Apache. Ed Macy

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      ‘Good set, sir.’

      ‘That time anyway,’ the Boss said drily.

      I was the squadron’s Weapons Officer. I taught people how to shoot these things for a living, for Christ’s sake. And I’d missed the target by close on 100 metres. The reason didn’t matter. I was livid with myself.

      ‘Breaking left into an orbit.’ I pulled the cyclic back, lowered the collective and banked left, decelerating swiftly.

      The Boss was keen to finish off any survivors.

      ‘My gun.’

      We circled the copse’s western edge.

      ‘I can’t see any movement.’

      Ten seconds later, we’d reached its northern window.

      ‘I’ve got something.’

      I looked down on the MPD. The Boss was right. There was a flat-shaped heat source moving extremely slowly towards the northern edge of the copse.

      ‘It’s somebody crawling towards the tube. Engaging.’ The Boss squeezed off a burst of twenty.

      An Apache pilot always announced when he was opening up so his co-pilot knew they weren’t taking rounds. An M230 cannon firing less than a metre from your feet sounded and felt like a sledgehammer banging away on the aircraft’s exterior. It bounced the balls of your feet and shook you in your seat.

      The cannon pointed down and eighty degrees to the right, and was powerful enough to throw the Apache a few metres to the left as it engaged. The on-board computer compensated for the change in direction.

      The cannon ramped itself backwards as the first three rounds flew from the barrel. Now in its optimum position, the remaining seventeen HEDP rounds streaked towards the target. By the time the nineteenth and twentieth rounds were away, the first were tearing through the trees. When the smoke cleared, the heat source had split into two smaller heat sources. But the Boss wasn’t satisfied.

      ‘There’s got to be a few of them in there. Is that another heat source further back or just the mortar barrel? Better make sure.’

      He gave it another burst, then a third and a fourth.

      The whole of the copse’s floor glowed on the FLIR screen. The Boss still kept hammering away, only stopping when we’d reached its southern edge again. The soles of my feet were tingling.

      He’d pumped seven bursts into the place, 140 rounds in total, leaving a great smoking pile of scorched earth, ripped foliage and charred branches. And enough lead to start a pencil factory. We continued to circle.

      ‘Do you think there’s anyone left alive in there?’

      I laughed. ‘Not a hope in hell, Boss.’

      So this was how the OC had won Top Gun in the States. The man was merciless.

      ‘Widow Eight Four, this is Ugly Five One. Target destroyed. Do you have any further targets for us?’

      ‘Negative. We’re pulling back into the desert.’

      ‘Copied. We’ll cover you into it.’

      ‘Ugly Five One, Ugly Five Zero. My suggestion, we go back to Camp Bastion. You need to rearm and refuel, and I need a new aircraft.’

      The engagement had lasted twenty minutes, leaving us with only an hour’s combat gas left. And with a broken gun we wouldn’t be going anywhere near Kajaki or Now Zad. The rest of the famil could wait.

      ‘Copied, Billy. That is an affirmative. I’ve got a conference call with the CO (Commanding Officer) in Kandahar at 1800, so we’ll finish the famil tomorrow.’

      Everyone’s spirits were sky high on the flight home. One sortie down, one–nil to us. We’d just been expecting a routine turn around the houses. The action was a bonus.

      Killing the enemy didn’t make me punch the air or whoop with joy. At the same time, I never got beardy about it or started to ponder the meaning of life. We’d helped out the guys on the ground, and some Taliban had gone to meet their maker. Ah well. They shouldn’t have shot at us first. Next target please.

      ‘Boss, do you fancy doing some flying on the way back?’

      ‘Thanks, Mr M. Much appreciated.’

      I wanted to give him the controls so I could text Billy. And I hoped that if he had something to do he might forget about my shocking performance with the rockets.

       U SEE HOW MANY RNDS BOSS STUCK IN THAT PLACE

      AWESOME … LIKES A BIT OF 30 MIL ACTION DOESNT HE …

       HE’LL FIT IN WELL

       IS THAT HIS 1ST KILL

       NO EYED DEER

       ASK HIM

      ‘Er, Boss, was that you popping your cherry then?’

      ‘Sorry?’

      ‘First successful engagement with a real enemy, sir?’

      He was sheepish. ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose it was.’

      ‘Congratulations.’

       YES … FIRST BLOOD

      ‘That mortar team needed their heads examining, Mr M. Quite unreal. It was almost as if they were asking for it.’

      ‘Probably so smacked out they wouldn’t have cared either way, Boss.’

      It wasn’t the first time I’d witnessed a pointless last stand in Helmand. The Taliban weren’t like any other enemy the modern British Army had come across. Much of their senior leadership was still made up of the people who controlled Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001. Their ‘Emir’, the one-eyed Mullah Omar, was still believed to be top of the pile. He’d started the whole Taliban movement (Taliban meant ‘God’s Students’) in a small village near Kandahar as a reactionary counter to the corruption of the warlords. In those days Mullah Omar had preached simple but strict Islamic ideals. He knew little of the rest of the world, and cared less.

      By 2006 the Taliban we were fighting was a very different beast. Its leadership had been infected and taken over by international Islamic extremists. Now it espoused global Islamic domination too.

      It was led from Quetta, the hot-blooded Pakistani city sixty miles south-east of Kandahar province, by no more than a dozen ageing men. They sent their senior commanders, all hardbitten ideologues, over the border to do their bidding.

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