A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (26 page)

It is different for the crewmen, of course. On Instant Response Team (IRT) missions the Chinooks become flying ambulances, so there were few among the Task Force who had seen as much blood as the loadmasters. 'I had a couple of pilots get out at Bastion and the back was covered in blood,' said Sergeant Graham Jones. 'I'm talking blood trails running down off the ramp and on to the landing site. And they've gone, "Bloody hell! What the hell's gone on in the back of here?" And I went, "Well, you know. The guy lost his leg. You try and stop a femoral bleed." And that's what it is, you know?' The crewmen handled such horrors in different ways. 'How can I describe it?' said Jones. 'It's like an out-of-body experience, it really is. Like, that's happened to a different part of me. Really you've got to be . . . I wouldn't say schizophrenic, but . . . when you're back here, I think I'm a different person.'

At thirty-three he was older than most in his squadron, and with a background in search and rescue he reckoned he was better able to deal with the proximity of death than some. 'When you pull kiddies out of lakes or the sea . . . you just have to, and I've got children myself. I find that more traumatizing, personally. Though some of the young guys have seen some shocking things. A couple of lads have been given help; it's caused them to lose their flying categories.'

What seemed to trouble Jones most about Helmand was the sheer numbers of wounded – together with a suspicion that those numbers were being deliberately suppressed. 'I think they've kept it very well under wraps,' he said. 'Because we're working hard, the IRT in Helmand. The amount we bring out of theatre . . . it's never on the news. The only time you see Afghanistan on the news is when there's been a death. But for every death there's a dozen seriously injured, and you just don't see that.'

Like Jones, Flight Sergeant Bob Larcombe, a Londoner, said he had 'lost count' of the times he had collected dead and injured from the front. He was used to it now, but admitted that the first time had bothered him; and although he had no problem with ferrying the plywood coffins the Army had begun to use, he was still oddly haunted by the thought of body-bags. 'I don't know why, but a body in a body-bag just seems slightly more . . . For me, it's worse than seeing someone in bits on a stretcher. You can tell it's a body when you lift it. I think it's that thing about not knowing what's inside – who it is, the state they're in, the colour of their hair and all that sort of stuff. It's . . . a bit weird.' Nevertheless, collecting body-bags became so routine that Larcombe and his crew soon developed the macabre and self-defensive sense of humour of undertakers. 'There was one body we picked up – a soldier from some other ISAF nation. The bag itself was in quite a mess because it had been left outside for a few days. There were some squaddies getting their kit out of the aircraft, and one of them managed to stumble back and plant his boot right in the middle of the guy's chest in the body-bag. It was awful, absolutely awful. And I thought, "I really don't want to know what's inside there."'

At the start of Herrick 4 there were only six Chinooks in Afghanistan, although later there were eight. Two of the six were kept at Camp Bastion while the other four, with which they regularly rotated for repair and maintenance, were kept at the airbase in Kandahar. Flight 1310 was very small, and when the Task Force themselves appeared to complain that they didn't have enough Chinooks, the media once again accused the government of letting the Armed Forces down, in pursuit of the ever-emotive theme that under-resourcing was costing brave British boys their lives. That story was one of the biggest of late 2006, but really the press missed the point. The problem was not so much a shortage of helicopters as the ballistic threat to the ones the Task Force did have. All Brigadier Ed Butler actually said, in response to the Prime Minister's offer to provide whatever extra resources were needed, was that if he had more, he could do more. 'Clearly we could generate a higher tempo, not just on offensive operations but also to crack on with the reconstruction and development.'

It was true, as one pilot acknowledged, that the RAF did sometimes refuse requests for transport, but this was very seldom because a helicopter was unavailable. 'After one casevac mission we were asked to go back on a resupply run the next day, to the same place at the same time,' he said. 'The ambush threat was high. I wasn't very happy, although I was ready to do it. But one of the crewmen said he wasn't sure either. The captain decided to say, "Sorry, boys, can't do it today . . ." It takes a pretty brave person to put the brakes on like that.' Gus Highet added, 'It goes against our ethos. We run a can-do operation. We don't turn things down. If we had fifty helicopters out there, they'd all be flying every day. It's just the way it works.' The US military, he added, sometimes preferred to use British Chinooks rather than their own because the British system was more flexible. 'The Americans have a rigid planning and briefing cycle that starts ninety-six hours before an op. We can get a piece of paper handed through a window and just go and do it.' It was another illustration of the uniqueness of the British Armed Forces – an institution, as the military saying went, that worked like an organism compared to the machine-like ways of the Americans.

The decision to fly was always a complex one. The risks of every sortie were individually and minutely assessed. Were weather conditions suitable for the approach? What was known of the enemy's strength in the drop zone area? How much fuel, how much daylight, how tired was the crew, how many flying hours were left before an essential maintenance check? But all the normal pre-flight considerations were dropped when it came to a casevac. The crews were intensely proud of how far and how often they pushed the envelope in a medical emergency. The suggestion that any soldier died on Herrick 4 because a Chinook would not or could not fly naturally outraged them. Graham Jones described a night-time casevac mission to the Sangin valley that took place twenty-two hours after his crew had first come on duty – long past the time when they should have stopped flying. 'It was a P1 – a Para shot through the chest. We were asked if we'd go and do it, and we volunteered. Initially we landed at the wrong landing site because they were still under contact, and what we thought was a strobe was actually muzzle flash. The medics had already gone off. I had to run out and grab them and get them back on . . . As we lifted we did see the strobe, so we landed "on". We got the guy on board and he was on a Hercules to Karachi within the hour. It saved his life.'

The press, however, were little interested in these heroics. On one occasion a
Daily Telegraph
reporter was invited on an IRT sortie to rescue five children injured by burning engine oil. Paul Shepherd, the squadron leader, met the loadmaster involved shortly after his return to Bastion. 'I've never seen someone look so grey,' he said. 'Burned kids is not something we train for.' But the published report did not mention this. Instead it spoke about how old some of Flight 1310's Chinooks were. It pointed out that one of them, Bravo November, had first flown in the Falklands twenty-five years earlier. The Joint Helicopter Force HQ in Kandahar reacted with predictable fury, and ordered its crews to refuse all journalists' requests for trips in future.

It was a good story for the
Telegraph
: a machine from the Falklands era still flying in Afghanistan sounded scandalous. But was it? Even the mechanics were divided. 'Put it this way,' said Flight Sergeant Bolton, leaning back in a well-used armchair in the tea-stained sergeants' mess, 'would you drive your 1975 Cortina down the motorway, fully loaded, at eighty miles an hour?' Yet he agreed that the older machines were not dangerous, provided they were regularly maintained and checked – which of course they scrupulously were. They were not even necessarily more prone to untimely failure.

What the
Telegraph
report failed to explain was that the Chinook, designed in the 1950s and still manufactured by Boeing, is a bit like a Lego set on to which new components can be bolted as old ones wear out. So the basic airframe of Bravo November might have seen action in the Falklands but virtually nothing else on board had. The reporter reckoned that the machine's vintage was a good illustration of MoD penny-pinching, and how the RAF was forced to make do and mend. He was right in a way; but it did not follow that the mechanics or anyone else in the RAF were clamouring for newer models. 'We've got some of the new ones too,' said Bolton. 'They're still working as hard as the old ones. It doesn't matter which one the troops get into. Any machine can fail.' More to the point, the newest models were a lot less like Lego sets than they used to be – and on operations, where the workshop priority was to turn around a damaged machine as quickly as possible, this could actually be a disadvantage. 'The new ones have got these single-piece, machined steel frames,' explained Phil Westwood, 'and when they break, we have to start getting specialists in. That's a fact. So sometimes the old ones are easier to keep in the air.' Thrift had its upside. It sounded remarkably like London Transport's dilemma when they decided to get rid of the much-loved Routemaster bus, the simple old design of which made it far easier to repair than its modern replacement. The Paras' jibe that the Chinook pilots were like bus-drivers because they took them to work every day was perhaps more appropriate than they realized.

The engineers took obvious pride in their professionalism and in their squadrons. But there was no hiding a certain discontent at the way the modern RAF was run – and that was worrying, because men like these had always been the Air Force's bedrock, the unsung heroes who kept its machines in the air. As elsewhere in the forces, recent cost-cutting measures meant their jobs were harder and more relentless than they used to be. In the old days, engineering units were attached to individual squadrons and travelled with them on foreign deployments. Now they had been reorganized into a pool, which meant, according to Westwood, that the 'intensity of engineering here is actually almost at the same level as you'd get on an operation. There are always crews generating to go away on ops. So the engineers have become a Monday to Friday operation . . . at the moment we're even working Saturdays and Sundays.'

According to Graham Jones, the fifty-two-strong team that went to Helmand with Flight 1310 were permanently 'maxed out' on the tricky task of maintaining the fleet in the heat and dust of an Afghan summer. Sand built up in the spaces beneath the fuselage floors and had to be cleaned out. Routine maintenance checks had to be carried out every thirty-one hours instead of the usual seventy-five. The rotors had to be reinforced against erosion with special blade tape, and extreme care had to be taken when lubricating the shafts and bearings because excess grease attracted dust and turned into a vicious 'cutting paste'. The engineers split into two shifts of twelve hours each, and had to sustain that for the duration of the eight-week tour. Splitting into three eight-hour shifts might have made for greater efficiency, but the manpower was not available for that. Fifty-two mechanics was all that Odiham had available. It was also the bare minimum they needed to do the job.

Military aircraft engineering, they wanted me to understand, was a much less attractive career prospect than it used to be; and the increasing likelihood of a dangerous deployment abroad was also having an adverse effect on recruitment. Bolton had friends working in recruitment who reported that there were still plenty of people interested in joining up, but that they tended to say that they 'didn't want to go to Iraq or Afghanistan, thank you very much'. Westwood heartily agreed with the Dannatt assessment that the present military tempo was unsustainable. 'My personal opinion is that I don't think we can keep doing what we're doing for the next three or four years without a major impact on people's health, lifestyle and possibly marriages.'

'There is pressure,' Bolton agreed. 'We as a nation don't have the assets to do it. We don't have an awful lot of battlefield helicopters.

We are the only Chinook operators in the UK, and everywhere they go they're wanted.'

Westwood was right about the impact on marriages. According to one pilot, the base at Odiham had the highest divorce rate in the RAF: 'What do you expect, when we're always away for eight months of the year?' The can-do spirit of the Chinook wing was magnificent, but as in the Army it sometimes came at a very high price. This pilot was unusually but deeply despondent about his future in the Chinook wing, and the war in Afghanistan in particular. The novelty of Helmand had worn off, and he had only completed two tours there. Dannatt's prediction of a 'generation of conflict' sounded grim indeed to him.

He was not alone when he complained that the public did not understand what the Armed Forces were doing in Afghanistan, let alone appreciate their efforts and sacrifices. 'It's disgraceful that Afghanistan isn't properly publicized,' said Graham Jones. 'Obviously we've got our hands full with Iraq, and it's better all round if they can keep as much of Afghanistan under the hat as possible. Because in reality we have got two Iraqs now. But I don't think people realize that. My friends go, "How's Iraq going?" I tell them, "I'm not in Iraq." And they say, "Oh, I didn't realize we had Chinooks in Afghanistan, I thought we only had peace-keepers and that out there." ' Flight Sergeant Bob Larcombe recalled an email from a civilian friend who moaned that he had been ordered to park at the back of his workplace instead of the front, following a policy decision to let female office-workers park there for personal security reasons. 'I thought, "Is that the most important thing you're worried about? Is that really it?" The week before I was at Sangin. There were 105s [artillery shells] landing two hundred metres from the landing site and the airframe was shaking. It's surreal.'

Flight Lieutenant Adam Thompson worried that the precious mystique of the Armed Forces, the RAF included, had somehow been allowed to drain away. Piloting a Services helicopter used to be seen as a glamorous role by the public, he said, but the old respect for it had gone. 'It's just another job to people these days. They don't wave at you when you fly over them like they used to.' He had noticed this change even before joining the Chinook wing, when he was still in grey-painted Sea Kings. On search and rescue missions, he'd found, people were just as likely to flick a V-sign at him as wave. This, perhaps, was the sorry downside of what Paul Shepherd called the 'civilianization' of the Air Force. There had been a concerted effort in recent years to integrate the Chinook wing into peacetime civilian activity, in a bid to maximize an expensive government asset. Chinooks cost about £15 million each, fully fitted. Allowing any of them to sit around on the tarmac unused didn't represent good value for money. And so it was that, in June 2007, the veterans of Helmand found themselves ferrying aggregate to stem the floods along the River Humber near Hull.