple on the ground had gone into a staunchly Republican area to haul in a suspect for questioning; we were to provide top-cover for them. We’d barely arrived over the suspect’s house when the radio sparked and I heard the multiple commander’s voice.
‘One Zero Alpha, leaving Crossmaglen now.’
I glanced at Tully. No reaction. I picked up the ‘patrol trace’ – the map that indicated the route the multiple would take. There was nothing marked, no tasking; merely a callsign, the one we’d just heard. When I looked at the image on the TV screen in front of Tully’s knees, I realised that he wasn’t scouting ahead or to the sides of the multiple for possible threats; he’d got the camera trained on the multiple itself.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘I’m filming the multiple. Why?’
‘Filming their deaths more like,’ I said under my breath. I got on the radio. ‘One Zero Alpha, this is Gazelle Four. Go firm, go firm.’
I watched on the screen as fifteen men dropped to the ground.
Tully looked horrified. ‘What are you doing?’
I told him and in no uncertain terms. Now we could see where our multiple was, we were at least able to identify who the good guys were.
As I circled above them, I asked One Zero Alpha to point out his VPs for me. He immediately said they were approaching Sniper Alley, a known hot-spot. I spent several good, long moments studying the street for things that shouldn’t have been there: bins, skips, tipper trucks, command wires and suspicious-looking vehicles. I saw nothing that raised my hackles and signalled as much. Afterwards, he thanked me for what I’d done, saying it had been an ‘awesome patrol’. In my book there was nothing awesome about it at all; it was supposed to be routine.
The problem was confirmed, when, over the next week or so, I flew with several other pilots who were every bit as lax as Tully had been in the way they covered multiples on the ground. It wasn’t their fault; they didn’t know any better. Realising I wasn’t going to make myself popular by sticking my nose in, I decided to speak to the RQHI – the regiment’s qualified helicopter instructor, the guy who defined the way we flew. James told me he was aware of the problem and said it was a knowledge-based deficiency; it’s why we had supervised duties. I told him the best, perhaps the only, thing to do was to write a document that standardised air-ground-air procedure. James told me to ‘crack on’.
So I wrote it all down: how a multiple functioned and what it might be called upon to do (P-checks, vehicle checkpoints, ambushes, searches, whatever). I then calibrated the threat it faced in any given situation and put the two together. The final ingredient was what we could supply in our Gazelles – how we could detect and alert them to IRA command wires, dustbin bombs, snipers, ambushes and so on. I then combined the ground and air pictures and came up with a set of procedures – kind of a ‘how to provide multiple support by numbers’ that anybody arriving in-theatre for the first time could pick up, read and follow.
When I’d finished, I ran it past some infanteer mates. They had no idea how much support our helicopters were able to provide them with.
Heartened by their reaction, I took my draft document to the squadron’s 2i/c.
‘Very good,’ he said, flicking through it as I stood in front of his desk. ‘But if you’ll allow me to say so, Sergeant Macy, it needs a bit of a polish-i’s dotted and t’s crossed, that kind of thing. You don’t mind, do you, if I…?’
‘Be my guest,’ I said. I’d written it as a functional document, not a piece of Pulitzer Prize-winning literature. If someone wanted to tart it up for the brass, I was delighted.
A few weeks later, when I was due to go back to the UK, I’d asked the 2i/c if he’d finished tarting it up; he told me he still needed to do some work on it. He’d let me know when it was done.
That was the last I thought about it until we were practising multiple support procedures over Yorkshire a few months later and my co-pilot mentioned that there was an excellent document on the subject he’d read while deployed in Northern Ireland. ‘It covers all this stuff, Ed. I’ll give you a copy.’
As I flicked through it, I was delighted to see that 95 per cent of what I’d written had been left alone – it really had just had its i’s dotted and t’s crossed. Then I saw the 2i/c’s name and signature at the bottom.
I gave a rueful smile. The important thing was that it was out there.
It would have a particular resonance almost ten years later in the dusty wastes of Afghanistan.
Then the UK MoD went and ordered the Apache.