A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan by James Fergusson

Author:James Fergusson [Fergusson, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, Middle East, Military, Afghan War, England, Ireland, United States, Modern (16th-21st Centuries), 21st Century
ISBN: 9781407033822
Amazon: B0031RS66O
Publisher: Transworld Digital
Published: 2008-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

5

The Chinooks Push the Envelope

The aviator's phrase 'pushing the envelope', first used by test pilots in World War Two, was decisively back in fashion during Herrick 4. The crews of the Army Air Corps' Apaches were, in effect, test pilots, because it was the first time their machines had flown in combat. The Apache was an American machine with a proven track record – it was first used in Panama in 1989 – but the Air Corps were flying a new British version that, for political procurement reasons, was fitted with engines built by Rolls-Royce rather than General Electric. There was much other clever technology and weaponry on board that had not seen active service before. No one knew for sure how the machines or their newly trained crews would perform. Herrick 4 turned out to be the hottest baptism by fire imaginable for both.

The pressure on the Army Air Corps was intense, although moderate compared to what the RAF's Chinook transport helicopters worked under. It was very quickly clear that the platoon-houses could not rely on road transport for their supplies. Instead, the garrisons had to depend entirely on Flight 1310, as the Chinook contingent was known, for their 'bullets and beans' as well as for troop rotations and the evacuation of casualties. The Task Force's whole strategy would have collapsed without them, and everyone, including the enemy, knew it.

Although agile for its size, the Chinook was still almost a hundred feet long and weighed twenty-two tons fully laden, and it was never more vulnerable to attack than when putting down near a platoon-house to unload. The Taliban nickname for the machine was 'big mosquito'; the Paras called it a 'big bullet magnet'. No matter how much the pilots varied the frequency, time of day, speed, height and direction of their approaches, there were only a certain number of places for a Chinook to land near the district centres, which meant the drop zones were frequently 'hot'. 'It was the flights into the platoon-houses that really put people's hairs up,' Squadron Leader Paul Shepherd confirmed. On troop rotations and 'deliberate ops' there were sometimes more than forty soldiers crammed into the back. Destroying a Chinook, therefore, was naturally the glorious jackpot sought by every gunman. A well-aimed RPG in the right place at the right time, or even a single lucky heavy machine-gun bullet, could cause a catastrophe with what Shepherd called 'Mull of Kintyre ramifications'.

The reference was to the fatal accident in 1994, when a Chinook carrying almost the entire top tier of Northern Ireland's military intelligence officials crashed on the west coast of Scotland in heavy fog. The political implications for John Major's government, which was then struggling against a resurgent IRA, were immense – and the stakes were just as high in Helmand now. Ed Butler and the MoD worried that public opinion could turn decisively against the Afghan mission if a fully laden Chinook were to be brought down. That fear intensified after 2 September

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