Now we knew the truth. Reality had bitten. Our enemy in southern Afghanistan couldn’t give a stuff what mandate we’d come under. If they got their hands on us, a quick death would be the very best we could hope for.
I gripped the cyclic resolutely as, then and there, I also decided there was no way those evil bastards were going to get me alive. If I was shot down, I’d keep on running until my heart gave out. If I couldn’t run, I’d fight until my second to last bullet was gone. Then I’d use the last one on myself.
We talked for hours back in the crew tents that night as word spread about what had happened. Every pilot came to the same conclusion. I’d be surprised if all the paratroopers out in the district bases hadn’t followed suit.
We only found out exactly what had happened to the two SBS guys some days later. Patten had been hit in the chest, the bullet exiting from the side of his neck. A rescue attempt for him was out of the question; the sky was raining lead. Now the SBS team was split in two, most in front of Patten and a few – including Bartlett – behind him.
Bartlett was with another SBS lad who’d taken a bullet in the arm. Bartlett stayed with him and found a hiding place in an irrigation ditch. With Taliban all around them, he then went forward alone, crawling through thick undergrowth to recce a route to safety through the enemy’s positions. It was the last anyone saw of him.
Bartlett was a very brave guy and he didn’t deserve to die like that. Neither of them did.
That wasn’t the worst part. The two men’s colleagues back in Force 84’s secure Ops Room at Kandahar Airfield were forced to sit and watch the whole ghastly show play out as it happened. Patten and Bartlett’s last moments were piped through in real time on a live TV feed from a Predator circling above them. That’s why they had been able to tell us exactly where to look.
7 November 2006
14.35
‘Two minutes, fellah …’
I’d been dozing. The Chinook’s loadie woke me with a gentle kick. He had to shout the standard warning to be heard over the deafening din of the helicopter’s giant rotor blades.
We were his only passengers on the fifty-minute flight from Kandahar. The rest of the cabin was stuffed full to waist level with every conceivable shape of box and bag you could imagine: cardboard ration packs, steel ammunition boxes, big sealed packages of office equipment, crates of dark oil-like liquid and half a dozen fully packed mailbags. There was nowhere to put our feet, so I’d stretched out on the red canvas seats, slid my helmet underneath my head, and drifted off to a chorus of rhythms and vibrations.
Billy and the Boss were sprawled across the seats along the other side of the Chinook when I came to. Billy had been kipping as well, but he was now sitting up. The Boss was still staring avidly out of a glassless porthole window, his short brown hair flickering in the wind. He’d been doing that when I closed my eyes, fascinated by everything below us. Unlike Billy and me, it was his first time.
I sat up and strapped on my helmet as the sound of the rotor blades changed. Our tactical descent into Camp Bastion had begun.
The Helmand Task Force’s HQ – meaning the brigadier and his staff – was in the province’s capital, Lashkar Gah. But Camp Bastion was its accommodation and logistics hub – its beating heart. It was home to the vast majority of the 7,800 British soldiers stationed in Helmand, and it was to be our home too.
Billy grinned at me. I shook my head and raised my eyes to the heavens, and that made him laugh. He was really enjoying this moment, the twat.
I couldn’t believe I was back. I shouldn’t even have been in the army. Civilian life for me was due to have started two months earlier, at the end of 656 Squadron’s first three-and-a-half-month tour of southern Afghanistan. After twenty-two years serving Queen and Country, I was getting out. I had been really looking forward to signing off too. I’d told Billy as much on our ride out of Bastion, precisely eighty-three days ago. ‘Bad luck buddy.’ I’d given him a patronising nudge. ‘I’ll raise a Guinness to you from the bar of my local the day you fly back to this shit hole, eh?’ That’s why he was grinning at me now. I was half expecting him to start raising an imaginary pint at me.
My dreams of Civvy Street had been postponed for six months, thanks to the army’s shortage of Weapons Officers. Apaches were a brand new business and there had only been time to train up a few of us. Every squadron that deployed had to have one. We were in charge of everything to do with the aircraft’s offensive capabilities. The other Weapons Officers were all posted, leaving the Army Air Corps (AAC) a shortlist of one. After a fair bit of arm twisting, and no small amount of emotional blackmail, I had agreed to do one more tour.
Newness was also why the whole squadron was coming back so soon. The Westland WAH64 Apache helicopter gunship had only entered operational service with HM Armed Forces in May that year. It was renamed the Apache AH Mk1. The first Apache unit – 656 Squadron – was only passed fully combat ready six days after we deployed in May. By the summer 664 Squadron had come online. They’d relieved us in August and as the only other available squadron we were now relieving them. The Boss, Billy and I had come out to start the handover.
We heaved our Bergens (army slang for rucksack) over our shoulders just after the aircraft hit the ground. On the loadmaster’s thumbs up, the gunner lowered the tail ramp and we clambered out onto the metal runway, flinching as the heat from the Chinook’s twin turboshaft engines stung the back of our necks.
Waiting for us fifty metres away was one of the saddest looking army vehicles I had ever seen: a battered old four tonner with the windscreen, canopy, frame and tailgate all entirely missing. A sand-ripped cabin and an empty flatbed was all that was left. It looked like something out of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
Standing in front of it, his hands clasped together in excitement, was John – 664 Squadron’s Second in Command. He was grinning, too, but for a different reason to Billy. John shook all three of us very firmly by the hand.
‘It’s great to see you guys – it really is.’
It was obvious he meant it too. Our arrival signalled the green light for his team to start packing their bags.
‘Never mind the bullshit, John. What the fuck do you call that?’ I pointed my rifle at his Mad Max-mobile.
‘It’s the missile truck.’
‘I know it’s the missile truck. But when we left it with you, it actually looked like the missile truck. It was in good order. You’ve totally trashed it.’
John chuckled. He was an old mate of mine. We had been warrant officers together before he’d taken his commission.
‘Yeah. We’ve been a little busy. There’s a war on – not that you work-shy slackers would have known much about it when you were here.’
It was the normal banter that rival incoming and outgoing units exchanged. We were actually quietly impressed with the state of the missile truck, but we didn’t want to let on to John.
I jumped up on the flatbed and let the warm sun dry the sweat on my brow. Late autumn for Helmand province meant bright sunshine and the temperature in the mid-twenties. It was a great relief after the furnace heat of the previous summer, when we slowly boiled