I took a deep breath.
‘Well?’ His face looked as though it was about to burst into flames.
I gave him my answer as slowly and calmly as I could manage. ‘With all due respect, sir, I’ve been recceing positions for years. Sat on a bare-arsed, skylined hill like that, we might as well have been flying a banner behind us saying “over here”.’
Mick’s head began to move from side to side. I wasn’t sure whether he was just questioning my approach or looking to escape through a crack in the floorboards.
I continued, undeterred. ‘If the sun, glinting off our bubble cockpit, didn’t give us away first the noise surely would have, because that position is directly upwind. And I didn’t hang around the area for the hell of it. I waited because there was every chance that the first vehicles were just the vanguard of a bigger convoy. I needed to be sure that there weren’t any others.’
They looked at me in disbelief and then at each other.
‘Sir…If I’d left too early and more vehicles had turned up, I’d have brought back the wrong enemy strengths and the commander tasked to destroy them could have found himself getting killed in his own ambush. That convoy was travelling at about twenty miles an hour, allowing us time to plan an ambush-making my information both 100 per cent accurate and very timely.’
Herbert was unimpressed. The marks he gave me said everything: I’d almost failed.
At breakfast with the rest of the students I completely lost it. ‘In a real battle, skylined on that ridgeline like that, we’d have been shot clean out of the sky. Instructors-put ‘em in combats or out in the field, expose them to real tactics and a little rain and they’d fucking melt! Herbert doesn’t have a tactical bone in his fucking body!’
Everybody had stopped eating. My marine buddy Sammy, who I’d spoofed the day we received our grading results, eventually said what everyone was thinking. ‘You’re supposed to pass the course, you tit, not teach the instructors tactics and declare war on the system.’
‘You were a gnat’s cock-hair away from getting us both failed for not using their OPs,’ Mick said. ‘We only scraped a pass because your plan was bombproof. If we’d made one tiny error they’d have fucked us with it till our arses bled. You need to fucking wise up, Para-boy.’
After Fremington, I flew with three different instructors. Up until then, I’d had pretty good grades. The new instructors were assigned to find out what had gone wrong with Herbert and me. Fortunately, they put it down to an aberration.
Fremington taught me a lesson every bit as valuable as tactics and tactical awareness. It had taught me coursemanship-when to speak and when to keep my big stupid trap shut. No one liked a smart arse, and in my determination to get into the thick of it, I’d forgotten a crucial ingredient: humility.
MAY 1992
Middle Wallop, Hampshire
No one at Middle Wallop wanted to find himself in the cockpit with a ‘chopper’, especially when it came to exams, and, as I’d already discovered, there was no instructor more feared than Darth Vader.
Mr Palmer and I had already crossed swords once and that was enough. I hadn’t forgotten our first encounter: his huge frame filling the doorway as he’d strolled into stores for a new pair of gloves, glaring first at my beret, then at me. Ever since, like everyone else on the course, I’d gone out of my way to avoid him.
Late in the month my luck finally ran out.
After returning from Devon, I had several days more flying to do before my Final Handling Test-make or break day, when I would either earn my wings or get booted off the course. First there was a halt in proceedings beforehand because of the International Air Tattoo, a huge fly-in, normally organised by the RAF but staged this year at Middle Wallop.
IAT (or ‘RIAT’ as it is known today-they’ve added a ‘Royal’ to it) is the biggest air show in Europe. Hundreds of military aircraft take part, from vintage Hurricanes and Spitfires to modern fighter jets and combat helicopters. It’s an organisational nightmare because tens of thousands of spotters descend on the event and traffic has to be diverted around the southern half of England. Marshalling this number of aircraft is a huge job and falls pretty much to the host base to organise; we students were told that we were the ‘work party’-the guys on the ground responsible for ensuring the visiting pilots taxied and parked where they were supposed to. The man in charge was none other than Mr Chopper Palmer.
Everybody groaned.
I knew I hadn’t helped matters by wandering around the place with the maroon machine on my head and sporting a set of Para wings on my arm like they were the only ones that mattered-before I’d realised that all that Para stuff wasn’t necessarily the best way of becoming an AAC pilot.
On the day before the Tattoo I walked over to the air traffic control tower to get a bird’s eye view of the proceedings, to orientate myself before the show started. As I wandered from window to window, getting my bearings, wondering how we’d fit all the aircraft in, I turned to see a petite, middle-aged woman engaged in a meaningful conversation with one of the controllers. I tuned in, because I’d overheard her mention that she had a couple of sons in the Paras.
I didn’t think any more about it until, on her way out, she said her goodbyes and the controller beside me said: ‘Bye, Mrs Palmer.’
‘Mrs Palmer?’ I asked when she had disappeared from view. ‘Chopper’s wife…?’
‘The very same,’ the controller said. ‘Nice, isn’t she?’
She was. Lovely, in fact. Something I found very difficult to square with her enormous husband and his fearsome reputation. But then it began to dawn on me. Maybe, on our first meeting, Palmer hadn’t been psyching me out; maybe I’d misread that stare. If the guy had a couple of sons in the Paras, perhaps it had signalled something else-an affinity, maybe? Jesus. Could it be that Chopper’s reputation was not all it was cracked up to be? Could he be a regular bloke after all? How else could he have ended up with such a charming wife?
Armed with this heretical thought, I left the control tower and headed round the corner for my briefing. My fellow students were already waiting.
I fell into line just before Palmer appeared, looking like thunder. His eyes met mine and they seemed to bore right through me. He gave me that thin smile again and boomed: ‘Right. I need a second in command. Who’s going to be my two-eye-see?’
You could have cut the air with a knife. Nobody said a word. The only thing missing was The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme music.
From nowhere, I felt myself stick up my hand. ‘I will, sir,’ I said.
Palmer growled something and stormed off in the direction of the hangars.
‘What did he say?’ I asked Sammy.
‘He said, “Thanks, you knob. You’ve blown any chance you had passing the course. You can go back to being a meat-bomb right now.”’
‘Seriously. What did he really say?’
‘He said, “Para, Para in the sky, living proof that shit can fly.”’
As I made to pelt off after Chopper Palmer, Sammy held me back by my shirt. ‘Are you fucking mad, Macy?’
‘Probably,’ I said, tugging myself free.
In fact, I was feeling happier than I’d felt in ages. My hunch-and it was based on some pretty solid first-hand evidence-said that, a pound to a pinch of shit, Palmer wasn’t quite the chopper he was cracked up to