My flight commander looked devastated. Tommo wielded a shed load of power in the Army Air Corps and was destined for the highest of appointments. He could kill careers with one swipe of his pen.
‘I checked the system before we took off and we were on the map, sir…’
‘Another one of your promises, Macy? What do you expect me to believe? You’re not on radar, no one knows where you are, and all of a sudden you two know the location of every fucking tank in Canada. If you switched the transponders off you are both for the fucking high jump. Do you hear me?’
‘Sir…’ I pointed towards the Excon Portakabin. ‘I was on radar two minutes before we left and was assured I could be tracked at all times.’
The sergeant who’d confirmed the presence of our Gazelles on the screen was at his keyboard. I chose my words carefully. ‘Would you let the Colonel know exactly when we met and what I asked you?’
‘Er…yes, sir.’ His eyes batted nervously between me and Tommo. He couldn’t bring himself to hold the big man’s 2,000-yard death stare. I couldn’t blame him. Sterner mortals had wilted under Tommo’s withering gaze. ‘He came in last night to check that his BATS box was working.’
Tommo jumped in with both feet. ‘Then why couldn’t I see him even once throughout the entire battle?’
‘You could, sir. Surely…’ The sergeant looked down at his computer. ‘One moment.’ His face began to redden. ‘Oh, he’s not there…’
‘Make your fucking mind up, man!’
After a few frantic keystrokes, the screen changed. ‘Er… here he is at the start, sir, next to the other Gazelle Hotel Two Zero Alpha-see.’
Tommo leaned forward. ‘Then what?’
The sergeant tapped away furiously, running the battle at warp speed. The icons began to move. They both examined the screen in minute detail, then Tommo turned and gave me a look designed to kill.
‘Well fucking well. You both disappeared together, in fucking unison, the second you got into the exercise area.’
I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking I’d switched off the boxes and gone black.
I needed to get to grips with this, and quickly. ‘Why did we disappear?’
‘I’m just checking, sir,’ the sergeant replied nervously. ‘Oh, there you go. Someone deleted you shortly after you took off. It must have been an accident. Lots of callsigns were lost at the same time, see…’ He pointed at the monitor. ‘We must have forgotten to load you back on with the others.’
At the debrief that followed, I realised that Tommo was impressed by what we’d done. I also knew that he was going to be the last to admit it.
Soon after I got back to the UK I heard that 9 Regiment Army Air Corps would be the first unit to take delivery of the Apache, slated for arrival in September 2003, a little less than three years away. I called Major Tucker, my course leader on grading, who was now the OC of 656 Squadron and asked him if he’d be willing to have me in his squadron.
‘You’re welcome in Six Five Six,’ he said. ‘But I won’t be here when the Apache arrives, and I don’t have the final say-so on this one, Mr Macy.’
‘Who does?’
‘The CO,’ he replied. ‘From what I can gather, Colonel Thomson is handpicking the Apache crews personally.’
My heart sank. After our run-in at BATUS, I couldn’t see him accepting me in his regiment in a million years, let alone selecting me for the Apache programme.
I called 9 Regiment’s only other Apache designated squadron Officer Commanding to hedge my bets. Tommo would be gone by the time 664 Squadron did the Apache conversion course. If I couldn’t get into 656 as an Apache pilot perhaps I could go that route. OC 664 told me that the crews would be handpicked from the regiment and anyone not selected would have to do a Lynx conversion course. If I didn’t get selected for Apache, I would end up on Lynx and that would end my SAS quest.
ONE ON ONE
From 1998 onwards, I decided I’d amass so much indispensable knowledge about attack helicopters that the Army Air Corps would have no choice but to select me for the Apache when it eventually entered service. I began by reading up everything on attack helicopters I could find. The next part of the strategy was to get myself on an Air Combat Tactics Instructor’s (ACTI) course.
A helicopter, by its very nature, is a vulnerable machine. Unlike a combat aircraft, it cannot rely on speed to get it out of trouble over the battlefield. The policy of the British Army, which did not own a dedicated attack helicopter force, was for its pilots to avoid trouble if they possibly could. This entailed remaining covert-flying down in the weeds – or remaining at ‘stand-off’ engagement ranges: attacking tanks outside the range of their offensive weaponry.
But with the Apache it would be different. The Apache had started life as part of a very exclusive club. Before the Berlin Wall fell, there were precious few attack helicopters in existence. The Soviets had developed a fearsome machine called the Mil Mi-24 Hind and the Americans had developed the Apache and the Cobra. There were other attack helicopters on the drawing board or in development when the Wall fell, but these three were the only ones that mattered.
With their enormous defence budget, the Americans bought the Cobra and the Apache in large quantities. Other less prosperous NATO nations had opted instead for machines like the Lynx, the Gazelle and the German BO105.
The first Gulf War brought things into sharp focus. The utility of the Americans’ Apaches quickly became self-evident. In the aftermath of the conflict, NATO nations began to accelerate their attack helicopter plans and numerous competitions were launched across Europe to determine the best machine for the job. The Apache began to find itself in contention with the Eurocopter Tiger and new developments of the Cobra. But it had been massively updated, too, from the ‘A’ model that first entered service with the US Army in the 1980s, to the ‘D’ model, which was equipped with the new Longbow radar system.
These machines had an unbelievable level of sophistication that enabled them to fly over the battlefield, not around it, looking for ‘trade’.
I realised that one of the keys to being selected as an Apache pilot was simply getting to grips with that sophistication. It would force the Army Air Corps into a brave new world of Air Combat Tactics it had never properly had to confront before – not en masse, at least – because pilots of its premier anti-tank helicopter, the Lynx, were taught to avoid battlefield threats, not go hunting for them.
In early 1998, I went to see my OC and persuaded him that we needed an ACTI course at Wattisham, with me and a few other 3 Regiment pilots as its principal pupils. The OC knew as well as I did that the Army Air Corps had some skeleton procedures for fighting and surviving over the battlefield, but no means of teaching it.
‘Fine, Staff,’ he told me, ‘but it you want it, you’re going to have to go out there and find it.’
Fortunately, I knew where to look.
The RAF had a Helicopter Tactics course, but the crabs were into a largely different game-ferrying quantities of men and materiel around the battlefield. I was more interested in air combat.
The Royal Marine pilots of 3 Brigade Air Squadron – 3BAS – practised ACT and told me the only way to get a course would be to ask the Senior Flying Instructors’ department. Like Aviation Standards – Chopper Palmer’s lot – what these guys didn’t know didn’t yet exist, but where Aviation Standards tested, the SFIs taught.
I’d flown with nearly all of them at some point, all over the world, so I asked whether they would be able to help us out. The short answer was yes.
Our Regimental Qualified Helicopter Instructor selected a handful of pilots-based on the number of flying hours they’d amassed, their standard of flying, their qualifications and a few other factors – and we had our course. The Army Air Corps formally entered the air combat instruction business for the first time.