Markham Public Library 3201 Bur Oak Avenue Markham, ON L6B 0T2
Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/dressedtokillOOOOmadi
AAA: Anti-Aircraft Artillery AAC: Army Air Corps AH: Apache helicopter APU: Auxiliary Power Unit ATC: Air Traffic Control BATUS: The British Army Training Unit Suffield
BDA: Battle Damage Assessment BP: Battle Position Cl30: Lockheed Cl30 Hercules helicopter
CCF: Combined Cadet Force DC: District Centre EF: Enemy Forces EFAB: Extended Forward Avionic Bay (the small side stub wing under the cockpit door)
FLIR: Forward Looking Infrared FOB: Forward Operating Base GMLRS: Guided Multiple Launched Rocket System
HALS: Hardened Aircraft Landing Strip
HIDAS: Helicopter Integrated Defensive Aids Suite HLS: Helicopter Landing Site HMG: Heavy Machine Gun IDF: Indirect fire IDM: Improved Data Modum IED: Improvised Explosive Device IntO: Intelligence Officer ISAF: International Security Assistance Force
ISTAR: Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance JTAC: Joint Terminal Attack Controller
JHF: Joint Helicopter Force JMB: Joint Mission Brief KAF: Kandahar Air Field LCJ: Load Carrying Jerkin — also known as Life Support Jacket Loadies: Officially called loadmasters and responsible for passengers and equipment on helicopters locstat: Location status LST: Laser Spot Tracker MERT: Medical Emergency Response Team
MPS: Mission Planning Station NCO: Non-Commissioned Officer NVGs: Night Vision Goggles OC: Officer Commanding OGp: Orders Group PID: Positive identification PNVS: Pilot Night-Vision Sensor pressel: The switch to allow you to transmit on the radio PTSD: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder RCB: Regimental Commissioning Board
RIP: Relief in Place RPG: Rocket Propelled Grenade RTB: Return To Base SAL: Semi-Active Laser TADS: Target Acquisition and Designation Sight TPF: Tactical Planning Facility TIC: Troops In Contact TPF: Tactical Planning Facility UAV: Unmanned Aerial Vehicle UOTC: University Officer Training Corps
U/S: Unserviceable VHR: Very High Readiness
This book is dedicated to all the men and women of our Armed Forces past and present, especially to those currently
fighting overseas.
‘Get some fucking fire down, ma’am!’
My eyes dart from side to side; flashes of red tracer slice through the sky. Scarlet and orange flames blossom across the ground and it is impossible to tell where the friendly troops stop and the enemy begins.
Stay cool[ Madison , stay cool. Take a deep breath.
The air smells thick with sweat and fear. I struggle to swallow, and gulp violently; my tongue feels too big for my mouth.
You know you can do this. This is what all that sodding training was for. You cant screw up now.
I blink hard. My eyelids already feel heavy, as if my brain is struggling to keep up with the sensory overload. I’m painfully aware that were saving our soldiers’ lives with our actions.
As we orbit, I see some Taliban fighters attempting to escape. They look like white dots, miniature figures running with what could be weapons strapped to their chests. My eyes strain to see what they’re carrying against their billowing Afghan clothing. We have to be sure they aren’t innocent civilians fleeing from the heavy fighting.
‘Darwin, I can’t see . . . maybe that’s an RPG, but . . .’ I tail off, squinting into my sights.
‘I’ll fly closer,’ my co-pilot, Darwin, says. ‘We’ve got to be sure.’
He’s already heading east, reading my thoughts as he watches the telescopic-view videoscreen I control from the front. We work as a team, so while I control the telescopic view from the front, he sits in the back maintaining the all-round perspective.
‘Widow Eight Zero, this is Ugly Five Four,’ I say into the
radio. c I’ve got three leakers heading south along the dirt track. Looks like they’ve come out of the fort on the eastern side and they’re carrying weapons.’
The response from the Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC) is immediate and confident.
‘Ugly, there are no civilians or friendly troops anywhere in that area. If they’re fighting-age males leaving the area of the fort, I’m happy they’re leakers.’
I’m ready. Am I cleared to engage?’
Now he’s busy with another crew. Ugly, stand by . . .’ His voice is drowned out by shouting, muffled bursts of machinegun fire and his own heavy breathing. He’s on the move.
Jesus. If it's scary up here , I dread to think what sort of hell hes living down there.
I try him again just as we move beyond our cannon’s range.
‘Widow Eight Zero, this is Ugly Five Four. I have leakers identified.’ As we continue our orbit, the leakers slip from view behind a wall.
Come on, come on, were going to miss them . . .
‘Come on, we’ve got to get round,’ I urge Darwin.
He knows, he knows.
‘I’m on it, ma’am.’
He’s giving a situation report back to our base. He’s calm; his voice is low.
The JTAC tells me he’s happy for me to fire at the enemy.
‘Ugly Five Four, you are cleared to engage on the eastern side. Send BDA.’
Finally.
Widow Eight Zero must have found somewhere to shelter from the hail of bullets. He wants the Battle Damage Assessment - my bird’s-eye view of the destruction.
Darwin brings us full circle as quickly as our gunship — fully laden with fuel and missiles - will allow.
Looking down, I panic for a second that I have lost them. I steer the sight around with my thumb, guiding the round
grey rocker switch on the GameBoy-style grip. Its stiff, and I use the strength of my whole arm to push it as the aircraft slowly circles. I find the men, crawling on their knees and elbows through the dirt.
'Happy?’ Me.
'Happy.’ Darwin.
One word that says we trust each other.
My fingers close around the cold trigger. I pause for a split second to think about the gunfire I am about to spray across the battlefield. At that moment, I realize that I have no choice but to be good at my job. There are people relying on me. After today, I’ll no longer be the new girl.
And for the best shot of the year, the award goes to Marksman Madison, who scored forty-four out of a possible fifty.’
I shuffle out of the row where I am sitting. The school assembly hall is musty and smells of teenage boys and body odour. My face reddens as two hundred eyes fix on me. I concentrate on squeezing past the line of combat-clad legs to get to the aisle.
As I walk up to the stage, I hear a whisper: 'That’s the American girl.’
I don’t look behind me. I hope my arse doesn’t look huge in my oversized combats.
What a joke. This result is a complete fluke. I know they’ll soon find that out.
I walk up the stairs. My boots don’t fit properly and rub against my heels.
'Well done, Cadet Madison.’
I shake the lieutenant-colonel’s hand, turn and am forced to sit on stage with a handful of other pupils. I see one of the other girls in my platoon, Mia, and grin at her, feeling awkward on stage. She smiles back, looking equally uncomfortable.
Someone is taking pictures for the fifth-form yearbook. 'Smile,’ he says, as the flash goes off.
I attempt a smile, but can’t open my mouth. I’m wearing
braces on my teeth and I hate them. They hurt and make me look like some kind of robot. Im counting the days until they come off. I also feel slightly light-headed. I’m on a special Weetabix diet - two, three times a day - with a few of my friends, in an attempt to shrink our bodies. My stomach growls. Perhaps a Twix wouldn’t be too bad . . .
Joining the Combined Cadet Force (CCF) at the local boys’ school a year ago, in 1995 , had seemed the thing to do at the time. I was fourteen when I started at my all-girls school, and the ‘in crowd’ went along.
When I moved to England, I’d joined as a boarder. Talk about limiting your options with the opposite sex. My school was very academic and prided itself on its yearly ranking in the league tables. They lost my entrance exam paper, and when I sat it again I knew the answer to every question, because I’d asked my dad the ones I didn’t know first time around. I guess I’ve always been a bit geeky that way. As a result, I was put up a year, having passed with flying colours.
In the boarding house, we spent nearly all our time either trying on each other’s clothes or revising for some test or another. I didn’t mind too much - the girls were fun and it was quite satisfying to do well at school.
But, of course, there’s the usual boy talk. We were all obsessed with the young and handsome history teacher, Mr Laithwaite. Fie was tall and blond with piercing blue eyes and a tight bum, which we all used to stare at when he turned to the blackboard. Fie teased us all mercilessly for forgetting our homework, and we were always trying to get into his detention. Just my luck that on the one occasion I managed it, I was lumbered with the massively overweight maths teacher. She was so enormous that when she turned round after writing on the blackboard, she had huge white patches on her boobs.
Kate, one of the coolest and prettiest girls in my class, told me that if I wanted a boyfriend, CCF was the place to be.
‘There are loads of fit boys/ she’d said in her sing-song voice as we sat on the grass one lunch break.
‘Andrew’s in the army and so are all of his gang.’ She gave her shiny blond hair an extra flick.
Andrew was her latest boyfriend. He was in the year above us, at the boys’ school, and gorgeous — not unlike a younger and slightly ganglier version of Mr Laithwaite.
And Jason . . .’ Her eyes glinted. She knew I really fancied the floppy-haired older boy.
OK, I was convinced.
So when the time came to decide, my name joined the long list of scribbled Biro signatures on the noticeboard. We also had the option of joining the navy or the RAF, but only the geeks and misfits joined them. We all knew that the army was the best.
Another handful of girls, who smoked behind the lacrosse hut and generally did as little work as possible, went for the other Friday-afternoon option - community service. I think they spent two afternoons serving tea at the local old people’s home then bunked off for the rest of the year.
I started to picture Friday-evening dates after CCF - the cinema, followed by a sneaky drink of cider on the way back to the boarding house.
Our housemistress, Mrs Mace, who doubled as the French teacher, was a fierce, rake-thin spinster. We all dreaded having to beg her for permission to spend a night away. When I wanted to go to a club with Kate, her mum had to write a letter — how uncool - asking if I could stay at their house and go to a ‘dance’, and I had to do a demo in Mrs Mace’s office of the kind of ‘dancing’ I was planning on doing while she sat and watched with a pinched expression, her hair pulled tightly into a bun which perched on the top of her head. I still squirm with embarrassment when I think about that.
The letter to the Mace was a necessary evil - being discovered coming in late prompted her scariest outbursts. But the
older girls always seemed to manage to come back from the boys school after hours, insisting they’d been kept behind to clean the rifles, or to help clear out the stores.
‘You can hang around with me,’ Kate had said. ‘I’ll show you how to make the best of the uniform. If you leave two buttons of your shirt undone and tuck your combats into your boots, it can look really good.’
I wanted to be part of a group - and this was it. But no way was I wearing that beret thing . . .
So every Friday afternoon, I joined the coachload of girls piling into the quad, where we were taught to march, given basic rifle and battle drill and spent the odd afternoon wading through tunnels filled with water and scaling twelve-foot walls. There was lots of shouting right from the start, but I loved the feeling of satisfaction when we got through it, and I used to treat myself to a Dairy Milk on the way back to school. I was told that, if I got through two years, I could become an NCO and be the one in charge.
Now, I’m sitting on the stage in full view of everybody and starting to wish that I hadn’t concentrated quite so hard earlier that day on the range.
Having completed the compulsory two years, after taking our GCSEs at the age of sixteen most of the girls gladly handed back their musty uniform to the stores and didn’t give CCF another thought. But I loved the idea of having a rank and being the one with knowledge to pass on, so I eagerly put myself up for one of the sought-after places on the leadership course to become a junior NCO. The course is a challenge both physically and mentally - and I was game. I was selected along with Mia and a few others to complete the intensive week-long programme, teaching us how to give lectures and educate new recruits. We all pass and are each handed a shiny stripe to attach to our uniform.
I’ll always remember the start of the new school year, and a
gangly bunch of recruits spilling out into the impressive quad area. The groups the new NCOs were allocated to train were always mixed sex, and we began with basic drill, attempting to teach the fuzzy-faced boys to march properly: right leg forward with left arm; left leg with right.
We rose through the ranks, while, one by one, the other NCOs dropped out, distracted by schoolwork, boyfriends and university applications. But we were still enjoying it, and by our final school year, Mia and I were, respectively, platoon commander and platoon sergeant; the two most senior females in our intake.
Two and a half years after I picked up my shooting award, and just months from finishing school, and were on the coach to one of the army bases in Kent for the day.
I prise open my eyes. They feel horribly gritty, and the bright spring sun makes me squint. I glance to the side and see Mias head resting on my shoulder; her dark hair falling over her face.
‘Oi, were here,’ I tell her, shaking her slightly. ‘Yuck, you’ve dribbled.’
‘Wliat? Oops, sorry,’ she says, wiping my combat-clad shoulder. ‘God, I’m knackered, and my mouth feels like, just gross, like a little man has stepped into it and pooed.’
‘Have some gum, buffalo breath.’ I chuck her a packet of Extra from one of the large pockets in my combat trousers.
As we pull into the car park, a crude concrete slab surrounded by a few Portakabins and open fields, we are met by a line of officers and army instructors, who look distinctly unimpressed at the task ahead of them: teaching yet another bunch of cadets about battlecraft.
An hour later, and we’re all totally camouflaged up, along with the other cadets — there must be about forty of us. As well as our usual combat gear and boots, we’ve got grass sticking out of our helmets, long reeds poking from our webbing and
green smears across our faces. It’s all part of the six ‘S’s - shape, shine, shadow, silhouette, sound and . . . smovement - the measures you take to blend in with the countryside and not be detected by the enemy.
We congregate at the meeting point and are met by three instructors; they are all young, beefy and extremely good- looking, and they clearly know it.
The middle one comes forward. He reminds me of a fitter version of Jim Carrey, with all the arrogance but none of the humour.
‘So, which one of you lot is the platoon commander?’ he asks, and there is a definite sneer in his voice.
Mia takes a stride forward. ‘Me,’ she says, as confidently as she can manage. He looks appalled as he clocks her stripes, then he raises his eyebrows, looks at his colleagues and snig- gers.
‘And your platoon sergeant?’ he continues, thinking it has to be one of the boys; they’re definitely in the majority here.
‘Yep, that’s me,’ I say, stepping next to Mia.
Now he’s totally amused. ‘What, two girls?’ he laughs. ‘You’re kidding me, right?’
‘Ha, let’s see what you’re made of. Give a battle command from over there by that tree. You can do it in front of the whole platoon so they can see what you’re made of, too.’ He snivels, ‘Blondie, you can go first.’
Mia gives me an encouraging ‘Sod them’ look. I take a deep breath.
I know this is a test. I look around me, and rows of eyes are staring back at me. My heart starts hammering.
I muster up every bit of energy I possibly can and let rip — I’m mindful of the fact that I need to keep my voice low. Squeaky shrieking would get me laughed right out of there.
Everything goes in slow motion, and as I start hollering it feels like the ground underneath my feet is shaking. I yell as if my life depends on it.
‘Enemy, 150 metres in treeline. Watch and shoot, watch and shooootF
I look round, and the instructor is standing open-mouthed; and his eyes are so wide I can barely see his irises. I don’t dare look behind me at the cadets, but I catch Mia’s eye. She’s grinning from ear to ear.
‘Well, well,’ he says, quickly regaining his composure. ‘Not bad.’ But it’s pretty obvious he’s determined to make fools of us.
‘Platoon Commander, call yourself a commander, let’s see it then,’ he says to Mia. As she moves towards centre stage, I can tell she’s terrified, but she starts bellowing the same instruction as I did.
It’s impressive. It’s so impressive, in fact, that when we turn round, it’s as if there is a whole new bunch of instructors facing us. The slightly patronizing looks on their faces have been replaced by genuine smiles, and wide mouths and teeth have replaced the pinched cheeks and squinty eyes. From that moment on, they are totally respectful. They don’t think to question our sex, our rank, our knowledge, they just let us get on with it.
We spend the morning barrelling through muddy fields, our platoon around us in various formations, looking for enemy and mocking up battles. In the afternoon we make a platoon camp and practise an ambush scenario.
As Mia and I pack up, pulling off our sweaty helmets and webbing, the main instructor comes over. He’s changed into a tight T-shirt and his chest and arm muscles bob as he walks.
‘Oi, girls.’
We look over, slightly apprehensive. ‘You’ve surprised us today, good work. You can tell all the cadets respect you too. I’m impressed.’
Three months later, and I’m sitting in a military waiting room before my medical for a Short Service Limited Commission.
I’ve just finished my A-levels and will still only be seventeen if I go straight to uni. Freshers’ Week and still below the legal drinking age - not an ideal way to begin my post-school life of freedom.
The idea of a gap year in the army came up during a chat with one of my CCF officers. It would involve four weeks’ training at Sandhurst, rather than the year a proper’ officer spends, and ten months working in a regular army unit as a junior officer.
I can feel my tummy churning. My paper gown is open at the back, and the plastic chair feels cold on my bum. Why does the army doctor need to see my bum anyway?
So far, the worst part about joining the army has been never knowing what’s going to happen to me next. Everything comes as a complete surprise, and no one ever reacts to me the way normal civilians would.
My CCF officer sent me some brochures. The cover featured a girl who was about to jump out of a plane. Underneath the picture were the words: Amazing opportunities to see the world - adventure training.’ The girl looked confident and suntanned, and she was smiling. I’ve always loved flying; everything about it, from the way time almost stops when you take off, to floating high in the sky, one minute in clouds, then high above them. One glance at that brochure and I was sold.
Two days later, I picked up the phone.
The conversation didn’t go at all how I’d imagined.
Army Careers,’ the gruff Northern voice barked.
I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom, surrounded by army leaflets and bits of paper.
‘Um, hi ... I’m thinking about joining the army . . . and I . . . er . . . have some questions.’
I scanned my list of questions.
c Go ahead.’
I could hear the tapping of a keyboard in the background and the faint whir of office machinery.
‘Well ... is it hard?’ I squeaked.
There was a hostile silence; I could feel the man on the other end of the line wondering if I was serious.
‘What?’
This was going badly. ‘Umm, you know. Joining.’
‘Depends what you consider to be difficult. Listen, miss, I suggest you go and have a think about whether you’re serious or not, then come in and see us.’
After the phone call, I was more determined than ever.
I’d been so nervous about this assessment that, apart from a Nutri-Grain bar, I’d been unable to eat all morning. I just had no idea what was going to be required of me. The train journey to Warminster was pure torture; I alternated between biting my nails down to the quicks and wondering what the hell I was doing.
The Nutri-Grain bar on the walk here had been the final straw for my stomach; it started churning so much I had to pop into a hotel to use the loo.
I walked in looking relatively smart in the M&S suit my mum had bought me the month before for these army interviews. I enquired where the toilets were and was directed downstairs by the pretty receptionist.
‘Stairs are off limits though; they’re painting. Use the lifts.’ She smiled and gestured towards the corner of the foyer.
By now my stomach was complaining loudly and I was working hard to keep everything under control. My pelvic- floor muscles went into overdrive as I pressed the button for the basement. The lift stopped downstairs and I stood perfectly still, poised to dart through the doors at the first available opportunity. My bowels were gurgling like a food processor.
But the doors remained resolutely shut.
I started to think that maybe a teeny-weeny fart would bring me some relief while I waited. I decided to go for it. I tilted my bum slightly towards the back of the lift. There was an explosion like a car crash, followed by a huge wave of relief.
I heard a small cough from behind me.
I turned in slow motion to see the doors open behind me . . . and a waiter with a little silver food trolley and three hotel guests with surprised looks on their faces.
Good start to the day, Madison.
‘Miss Madison?’
I followed the nurse into a large, cold, uncarpeted examining room with peeling paint and a few dog-eared anatomy posters on the walls. An old man who looked like a corpse sat behind the desk, a stethoscope around his neck. His skin was transparent and I could see the blue veins pulsing softly around his temples.
The doctor asked me a few questions, noted my responses in some papers on his desk, then directed me to the scales.
As I turned my back to him, I was mortified to realize that I was wearing a barely-there G-string. I felt my face flush and did my best to hold the back of my gown closed.
‘Over to the measuring rule now, please.’ His voice crackled like parchment.
The nurse took the reading then resumed her place against the wall. I was standing uncertainly in the middle of the room, one hand shielding my bare arse.
The doctor indicated the examining couch. He wasn’t hostile, exactly, but he unsettled me.
He came over and listened to my chest, front and back. The stethoscope was like an icicle. ‘We’re just going to have a quick feel of things . . . Hope you don’t mind . . .’ He folded back the side of my gown.
I grabbed a peek at myself as he reached over and got the shock of my life.
My nipple! It was poking out of my nice lacy bra! There was a hole in my bloody bra. I felt myself start to sweat and went an even brighter red.
Maybe he wont notice.
He worked his way up my abdomen, checking for God
knows what. He was heading for my boobs, appearing not to notice my ridiculous choice of underwear.
I glanced at the nurse, who looked faintly amused.
The doc replaced my gown. 'Hop down please, Miss Madison. We need to see how you move.’
They both stared at me, waiting.
I climbed hesitantly off the couch and stood in the middle of the room again. What’s happening now ? 'See how I move?
‘Walk towards me please . . . and away . . .’
My knuckles whitened as my fist clenched over the opening of the gown.
‘Just swing your arms naturally, Miss Madison.’
Pervert! He wants to see my arse! And the nurse is in on it . . . No wonder she looks so amused.
‘OK . . . Now face me and bend side to side.’
I did so, right then left.
‘And forwards.’
Ohmygod y he’s having another look at my boobs. I leaned tentatively forward, keeping my head over the neckline of my gown.
‘Mmm . . . hmm . . .’ Apparently satisfied, he jotted down something else in his notes.
‘Face the wall, please, and run your left hand down the outside of your left thigh.’
I swivelled slowly on one foot until I was facing the wall and stood with my bum on show and my heart pounding. I can’t believe this. I was expecting a check-up, not an audition for Spearmint Rhino.
I took a deep breath and lifted my left arm slowly into the air. I cocked my left leg to the side and then slowly, almost sensually, ran the tips of my fingers from the line of my G- string down the outside of my thigh, all the way to my knee. It seemed to take for ever.
As I turned to face them, the nurse made a noise like a bark and started laughing uncontrollably. Realization dawned on me. The doctor just wanted to check my spine.
The doc cant bring himself to look me in the eye. He’s even more embarrassed than I am.
/ cant believe I just did that! Does he think Fm trying to sleep my way in! Ohmygod, get me out of here nownownow.
The last five minutes in the examining room are a blur.
A letter arrived a week later, with ticks in all the right boxes. My little performance hadn’t damaged my chances. And no one needed to know anything about it.
I was invited to spend two and a half days at Warminster with the Regimental Commissioning Board the following month. There, we were put through a number of tests - a short run, an individual assault course - then given some lectures and participated in some discussions. Finally, we went through a series of interviews, each one harder than the first.
It felt as if everyone was much older than me, but none of it seemed to faze me as much as it did some of the other candidates, even when they told me my military knowledge was crap. I just told myself I was still not totally sure I wanted to do this, and that if I failed it would be a sign.
At the end of it, the RCB held a dinner to show us some of the good things we could expect if we passed - silver-service four-course meals polished off with a small vat of wine is the norm at these regimental meals, apparently. I wasn’t even able to have a drink, though, and had to sip my water as demurely as possible. Turning eighteen wouldn’t come a moment too soon.
The water is cascading down my body; my hair is soapy and smells sweet. My legs and armpits are freshly shaven and smooth to the touch. I’m bronzed, exfoliated and buffed. There isn’t a hint of orange peel; I’ve been using a special, ultra-expensive cream to shift it. Chicane’s ‘Offshore ’ plays softly in the background. An enticingly fluffy white towel sits by the shower, a crisp waffle dressing gown and big slippers
beside it. A huge carrot cake topped with butter cream and eighteen candles waits invitingly, as does a chilled bottle of rose . . .
‘Second Lieutenant Madison!’ A gruff voice breaks into my daydream. ‘We’ll be moving in five.’
Despite the fact that it’s my long-awaited eighteenth birthday, the possibility of my first legal drink is still months away.
We’re on the last day of a six-week exercise. The British Army Training Unit Suffield (BATUS) is 1,200 square miles of open prairie in Canada where we have free rein to fire our rifles and drive our tanks at breakneck speed. It’s one of the army’s biggest and best training areas, and every unit comes here to be put through its paces at least once a year.
I was the youngest cadet and one of only a few girls to have made it through the short Sandhurst course for gap-year students. I’d accepted an offer to read civil engineering at Nottingham but deferred it for a year and instead had been posted to Osnabrtick, Germany, with the 21 Royal Engineer Regiment for ten months.
Coming to BATUS is our biggest exercise of the year. I’d been on a handful of adventure training courses, learning to ski, sail and climb, but it was always a relief to escape from Osnabrtick. The only things there are the military base and Europe’s largest sex shop. I’ve been sentenced to six weeks in a tank at BATUS. It’s inhabited by four men — and me. One of the men is the officer commanding my squadron in Osnabrtick, but far from being an honour to share his, bigger, tank, it’s turned out to be a death trap.
We crashed about two weeks into the exercise. As the tank nose-dived into a trench, I was slammed against the metal grille separating the driver’s compartment from the radios and bombarded with the OC’s camp bed, solar shower, several plastic buckets, and his flip-flops and bright red shorts. Unforgettable. The door slowly opened in what had now become the roof
and through it I saw a puffy cloud go by, followed by a helicopter.
The stench in the tank is something special - a mixture of BO, feet and general decay I’ve only managed one shower in the last six weeks, and my hair is plastered to my head in greasy clumps despite my regular use of the dandruff-inducing dry shampoo spray (which, misleadingly, has a picture of a shiny- haired lady on the tin).
We’ve been in this position for four days, and the boredom is indescribable. Amazingly, the boys all seem to think this is great - real-life playing soldiers.
I go back to my shower fantasy . . .
I’m too scared to drop off; I got an almighty bollocking for resting my eyes for a few minutes too long one day, so I fill the time in the half-darkness by counting down the hours until I can step into the wall of steam and lather up . . .
And planning my next shopping trip.
I make mental notes of what I need for my next holiday with Paul, the man of the moment, whom I met when I was at home. Maxi dress, tick. Wedges, tick. New bikini, tick. Hawaiian Tropic factors 8, 15 and 30, tick, tick, tick. I won’t burn my boobs this time round.
Despite my junior-officer tag, I know I’m next to useless after my paltry four weeks’ officer training at Sandhurst, especially as I am now working alongside a bunch of guys who have done this job for years. I’ve been manning the radios, transcribing the code as the different platoons communicate with each other across the vast plains, so I haven’t been able to get out of the tank.
It doesn’t matter too much — there are some things against getting out. I’ve developed an irrational fear of going to the toilet in the open. Out on the prairie, there’s one tree, the ‘shitting tree’, which everyone avoids unless the situation is really, really urgent. If the smell in the tank is anything to go by, it’s not going to be pleasant. Inside, there is nowhere private where
I can go to the loo, so I wait until dark - but of course the guards wear night-vision goggles and I just have to accept their ribbing the next day.
We do everything with the tank: sleep by it, service it, dress it up in camouflage nets . . . its like a very demanding boyfriend who never even takes you to dinner or to see a film.
Our final day is an endless stream of radio messages punctuated by periods of driving at three miles an hour to lay imaginary minefields to foil the imaginary enemy’s imaginary plans. I fear my heart might stop through lack of stimulation - I’m so relieved the end is in sight.
At long last, I decode a radio message with the words I’ve been dreaming about for six weeks. It’s not quite ‘Your bath is ready, Miss Madison,’ but it is second best: ‘ENDEX’.
It’s over.
I press the ‘open’ button next to the tank hatch.
As I stumble through the door to freedom, a helicopter is landing 100 metres away, on its way to the debrief. The blades slow and whoop, whoop, whoop, throwing up a cloud of dust. The air smells suddenly exotic: aviation fuel.
The pilots climb out of the cockpit. They’re blond and their uniforms are clean and freshly starched; I bet they smell of washing powder and home. I long to run up and sniff them, but I manage to restrain myself.
‘Would you like a ride?’ one of them asks.
Is that a joke?
‘Yes, please!’
The next thirty minutes are blissful — I can see the whole prairie from up here! And all the stupid tanks and cardboard minefields. And that God-awful tree.
As I watch the pilot’s hands making tiny movements on the controls, I’m fascinated. I think about how amazing it would be to do his job, and realize that, maybe one day, I could do it. I land and tell anyone who will listen that I want to be a pilot. As I say it, I know it sounds a bit lame — as if all it took
was one helicopter ride to make anyone want to be a pilot, rather than it being a life-long, burning need of mine.
They snort with laughter. IT1 show them I’m more serious than that.
University passed in a blur of drunken nights out, the odd lecture and Wednesday afternoons at the University Officer Training Corps (UOTC), where I instructed new cadets on all the basics: drill, rifle training, fieldcraft. I kept my commission and earned £50 a week - big money to poor students living on baked potatoes, pasta and vodka. I also surprised myself by being a good instructor. I liked all the cadets in my platoon and hoped the feeling was mutual; they certainly didn’t dive out of the way when I saw them on campus. The only tricky thing was the fact that I was a fresher teaching fellow freshers, but as long as we all made it to Club ISIS together every Wednesday night, we all got along fine.
During my first long summer holiday, I was asked to go back to school to help out on the regular army camp, and when I was there I was called ma’am’ by all the NCOs and cadets. I felt totally in my comfort zone for once, and even the teachers seemed slightly in awe of me, which was a bit weird, considering how recently they were shouting: £ Stop laughing at the back of my class, Madison!’
By my second year of uni, I’d decided I wanted to make a career of the army, but I hadn’t enjoyed my time with the Royal Engineers enough to want to join them. Each time I thought back I could only muster images of the shitting tree, the stinky tank . . . and then the amazing helicopter and Persil-fresh pilots. I put aside any memories I had of the engineers’ faces when I told them I wanted to be a pilot and decided to take a leap into the unknown: to try for selection for the Army Air Corps (AAC).
I wrote off and, a month later, I heard back. I would have to have yet another sodding medical. The list of requirements
was so long, anyone would’ve thought they were looking for an Olympic athlete: perfect hearing, flawless vision, no joint problems, limbs of certain lengths so you could fit snugly into the ejection seat. One guy failed because his arms were too short. Thankfully, I was deemed a well-formed, healthy specimen.
Having passed, along with the other AAC candidates who had made it through the medical, I was sent on a two-day selection course at RAF Cranwell during the Easter break from uni. We had to sit endless tests. Some of them were just like those computer games where you control the action using a joystick, and were designed to assess our speed of learning, coordination and general aptitude for flying. It was good fun, but the stakes were high: usually, only between two and five people in every twenty pass, and our group was no different — only three of us made it to the next stage. The whole thing reminded me of The X Factor , but without Simon Cowell.
A few weeks later, a brown envelope fell through my letter box. Luckily, I’d been looking out for it, and I plucked it from amidst the takeaway-pizza leaflets and unpaid bills and ripped it open. I’d been invited to the three-week selection course at Middle Wallop (the AAC headquarters) in the summer for some intensive flying training.
Alongside eleven other AAC candidates, we learned to fly fixed-wing aircraft called Fireflys. There’s no way to describe the feeling of floating above England in those small yellow planes - I felt freedom like I’d never felt it before; it was as if flying was what I was born to do.
The instructors loaded us up with new information every day to see how fast we could learn; they plotted each candidate’s learning curve to ensure it didn’t start ‘flattening out’ - a sign of being overloaded. They told us that anyone could train to be a pilot but that only a few could master the skills quickly enough to make becoming a pilot feasible. Of the twelve people on my grading, four failed. I’m lucky to have an
almost photographic memory, so I found it easy to retain the checklists that many would-be pilots fell down on. So far, so
There was still no guarantee that I would make it on to the notoriously tough Army Pilots’ Course. It’s like A-levels: you may get the right grades, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get that coveted place at your university of choice. The medicals, aptitude tests and flying grading were just my ticket for a place in the race.
I returned to my final year of uni with a clear idea of what I wanted to do. I sat smugly in the back of my lectures daydreaming about flying high in the clouds and imagining the lives of hard-hatted site visits awaiting my fellow engineering students.
I’m at Sandhurst on my commissioning course, which I started straight after uni. We’re on the Yorkshire Moors - although it could be anywhere for all we can see across the bleak countryside. I can only make out rows of fields, stone walls and barbed wire, with the odd cow dotted on the horizon.
The light’s closing in and I’m absolutely freezing. I’ve been on sentry duty with another girl, Michelle, guarding our allfemale platoon camp for what seems like a week although, according to my Casio watch, it’s only been two hours.
Tucking hell, those ration packs play havoc with my guts,’ Michelle groans, pulling a face.
‘But imagine a double hamburger and fries,’ I say dreamily.
I’m wearing a ridiculous gas mask and helmet combo, and when I whisper I sound like Darth Vader before he went through puberty.
‘Ohh, or a hot chocolate with marshmallows, that would be amazing.’ Her eyes roll upwards in her steamed-up mask.
Michelle’s stomach gives a loud and ominous gurgle, and we giggle, then shush ourselves loudly, remembering that we are meant to be being covert’. I count my blessings that I’ve been
paired with her; she’s the funniest girl in the platoon. She’s a complete gem, making what could be just the most depressing of experiences bizarrely enjoyable with her brilliant sense of humour and hilarious face-pulling.
Another five minutes go by. I’m lying on my front, supposedly looking out for 'threats’, and it’s so cold my toes and fingers are starting to ache. My rifle is jammed into my shoulder, and I peer across the sights to look at my arcs. My whole body is numb and sopping wet and my elbows are slowly sinking into the icy mud.
I’m four months into Sandhurst 'Take Two’. It’s the scariest experience of my life, and the most challenging, but it’s better that I had imagined. In all my worst nightmares before I came, I pictured myself on my own — on my own trying to clean my room with a toothbrush, on my own trying to climb a six-foot wall, on my own being told to iron everything I have by morning. What I didn’t account for are the twenty-odd like- minded girls that are also here so, no matter how bad things get, there’s always someone beside me, going through the same thing with a smile — or a grimace and some blood, sweat or tears — on her face. Most of the time, as we run along the corridors of Sandhurst’s halls, we laugh so hard I once thought I’d wee myself.
When I did that gap-year month at Sandhurst, I remember thinking it was pretty hard, but this year-long course is, predictably, much more gruelling. It’s divided into three terms, and I’ve just completed the first, which everyone says is the hardest. It’s physically tough and, some mornings, when I try to get out of bed it takes a good five seconds for my legs to work; it’s as if my brain has lost the power to communicate with my body. I ache all over, my heels bleed constantly from the stiff leather boots and I haven’t worn mascara in weeks. In fact, I can’t remember ever even owning a make-up bag.
We’re all severely sleep-deprived, working on an average of just a few hours a night. It’s a common sight to see one of the
girls falling asleep on the march and veering off into the bushes, or for someone to nod off in a ‘holding area at night and just get left behind. Both of those things have happened to me over the past three months, and every morning it feels as if my eyelids have barely closed the night before. But, on the plus side, all the exertion and lack of sleep seem to be good for my figure - I’ve just bought some size-eight skinny jeans from Top Shop, and they actually go over my thighs.
Our schedule is packed, but no two days are the same. Were trained in basic military skills such a fieldcraft, operating the basic army rifle, the SA80, drill and fitness, as well as military knowledge and history, instructional techniques and leadership skills. I have a bit of a head start because of my seven years of CCF and UOTC, but there are definitely areas where it would seem I hadn’t been paying enough attention first time around.
I know that, if I want to be a pilot, I need to be at the top, or at least near it, to fulfil my dreams. The AAC only take the top cadets, and I’m desperate to be given the chance. From the start of our time at Sandhurst, we are graded on virtually every aspect of our training: from our fitness, officer qualities, intelligence and confidence to how well we perform in the classroom, at giving lectures and writing essays. Out of the thirty people in my platoon, I come in the top five for everything. I’d always hated being near the bottom; it feels as if the climb upwards is impossible.
We’re told that the commissioning course, where we are trained to become officers, will teach us all sorts of wonderful personal skills that will help us ‘be the best’, such as decisionmaking, negotiation, self-confidence and discipline. I think they need to add having a good sense of humour to that lot.
We need it.
An average day might go like this: we’re forced out of our hospital-style beds by the shouting of our scary, automatonlike colour sergeant after what feels like two seconds’ shut-eye.
We flail around trying to find the right kit while trying not to make a mess in case there’s an on-the-spot check later, then run outside to be inspected for smartness, shininess and correctness. Were often then instructed to change at speed into any number of outfits, and each change is timed.
In the first term we had a cleaning period between 4 and 5 a.m. I remember squatting in my doorway cleaning the door jamb with a cotton bud and listening to Farming Today on Radio 4, the only radio station we were allowed. Someone’s cow had broken free; I listened closely for any tips the broadcast might offer to aid my escape.
During our PT sessions we have to run for miles in full combat gear, which roughly equates to the weight of a small person attached to your chest. And that’s on top of what my Aunt Margery calls the ‘legendary Madison boobs’, which are becoming a right pain in the arse. Actually, if they were on my arse it would be a bonus; I could use a padded chair at times.
Most of my friends are starting their careers as medical students, lawyers and journalists. We write letters to each other, or send each other funny cards and have the odd telephone chat during my rare weekends off, but it’s really hard to describe what I’m up to, so I stick to asking them questions, or swapping gossip about other friends.
I once tried to get some sympathy from Rachel, a fourth- year medical student I lived with at uni. She’d rung me and said she’d had a shit day.
‘Tell me about it,’ I said. ‘We were up at 0400 for a room inspection, then we had a log race; I fell off a wall and bruised my face. Then we went straight in for three hours of lectures, and I fell asleep and got shouted at and was made to stand at the front of the room for the rest of the period. After lunch we practised digging holes before going to the gas chamber and being gassed.’ I gave a hacking cough as evidence of my recent gassing.
There was a short silence.
C I know! My day was hideous!’ Rachel started. C I sat in the library for five hours waiting for Rich, who was too hung over to make it for our study period, and then on the way home I broke my heel and my bus was delayed . . . talk about shitty days. What are we doing with our lives?’
Hmm, not exactly the response I was hoping for.
I pull myself back from these thoughts and look over at Michelle. She’s nodded off. I give her a prod to avoid her getting a bollocking from the colour sergeant.
‘Thanks, you cow. I was dreaming I was on holiday with my boyfriend!’
With an hour to go, I’m practically counting down the seconds until I can get back to my bivouac, my best attempt so far at hoisting my poncho between two trees to provide some shelter. My eyes are now primed to spot the perfect bivouac site: big tree, trunk not too fat, right distance from its neighbour, nice soft leaves on the ground, not too wet, no ants’ nests. My musty-smelling sleeping bag is heavenly in comparison to this muddy ditch.
Michelle and I have a running joke about what we’d do to get medevac-ed off every exercise. It’s like a scale of how bad things are. I might run past her during a platoon attack and she’ll shout, ‘Would you shoot yourself in the foot?’, and I’ll respond, ‘Not yet’, or, ‘Maybe the face!’ depending on how dire things are at the time.
We’re both struggling to stay awake as we look across the slowly darkening horizon through our rifle sights. I consider sucking on the mouldy chocolate I’ve got in my jacket pocket and wonder whether that would make me just the right amount of ill to get to go to hospital but not kill me.
I shuffle along the ground a bit in an attempt to get my circulation going. It feels as if my blood’s stopped flowing and that everything might just turn blue and drop off.
Despair is seeping in when my eyes sweep over a big cowpat
nearby. It’s the size of a large wok, a strange greeny-brown and crusted over in large bubbles, like a green curry from a bad takeaway. There are some rancid flies buzzing around it. It’s only about two feet away from my face, and it’s testament to my state of mind that I don’t even feel the need to move away from it. I nudge Michelle and gesture towards it.
‘If I ate that, do you think I’d be airlifted out of here?’ Michelle whispers, her eyes scrunched up behind her mask. ‘It would make me really ill, like a-week-in-the-sick-bay, ill. And think of the weight loss! Look at the colour of it!’
‘Go on, I dare you,’ I say.
‘Seriously, though, how much money would actually make you eat that?’ Michelle looks serious.
I consider the taste, texture and possible hospital stay.
‘A grand?’
‘Hmmm, I reckon if someone waved ready cash at me I’d take five hundred.’
‘Fuck it, three hundred!’
We amuse ourselves with more childish poo-chat until two of the others come over and tap us to let us know our shift’s up, and then we crawl back to our bivouacs. I struggle out of my combat jacket and helmet and climb into my sleeping bag with my rifle stuffed down the end. I take huge pleasure from listening to the noise the zip makes going up — to a trained ear, so totally different from the noise of a zip going down prior to going on sentry duty. I drop off, cold but happy, wearing my gas mask, muddy clothing and boots.
The Army Air Corps is the most selective unit in the army, and the only combat arm which women are allowed to join. There are lots of things I could choose to do, but this is the biggest challenge — to be on the front line.
The next hurdle is the interviews with senior AAC officers, which take place a few weeks before we finish the commissioning course. Our performance in these interviews, together
with our conduct during the past forty weeks, will be the deciding factors as to whether the AAC wants us.
Apparently they can ask us anything about the whole Army Air Corps - when it was formed and who is in charge - as well as current affairs and general knowledge stuff/ I say in a panic on the phone to Mia the night before my interview.
‘What kind of general knowledge? Like “Which football team won the World Cup in 1970?” kind of thing?’ she laughs, clattering around in her kitchen in London.
‘No, dumb arse,’ I giggle. ‘But I’ve heard of them asking people to name all the countries in South America.’
‘Go on then, have a go.’ I hear toast popping up in the back-
‘Ummm, Brazil, Mexico - no, wait. Oh, shit!’
The day of the interview comes, and I wait in an echoing Sandhurst corridor in my unfamiliar-feeling and now much- too-big suit. I’m the fifth cadet to go in, and during my hour- long wait I go to the loo six times.
‘Cadet Madison.’
I jump as a female voice calls my name, smooth down my skirt and follow a dumpy-looking secretary down the corridor. The clicking of her heels hurts my ears as the sound ricochets around us. She ushers me into a cream-carpeted room where a long table stands before me. Three uniformed men sit on the far side like judges in a court, and a single wooden chair sits in the middle of the room. It feels as if I stand for ever in the doorway watching the unseasonal summer rain spattering against the grimy window behind the judges.
‘Will you have some coffee, Miss Madison?’ the judge sitting in the middle asks in a surprisingly low voice. The room feels suffocatingly quiet when he stops speaking. This judge is the tallest by a whole head, and his face is politely blank.
My hands are cold and shaking slightly with nerves - I reason that a cup of coffee will warm and steady them.
‘Yes, please,’ I say.
There is a slight pause before the tall judge nudges the man on his left. Short and slight, he reminds me of a small, nervous feline, and he is clearly at the bottom of the judges’ pecking order. He scurries off to a table in the corner which I hadn’t spotted before. I notice with anxiety that there are four utterly untouched stacks of cups and saucers on it. The feline judge is battling with the plunger on the cafetiere, and then I see him ripping the seal off the milk.
No one has had any coffee yet — maybe I wasn’t supposed to? Why do I always get these things wrong?
At a signal from the tall judge I sit on the wooden chair, cupping my coffee and trying not to spill any on my lap. Five minutes of questions about myself, my education and interests and my time at Sandhurst put me at ease. Then the third judge, who looks incredibly serious, speaks for the first time. His voice is thin and threatening.
‘Now, Cadet Madison, just some general questions to check that you have a good working knowledge of current affairs.’
I gulp.
‘Do you know who is currently the vice-president of the United States?’
Ha! They don’t know that I’m half American.
‘George Bush. George “W. ” Bush,’ I correct smartly.
‘No, Miss Madison, the vice-president.’
‘Oh, yes, of course.’ Then I have a mind-blank. ‘It’s ummm • • •
The serious judge looks down and starts jotting something in his notepad.
‘Oh, it’s Dick, errr, Dick, ummm, Dick . . .’ I scrabble around in my panicked brain for a surname, but nothing comes. I realize there are three men staring at my increasingly pink face as I just say ‘Dick’, over and over again.
‘Sorry,’ I say. Silence replies.
‘And who is the UK defence secretary?’
I have no idea. Why would I ever need to know that, I wonder - in case I need to phone him up? Hello, Bob, its Charlie. You know, Charlotte Madison from Sandhurst. Just wanted some money for my personal defence budget. Hardly.
I suppress an urge to say, ‘He’s the one whos always refusing to give us more cash to make sexy uniforms,’ before realizing that too much time has gone by and the judges have taken my daydream for a wrong answer. They are all shuffling to their feet.
‘Thank you for your time, Cadet Madison,’ the tall judge says, extending his hand. I shake it and then back away, unsure whether to salute or not. I remember that I’m not in uniform, so I’m not supposed to, but isn’t there something about not turning your back on senior officers? Or is that just the Queen?
The three men are looking at me, waiting for me to leave, and in my frenzied attempt to make a final good impression, I find myself doing a horrifying, slow-motion bow in the style of a maid from Upstairs, Downstairs.
As I stare at the carpet on my way up from the low bow, I feel my chances of getting into my dreamt-of Army Air Corps slipping away.
‘Thanks,’ I mumble, not meeting the judges’ eyes as I dive out of the room at top speed.
Bollocks.
Just days later, with two weeks left to go until the end of my course at Sandhurst, it’s crunch time: the remaining AAC candidates will find out if they have made the grade. Of the original seventy applicants, there are now only twelve of us, and we are sent to a small, plush room at the back of the headquarters. I’m so exhausted by this point that I have to concentrate hard even to put one foot in front of the other as I walk across the polished wooden floorboards, but the closer I come to the room, the more adrenaline pumps through me. I feel my heart beating faster as I see a sign on the door: AAC
CANDIDATES 1030-1100.
As we walk in, sunshine pours through sash windows on to several plump armchairs and sofas. I squint.
‘Come in, welcome,’ a colonel from the AAC greets us. I recognize him from the interview phase. He looks immaculate in an expensive civilian suit, but his face is unreadable.
‘Help yourself to tea,’ he tells us.
On the far side of the room is a table laid out with china teacups and saucers, posh-looking biscuits and gleaming silver cutlery. We edge over, too anxious to eat but politely pouring ourselves tea nonetheless.
I recognize a red-haired cadet from the all-boys company and make my way over to him.
‘Hi, I’m Charlie.’
He breaks into a big friendly grin. ‘I’m Steve.’
‘I’m so nervous. Are you?’
‘I guess. I know I don’t want either of my other choices of regiment, but I’m pretty confident the Air Corps will have me.’
‘Why?’ I ask, envious of his confidence.
‘My interviews went well. They asked me lots of political questions, and I like to keep up to date with politics.’
‘Oh,’ I say, remembering the awkward moments in my interview.
‘And my grading was awesome — I loved it. How was yours?’ I smile just at the memory of flying high above Wiltshire in a Firefly.
‘Amazing. I loved it too. That makes this worse, though, don’t you think? To know you want something so much and to know that you enjoy it, and then have the selection completely out of your hands?’
‘At least we’ve both done ours . . . some people here haven’t even done theirs yet. The Air Corps has to take a gamble on them — they know what they’re getting with us.’ I like Steve already; he’s so friendly and positive.
After a few painfully nerve-racking minutes, all twelve candidates are assembled, and the colonel addresses us.
C I am now going to read out two lists of names, separate you into two groups and announce who will be accepted into the Corps.’
‘Oh, God,’ I whisper to Steve. ‘I don’t think I can take the suspense.’ What if I end up back in that awful tank with the Royal Engineers, I think to myself.
The colonel reads down his list, calling off six names and motioning for those called to be seated on six armchairs at one end of the room. I am not among them, but Steve is, and so are two other cadets I know by reputation - they performed well at Sandhurst and are bound to be accepted into the Air Corps.
He calls out another six names, ending with 'Officer Cadet Madison. Now if you six could sit over here.’ He gestures towards a ridiculous red sofa.
I sit down, numb with shock and anticipation of the crushing blow about to be dealt to me. I think about the year of sheer effort and exertion I have just been through, about how I have striven continuously to be in the top few in the platoon.
‘Now for the results. The cadets who have made it into the prestigious Army Air Corps, who will be starting their flying training within weeks, are . . .’
My stomach lurches with yearning to be allowed to start the pilots’ course.
‘All of you! Ha, ha, ha, ha! Tense, wasn’t it?’
It takes a few moments before any of the bone-weary cadets stir, and then realization spreads through the room like an electric shock. I’m too happy to be angry about our Pop Idol-style acceptance.
‘We’re in!’ I shout. Everyone is grinning wildly and there are handshakes and back-slapping.
I rush over to Steve. 'Well done, Charlie,’ he greets me. I grin back, speechless with relief.
My official ‘passing out’ ceremony from Sandhurst falls on a drizzly day in September, a month later. As I stand to atten-
tion for perhaps the last time in front of the grand white stone building, I reflect on my time there. Through the pain of cracked heels and bruised shins which glow like a map of the assault course through my tights, the overriding emotion is a huge sense of achievement. Looking over to the sea of faces watching the ceremony, I can make out Mum, Dad and Mia smiling in the front row. I don’t dare smile back but raise my eyebrows in recognition.
Afterwards, we gather for a meal in the vast dining room and I pick mine out among all the proud parents and friends and hurry over.
c God, you look a bit rough,’ Mia tells me while my parents chat to my platoon commander. ‘Are you all right?! I mean . . .’
‘Just fucking knackered,’ I tell her honestly, then wince at my language as I realize my parents are standing right beside us. ‘But thanks. I thought I could pass it off as looking wiser or something.’
‘And the flying stuff?’ she asks. ‘How are you feeling about it?’
‘I can’t wait!’ I tell her. ‘It feels like my whole life is about to start.’
Now I am officially qualified, I am sent to spend five months flying Fireflys at Barkston Heath, near RAF Cranwell in Lincolnshire. There are twelve of us at the starting blocks. Every flight we make is assessed; it’s three strikes and you’re out. I bond with the group really quickly.
They’re a mix of navy, army and RAF; I already know Steve and immediately click with one of the other girls, Sue. She has long flowing dark hair and hasn’t compromised an ounce of her femininity for the RAF.
Making my way through the various rounds of training and tests, it becomes clear I have found a place where everyone is like me. After a lifetime of Mum telling me off for running around with a glass of water or a plate of food
in my hand, now I’m in a place where everyone runs up- and downstairs with cups of tea in one hand and a phone in the other. I’m with other coordinated people. I’m in my element. Christmas that year comes and goes in a whirlwind of fun and learning, and in the spring we switch to learning to fly Squirrel helicopters at RAF Shawbury, near Shrewsbury, and are taught the basics of rotary-wing aircraft. IVe known for ages that I want to fly for the AAC, so IVe always known it would be helicopters for me. Who wants to just go fast when you can go fast, then stop, hover and check out your surroundings?
Im nervous and excited before my first helicopter flight, not knowing what it will be like and having such high expectations, but as soon as it begins, I’m hooked. My instructor is a short, slightly plump man who’s recently left the army, and he tells me he’s doing the job he loves most in the world. His enthusiasm is infectious.
As we take off, I feel like I’m in the middle of one of my thousands of dreams about flying, lifting off the ground lighter than air, on a smooth magic carpet. The blood rushes to my head, and I feel weightless.
‘What was it like, what was it like?’ My course mates crowd around me when I land; I was the first one to go up and they are dying to know the details.
‘Like flying . . .’ I say dreamily, oblivious to the sniggering from behind me at my stupid remark. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. Most evenings I go out with my course mates and we sit chatting in the pubs by the river, watching the hazy oranges and pinks of the sunset over Shrewsbury and swapping stories of our mishaps during that day’s flying. I’m convinced I’ve pulled out the trump card with this job, and it seems I’m quite good at it too.
In early autumn we move down to Middle Wallop, where we continue to fly Squirrel helicopters, but now solely with army instructors, and begin to learn army tactics. Sue stays at
Shawbury to continue her training with the RAF, and Im gutted to be leaving behind a girl Fd grown so close to. The next phase turns out to be even more exciting, as we embark on the very serious job of preparing to go to war. By now people are being dropped from the course thick and fast; there’s no time for stragglers. Our set of four, which includes Steve and me, is too small, so we join another group, to make the numbers up to eight. For the most part, I find it OK, and Fm overjoyed when I pass the course, with the highest possible grade in my final test. Two more people fail. Each time someone leaves its like a punch in the stomach, but I know I can’t take my eye off the end goal and have to stay motivated. I start to learn that people come and go in the military; like Sue, one week you spend twenty-four hours a day with someone — waking them up in the morning, studying over tea, having the, now odd glass of wine in the evening, comparing notes - and then you never see them again. I decide to have fun with my course mates but never let them get too close.
Now we’ve completed our final test, we’ll be recommended to fly either Lynx, Gazelle or Apache craft, but we are also asked to state our preference. I know deep down that flying an Apache would be the most challenging, but I don’t want to tempt fate or end up disappointed so I put off thinking about it too hard.
It’s party time. Five friends from uni have come to stay for the weekend. The six of us spend hours in my bedroom in the mess perfecting our outfits: angel wings, tutus, wands and roller blades - the theme is ‘children’s party’, complete with kiddie food and games.
I first laid eyes on Jake when he was throwing a broken toaster out of the window of the officers’ mess, but we haven’t spoken. I’ve been telling my friends at home about ‘The Fitty’ for ages, and can’t wait for them finally to lay eyes on him. He arrives downstairs in the bar dressed only in a long fawn
trench coat and a leopard-skin thong, and carrying a stuffed animal. Hes come as a paedophile. Charming.
Tonight, at last, Jake crosses the room to chat to me, and we sit in the pool of brightly coloured balls we’ve put together for the party and spend hours discovering how much we have in common and making each other laugh. I’m hooked. He moves to his next posting - in Somerset - two days later, but most weekends we will be inseparable.
Two months on, and Jake is posted to Bosnia on a peacekeeping role for five months. Before he goes we have a serious conversation. He asks me to wait for him.
I don’t hesitate for a second before giving him my answer, and he promises to keep in touch as much as he can.
True to his word, he rings me every single day. The phone call always follows a similar pattern.
‘Hi, it’s me,’ he says. I feel a rush of butterflies in my stomach and try not to squeak with excitement. ‘How are you?’ He always asks after me first — this is a refreshing change from other men in the military who tend to push themselves forward in the hopes of impressing you with a roll call of their rank, sporting prowess and a list of tours.
‘Yeah, good thanks,’ I say casually, as if my life hasn’t been made instantly better by this one phone call. ‘You?’
He tells me about his day in Bosnia, where he is flying his Lynx helicopter almost every day, but he can’t tell me any of the details of with whom, why or exactly where, so we soon run out of that line of chitchat. Then comes the good stuff - the stuff I lie in bed thinking about for hours. As he can’t talk about what he’s doing every day, he asks me about my family, school, work, aspirations - everything. He listens like no one else and I am filled with proud and secret delight when, during my long days at work, I suddenly find myself remembering one of his cousins’ names, or recalling one of his old family stories. But the best thing about Jake is that I don’t feel like I have to play a part or act in a certain way.
I feel comfortable just being me. I know that this relationship is different.
Im at home one weekend lounging in a minging shorts and T-shirt combo on one of the ancient blue sofas Fve inherited from a distant family member. As I hang up the receiver after one of my long conversations with Jake, I walk towards the kitchen to pour myself a glass of wine, but something doesn’t feel right; it hasn’t for days. It’s a horrible, nagging dread deep inside that I just can’t shift. I carry on my everyday life as normal, but that feeling sits heavily, rooted in the pit of my stomach.
And then I realize I’m terrified that he is away. We’ve grown so close that I can’t imagine how I would feel if something happened to him. It’s warm in the house, but I’m suddenly covered in goose bumps and want to shiver. My breathing quickens.
I inhale deeply and count slowly to five. Taking my wine with me, I sit back down on the tired sofa and tuck my legs under me.
I could never change Jake, or make him leave the armed forces. He went straight into the Marines from school; he knew it was his vocation. And I can tell he is a brilliant officer.
My mind drifts towards the future: engagement, weddings, children. I know it’s years away, but it dawns on me that I could never be a mother while I’m in the army. Losing a partner would be terrible, but a baby or child losing its mother must be so much, so much worse.
I make the decision there and then. I’ll leave, I think. I’ll just get out. When the time is right.
I feel instant relief. My breathing slows, my head clears and that lead weight starts to subside. It’s the first time I have ever thought about leaving.
I hear that I’ve been posted to Apaches when one of the guys in the mess comes over and congratulates me.
‘Well done, Charlie,’ he says. ‘Apache, eh?’
I’m confused. My posting preference proforma, the form that I needed to fill in to say which aircraft I wanted to fly, lies untouched on my desk still, as I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next. All I know is that I don’t want to be a million miles away from Jake. But this guy is now telling me that he’s seen the course nominal roll and I’m definitely on it.
I know the Apache course is sought after, and I’m thrilled to have been selected, but I’m apprehensive about the infamously challenging Apache conversion course. At the moment, the AAC chooses only the top three per cent of its pilots for it. We all know how many decent pilots have failed the course; that it requires your eyes to work independently of each other and that it costs almost £10 million, just in flying time, to put someone through it from start to finish. I also know that the AAC has been looking to select a girl for a while, and wonder whether my card had been marked earlier on in my pilots’ course.
It’s going to take me six months to learn to fly the Apache, six more to learn how to do battle in it, and another six before I’m combat-ready. With a few other courses tagged on the end. And when I complete my training, I know I’ll be posted to North Yorkshire, hours away from Jake . . .
The good news is that there is a special Apache wing’ in the officers’ mess at Middle Wallop so I get to move immediately into a big, shiny new room with a shared en suite bathroom. This is pure luxury compared to my grotty old room, where the bathroom was shared by the entire corridor; not long after I joined the forces I realized that my dressing gown was more important than any other piece of kit I would be issued. Another bonus is that, because Apache pilots are also required to work night shifts, the cleaners don’t come until the early afternoon, allowing us the odd lie-in. At this stage of the game, this is the best bit.
* * *
When the new course starts a month later at Middle Wallop, I’m surrounded by new and unfamiliar male faces brandishing little Yorkie-bar-style stickers saying 'APACHE - IT’S NOT FOR GIRLS’.
I have something to prove, big style. Lots of people may fail this course, but I am determined not only to be the first girl ever picked but the first to pass, too.
The night before the course begins I go to the bar to meet the other guys - again, there are twelve of us. All I can see is a row of backs — five or six men huddled together, deep in conversation. I squeeze myself into the ring of steel. It’s never easy meeting new people in these situations, but I try to overcome my apprehension. In the military, you are expected to just get on with it. I know there is no time for girly worry about what to say.
'Hi, I’m Charlotte.’ I force a grin. My voice sounds like a whisper alongside the booming, beery outpourings of the boys.
They don’t even look up.
One of them, who apparently goes by the name of Jon, is recalling how he brought some friends to a recent party at the mess.
'. . . and they said, "God, you pilots, you’re all so arrogantV\ and I said, “Yah, I know!”’
He’s part caricature British gent, part Ice Man from Top Gun.
Everyone in the circle snorts and whoops. 'Oh yah, ha ha ha, we are!
At first I think they’re joking but, I soon realize, they’re not.
I christen the group of offenders - there are six of them — the Dicks. Jon is tall yet weedy with a prominent nose and small eyes that are half an inch too close together. His skin is pitted as if he suffered from serious acne as a teenager. I look anxiously around me for anyone else who looks like they are on the course, but it’s only me and them. So I tell myself to at least try.
I make an attempt to join their circle, but no one makes a move to create a gap; they stand shoulder to shoulder and I feel too awkward to push in. I linger waiting for an opportunity to join the conversation and physically scoot myself into the circle.
‘And do you remember that time at Sandhurst when we came first in the inter-platoon competition?’
Four of them snort away together, amused. They start describing the competition in detail, so I walk off to the bar to buy myself a drink. I turn towards the group while my red wine is being poured, looking to see if anyone else needs a drink. As this bar is inside the mess and most people know each other, its unusual for someone not to catch your eye and raise an empty glass with a smile. I’ve had more than my fair share of drinks bought this way, but clearly the Dicks don’t know the score and not one of them glances around.
‘Just the one?’ the barman asks me, hinting that this is a surprising breach of etiquette.
‘Just this, thanks - no takers. Will you have one?’
‘Go on then.’
I take my wine and head back to the fringe of the frightening clique. I’ve never felt ill at ease in this bar before - it’s part of my home while I’m stationed here - but tonight the air tastes hostile and foreign.
Anyway, so I was trying to explain to him that you have to remember to talk down to the other pilots, keep things simple,’ another of the Dicks is explaining in his patronising voice. Fie seems even more offensive than the others and I christen him Dick Number One. The others nod blankly like those tacky plastic dogs you sometimes see in car rear windows. I do notice a raised eyebrow from one of them but he doesn’t disagree.
‘You have to remember that we have been specially selected for this. We are the creme de la creme ; the best pilots in the corps, and you have to bear in mind that other pilots’ brains don’t work the same way. Dumb it down.’
There are more mutters of agreement. I stand in my group
of one, astonished. I certainly wont be joining in this particular conversation.
We start ground school, the first part of our training, with Tech (the technical side of the Apache, all the engine workings and the hydraulic system - the boy stuff). I’m bad at this. IVe been dreading it for weeks. I’m sure this is the bit IT1 screw up, and I’ll never even get to fly the helicopter. The boys will be right after all, and Ill be a disgrace to women everywhere.
I enter the classroom and sit down without looking around. After my terrible start in the bar, I’m not sure entirely how to behave or what to say. With the Dicks at the centre of every conversation, I feel like I have nothing in common with most of the group, and their whispering and smirks are unnerving me. They’re worse than the nasty, cool gang at school, the girls who smoked behind the lacrosse hut, wore loads of make-up, scraped back their hair and passed notes around about everyone else being frigid.
I get my pad and pen out and wait. The tech teacher enters. He is famously knowledgeable and infamously fat. I can see pink flesh straining against his shirt buttons. I try to avert my eyes.
The teacher introduces himself, then starts the first presentation with a question.
‘Now then,’ he says in his broad Yorkshire accent, who can tell me how many engines the Apache has?’
Relief washes over me. I know! It’s so easy. The Apache is a twin-engine helicopter; it says so in the pile of handouts we were told to study.
I sit up extra tall and beam at the teacher, willing him to let me tell him the answer is two. Get it over early, then he won’t ask me any difficult ones later . . .
‘You . . .’he says, pointing to the opposite side of the classroom.
My enthusiasm instantly deflates like a left-over party balloon.
‘How many?’
‘Three/ comes the reply.
I smile knowingly and shake my head, showing the teacher that I know better. I imagine were sharing the joke about the silly man who thinks ‘twin-engine’ means three.
‘Correct,’ the teacher says matter-of-factly.
‘Now then, why are there three?’ he asks, looking around the classroom for another victim.
I avert my eyes, panic-stricken. Three? What? Where? But . . . twin . . .
I hear the teacher explain about the small third engine, the auxiliary power unit. I’m not really listening now. Shit, am I in trouble.
A few days in, I see my first Apache for real. There are loads flying around the base, but I’ve never set eyes on one up close. It takes my breath away. It’s awesome. Forty-nine feet and one inch from nose to tail, its rotor blades stretch out another eight feet. It’s seventeen and a half feet high and sixteen feet four inches wide, and weighs a hefty 23,000lbs when fully laden.
A monster.
It’s angular, black and angry-looking. It’s like I shouldn’t be anywhere near it. No wonder the US pilots call flying it ‘riding the dragon’.
Our instructor shows us around, pointing out various parts of the airframe and armament. This is one highly intelligent bit of kit.
The high-tech rotor blades slice quietly through the air; the Rolls-Royce engines give the helicopter extra power and speed. While the fuel burns at 800°C, the advanced cooling system makes it more difficult to track with a heat-seeking missile than any other helicopter. The state-of-the-art integrated defensive aids suite (HIDAS) recognizes the heat signatures of rocket- propelled grenades, activates counter-measures to defeat them and sends a verbal warning to the crew.
The Target Acquisition and Designation Sight System (TADS) is composed of a number of cameras housed in the cone-like nose on the front of the Apache, providing the pilots with 127 times magnification in daytime - enough to see the face of the man on the ground. At night, with the Pilot Night- vision system (PNVS), it can detect a person from over two and a half miles away.
Then there are three weapons systems. There’s a 30mm cannon on the underside, with 1,160 rounds in the magazine for starters. Then there are the rockets - HEISAPs (High Explosive Incendiary Semi Armour Piercing); point detonating; MPSM (Multi-Purpose Sub-Munition); and flechettes - a maximum of seventy-six rockets are loaded into four rocket pods located on the side wings of the aircraft. Both the cannon and the rockets are fired with the traditional crosshair aim. Finally, there is the piece de resistance - the Hellfire missile. Each Apache can carry up to sixteen of them. They’re laser- guided from the cockpit, and are accurate enough to be posted through a letter box and powerful enough to destroy any known armour.
And at the flick of a small switch all the weapons can be automatically slaved to the pilots’ line of sight.
This type of Apache has been around since 1998. It’s more deadly than its predecessors, the most significant update being the addition of the Longbow radar, which can detect over a thousand potential targets from up to five miles away, classify them and identify the sixteen most threatening.
'The UK bought sixty-seven of these for a whopping £46 million each,’ the instructor informs us. Wow, that’s one hell of a lot of shoes.
With a £30,000 an hour price tag to fly one of these, I wonder if I could do forty-five minutes and go shopping with the rest . . .
'It’s the most expensive attack helicopter in aviation history
and the most technologically advanced helicopter in the world.’
The enormous instructor climbs the ladder and stands on the Extended Forward Avionic Bay (EFAB), the small side stub wing under the cockpit door, his buttons bulging.
‘This can take the weight of two pilots, plus kit. It’s surprisingly hardy.’
He moves swiftly on to talk about the ballistic tolerance of the Apache to enemy fire.
‘What can it take?’ Rich, the guy next to me, pipes up, referring to the calibre of the incoming round. He’s older than us, in his early forties, and I never see him joining in with the Dicks; at the end of every day he goes back home to his wife and teenage kids. He’s as bald as a coot with teenage braces across his bottom row of teeth, but he’s strangely attractive with it because of his super-fit body and expressive face. He is a qualified helicopter instructor but has decided to up his game and convert to Apache.
‘Oh, it’ll take me easily.’ The instructor smiles, thinking the question was about the weight of a pilot on the EFAB.
‘Fired from what ?’ someone asks. I picture the instructor wedged into a cartoon plane’s rocket launcher, like a circus cannon.
He looks around, alarmed.
‘No, he means the side wing. It can take his weight.’
‘Thank God for that.’ Rich and I try and stifle our giggles, disguising them as coughs.
At least I’m not the only one laughing.
‘Do you know, they call you the Robot?’
I’m at the bar one evening with Steve. It’s the only place to socialize within the building - and serves dirt-cheap alcohol. Most of my course mates congregate there after mealtimes in the evening to try and unwind from the day’s studying.
By then, Steve has become a firm friend. He is extremely
kind and sociable — I’ve never known him to turn down a trip to the bar, the cinema or out for supper. IVe lost count of the number of times he’s bailed me out of trouble by letting me borrow his car or bike, or picked me up or dropped me at the train station after weekends away.
Tonight, the Dicks are all out at a party for one of their girlfriends at a pub in a nearby village. Neither Steve nor I was invited or even told about it.
‘Doesn’t surprise me,’ I tell Steve as he waits for me to sit down. ‘In fact, if that’s the worst of it - which I’m sure it’s not - I’m relieved.’
I drink a big swig of my Pinot grigio, enjoying the rare occasion of being able to use the bar without Jon and Co. being there.
‘Why “the Robot”?’
‘Dunno, really. And as if they’d tell me! I only overheard it, but I know they all joke about you having no personality . . .’
I think about it — it could be worse. Imagine being known for being stupid, or for having a huge arse or a face like a horse. The Dicks clearly think that this job should be the preserve of men and that I’m intruding in their cosy men’s club. I know they think I might not be able to hack it; that I’m the token female given a chance in some weird bid for equality.
Steve and I spend a pleasant hour or so before The Dicks come barrelling in from their party, drunk. Dick Number One is in the lead and heads straight for the bar.
‘Can’t believe we’ve got another “Bag” sortie tomorrow, I’m not in the mood,’ he says.
‘You said you were pretty good in your last one - no debrief points, according to the instructor. That’s what you said,’ another Dick points out. I’ve christened him Panicky, as he is always in a flap about something or other.
I see the two of them nudge each other and look in my direction.
‘Hi, guys!’ Steve says happily, and waves over at them. They’re already heading our way.
Panicky, Number One and a sidekick slide into the booth next to Steve. I feel torn between being ridiculously rude and leaving, or sitting here trying to think of things to say for another twenty minutes. I decide to give it five minutes.
Panicky Dick is mumbling something about tomorrow’s ‘Bag’ trip, and I’m sure some insider info I have could make him feel a bit better. I take a deep breath.
‘I spoke to the Met forecaster before I left work today and he reckons there’ll be thunderstorms all day tomorrow. I don’t think any of our sorties will go ahead.’
Panicky Dick looks up at me, a bit surprised that I’m speaking.
‘How many hours have you flown so far?’ he asks.
‘Umm, about three hundred and fifty.’
‘Exactly. Less than half what I’ve done. Anyone else need another beer?’ He stands up and leaves the table.
I take the opportunity to excuse myself to go to the loo but instead head straight for my room and phone Jake.
It’s fairly miserable. Steve and Rich are my allies, but I never feel comfortable. The Dicks are only six of a twenty-man course, but I still feel quite isolated. They’re loud and consider themselves the leaders of the pack, so no one ever questions their behaviour. It’s pretty obvious they don’t think they should be sharing the same space with me and, to my discredit, I go past the point of even making an effort with most of the other men and, as a result, I imagine that the wider group dislikes me just as much. I skip going to supper and eat carrots and sandwiches in my room to avoid mixing with them. I simply can’t stomach any more bouts of macho bragging - willy-waving competitions as I call them. About half of the students on my course are married and have houses outside the camp with their wives. I jealously imagine being
able to leave this world behind at the end of every day and going home to a warm house where everything is my own. I try to construct my own equivalent right here in the mess, making my room as homely as possible, buying cushions and rugs and making sure that nice music is always playing. I come back and change into civilian clothes as soon as my day is over, then go running or to the supermarket. Anything to have a little bit of normality.
Apart from when were working, the only other contact I have with my course mates is when I rush to and from the shared en-suite in a very large, fluffy blue dressing gown, like some sort of live-in hooker.
I am horribly lonely on days when the pace is slow and live my life for weekends away from the base and life after training. I join a local orchestra, where I play my double bass. At our weekly rehearsals, Im so relieved to be somewhere where people don’t know the finer details of what I do, just that I’m in the army. It’s a brilliant release and, as I drift off into a haze of classical music, I don’t give work a second thought. Some days I scare myself with the thought that my entire career could continue in the same way, with Dicks at every turn. The idea makes me feel sick but, as much as I’d love to give up my course, I’m not a quitter.
On my original pilots’ course there were Sue and myself and plenty of women who had gone before us, but training on the Apache is a whole different ball game. I always knew there would be men who would take the piss or might not accept me along the way, but I never bargained for people to be willing me to fail. I’m rewriting their rulebook - but I never anticipated feeling quite so alone, vulnerable and exposed.
Every weekend I make plans to see Jake, my friends and family. I think nothing of climbing in my car, switching on the radio and driving a few hundred miles on a Friday night to get away. I don’t really share the true depth of my feelings
of isolation with anyone but Jake and, to an extent, Mia. She knows I hate it, but it’s hard to explain, especially because she isn’t in the military. One weekend when I’m visiting her in London for a shopping and wine blow-out, she starts to talk about the overweight and ineffectual men she manages at work. She’s coined the term ‘beardos’ to describe them.
‘God they’re useless,’ she says. ‘Did I tell you about the one - the Goth - who spends half his life on World of Warcraft or whatever the hell it’s called, when he thinks I’m not looking? And one of them - the one who looks like a weasel - is so snotty; if he sniffs one more time, I think I might lose it. I even bought him a new box of Kleenex as a not-so-subtle hint. He didn’t take it.’
‘They sound awful. But imagine going home with them, eating dinner with them, showering next to them and then saying goodnight, only to sleep a few yards from their rooms. It’s like a mix of The Apprentice , where you fear everyone will stab you in the back as soon as you turn round, and Big Brother, where you are literally trapped. Then in the morning, you get into the shower after one of the beardos, only to discover a weird pool of gunk by the plughole which definitely isn’t shampoo, and wee under the toilet.’
She spits out her wine. ‘I don’t know how you manage. Thank the Lord my working day only lasts ten hours.’
The days drag by. It takes four weeks of long days in the classroom for us to have a sufficient understanding of all the technical stuff, from how the engines work to how a four-bladed helicopter stays in the sky. To my great relief, the teachers treat me exactly the same as the boys; if anything, in the classroom, I feel I’m doing better than many of them. I’ve always been a quick learner, so I thrive on the fast pace of the course. It’s frustrating that the Dicks can’t accept me for what I bring to the group; they never ask me for help.
After the classroom phase, we move on to the simulator,
a stage that lasts almost a month, and we fly all times of the day and night. We know it’s a great training tool, but sometimes your brain becomes so overloaded at the beginning that you may as well not have bothered. It’s as important to pass this stage as the final flying stage; again, it works on the three-strikes-and-you-fail principle. There are new challenges at every turn, and we’re all dreading the 'Bag’ phase, the infamous killer section of the course. It’s where we’ll be trained to use the night-vision system, when the whole cockpit is blacked out and we have to rely totally on the picture in the monocle which you clamp over your right eye. It has a dozen different instrument readings projected on to it, and I can call up a number of images behind the faint green glow of the numbers: the night-vision system; camera images from the TADS; or the Longbow radar’s targets.
When we finally start flying the 'Bag’, I find that the picture is a bit of a joke, like one in a bad video game: green and black and fuzzy around the edges. But the trickiest thing about it is that the PNVS is located three feet below the pilot and eight feet in front, so the picture displayed is not what your brain expects: imagine sitting in the pilot’s seat and looking over your left shoulder. On the PNVS picture there is a tree right across from you, but in reality the tree is eight feet in front of you. Now imagine the cockpit is not bagged up and you can see out clearly across the moonlit sky. You look over your left shoulder, and the monocle over your right eye shows that there is a tree level with you. Your left eye is also looking out but sees the tree at the front of the aircraft. Your eyes are basically crossed over, just trying to look at the tree. Now picture doing this while you’re flying at 50 mph at fifty feet above ground, in the dark, trying to find a safe path for the aircraft. It’s not that your eyes need to work independently but that your brain has to interpret the information from each eye separately.
I sit in the crew room drinking ridiculously milky tea, just the way I like it, and waiting for Sean to come and get me. He’s my instructor for my first Bag trip, but he’s still debriefing the last student. A long debrief is a bad debrief, so I feel a pang of worry for whoever it is. Sean is short and portly, like a Hobbit, and he behaves as if he’s been teaching Apache for at least a thousand years and as if going for another flight is about as exciting as going for a trip to the urinals.
Eventually, half an hour after we were meant to take off, he breezes in, grabs a Coke and sits down next to me.
'Ready?’ he asks.
‘Yep,’ I say, trying to act like it’s just another trip.
‘Read the aircrew manual on this?’ Sean asks nonchalantly, sipping his drink.
I nod.
We quickly brief, but it’s nothing I haven’t heard from the other students or read in the aircrew manual. This is just a ‘get- to-know’ trip, so I can feel how it is to use the Bag. We walk to the aircraft, and Sean chatters happily about his plans for the weekend. I tell him that Jake and I are off to a friend’s house for a barbecue. It reminds me that I haven’t decided what to pack and gets me thinking about what to wear. In my happy reverie, I almost forget what I’m doing out here on dispersal, but when I finish checking my side of the aircraft, ending back up at the cockpit door, I remember. Oh shitty bollocks.
Kit stowed and harness strapped on, I grab my helmet from the EFAB and pull it on. It’s taken three months, but I finally have the right combination of padding and strapping to make it comfy. I clip the monocle on to the side of it and swing it around so that it’s directly in my eyeline.
After starting the engines normally, at the last minute I close my canopy door. Everything goes completely black. God, this is what it’s like to be a blind person. My eyes gradually become aware of the faint green glow of the PNVS, but it seems my brain would rather concentrate on the dingy clues available to
me inside the cockpit - I can just make out the outlines of the controls and cant force my brain to ‘see’ what my right eye is seeing. This is a problem weve been warned about, but apparently we’ll get used to it’.
The first hurdle is taxiing, and I make a predictable hash of it, despite vague hopes that perhaps I would turn out to be a natural at night-flying. I find it impossible to tell where the taxi lines are, because when I think they’re going underneath me, they’re in fact only going underneath the PNVS. I turn early on every corner.
The next hurdle is getting over the fence to dispersal. Rather unfairly, I think, the fence has stuck shut and now presents a 25-foot dice with death between me and the runway. We lift slowly into a shaky hover, me struggling to detect when we start drifting one way or the other. I’ve watched other students taking off in the Bag, and it’s laughable - they do everything so slowly, and badly. And now that’s me.
I taxi forward from my 25-foot hover and try to gauge when enough space has passed behind me to make it safe to descend. I pick my point and lower the collective, the lever control used to adjust height, only to feel Sean grabbing it and pulling back up.
‘Not yet, you’ll chop us in half,’ he laughs, unconcerned.
My stomach knots in frustration, the way it always does whenever I’m not good at something the first time, and I redouble my concentration.
We don’t leave the airfield for the whole ninety-minute sortie; instead we spend it doing ridiculous tricks with the PNVS, which are designed to build confidence. I’m told to look directly at the ceiling, then taxi smartly sideways, keeping the helicopter on a line. All the symbols I need are right there in my eye: I have a velocity vector telling me which way I’m moving; I have an acceleration cue which tells me which way the cyclic - the joystick, which controls direction — is telling the helicopter to go; I have speed and height information as well as
engine information; I have boxes telling me whether the attitude hold is in, to give me information to help me hover and whether the height hold is in (it will beep if I start descending). So there is no excuse, but still I find it hard and have to have two gos. Its like trying to ride a bike along a straight line by looking up at a mirrored ceiling - there’s no reason you can’t do it, but it feels very weird.
Then Sean coaches me through 360 degrees and backwards flying. All the while he is peering out of the window into the clear blue afternoon checking that we’re not going to fly into anything.
By the time we taxi back over the broken fence, I’m feeling much more confident. I taxi in, missing fewer of the taxi lines, and park. Sean chuckles, but won’t be drawn on why until I’ve fully shut down the engines.
‘What are you laughing at?’ I demand, giggling despite myself.
‘Open your canopy,’ he says.
I do so, and see that not only have I missed the taxi line by yards, but I’ve also barely made it into the parking space; we’re hanging out of it by miles. Sean is still laughing.
‘Women and parking, hey?’ he says to the ciwie engineer who has come to monitor our shutdown.
‘Shouldn’t be allowed to drive, in my opinion,’ he answers, smiling at me.
I grin. ‘I’ve heard to all before, boys.’
There’s a huge amount to learn both in the air and in the classroom. I don’t find any of it particularly difficult; there’s just lots of it. The course is divided into phases, and for each one we have lessons in the classroom, then time in the simulator, then in the air. The Dicks spend hours in their rooms testing each other, I spend hours in my room flicking through magazines and chatting on the phone and doing the right amount of work to keep me here. Some evenings I go to the cinema with Steve or break up the tedium with gym sessions with
Rich, during which we run on adjacent cross trainers and quizz each other on the latest Apache systems. As an instructor, even though were learning together, I feel he’s taken me under his wing; him as the eldest and with the benefit of fifteen years’ flying experience and me as the youngest, eager to learn. He encourages my questions, and we spend free hours in one of the classrooms or one of the dimly lit hangars practising our checks together.
We then start to be trained to go ‘combat-ready - to learn how to fight with the aircraft. On the ranges for the first time, we fire 30mm but, disappointingly, its just like the simulator, except that you cant even see the impact of the rounds here because they bury themselves into the dirt. The Dicks love it and crow about it for days, giving each other high fives and saying, ‘Welcome to the gun club.’
The other thing that starts to grate is that the squadron only has two small girls’ loos. One of these is also used as a stationery cupboard, with the toilet shoehorned in between cabinets, and the other is a general junk room. I go to the loo with my knees up against a broken overhead projector, while people rattle on the door mid-flow, in search of a fresh box of staples.
It’s gone midnight and I’m laden with kit. My stomach is churning with nerves. My Final Handling Test (FHT) marks the end of my Apache training at Middle Wallop and will make me a fully fledged Apache pilot, but even though it’ll all be over in three hours, it feels like I have to climb Everest before I’m done.
The trip is the culmination of all our training so far: a low- level, night pairs mission. I’m going to go flying in the dark for two hours only ten feet away from another Apache while the instructor loads me up with as much information and tasking as he thinks I can handle . . . and then a bit more.
Rich has been my ‘stick buddy’, my regular partner, throughout this phase of training, and we have planned every-
thing together: our exact routing, the manoeuvres we plan on practising and what well do if it all goes tits up.
My stomach gives a lurch and I think how nice it will be when this is over. Jake is waiting for me in my room in the mess with a bottle of champagne — he’s always had the utmost confidence in me and is sure Ill do well enough to warrant a celebration. Im not quite so certain.
I reach the aircraft alone; Sean is at least thirty minutes behind me. I do the walk-round by myself and start the Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) to get various systems spooling up before he joins me.
I dump my Load Carrying Jerkin (LCJ), otherwise known as Life Support Jacket, helmet bag and nav bag underneath the right EFAB and pull my gloves on to start my checks.
As I reach the top of the aircraft, I see Rich starting the long walk towards the aircraft from the REME hut (where the men who look after the aircraft are based). I wave and he waves back, pointing his torch at his crossed fingers to signal me good luck. I grin at him and make a show of crossing all my fingers; probably all he sees is my head torch hobbling around madly.
A civilian engineer arrives to monitor my start and plugs his headset into the wing. This will enable him to talk to me and to Sean, when he arrives.
‘You OK, Charlie?’ he asks kindly.
‘Pretty nervous, actually,’ I admit, and start gathering my things up from the floor.
I pile my gear on to the EFAB, zip on my LCJ and climb into the back seat, dragging my stuff in after me. The cockpit smells like dust and nervousness; almost every flight I’ve had in an Apache has been a test of some sort and the musty smell of the cockpit reminds me of exam halls and sweaty panic. I put my soft-leather-gloved hands over the hard metal of the flying controls and briefly close my eyes; at least these are starting to feel familiar.
I press a button to power up the APU, then start turning on all the systems we’ll need for flight: the Longbow radar, the TADS and PNVS, and the Back-Up Control System (BUCS), which will take over if the main controls fail. Each system runs through its own power-up checks as it turns on, and these checks, plus the ones I need to do once the systems are up, can take up to forty-five minutes to complete.
As the PNVS picture slowly comes into focus, I squint through my one-inch monocle.
Gradually, all the systems come online and Sean walks out to join me. I need to be in the front seat for this trip, so I climb out and let him get into the back, then crawl along the EFAB and squeeze myself into the front seat, realizing for the millionth time how bloody cramped it is in here.
Sean says nothing as I strap in, which is fairly unusual - he’s so relaxed normally that his silence unnerves me. I busy myself trying to make sure my maps, nav information cards and other notes are in order before we go. I pray that nothing will go wrong with the checks we still have to do, or I’ll be late — the very worst crime for an Apache pilot. I would be massively marked down before I’d even taken off, and there are enough hurdles to jump without starting on minus points. Sometimes the PNVS doesn’t ‘follow’ your head properly, the BUCS can fail at the last minute or something can go wrong with an engine just before taxi. These things are out of my control, but they would still put a big, thick black cloud over the test.
With Sean strapped in, we run through some of the checks that need both pilots to complete, including the weapon operational checks.
Actioning gun,’ I start.
‘Roger, C-GUN,’ Sean answers, reading out the display that shows in his eye.
‘Up. Down. Left. Right,’ I continue. The engineer on the wing acknowledges that the gun is moving.
We repeat the process throughout the weapons systems and,
eventually, all checks are, thankfully, completed successfully and on time. The clock shows 0125, the time allotted for engine start.
‘Shall we? 7 I ask Sean.
‘Roger,’ he answers. His replies are more formal than usual and, for once, he doesn’t seem quite so horizontally relaxed about the whole affair.
From the light cast by the landing lamp, I see the engineer on the wing nod that he is ready and Sean pushes the first engine power lever forwards; this has to be done from the back, otherwise I’m sure I would be made to do it. The rotors start turning almost immediately, and I look over at Rich’s cab and see with satisfaction that his rotors are also just spinning up. Perfect timing; a good start.
When both the engines have fired up, I lift. The black- topped dispersal gets smaller below me and I feel a tiny shiver of elation. It isn’t over yet, but after this trip I’ll be allowed to fly without an instructor and I know how it’ll feel: free - exactly how I felt the first time I drove alone after passing my driving test.
Normally the back-seater does the flying so the front-seater can concentrate on running the mission, but today I am being tested to capacity, so the controls are all mine. I start to feel overloaded. My head begins to ache as I squint into the monocle. Beads of sweat prickle at the back of my neck. I taxi slowly at fifteen feet until I reach the Hardened Aircraft Landing Strip (HALS), with Rich right behind me. Sean gets permission for departure and I concentrate on not screwing up the take-off; I don’t want to leave him with anything to debrief me about. I am setting myself the highest bar to reach and I know I’ll be angry with myself if there is a list of points where I haven’t quite reached it.
Moments later, I am positioned on one end of the HALS, and Rich is behind me. I pull the collective smoothly up to about 60 per cent torque and we slowly start moving across
the tarmac. As the speed builds, I push forward on the cyclic and watch as the altitude indicator changes, showing that the tail wheel has lifted off the ground. As we reach the end of the HALS, I pull the torque up to 80 per cent and we lift smoothly off the ground, climbing high above Middle Wallop with the lights on the runway disappearing below me.
Our route takes us west, above a small local village, and from there north, on to the Salisbury Plain training area. I feel I know this route like the back of my hand after almost nine months, and as I follow the nearby railway line, I run through the outbound checks: Fuel — sufficient, start an automatic fuel- consumption check; radios - say goodbye to Wallop Tower and dial up the next frequency, Salisbury Plain Ops; engines - I look on my Multi-Purpose Display (MPD) and see that all engine-oil temperatures and pressures look fine; data-manage- ment systems — no faults showing; direction - I check that the standby compass is showing the same as the digital one in my eye; altitude - I check that the other standby instruments correspond with the digital outputs; if we have an electrical failure PH be relying on these standby instruments to get me home.
‘Check harness, please,’ I instruct Sean.
‘Tight and locked.’ He’s still answering with only the minimum of words. It’s unnerving.
Outbound checks complete. Rich follows me through the first twenty minutes of our planned route in his own bubble of nervousness, the trees and hills rushing past the PNVS in a green blur. I feel as if we’re going too fast, but I don’t want to be late to the target. After what seems like an age, we reach the northern end of Salisbury Plain and take up our Battle Positions (BPs). Rich and I spent hours poring over the maps on the Mission Planning System (MPS) choosing these; we have to have a good view of the target area but be hidden from view ourselves. The BPs have to be safe for us if something goes wrong with the aircraft as well as allowing us to fire any weapon we choose without firing through trees or earth.
Hovering at thirty feet, I can see that we chose well - I can see everything I wanted. The target we’ve selected is a windmill about two miles in front of my aircraft. The time is now 0215, and ‘H hour’, the time we are going to engage, is 0218.
Timed to perfection. Concentrate , Madison.
I bring up a weapons’ page on my MPD and select a Semi-Active Laser (SAL) missile. Of course, we don’t have any on board, but we are using a system that makes the aircraft think it has a full weapon load - kind of like inserting a video-game cartridge. I press the c Wpn Arm’ button on my control panel, which is level with my left eye, and press the small cocked-hat-shaped button on my left ‘Gameboy grip’ with my thumb; the missile icon on the weapons page starts flashing.
I select the pre-stored target file for the windmill and slave the TADS to it with my right thumb. ‘T-10’ shows in my monocle, letting me know which target file I’ve slaved to. The thermal imaging picture in my eye now displays a green and black image of the windmill.
Perfect.
I zoom in with my left hand and start to make out the details; how many windows it has, whether there are trees in between the windmill and my aircraft that could ‘block’ the laser signal.
All OK. Come on , you can do this.
I pull the laser trigger with my right index finger to find out the exact range to target - 2,750 metres. It’s not a real laser, as that would be a dangerous weapon to deploy in the UK; it’s a training one we use to practise, but it still gives me a pretty accurate range. The missile needs to impact at exactly 02:18:00, so I quickly calculate that it has to leave my aircraft at 02:17:49. The time is now 0217.
‘Happy?’ I say to Sean.
‘Sure, if you are,’ he answers, and I immediately feel as if
I’ve missed something. I mentally go through my checks, but can’t think of anything. I can feel stress starting to cloud my thought processes.
‘Umm, OK . . .’ I trail off. Fuck , fuck, fuck . . . what is it?
I set up the tracking gates over the windmill with my left thumb; this will make the TADS grab’ the target so that the laser spot is steady for the missile.
I pull the training laser again and watch the missile icon change to a solid line; it’s letting me know it can see and track the laser energy from my trigger. I’m all ready. The time ticks past: 02:17:41, 02:17:42 . . .
'Forgotten anything?’ Sean asks. It’s the first tip he’s given me since take-off.
I panic. Bollocks. What? You dont have long.
'Ummm, I guess so. What?’ I’m stumped, but I’ve got to get it right, even if it means asking for help. My heart is starting to thump loudly.
'Video recorder,’ he says.
Damn.
I stab at the record button on my left grip and watch as 'RECORDING’ appears in my monocle. It’s vital to get into the habit of recording every engagement so we can discuss it afterwards in the debrief. I know that, when I get out to a war zone, they’ll need everything taped for legal reasons.
It’s 02:17:49.1 keep the laser pulled and squeeze the left-hand trigger as well. An electronic whoosh fills my ears as the ‘video game’ fires off a missile. As I silently count the seconds until impact, sneaking thoughts about how I missed the video recorder crowd into my brain.
Youve failed[ youve failed ... I ignore my traitorous brain and concentrate on counting.
‘Impact,’ I announce when the time is up.
The windmill stands there defiantly, surviving the blast of my imaginary missile. In my head it’s a smoking wreck with flames licking it angrily, like in the simulator. The lack of smoke
and rubble is quite an anticlimax, really, I think, but Im glad the timing of the shot is spot-on.
The next hour of our sortie takes place at 2,000 feet above ground level, and is to practise tactical formation. Ten minutes in and Im sweating with the stress. I just hope it’s going to get easier. My back feels wet as I lean into my seat, and my head is throbbing as the muscles in my neck and through my shoulders tense.
This has always been the most difficult part for me. The FLIR picture is terrible even on a good night — the world looks grainy and surreal, and the boundaries between earth and sky are blurred. Rich’s aircraft looks like a giant murder weapon in my tiny PNVS picture; it fills my vision with all its whirling, knife-sharp rotor blades. I’m supposed to be able to anticipate his every move so that I can move in tandem, but it takes me a split second too long each time to assess what he’s doing. The helicopter is only ten feet from me, and one wrong move by either of us would end in disaster. The cockpit is filled with the sound of our roaring engines; neither Sean nor I utter a word - were both concentrating on not flying into Rich. I make hundreds of tiny movements on the controls, and I can sense Seans hands covering the collective and the cyclic, preventing me from doing anything dangerous. Far from being offended by his lack of trust, Fm maniacally delighted by this extra safety measure - this is terrifying. Over the scream of the rotors I can hear my heart thudding in my ears.
c Tac left . . . GO.’ I hear Richs voice over the radio. It sounds like its coming from far away.
While I try and remember what to do, Richs aircraft wobbles slightly and my heart almost stops. Tac(tical) left means a turn to the left where the outside aircraft turns first. In this case, that’s Rich, and my foggy brain finally analyzes the PNVS picture enough to see that his cab is now turning dangerously close in front of mine. I resist the temptation to squeeze my eyes shut and wait until he is in my 12 o’clock before snatching
the cyclic hurriedly to the left, staying on the left-hand side of Rich’s aircraft.
‘Battle,’ orders Rich’s cab, and with my sweat-sodden, gloved hands I pull the collective to 95 per cent. I need as much power as possible so that I can pull level with Rich’s aircraft and achieve ‘battle’ formation.
Once we’re in position, ‘Rotate . . .GO,’ says Sean’s voice over the intercom and the radio. This is where both aircraft turn towards each other and do a 180-degree turn, passing each other right-hand side to right-hand side. I think . . . Or is it left to left? I decide to go left to left, but the indecision, coupled with the fact that to ask Sean would be an instant fail, makes my hands shake. I feel like I’m outside of myself, barely in control of my weakening limbs.
I’m on the outside of the turn, so at least I don’t have to change direction as sharply as Rich, but this is still one of the most uncomfortable manoeuvres. I breathe rapidly and imagine Sean staring boreholes into the back of my head, willing me to do this correctly and not kill us both.
The worst that can happen is that Rich feels the same indecision as me and his aircraft tries to pass mine on its right-hand side in the heat of the moment, creating a dangerous head to head. I concentrate on staring at the right side of Rich’s cab as I lean the cyclic over.
I stare into my monocle, but my turn doesn’t seem tight enough: all I can see is the front of Rich’s aircraft - I should be seeing the sides. It isn’t right; his aircraft isn’t leaning away at all, and I turn even more tightly. The cyclic presses into my thigh and I feel like we’re on our sides, falling out of the sky. I peer at Rich’s cab, trying to be objective: it still looks like it’s getting closer.
‘Knock it off, knock it off,’ Sean says suddenly and loudly into the radios. ‘Knock it off’ is the emergency code for when it’s all going wrong. I roll the wings level just as Rich’s cab does the same, and we pass each other with only feet to spare.
It happens too quickly for my overloaded brain to take it in, and all I feel is joy that I’m alive.
Oh my god, what the HELL just happened ?
Sean had seen what I was too unsure to notice — I got it wrong. Rich was correctly going for a right to right and, with me trying to do the opposite, we could have crashed. I curse myself for not noticing. When we finally arrive back at Middle Wallop, my helmet liner is soaked with sweat. The shutdown checks seem to take ages, and I am acutely aware of Seans silence in the back. I listen for any hint, any nuance, that will tell me whether I’ve passed or not. Either I’m a free woman, or I have another few weeks of retraining and another final handling test awaiting me. Its agony not knowing, and I cant gauge myself how the trip has gone. I feel bedraggled and wrung-out after concentrating so hard for so long.
We dump our kit in the crew room inside and grab cups of tea before sitting down in the debrief room. Em convinced I’ve failed and feel furious with myself.
You always think you ve failed, Charlie. Calm down.
‘How do you think that went?’ asks Sean. I hate this question, and look at Rich for help.
‘Well, the timings all worked out well, 5 Rich says. ‘The BP work was good and the tac formation was fine apart from one wrong manoeuvre, so I’d say it went OK. You, Charlie?’
I nod and say something about there always being things you can improve on. I’m always really hard on myself, and can never stop thinking about the thousands of tiny things that could have gone better. Most tests seem like they were a disaster to me when I debrief, but in reality they have generally gone well. I tend to be a glass-half-empty kind of girl when I’m assessing myself.
There is a silence, and the two instructors glance at each other, before Sean clears his throat.
He begins, ‘I agree that there were several areas which could
have been much tidier. The tac form was pretty bad, and the transit to the BPs was sloppy . . .’
He keeps talking, but I’m not listening any more.
Weve failed. How will I tell Jake?
I’m not even interested in all the things Sean thinks were crap; I bet I can think of all of them and another three hundred things.
Dammit.
Sean is standing up, beaming and shaking Rich’s hand. He reaches for mine, and I stand uncertainly.
'Congratulations, Charlie,’ he says, shaking my hand. 'You are a fully fledged attack pilot, and the first British woman to achieve that. You could try looking a little more pleased.’
Weve passed? I should have listened — I look around at three Cheshire cat grins and break into a wide smile myself. YES!
As soon as we have left the room, Rich and I embrace in a giant bear-hug.
'Wow! We’ve done it, Charlie,’ he grins. 'Can’t wait to tell the missus. She’s gonna be chuffed to have me back at home more - no more fifteen-hour days for us.’
'Ha! Don’t speak too soon - you know what this place is like! I’m off to see Jake. Have a brilliant evening.’
I cycle back to the mess on cloud nine, and Jake is waiting in my room. He’s come to visit specially on his evening off and jumps up, sees my huge grin and gives me an enormous, too-tight cuddle. We pop the champagne.
‘Well done, gorgeous,’ he says, and I feel exhaustion and happiness finally washing over me.
He pulls my arm until we’re sitting side by side on my bed — the room is too small for an armchair. ‘So how was it?’
‘Disastrous,’ I tell him.
‘I’m sure it wasn’t, Super-pilot. Otherwise you wouldn’t have passed,’ he reasons. He pulls me closer and I feel ridiculously comforted. ‘Well, I did a rotate the wrong way round and my instructor had to call "Knock it off”.’ I’m glad that Jake flies
too, and understands all the terms. I don’t have the energy to explain anything tonight.
‘Is that the only manoeuvre you messed up?’
‘Yes.’
‘So in an hour of tac flying you screwed up a single two- minute manoeuvre?’
‘Well, yes, but . . .’
‘What else?’
I tell him about the video recorder.
‘Mmm hmm. But you arrived in the BP on time, got the missile into the target on time and destroyed it?’
‘Ye-es.’
‘Isn’t that your whole job description?’
‘Yes, but . . .’
‘Come here, you silly worrier. I’m proud of you, Charlie. You’re so hard on yourself. You’ve passed - the first female Apache pilot in the country!’
I nod and raise a smile. I feel so comforted by the fact that I can completely unload on to him. I long for his reassurance and, when I get it, I instantly feel lifted; it’s like he’s protecting me from the world.
Next comes the phase of the Apache course that teaches us the final skills we’ll need to go to war. We spend more hours in the simulator, where they test us to the limit. It’s fast and furious, and my brain literally aches from the pressure. It takes almost eight months, and when we all finally pass, there is a very puffed-up ceremony. We shake important people’s hands, are welcomed to the Attack Pilots’ Club’ and given the coveted Apache badge. No reference is made to my sex or to me being the first girl to pass through the course, but that’s fine with me. I don’t want anyone - namely the Dicks - to think I have had to do any less than the boys to earn my position or that I have had, or will have, any sort of special treatment. At home, of course, there is a little part of me that enjoys the fact that
my job is so different. People are always surprised and interested, although the military world is so far removed from most peoples lives that its hard to explain.
I am posted to 656 Squadron in Dishforth. I know for a while beforehand that I’ll be joining them, and I’m pleased; all the pilots there have excellent reputations, but beyond the normal day-to-day niceties, they are all virtual strangers. My new home in North Yorkshire turns out to be much like any other RAF or army base, but I immediately feel more welcomed by my colleagues here. I briefly meet my new flight - the three other men I will be working in a team with - but I have no awareness of the dirty undercurrent that has plagued me since I started: that there is no way the girls can be as good as the men. I’m sure I’ve caused a stir among them, but they’re careful not to show it.
On my first day of work, I’m straight in the simulator with my new boss. I’ve heard a lot about the squadron’s new officer commanding, Major Christopher James. He’s new to the job, but I already know he’s a whizz at the Apache and was one of the first British pilots to fly the new American model, the AH64D, on the US Army’s first Longbow conversion course. In Arizona, he blew all the Yanks out of the water, and was awarded the Top Gun prize and then an MBE by the Queen.
I’m so nervous I’ve got butterflies and go to the toilet at least three times in the half hour before our flight, but as soon as he comes to greet me, I’m at ease.
‘Captain Madison,’ he says, proffering a hand. ‘Pleased to meet you. I’ve heard lots of things about you. All good, of course.’
I extend my arm and literally cannot believe the size of his hands. His fingers are like Swiss rolls or giant udders. God knows how he gets those around the controls.
‘Great to meet you too.’ I tear my eyes away from his omnihands and look up. I’d expected him to look far older, but I’m
guessing he is less than ten years my senior. He has thick dark hair, a round smiley face and a chiselled jaw.
'After you,’ he says as we make our way to the simulator.
We climb in. The sortie takes us over the town of Now Zad in Afghanistan, escorting a Chinook to pick up an injured soldier. The console flashes menacingly as we are shot at, and I struggle to keep up with the constant lists of demands from the cockpit: sorting weapons, the radar, numerous radio calls, as well as dodging bullets. The boss never instructs me and just lets me get on with it, as if I’d been in the squadron for ever.
As I step out feeling dazed and blinking into the light, he’s full of praise.
'Great work, Charlie,’ he says, and I start to feel more confident about my new colleagues. We walk to the mess room, and the six pilots stand up respectfully when they see Major James. And, for once, the smiles feel totally genuine.
The men are professional and straightforward and actually seem to enjoy having a girl around the place. I think they get a kick out of showing off their chivalrous side and open doors in a gentlemanly fashion. They are clearly prepared to give me a chance in the way that the Dicks never did. I’m keen to try and be part of that team before I face the biggest challenge of my life so far: three months in Afghanistan.
The journey to Kandahar in November 2006 is no fun at all. No comfy chair, no complimentary mini-bottle of wine and certainly no in-flight movie to keep me entertained.
I sit next to my new flight commander, Nick, who chirps away throughout the entire eight-hour journey like an overexcited child on the way to Disneyland. He’s one of life’s optimists and a brilliant guy to be around. After he won the Sword of Honour at Sandhurst, he became the first pilot to start training directly on the Apache. He really is the golden boy; good-looking, liber-talented and modest as well. It’s impossible not to like him.
£ I cant wait. Are you excited, Charlie? My first tour was great.’
Tm not sure what to expect, to be honest,’ I tell him. I feel very apprehensive but am keen for it not to show. I ask him a host of questions: How do I do my laundry? What’s the accommodation like? Are there girls’ toilets? Surprisingly, he can only accurately answer questions about work and missions, so I secretly fantasize I will be arriving at a luxury safari lodge and provided with a maid who does all my washing.
It is 656 Squadron’s second tour of duty and my first. I try not to feel nervous about the prospect of three months away from home in a hostile war zone; after all, it is what I signed up for. I desperately hope I’ll walk away from this tour as well regarded as they are. But I feel I’m going to work twice as hard to prove myself as any of the men that are out here for the first time. My squadron all seem to be welcoming, but I’m still aware that, as I am the first girl, all eyes will be on me and some of the men will have their doubts.
We arrive at Kandahar in the middle of the night. It’s safer touching down in the dark — this huge base is located in the middle of the city, so anything beyond the barbed-wire fence is dangerous territory. The first thing I notice is the smell of rotting shit. I have heard tales of the ‘shit-pit’, a giant hole in the ground smack bang in the middle of camp where the waste from all 25,000 men is filtered. I resist the urge to heave and tell myself I’ll get used to it.
‘God, I’d forgotten how much that stinks,’ FOG says as we trudge down the steps. Affectionately known as the granddad of the squadron, FOG has two obsessions that dominate his time, food and Google, which have earned him his nickname. He is never more than a few steps away from the computers, rota in hand, pointing out that it’s his turn next. He also carries his laptop around with him as religiously as I carry my lip balm. And, as for food, I have enviously observed that, despite
being in perfect shape, he eats enough for three and invariably gets grumpy if we ever miss a meal.
‘I thought that was your arse,’ Darwin shoots back.
I am already looking to Darwin and FOG for my cues and follow them as they head off to collect their bags. Darwin has a playful face with prominent ears, dark cropped hair and a small forehead, just like a chimp — hence his nickname as Charles Darwin’s missing link. There’s always a practical joke brewing in his sparkling brown eyes. As a dad of two young children, he’s matter-of-fact and funny and I’m enjoying his company.
Nick and Major James appear oblivious to the assault on our nostrils and go bounding off across the burnt earth to find some transport. We have affectionately nicknamed him 'the Boss’, and he has already won our hearts and minds. He’s fought across the world, but this is his first time in Afghanistan. He keeps telling me we’re both new, that we’re learning at the same time, and I don’t need to worry. He fills me with confidence.
‘OK, Charlie?’ he says when he and Nick get back, having established that we need to dump our stuff in some sort of temporary accommodation until the final leg of our journey towards Camp Bastion, the main British army base in Afghanistan, tonight.
‘This is all a bit crazy, isn’t it?’ he says, gesturing around. The camp is huge — many of the American soldiers are out here for up to eighteen months, so they have to make it comfortable.
We have a choice between sitting on the wall-to-wall camp cots in the temporary accommodation tent, or getting out and seeing Kandahar Camp, so we dump our stuff and my flight decides to go and get coffee.
I follow the guys towards the boardwalk. It’s a huge, raised wooden walkway, square and about 160 yards along each side. The inner quad has a small enclosed hockey pitch and some areas of wooden picnic chairs and tables nestling in
the dirt. All around the outside of the square there are trucks and iso-containers backed up against the walkway selling various things: trinkets and local gifts, Afghan rugs and hats, knock-off sports gear of every description, baseball caps and pistol holsters. There are mobile-phone stores in wooden shacks against the walkway, a tailor and an embroidery shop. And there are food outlets of every description — from a Pizza Hut truck and Subway van, to a noodle stall, and a Burger King.
‘Tim Hortons?’ Nick asks, pointing in front of us. ‘It’s the Canadian version of Starbucks.’
A dozen people - some military and others who look like contractors - sit outside eating doughnuts and sipping lattes in the weak November sunshine. The Canadian radio station The Bear plays through speakers.
We sit down on the wooden steps and FOG and Nick go inside and come back with a variety of goodies.
‘Oh, I’ve missed these iced coffees,’ Darwin says.
‘It’s not exactly the Bahamas here - I don’t know how you can drink a cold drink,’ I point out, zipping my combat jacket up to my neck. I take a tentative sip from my boiling-hot, milky tea.
Nick’s voice is muffled by his cinnamon Danish. ‘We’ll go for a run later and burn this off,’ he says, patting his finely honed torso.
FOG nods his agreement vaguely, distracted, his biscuit sitting ignored in its bag. His laptop is open on the table in front of him.
‘I won’t.’ Darwin’s eyebrows shoot up meaningfully. ‘You all right, FOG? You haven’t said a word since we sat down.’
‘Mmmm. Just wondering why my laptop isn’t connecting to the Wi-Fi here . . .’
‘There’s Wi-Fi here?’ I’m astonished. ‘In Afghanistan?’
‘Sure. None in Bastion though - have to make the most of it while I’m here.’
‘Surfing porn again, old man?’ Darwin reaches for his Marlboros.
FOG ignores him, so Darwin looks for fresh bait.
‘I hear they’re running a half-marathon competition here this afternoon,’ he says casually. FOG smiles almost imperceptibly and glances at Darwin out of the corner of his eye. This seems like a well-practised routine.
Nick springs to attention as soon as Darwin mentions competition’.
‘Are they? Where? Who’s running it?’
Darwin just laughs. ‘Oh, no, wait. There’s no competition.’
FOG draws himself away from his laptop for long enough to chuckle lightly at Nick. I again get the feeling that this is a long-running joke.
Nick doesn’t seem the slightest bit fazed and eagerly announces, ‘There is a ten-kilometre race on at Bastion not long after we arrive. I saw a poster in the air terminal when we got here last night.’
FOG slams his laptop shut. 'Curses. It just won’t connect.’
‘Curses?’ Darwin teases.
‘I don’t think swearing is always necessary,’ FOG answers.
‘I agree. Anyway, who’s up for the 10k?’ Nick hasn’t been distracted.
‘Me, definitely,’ I say.
‘I’m in too,’ FOG agrees, taking the first bite of his biscuit.
No one bothers to ask Darwin. I realize I’m going to have to keep my eyes peeled to avoid becoming the butt of one of his practical jokes, but congratulate myself on my extreme good fortune - my flight are a great bunch.
That night, as we fly west over the Red Desert, I peer through the window. It’s hard to imagine that anything lives down there - it looks like the surface of Mars; rusty red, arid and barren; like the most unforgiving place on earth.
Running vertically through the middle of Helmand is a strip
of land known as the Green Zone. But here, green definitely doesn’t mean go’. No more than ten kilometres wide at the broadest point and well irrigated by the Helmand river, whose muddy waters snake their way towards Iran, this is where the Taliban fight their battles. The whole area is laced with underground bunkers, rat runs and tunnels, so our men seem to spend much of their time playing a macabre game of bat-a-rat.
The vast majority of Afghans live in small towns, scratching a meagre living from their poppy crops, which more often than not end up as heroin, which itself ends up putting the fringes of British society on a slow road to an early death.
The Hindu Kush stretches far into the north, on the border with Pakistan, as if it has been punched out of the earth in a fit of rage by the ancient gods. Snow-capped and weathered through time, the vast mountain range only has one path through it. It reminds me eerily of Mordor in Lord of the Rings. Camp Bastion is located on the west side of the river, in the Dasht-e Margo, the ‘Desert of Death’, home only to a handful of nomads who raise small herds of animals and forage in the dusty land.
As we descend, the broken rock and gravel shimmers like waves on a silver sea.
I’m keen to settle myself in. We do everything as a squadron, so I’m sharing a tent with my three colleagues - Nick, Darwin and FOG - and the opposite flight, who we’ll be working closely with. We are paired up and put together according to our levels of experience. This is the first time Nick, Darwin and FOG will be teamed up together too, but they’ve all been in the squadron for at least a year and they’ve all flown with each other before. The squadron as a whole is divided into four flights - HQ, 2, 3, and 4 - with four pilots manning two aircraft in each. We are treated and treat each other as equals; officers call each other by their first names, and other ranks are often called by their nicknames.
‘This one’s mine.’ I rush over to the corner spot and fling down
my Bergen rucksack, desperate for a shower. I start to unload my kit. Our small sleeping spaces only have room for a bed and some portable canvas hanging shelves, but I’m desperate to make it as homely as possible and give my fake flowers pride of place.
FOG and Darwin offer to show me around, and I jump at the chance.
We walk out of our tent into damp, sandy-smelling air. The ground looks dry and dusty, but when I step outside my boots sink ankle-deep into the sludge.
Bastion is home to just over two thousand soldiers. At 1,500 square metres, its the largest British military overseas camp to have been built since the Second World War. Its hard to imagine that every last piece of kit had to be airlifted in or transported by road from Karachi Port in Pakistan, over 1,000 miles away. However, there’s a good tactical reason for being here: surrounded by hundreds of miles of sandy no-man’s-land, we’re relatively safe from enemy attack, because you can see for miles from the watchtowers dotted around the fenced perimeter.
We head out into a grey-skied day. A mist of sand seems to hang in the air, and the powdered-dirt ground matches the scum of dust on everyone’s faces. It’s cold but thankfully windless; I stick my hands deep into my pockets. The air smells exactly like the shitty-smelling air at Kandahar and I wrinkle my nose as I catch a fresh waft.
'Oh yeah, there’s a shit-pit here too,’ Darwin says. 'No escape.’ He lights a cigarette and I jealously breathe in the fumes to disguise those from the poo.
There’s a tent for everything at Camp Bastion: tents to sleep in; a plastic cookhouse tent the size of a warehouse; tents with metal showers and toilets; office tents with haphazard bundles of maps and computers; recreation tents with board games with bits missing and well-thumbed magazines, and a variety of gym tents.
Fifty yards outside our line of tents is a large tent standing on its own.
‘Crab and Archer?’ I ask, reading the sign hanging wonkily from the door.
‘Squadron rec tent,’ FOG explains. ‘The soldiers can go and hang out in there, play Scrabble or Ludo or read their books. I think there’s a TV in there that the last guys bought with the welfare budget. Be careful about going in there on your own, though, probably better not to.’
Tie’s being really protective for some reason, but it’s comforting rather than stifling, and I’m relieved they’re taking the trouble to guide me through the unknown.
I put my head into the Crab and Archer for a quick look - mostly it is just a big, empty tent; it has a really high ceiling and is pretty chilly. There are two wooden benches in the corner set around a big TV. There’s some sort of sports match on and my eyes skim over it.
‘Ooh, cards,’ I say, spotting a home-made wooden table and some canvas chairs. On the table is a half-finished game of poker. ‘I love cards.’
‘There’ll be plenty of time for that,’ Darwin chuckles mysteriously.
Halfway across camp, past a high-walled, barbed-wire-topped area, we reach our office.
‘This is the main drag?’ I ask, looking at yet another mud road snaking past lines of tents. The only thing to mark it out is a gravel-lined path leading off the road with three tall flagpoles towering above it. Today, the tops of the flags are licked by the low cloud.
‘The shop’s over there . . .’ FOG points into the distance.
‘There’s a shop?’
‘Oh, don’t get excited, unless you like jars of clams and weight-gain powder.’ Darwin laughs.
‘What?’
‘Yep, that’s pretty much all you can buy there. Oh, and last month’s FHM .’
As we walk down the gravel path leading to the flagpoles, I
notice a group of four or five soldiers looking at us. They’re in a huddle and immediately stop talking when I notice them. When we walk past, they don’t try and hide the fact that they’re ogling us.
Darwin and FOG are silent.
‘What are they looking at?’ I ask, smiling but nervously pushing a few stray stands of hair behind my ears.
FOG answers: ‘God knows — might be the first time they’ve seen a woman in a while. Ignore it.’
We head to the shop which, true to the boys’ word, sells nothing of interest to me whatsoever. I make a mental note to ask Mia to send some extra mags.
We walk back to the main drag and turn up the gravel path.
‘And this,’ Darwin says with a flourish, pulling aside the flimsy wooden door that’s embedded in a massive tent, ‘is the JFiF.’
‘Joint Helicopter Force?’ I check.
‘Er, yes.’ FOG looks slightly doubtful, as if this should be unspokenly obvious. It’s the control centre for all our missions.
I stick my head in and am practically knocked out by the rancid stench of BO and stagnant water. I survey the room: desks line all four walls, and wires and lights are strung in every direction across the low ceiling sending a bright, neon glow over every surface. Along one wall, radios stand and hang from every desk, and groups stand round them listening in.
In the centre of the room are two big bird tables, planning tables, crowded with papers and diagrams. The place is crammed with people, and there is a low-level buzz of conversation, with the occasional loud shout.
‘Out the back is the brew area,’ FOG adds, pointing through a plastic flap at the end. ‘There’s a slightly collapsed trestle table and a kettle, but it’s a relief being out there sometimes.’
As we walk through the JHF, the Boss immediately greets us.
‘Two flight!’ He looks around. ‘Where is your illustrious flight commander?’
‘Not sure,’ Darwin answers. ‘He went off to the flightline ages ago.’
‘No matter.’ The Boss is already herding us into the heart of the operations room.
He talks us through what happens at each of the desk areas around the room, reeling off the names of all the important personalities. I try to take them in, but mostly I just stare around the room marvelling at how it looks exactly like the tented HQs in Second World War films.
As the Boss finishes off, I realize I can hear a female voice coming from somewhere. It’s almost like it’s on a different frequency to all the men’s low grumbles. I turn to see a pretty, petite girl with neat brown hair briefing a group of pilots.
‘Who’s that?’
‘Ah, good. There she is - I thought you’d like this, Charlie. Louise here’ - he points in the direction of the briefing - ‘is one of the intelligence officers. She’ll be briefing you every day before you go flying.’
I’m gobsmacked. Another girl? I feel a bubble of excitement rise through my chest. Hopefully Louise can show me the ropes; where we can shower, the best way to wash clothes and where the cleanest Portaloos are.
As soon as she finishes talking, I go over and introduce myself.
‘Hi, I’m Louise,’ she says. Up close she is even prettier; beautiful clear skin and bright blue eyes in a tiny frame. ‘I saw you walking in — your boss said he had someone to introduce me to this morning.’
‘I had no idea there would be another girl here - I’m so relieved.’
‘Me too,’ she tells me. ‘I only got here a few weeks ago, and I’m totally starved of good conversation already! If I have to talk about cars, computers or engines one more time, I might cry!’
She checks her watch. ‘Want to go to lunch?’
‘Sure.’
As we make our way towards the cookhouse, I notice heads turning at the sight of two girls together and chuckle. Louise and I chat all the way to the dining tent and through the twenty-minute queue to get in. She tells me that she is engaged to Tom, who is in the army and due to deploy to Afghanistan soon; they are getting married next year when they both get home.
Tm engaged, too! We can compare ideas and share wedding magazines.’
We swap notes on what we have planned and, as we chatter, move along the queue, pick up a tray each and make our way along the human conveyor belt. Angry-looking chefs shovel piles of food on to our plastic plates, and by the time we pause to draw breath we re sitting at a shiny trestle table in the middle of a hot, sweaty tent filled with hundreds of impossibly young- looking soldiers, many of whom are looking in our direction or nudging friends to do the same. I smile self-consciously and look back at Louise.
‘Oh, just ignore them - they’re girl-starved and have been here so long they’ve forgotten how to behave.’
I pick up my knife and fork, which appear slightly crusty, and look properly at the food on my plate for the first time. To one side is what is supposedly curry, which is a funny orange colour. Blobs of grease are swimming on the surface of the sauce. Next to it is a giant portion of egg-fried rice. The bits of egg look seriously congealed. Pudding is some sort of frozen cake.
‘This looks absolutely rancid.’
‘Yep,’ Louise says. ‘It’s pretty greasy, but considering what the food goes through to get here, it’s not too bad.’
‘I’m going to have to go to the gym twenty times a day to burn this off — I have to fit into that wedding dress!’ I scoop some of the curry up with my fork and post it into my mouth. It tastes good. Like Friday school dinners.
‘Tell me about it. Mines a size four/ Louise says matter-of- factly, without a hint of bragging.
I look up at her; she is tiny. ‘OK. Gym thirty times a day then.’
I’m so glad shes here. I feel the gnawing anxiety that has been with me for the last few weeks starting to melt away.
British forces first deployed around the Afghan capital, Kabul, in the months following 9/11, as part of a coalition whose primary mission was to root out al-Qaeda. In February 2006, Defence Secretary John Reid ordered several thousand troops to Afghanistan as part of the expanding NATO stabilization mission. He said that he hoped troops would return home having ‘not fired a single bullet’.
One of the main tasks of Operation Herrick is to combat the resurgence of the Taliban. The underlying long-term aim is to help the people of Afghanistan build a democratic state with strong security forces and an economy that will support a civil society.
The British have taken on Helmand in the south; the biggest province in the country, which is largely run by lawless drug lords. The Soviets tried to control it in the 1980s with a force of twelve thousand and failed. Opium production was increasing at the time and impoverished farmers were selling their crops to the local Taliban leaders. It’s anarchy, with President Hamid Karzai’s government existing here in Helmand in name only.
Resistance to the aims of the British deployment is vicious and relentless. The Taliban and drug barons club together and form a more aggressive and desperate opposition than anyone had at first imagined; the District Centres (DC) around Helmand in Now Zad, Sangin, Kajaki and Gereshk are constantly pummelled with small-arms fire, RPGs and rockets. In September, troops were forced to retreat from the DC in Musa Qaleh because it was becoming increasingly hard to deliver much-needed supplies of food, water and ammunition.
The death toll has spiralled, and the Apaches’ role in supporting troops under attack is crucial. As far as neighbourhood-watch systems go, they don’t come any better than us. The message to the enemy is clear - we’re not here to dish out sweets, and if they take us or our troops on, the consequences are fatal. The Apaches also reassure the men on the ground; they’ve quickly become the support aircraft of choice. The Taliban are desperate to take out an Apache; they call us mosquitoes’ and hate us with a passion. We pack a punch, and they know it. As their war becomes more asymmetric - with the increased use of suicide bombers and Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) - ours has too: our destructive power is greater than an entire platoon’s on the ground.
But it’s also a war of hearts and minds; we must win over the Afghan people and convince them we have come to deliver them a better future. Our troops spend hours holding ‘shuras’, or meetings, and talking to local leaders. Many have grown beards and learned Pashtun to try and blend in. A whole host of locals work inside the wire, as cleaners and labourers, even though their integrity is questionable. The Taliban are quick to play catch-up and adapt their plans as they go. It’s impossible to know when the region will be stable enough for the Afghans to run it themselves; at the moment, I can’t imagine it ever happening. Yet I know we have to stay positive and remember the good we are doing for the ordinary people on the ground. Otherwise, what are we fighting for?
We negotiate the handover with 664 Squadron. Although every one of them seems to be an identikit tall, handsome, impressive model, they also look dog-tired and relieved to see us; our arrival is their signal that they’ll soon be on their journey home.
We, on the other hand, are gnashing at the bit. Nick and I will be in the front seats of our Apaches for the duration of the tour, in charge of all the awesome weaponry. FOG and Darwin will be in the back seats taking care of the tricky
business of flying in a desert - dusty conditions, thin air and tiny, treacherous landing sites. Its all a bit alien, and I decide the only thing to do is to take each day as it comes.
I soon find myself settling into an easy rhythm; we live our lives in twelve-day cycles. We have three duty operations days in the ops room to plan future missions, track the progress of ongoing missions over the radios and do paperwork. Its a bit like being in an office, but a very strange one: there’s a lot of shouting, the constant buzz of radios in the background, and all the statistics and briefings are to do with missiles and enemy forces.
The following three days, we fly deliberate, pre-planned missions. Each is normally preceded by an Orders Group (OGp), which ensures that everyone knows what’s up, and the tasks themselves can happen as far away as the Pakistani and Iranian borders. Some are planned days in advance, while for some, we are only given a few hours to prepare. In the first few weeks, most missions are to escort Chinooks as they drop off supplies at the various DCs or pick up casualties. We’re often scheduled to appear overhead when the Marines push out of their bases on exploratory patrols. If they’re alone, they’re often met by vicious opposition, but the low growl of the Apaches issues a warning to any enemy hoping to infiltrate.
The three days after that we’re on Very High Readiness (VHR), during which we can be called out at any time of the day or night on a shout’ to help out when there are troops in contact (TIC) from Taliban fire on the ground. Sometimes there are four or five call-outs a day, sometimes nothing for the entire duty. We have thirty minutes to be off the ground once the call comes in on our hand-held Motorola radios, or sixty at night to wake up and adjust to the night-vision systems. Initially, I find it terrifying springing out of bed at three in the morning never knowing where we’re going. We have to sprint to the aircraft as fast as we can, and before long I learn that VHR really means Very Hard Running. Every second counts, so the
VHR tents are close to the flightline and the aircraft, alongside mini-hell: a tiny, three-metre-square Portakabin containing three loos, three showers, four sinks, eight people, sixteen unflushed man poos and a big fart cloud. Everything is metal and grimy
- and the floor has an array of soggy toilet roll, mud, dust and God-knows-what else slicked across it. There are some mirrors but, like the ones in garage service stations, they’re dingy and it’s like looking at yourself in tinfoil. To add to the excitement, the shower curtains are wafer-thin, harbour a generous amount of green fungus and are made of that gossamer-type material that crawls right up your bum crack the second the water goes on. After every shower I feel I need another one to wash the dirt off from the first one. There seem to be naked man-bottoms everywhere I look in the Portakabin - and they’re not exactly the tanned, buffed ones of my teenage imagination — so I’ve decided that staring at the floor is the easiest option.
Because VHR can be very tiring, the three days after it are spent doing ‘Testing and Maintenance’ at Kandahar Air Field. When one of the helicopters breaks, it’s flown back to KAF. We only have eight aircraft out here, and four need to be fully serviceable at Bastion at any one time. Once fixed, the cabs always need flight-testing around the airfield and the makeshift shooting range next to it - in between cups of coffee and cookies at Tim Hortons.
The only pitfall is the giant cesspit in the middle of camp
- wherever you are, there’s always the stink of other people’s shit. And the American Marines’ ultra-smooth chat-up technique is pretty amusing too.
On my first break at Kandahar, I have an afternoon off and decide to go to one of the three huge gyms to work off yet another man-size meal (this time, steak and kidney pie and chips, followed by a wedge of cake and a gratefully received and well-travelled apple). I am walking along the road, when an open-top Hummer comes past and slows down beside me. Inside are four men, all muscly and tanned.
‘Hey, pretty lady can we give you a lift?’ the one in the passenger seat calls. His voice has an unmistakable American twang.
‘Er, no thanks.’
‘But you’re too pretty to be walking on your own.’
‘Er, Em fine, honest.’
‘Well, we ll be in the disco tonight if you want to see us again.’
‘Disco?!’
‘Yeah, the Dutch run it. It’s near the Boardwalk. See you there.’
‘Not if I see you first,’ I say under my breath. There’s no alcohol here, and I’d have to consume at least three bottles of wine before I even considered hitting the dancefloor with my body armour on.
They speed off at an embarrassing 15mph - the fastest speed we’re allowed to drive. I chuckle to myself as the dust is kicked up in their wake.
One morning in the second rotation back in Bastion, I lie on my cot, freezing and trying not to need a wee. My watch says it’s four in the morning, and after tossing and turning for a while in my sleeping bag, I realize I’m not going to be able to drift off unless I go to the loo. Considering the time, I reckon there won’t be anyone around, so I manoeuvre myself as quietly as I can from my camp cot, stick my flying boots on over my shorts-and-vest-top PJs and unzip the tent flap. The cold hits me as I emerge into the early morning, and I put my hands over my boobs, hoping not to bump into anyone and wishing I’d stopped to put a bra on - the Madison boobs hardly go anywhere without a bra for fear of knocking someone out. I creep down the dark alley between the tents, glad for the hint of pale dawn light to show me the way. I round the corner towards the toilet block and, just as I think I’ve made it safely, I practically run smack bang into a huge, poker-faced sergeant.
He’s one of the firemen who live in the same compound we do. I’ve had a few unpleasant chats with him before, and he looks at me with his usual disapproving scowl. Thick-set and tall, and with a puckered and weather-beaten face, he looks about sixty years old, but I’m guessing he’s probably in his mid-forties. He might be missing the odd finger or toe, I’m guessing, and is so at home in his uniform; he’s the type that wears bad Next trousers and high-ankle trainers when he’s on leave because, without his combats, he’s lost. All he knows is the army.
He’s also the kind of person I struggle most to gain respect from. He’s been in the army for ever and climbed the ranks straight from coming in as a private at the age of sixteen - as young as you can. He’s the sort that thinks officers are mostly too young and unnecessary - and that the fast-track year at Sandhurst can’t even begin to equate to twenty years’ experience on the ground. And because we pilots are in the air (obviously) rather than down on the dusty ground doing hard labour, he acts like he thinks we’re weak and arrogant. What he thinks of a female officer pilot standing in the cold in a vest and flying boots holding her hands over her nipples at four in the morning - I daren’t even go there.
‘Morning, sergeant,’ I say, as if running into him is just totally fine and I’m not dying inside. I can feel my cheeks glowing, despite the cold.
‘Morning . . . ma’am,’ he replies, with just the right withering pause between ‘morning’ and ‘ma’am’ and a lingering glance at my boobs which is a fine blend of distasteful (all women should be at the sink) and lecherous (he can’t have seen any female quite so exposed for months).
I practically sprint away, heart hammering, towards the loo, thank heaven when I find that the unisex toilets are vacant, go for the longest wee ever, like some sort of camel that has been storing it up for a few days, and then hotfoot it back to my cot as quickly as possible, my head firmly down.
At half six, I’m awake again, having got over my humiliating encounter and been able finally to fall back to sleep at about five. Were on duty ops and not on the programme to fly until this afternoon, and I lie on my cot listening to snoring and a light rain falling. Since my flight had agreed to go for breakfast at eight, I decide to go to the gym. I swing my legs down, avoiding the cold metal frame of my cot, and hurriedly shove on my gym kit.
When I pull the poncho-wall around my cot aside, I see FOG and Nick also hopping into their gym shorts.
‘Gym?’ I whisper.
‘Going running,’ Nick whispers back, beaming at me as if he’d said he was off on a luxury holiday to Bali. ‘Coming?’
I’d been wanting to see the running route but hadn’t wanted to explore on my own; I’d only managed to find the gyms so far. I’m keen to maintain my fitness — no way am I going to develop a paunch like some of those RAF types. I call my regime the Afghan Plan, my version of a diet and exercise combo. I’m determined to lose that extra half a stone, even out here. And with all those fatty meals, I know I’m going to have to work doubly hard at it.
I’ve started to work my way around the different gyms so I don’t get bored, but my favourite is the smallest and most ragged, between the main ops room and the VHR showers. It’s through a random wooden door; you’d never go in unless you knew it was there. It contains a few sand-clogged machines and an opening at the far end so the breeze can bring some kind of relief from the heat you generate. It’s normally almost empty - a handful of people working out as the likes of Mika and the Scissor Sisters blare out from the dust-choked speakers, day and night, on MTV.
I’m always happy when I’m working out, and I do my best thinking as I move rhythmically on the cross trainers and treadmills, my feet pounding the dusty rubber surfaces. But I’m also keen to get outside. The barbed-wire perimeter isn’t clearly
marked, and it looks as if it’s fairly easy to end up on the wrong side of it. I don’t fancy my chances against the Taliban just wearing my Asics and cycling shorts. I give Nick a thumbs-up and go to wait outside.
‘Let’s go,’ says Nick when he bounds out of the tent a few minutes later.
‘Morning.’ FOG nods in my direction, hopping from one foot to the other to warm up. They’re both wearing those ridiculously short running shorts that some men seem to favour, the ones with the unnecessary slit up the side of the thigh. They both look like well-muscled gazelles bouncing around, and I feel like a lead weight.
We set off towards the perimeter track, slide through a gap in the twenty-foot-high HESCO wall and turn left. These huge constructs are made with wire mesh and heavy duty fabric liner to act as a barrier against small arms fire, and seem to be everywhere I look. We’re running in a fifty-metre-wide channel between the E1ESCO and the barbed-wire fence that surrounds Bastion. We could be anywhere - and it’s so foreign and desolate, I imagine this is what the moon must look like. The powder-fine dust has been churned into deep mush and then frozen into an ankle-twisting ocean of icy mud. The fine rain makes the sky look almost the same colour as the dirty ground. I concentrate on my feet, as the view isn’t much to look at. All I can see is diarrhoea-brown-with-a-hint-of-blue sky and vomit-coloured mud. At least the wind is blowing the shit- smell the other way.
I find myself out of breath just keeping pace with them, so I give up any hope of joining in FOG and Nick’s conversation and content myself with listening. There’s no way Em letting myself fall behind.
We round the first corner of camp, and I look up from my trainers, ready to take in the new sights. Em greeted with a mirror image of the last leg of camp: brownish-blue sky, brown death-trap floor, high walls either side. They pick up speed
again and, although my whole body is burning, I feel a familiar rush of endorphins surge through me. IVe always loved running, and I’ve missed not doing it in the open since being here.
‘Great training for the fitness test, this,’ FOG announces.
‘What time do you normally get for the mile and a half? I get eight minutes forty-five,’ Nick says proudly.
‘Oh, around eight minutes thirty,’ FOG answers, smugly speeding up once more. ‘I’m allowed extra time now that I’m in my forties - twelve minutes - but I don’t ever intend to use
• 5
It.
I stumble in surprise. ‘Forties!’ I wheeze. ‘You’re never . . . in your forties.’ I heave a huge breath in. ‘I thought . . . more like . . . thirty-five.’ I stop talking before I expire.
‘Yeah, yeah, FOG is for “fucking old guy”, I know what you lot think of me,’ he chuckles. But we know he’s kidding - he looks much younger than forty. He’s tanned, healthy and toned. In fact, looking ahead at them, neither of them has an ounce of fat on their bodies. How annoying.
‘I like to stay healthy for my boys. I do a lot of orienteering - I really enjoy that.’ FOG sounds happy mentioning his kids.
‘How old are they?’ Nick asks.
‘Oh, both teenagers now. Scary, really.’
‘I like to keep fit so I can do all my kite-surfing, skiing and climbing and stuff,’ Nick says.
‘So you can come first in all of it, you mean,’ FOG retorts.
Camp still looks the same when we turn the corner of the perimeter fence, except that, on this leg, the rain is blowing into my face and the wind is carrying the sweet smells from the shit-pit straight into my nostrils. I breathe through my mouth to minimize odour-trauma, then realize that I’m breathing in tiny particles of everyone else’s shit. I close my mouth, gagging, and concentrate on my feet again. The wind has picked up, and I can no longer hear much of what FOG and Nick are saying. I let my thoughts drift to home. I calculate
the time - we re four and a half hours ahead, so it will be the early hours of the morning at home. I think about Jake sprawled across the bed with all the covers over him, and Mum at her house in Oxford beneath her favourite quilt, sleeping peacefully. I wonder what their days hold. Shooting with his mates, a session in the gym and a drink at the pub for Jake; and collecting a million rogue apples from the over-ambitious apple tree for Mum probably. I desperately miss everyone, but I want to be here and to get on with it so that I have some exciting stories to tell when I get back. Jake sends me daily eblueys (emails which are printed off like letters and given to us). He writes about what he’s been up to — perhaps even more than he’d tell me if I was at home - and constantly tells me he misses me. And Mia has promised to write as much as she can, so I feel that maybe I won’t be missing out on all the gossip too much. They’re all there, always in my head, but I know that I just have to get on with it, homesick or not.
Turning into the final stretch, I’m relieved when the wind dies immediately and the stench clears.
‘. . . back seat? I think it’s more interesting in the front,’ Nick is saying. I guess they’re discussing the merits of the front seat versus the back in the Apache. Nick is often in the front, like me, whereas FOG spends most of his time in the back.
‘No way,’ FOG says, gesturing with his hands. ‘You can see more from the back, and you get to do all the flying.’
‘But you don’t get to pull the triggers,’ Nick says, as if he’s closing his case.
‘I’ve fired the gun plenty from the back. Plus, we do every rocket shot from the back, and they’re the most fun,’ FOG points out.
When we reach the opening in the HESCO that leads to our tent, I start veering left towards it, checking my watch. We’ve done thirty minutes of sprint-speed running on the frozen mud-ocean.
‘Not coming round again?’ I hear Nick’s voice, and turn to
see FOG and Nick sailing past the gap in the HESCO, neither sweating nor even breathing hard.
I’m a bh annoyed at myself for not keeping up but I’m knackered, so I make a face that I hope will explain my decision and, as soon as I’m through the gap in the FIESCO, I walk. Back inside, its like Em emerging into a different world. In here, there are muddy-brown tents in little brown rows, dirt roads in nice straight lines and hundreds of matching soldiers making their way to breakfast. They look ever so slightly robotic. Their faces are unreadable, but they don’t even try to hide their staring. I know its because Em a pilot and a girl and blonde, nothing else. Its like Em on the front of a giant Wonderbra billboard ad. It makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, but I still try to laugh it off. It isn’t as if I ever expected to be serving behind the Waitrose cheese counter with lots of women, after all.
At times, the boy-heavy environment does verge on the gross, though. In some of the unisex blocks, there are signs up saying, ‘PLEASE DON’T LEAVE SEMEN ON THE SEATS.’ It’s vomit-inducing, to say the least. Em sure the other girls on camp get the same sort of attention. But Em the only female Apache pilot and I guess that marks me out as different. When Em with them, my flight always seem to draw me into conversation, as if they’re helping me to ignore the eyes looking me over.
I try not to catch anyone’s eye and drag myself back to the tent. It feels like a warm cocoon. As I walk in, Darwin is strolling cheerfully back to his cot, a towel around his waist. His semi-nakedness doesn’t bother either of us one bit, although I am meticulously careful about getting changed behind my makeshift poncho wall so I don’t embarrass anyone. Even my strappy tops make them a bit red-faced. But they’re all trying to include me. When one of the groundies - the guys who work with the aircraft when they are on the ground - suggested calling the aircraft after famous porn stars, that got everyone’s
vote. So we fly Lolo Ferrari, Tabatha Cash, Jenna Jameson, Tera Patrick, Taylor Rain and Silvia Saint. Cue hours of crude jokes about their ‘hours inside Lola, ‘riding Jenna and ‘Isn’t Taylor a goer?’ Boys . . .! But, so I didn’t feel left out, the final aircraft was christened Ron Jeremy. I must remember to Google Ron Jeremy in my next internet session. Apparently he has the biggest cock in Hollywood.
‘Morning! Been running?’ Darwin asks, screwing up his nose, as if he’s asking whether I’ve been rolling in broken glass for fun.
‘You really missed out,’ I say, but feel the exhaustion in my voice will give me away.
By now, I’ve begun to realize that, most of the time I spend here, I’ll have sand in my hair, in my boots, even in my knickers. After the run, I’m as finely coated as a chicken nugget. I head to the showers and spend the whole three minutes visualizing a shower where the water is hot, it doesn’t start by you pushing a button, there’s a tiled floor and fluffy white towels and slippers. Afterwards, gingerly patting myself with my dusty towel, I still don’t feel clean. It feels like there’s a film of grime clinging to my skin, which I long to scrub off.
I reach for my uncomfortable flying shirt. I always strip down to a T-shirt when I can; the scratchy, hot shirt is my least favourite item of clothing. The army needs to get Trinny and Susannah on the case, if you ask me. The whole outfit is ridiculously unflattering. There’s the desert shirt and matching trousers, and I can only imagine the trousers were styled on someone totally square with a really wide waist and very short legs. I look like some kind of rapper, with the drawstring pulled really tight around my middle, the crotch down by my knees and the legs barely skimming my boots.
When we go flying, everything we wear is fire retardant and it all looks like the uniform regular infantry soldiers wear, with no markings that would label us as Apache pilots. If we were shot down and they realized that’s what we were, well
. . . it doesn’t bear thinking about. Over our shirts we wear the LCJ that contains all the kit we’d need if we ever went down, such as spare ammo and a vial of morphine for pain relief. It’s just loose enough for us to be able to breathe, and more than tight enough to hold in our innards if we ever get shot. Clipped to the LCJ is a rock-hard, bullet-proof Kevlar breastplate. The whole get-up makes me look like a barrelchested butch lesbian, especially when the outfit is finished off with a crotch strap.
Now fully dressed, I head for some food with FOG.
The whole camp is split up with HESCO barriers. The only way to cross them is to climb the ladders placed sporadically along their lengths. The only snag, as I found out on day one, is that it is unbearably uncoof to climb down the other side facing in — you have to walk down forwards, like stairs. This is easier said than done, and it’s not like I haven’t been putting in the practice. The other, favoured way to cross is to reach the top and then launch yourself off from there.
As we approach one of the barriers, I see a platoon of Marines standing in a neat line on the far side, like a crocodile of children waiting at a zebra crossing.
I feel the familiar rush of panic as I clamber up the rickety ladder. It’s ridiculous, I know, but it suddenly seems to stretch ahead of me like a giant banana skin. I make it to the top without mishap and my confidence returns. I decide that, in light of my audience, I’ll play safe and jump down instead of using the ladder, and I rest a hand on the wall and launch myself off it, thinking how suave this nonchalant manoeuvre must look to the thirty young soldiers staring up at me. Just this once, I’m enjoying being watched.
Suddenly, I’m aware that my booted foot has remained at the top of the HESCO, while my head and body travel down. There’s no way out of this. A second later I’m spread- eagled across the hot gravel, flatter than I’ve been in my entire life. I haven’t even broken my fall with a knee or an
elbow. Every part of my body is in contact with the ground apart from my forehead, and my eyes, which are fixed on the Marines.
I long for the gravel to swallow me up. My cheeks burn as I blink, wishing that, when I open my eyes, the Marines will no longer be there. But they stare at me impassively and don’t move a muscle.
FOG is still climbing over the HESCO, studiously pretending everything is going as normal. I make a point of never asking for help, so he knows Ed probably bite his head off if he scrambled down and attempted to pick me up. I climb to my feet and dust myself down. As I walk away, I feel a warm trickle of blood running down my leg and the stares of the young soldiers on my back. Boy, will they have fun with this one . . .
FOG’s eyebrows are raised in concern, but I can see he’s stifling a grin.
'There better be something good on the menu,’ I croak.
Two weeks into my tour, and the sun is shining in through the Perspex of the cockpit windows as we head towards Now Zad. FOG flies at maximum speed and the cab shakes as if it’s going to fall apart. We don’t speak much, as this is a VFfR shout and we’re both working hard. I can see FOG’s eyes moving rapidly between the huge blue expanse of the sky and the confines of the cockpit as he checks the instruments. After more than Five thousand hours’ flying time, so much of this is second nature to him, and I imagine his fingers using muscle memory while his brain considers the next three tasks.
Em listening in to Nick’s conversation with Widow Seven Zero, the JTAC, and try to keep up with all the grids he’s sending. For every one, there are more than thirty button pushes to be made before I can send Nick the target file by email, and it all has to be done at the speed of the radio conversation. To make matters worse, Em desperate for the loo. I feel
like I spend 50 per cent of my time worrying about when I can wee next and dehydrating myself on purpose and the other 50 per cent hopping from one bum cheek to the other in my seat, the in-flight equivalent of crossing my legs. It’s become my obsession, and sometimes my bladder physically hurts from holding on so much. During flights when I think I’m going to burst, I try to think about anything other than the moment when I can finally relieve myself, but my thoughts keep turning back to it. Could I wee into my water bottle? Would my nav bag be big enough? Why did I drink that tea five hours ago? This is the only thing that truly takes my mind off what I am
In the breaks between calls, alongside plaiting my legs I’m making sure my cockpit is ready for the fight: TADS ready to slave to the enemy; weapon systems set up with correct trajectories and ranges; and no errors in the weapon processor, the brains behind the whole thing. Widow is taking incoming fire and has sustained two T2s, who need immediate assistance. Casualties are given a grading by the medics on the ground: a T1 is in grave danger and needs to be in the operating theatre within an hour; a T2 needs to be there swiftly enough not to become a Tl; a T3 is more often than not walking wounded. There’s nothing you can do for a T4 except carry his body home.
I can see the Chinook icon on my radar screen. It’s slightly ahead of us and off to the left, aiming for the Helicopter Landing Site to collect the injured soldiers. Through the TADS I can see tiny figures surround the HLS, making sure it’s safe for the Chinook to come in and pick up the casualties.
We reach the overhead of Now Zad as the mighty Chinook lands in a huge cloud of dust. Sometimes they remain enveloped for up to a minute. It takes balls to do that when you can’t see and under enemy fire; I don’t envy the pilots one bit.
Nick decides to look after the Chinook while we take the
wider area, scanning for any of the blighters who may be responsible.
‘Ugly Five One, this is Widow Seven Zero, this last incident originated from the area of RPG alley, but I think that was more shoot-and-scoot than anything. Could you look for any rocket firing points in the eastern woods?’
‘Roger, Widow,’ I reply. ‘We’ll let you know what we see.’
RPG alley is one of the Taliban’s favourite firing points, a mere street away from the platoon house but protected by thick walls and the darkness of the tight urban surroundings. They set up their RPGs to land inside the British area then melt away into the nearby markets and join the stream of other men in cream dishdashas (the long tunics worn by the men in Afghanistan) as if nothing has happened. There is little or no chance of catching them unless we’re actually overhead when they attack — but the Taliban are too wily for that. So we’re off to look at the woods instead.
FOG is already a step ahead, flying towards the zone Widow is talking about. I flick between Day TV and FLIR to try and make out any telltale signs. The Day TV is better for picking up movement, but the FLIR can see through the foliage and pick up the heat signatures of people, warm metal and recently disturbed ground. I scan the whole woods methodically, like a fingertip search from the air.
‘There - what are those?’ FOG says five minutes later, jerking the cab into a tighter arc so that the TADS can look down at a steeper angle. Lie’s been watching my screen, and his experienced eye has picked up some hot spots I’ve missed. ‘They look like people. What do you think?’
I follow the icon in my eye that tells me where he’s looking. I slave to it, then scan back along the tree line with my TADS until I see a point where a small pathway broadens into dusty, scorched dirt track. Along the side of the track is a ditch and along it is a line of hot, evenly spaced blobs. I struggle to see more detail and switch to Day TV. No bodies; they’ve
obviously moved on, probably only moments ago, leaving the ground warm beneath them.
‘Dammit,’ I sigh, moving the TADS immediately back into a wider field of view and taking up my scan. FOG sees what I see without us having to speak; we each know where the other is looking, where the TADS and the aircraft are pointing, what radio the other is working on. He sees my TADS picture and I see what he’s looking at with the radar or the PNVS. It saves all the chatting and pointing.
The radio crackles into life.
‘Ugly Five One, this is Five Zero, we’ve got movers!’ Nick says. ‘Stand by for laser spot.’
I make sure my Laser Spot Tracker (LST) is set up to look for Ugly Five Zero’s laser code.
‘Ready for spot.’
My TADS swings wildly around, then homes in on Nick’s laser spot, which is moving slowly across the woods.
I can see four figures on the Day TV, darting in and out of the trees. They obviously think they’re relatively safe under the thick vegetation, because they’re only jogging, not really going for it.
Widow confirms there are no friendlies or civilians in the area; these men are definitely Taliban, and probably the very ones who were firing rockets at our soldiers thirty minutes ago.
Nick has a plan.
‘We’re going to set up south-east to north-west for a flechette run; you follow up with another salvo and watch for BDA.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘Turning east now.’
We’ll be doing a co-operative shoot, where I aim the TADS and squeeze the laser but FOG flies the aircraft towards the target and pulls the trigger - it’s the most accurate way. Each time FOG pulls the trigger, four rockets will fly towards the target that I’m tracking, each spraying eighty six-inch tungsten darts which punch holes in everything they touch.
‘Nick’s tipping in,’ FOG says. We’re flying at 90 degrees to
them, ready to turn north-east, towards the target, when Nick pulls away.
I slave the TADS to where Nick is firing, and the screen shows Nicks rockets splattering through the trees. Neither of us can see any of the targets now though; theyVe gone to ground, seeing us changing our wheel into something more threatening.
‘Resetting.’ Eight rockets have been fired from his aircraft, and Darwin’s voice is calm. We see the darts rip through the canopy of trees below and disappear.
FOG pulls us around to face the enemy. I slave the TADS to the last known target location.
‘Go co-op,’ I say, the drills feeling natural after hundreds of missions in the simulator.
‘Co-op,’ FOG answers, actioning his rockets as I action mine.
I have a last check that the crosshairs are on target as we fly towards it at over 1 OOmph.
‘Match and shoot,’ I say: FOG’s cue to line up his steering cursor with my crosshairs and pull the trigger.
‘Five One firing,’ I tell Nick over the radio. It’ll help Darwin position his aircraft where they can see our BDA and tip straight in to fire again if needed.
‘Firing.’ FOG pulls the trigger. ‘Good set.’
I watch the trees for movement but see none. That doesn’t mean they aren’t down there, though, and we have the time to fire another set.
‘Repeat,’ I tell FOG. He does, and I watch with satisfaction as the rockets hammer down into the woods.
He pulls the aircraft away once we’ve seen the rockets land, and we both reset into a wheel over the area and all eyes search for movement.
We see none.
Nick updates Widow, and I hear the Boss’s voice telling us that, unless Widow has taken incoming fire in the last five minutes, we have to return to base. Widow hasn’t, but sounds like he wishes he had when Nick tells him we’re leaving.
We start back towards Bastion, and I fold away the Now Zad maps. I hadn’t needed them; we are all so familiar with Now Zad that I hardly ever have to look up a building location.
‘So?’ FOG asks.
‘Fuel’s fine, aircraft’s fine.’
‘That was your first real engagement, wasn’t it?’ FOG asks. ‘How do you feel?’
I hadn’t given it a moment’s thought until now - it all seemed so natural after almost two years of training. The Taliban we’ve just taken out had been firing rockets at British soldiers only a short time before; I’m glad we did what we did. On a professional level, I’m happy; I know I’ve passed the test. I didn’t crumble under the pressure of the real thing, didn’t decide I couldn’t pull the trigger, didn’t whoop unprofessionally as our rockets went off. I was . . . just as good as one of the boys. And I know that a large part of my calmness has to do with FOG.
‘Felt fine,’ I say. I don’t need to add anything more.
As we shut the engines down and walk away from the flightline, a creeping sense of uncertainty starts to bubble through me. I feel slightly nauseous as I look around me and see the guys on the ground working: two men are loading a giant missile into the rails on the side of the wings of one Apache; another aircraft is being refuelled. Everything is just going on as normal, but I have this creeping sense of unease about what we’re really here for.
Now I am a killer.
I walk fast; pumping my legs to try and push out the uncomfortable feelings. With each stride, another grim thought sneaks its way into my brain. Who were they? Did they have families? Children? While I know I have done the right thing professionally, I feel horribly agitated.
I stop and lean up against one of the HESCOs. My heart is hammering and my breathing is ragged.
This is my job. I push the feelings away but its hard; like a wardrobe overstuffed with coats, to get the door shut you have to push down twenty things at once. I suddenly realize that thinking too hard on a human level about what we do would make it impossible for me to do my job. I create a heavy trapdoor deep in my consciousness where I will hold everything from now on; anything that disturbs me I will push inside and lock it down. I have to cut away and feel nothing.
I start walking again and deliberately will the unhappy thoughts away by thinking of other things: Jake in our house with his feet up and a cup of tea in one hand watching some action drama; Mia sitting at her computer in her office surrounded by beardos, who are now a bunch of hilarious caricatures in my head.
I step into the JHF, and the Boss comes over.
‘Good work, Charlie. 7 His smile is honest. He’s heard everything on the radio.
Genuinely interested in people, he talks to everyone regardless of their rank or job, asks the various groundies about their children, and the cookhouse staff if they’re having a good day. I can only chat comfortably to the people I recognize, but the Boss will start a conversation with anyone. His enthusiasm is catching. He’s one of the gang and always takes part in any practical jokes, but at the same time he commands ultimate respect. I think if he ever needed us to follow him into a certain-death mission, we all would.
‘Thanks, Boss.’ I still feel slightly unsure of my feelings, so I head to the computer room to write Jake an email. I don’t tell him about what I’ve done, of course - I’ll never be able to - it’s confidential and I also find it so hard to talk about. I wonder if I’ll have changed when I go back? If I’ll look different, sound different; appear at ease with myself in the way I feel I always have been with him? I can’t wait to hear his voice.
I tell him other stuff, talk about the foreign landscape that I still find so barren, burnt and angry; I long for the smell of grass, to see birds in the sky or to see bright flowers on a table.
I ask him about his work and family, for the latest gossip. I also pick up an email from Mia.
‘Madison,’ she writes. She’s called me that since our time at CCF. It’s a bit of a joke and feels entirely different to anything military.
‘Now I’ve got some gossip for you.’ She fills me in on all the latest scandal at home. An engagement, someone’s new job, a rowdy birthday party when someone was sick on the way home, one of the beardos being disciplined after writing obscene things on a blog using his work email.
‘So, of course I shopped him to my boss. It was brilliant. You should’ve seen his face. Anyway — it went straight to a final warning. I was seriously hoping he’d get the sack, but apparently he was quite remorseful. Weirdo.’
I picture her tapping away at her work computer and feel a sense of longing for home, worrying that I am missing out and that I really have changed. If only I could be that carefree again.
‘Tuesday - know what that means?’ Darwin asks.
‘Of course! Shall we?’ FOG says, closing his laptop and looking at his watch. ‘We can go now, before lunch.’
‘Yes, God forbid we get you to lunch late!’ Darwin rolls his eyes.
We’re sitting in the VHR tent, pretty much in the same positions we’ve been sitting in all morning: me lying on my bed reading my book (a Sophie Kinsella that Mia sent me), Darwin sitting in the collapsed chairs by the TV playing Nintendo and FOG sitting propped against his pillows using his laptop.
‘Where’s Nick?’ asks Darwin, looking around.
‘He’s been darting between the VHR tent and the JHF all morning, trying to find a fight for us to go to,’ I groan. I’m quite happy having some quiet time. ‘He can’t bear to sit still.
He’ll be back to update us soon, no doubt. So, what does Tuesday mean?’
‘Oh, it’s the Jingly market,’ says FOG.
‘What?’
‘Every week some of the locals are allowed to come on to camp to set up a market for the soldiers. They sell all sorts: rugs and fabric, knock-off CDs and DVDs, crappy clothes, jewellery, cheap fags . . . What else, Darwin?’
‘All those supposed antique weapons and stuff. And watches, some pashminas, which my wife likes. All sorts,’ Darwin says, standing up and stretching.
‘Why “Jingly”?’ I ask.
‘You must have noticed all the locals’ trucks,’ FOG explains. ‘What have they got all over them?’
‘All that bling shit!’ Darwin answers him. All those gold dangly bells and decorations. When they drive in, it all jingles.’
‘Sounds good to me.’ I’m keen for a change of scenery.
As soon as Nick gets back, we all pile into the Land Rover, with the usual disagreement between the boys over who drives. Darwin wins with the argument:
‘We’re on VHR! If we get a shout and you re driving we’ll never get there in time. Fifteen miles an hour is too slow!’
‘It’s the speed limit, in case you hadn’t noticed,’ FOG replies, climbing into the back with me.
As we bump along the roads, the exhaust coughs out the usual black fumes and the airflow around the Rover sucks them into the back through the gap where the door doesn’t meet the frame. FOG holds the door wide open with his foot to keep us from suffocating.
When he pulls up by the food tent, I jump to the ground and put my sunnies on. It’s a gorgeous winter day, sunny and clear. The smell from the shit-pit isn’t too bad either. We stroll towards the small, permanent coffee shop - the only shop on camp. It sells coffee, tea, two-week-old magazines and a few snacks. It’s the same tea and coffee we can get for free in the
food tent, but it feels civilized to pay for your drink and sit on the wooden benches outside.
I look up and see the market laid out, stretching away from us for maybe a hundred yards. The sellers lay their wares on the floor along two lanes. Brightly patterned scarves and pash- minas stretch down one side of the market, and I can see Persian rugs at the far end. Their rich colours seem to sparkle in the sun, dazzling everyone with the unexpected splash of colour. I feel slightly dizzy looking at the rich shades after so much brown.
The closest pitch is stacked high with DVDs, all for $5 a piece. Some of them look like recent releases, and we gravitate towards them. Darwin peels off to buy cigarettes.
Are these any good?’ I ask FOG, picking up a copy of the latest Harry Potter film release.
‘Some are perfect quality, others don’t work at all. Bit hit and miss, really. But if you want movies, you should have just asked me - I’ve got hundreds on my hard drive,’ FOG says proudly. ‘You can always borrow it, you know.’
‘Thanks, but I’m good with my book; it can’t throw a fit and delete itself.’
We walk on through the market. I realize that the locals probably make a killing - everything seems really inexpensive but it’s still probably ten times the price they can charge outside the wire. Most local Afghans are dirt poor and live hand to mouth.
On the far side are pitches selling ‘real’ designer watches, including ‘Brightling’ and ‘Channel’, and supposed artifacts from the war with Russia — old rifles and bits of tanks. From the prices, I doubt if anything is genuine. I see an ‘I ^ Allah’ paperweight and an alarm clock in the shape of a mosque. The bearded seller sees me looking and comes running over to us, holding one in gaudy pink. He pushes his veiny hand into my face and presses a button on the top, and the tinny sound of prayer-calls comes out of the tiny speaker.
‘No, no thank you.’ I shake my head vigorously at him and we walk on. Darwin catches up with us, holding several two- hundred-packs of ‘Malborog Lighs’.
FOG looks at them. ‘You have no idea what they’re putting in those; there could be anything in there.’
‘You’re joking, right? They don’t grow anything in this country other than goats and opium. The worst that could be in them is goat shit.’
‘Oh, yummy,’ FOG answers sarcastically.
‘But they’re only $6 for two hundred. What a bargain!’ Darwin says. ‘I suppose I better get the missus another scarf - she really liked the one I brought home last time.’
I knew he was happily married, but Darwin rarely talked about his wife and kids, so I grab the opportunity to ask about her.
‘How is Eva getting on without you?’ I ask.
‘Probably shacked up with Winston the gardener by now,’ he says. ‘No, she’s used to it. She’s just really busy with the children - two kids under seven is never easy. I try and ring at least every couple of days, and she always seems to have a girlfriend around or something, so I guess she’s fine. The kids drive her nuts, of course - I really miss them, but I wouldn’t want to have them 24/7 either.’
‘I can’t imagine,’ I say truthfully.
I don’t know how anyone can go away on operations and leave children behind. I miss Jake and my friends so much; I can only guess how much, as a parent, I would miss my child. I wonder about the women working in the hospital a hundred or so yards away from me; so many of the doctors and nurses in there are older than the average soldier out here, so many of them must be mothers to children left behind. And it’s almost Christmas, too - that must be an awful time to be away. Just as Darwin is bending to look at a scarf, the VHR callsign booms out of the Motorola radio.
‘A shout!’ screams Nick, ecstatic.
We run towards the Land Rover. The unspoken rule is that Darwin drives when were in a rush, and were on the move before FOG and I have fully climbed in. So much for shopping ... I sit in the back, bracing myself against the bumping and crashing, and try to calculate what duty I’ll be on next Tuesday.
While Jingly market is pretty good, mail day has to be the best day of the week in Bastion. However, like most things out here, it’s pretty unpredictable, so you never know which day it will be. It’s like turning the key to your front door at home and seeing on the door mat a shiny parcel wrapped in ribbon or a smooth cream envelope with ornate writing containing an invitation to the best party. Multiply that feeling by about ten and that’s what it’s like getting a delivery here; we all get stupidly excited every time. Even the most macho-looking men suddenly morph into hyperactive five-year-olds who have consumed too many E numbers.
One morning, when there wasn’t much on to keep us busy, FOG and I do a walk-by recce of the mail tent and see hundreds of beautiful grey bags piled up outside, waiting to be sorted.
Took at those babies,’ I say, mentally preparing myself for at least two or three envelopes. Lots of sweets, some letters and — fingers crossed — the latest Cosmopolitan Bride.
c I’m guessing about two of those bags are mine,’ FOG laughs.
From time to time, I get a bit of inside knowledge about the mail’s arrival. Louise occasionally tips us off at the morning brief, because when she walks back from her night shift she can sometimes hear the Cl30 land. Everyone at Bastion knows what a Cl30 sounds like: sod the technical description; it’s the sound of parcels and letters arriving from home.
We all find reasons to hang around in the JHF all day waiting for the signallers to come pushing through the dusty tent flaps, mail bags first, like rake-thin Father Christmases.
I sit in the corner trying to type up notes for a post-operational
report the Boss has asked me to put together, but I’m distracted. You have to be fully marinated in boredom in order to do one of these properly. There is endless paperwork and form-filling, which has never been a strong point of mine. Rather than doing it, I find myself digging out my kneeboard - a Filofax containing military reference documents and a pad of paper which I attach to my leg - clearing out old scraps of paper covered in messy grids, a couple of sketch maps and the Viagra advert someone has obviously snuck into my stuff when I wasn’t
‘So, who added this little something, huh?’ I laugh, glancing at FOG, Nick and Darwin, who are all busying themselves with other tasks. They shrug, the corners of their mouths twitching.
The signallers come in before lunch and dump four bags on the tables. Immediately they are swarmed by soldiers vying for prime position near the mouth of the first bag. The letters, newspapers, parcels and presents spill over on to the map table; they’re a positive cornucopia of happiness.
‘Get off, you lot!’ shouts the watchkeeper. His team try to get the mail filed neatly into the ammo boxes we use as pigeonholes, but there are hands everywhere, shoving, pushing and grabbing.
The boxes are leftover 30mm ammunition shipping crates, about the size of four shoeboxes, and they make great storage. I grab a letter with my name on it and run away back to the flight tent.
It’s my daily ebluey from Jake. If anyone is flying from Kandahar to Bastion, I can sometimes receive them four hours after he sits down at his computer. Sometimes I receive several days’ worth at once if there’s been a backlog for any reason, but today there’s only one. I rip it open hungrily and read about his yesterday. He has been offered a choice of new jobs, so we are trying to decide which is best for both of us in terms of location and long-term goals. Thinking about mundane
things like commute times, leave schedules and weekends off makes me forget about Bastion for a while.
After lunch, back in my tent, I lay out the days spoils and decide which order to open them in. IVe got four letters and a package. I decide to go for the letters first and leave the best, the package, until last. It has Jakes handwriting on the front and a drawing of a Christmas tree.
Three letters are Christmas cards from friends from uni. I proudly hang them on the line IVe rigged above my bed with bungees. The fourth card is a long handwritten letter from a friend from Sandhurst who is sailing around the world. She has taken the time to send me a letter from Sydney. I think of her sitting in her skipper’s cabin scribbling away and make a mental note to write to her when I have time.
I pause with the parcel in front of me, and then peel open the side of the laptop-sized box. As soon as there is a hole in the packaging, I jam my nose into it to try and capture any escaping scent of Jake, but I’m met by the saccharine smell of sweets and dusty cardboard.
I rip it open, and a handmade advent calendar stares out at me, complete with little 3D compartments holding presents. Every one of the twenty-five doors has a tiny picture of me and Jake on one of our holidays. There’s one of me sunbathing, freckled and laughing, reaching up to grab the camera from his hand. Another one we tried to take ourselves, of both of us on a sailing holiday, and he’s cut off my chin. It’s awful, such a bad angle, but he knows it’ll make me smile and tell him to burn it. A note tells me that, behind each door, is one of my favourite treats.
‘Time to go, daydreamer.’
It’s FOG, pulling on his boots and looking at his bedside clock, which is propped on top of an old water box.
We have an escort mission, which is one of our most boring tasks.
‘Ugh. I fancy staying here and having a snooze, actually,’ I say hopefully.
‘Come on,’ FOG says happily, looking as though he has all the energy in the world. I pick up my hated flying shirt and thin chamois-leather gloves, and we stroll slowly back up to the JHF along the designated walkways, discussing our mail hauls.
The Chinook crew, two pilots and three loadmasters, also known as loadies and responsible for passengers and equipment, wait for us. We go through our twenty-minute brief, discussing heights, speeds and the tactics we'll adopt if something goes wrong. Then FOG and I scrounge a lift from the signallers and climb into the aircraft with twenty minutes to go until take-off.
The boys on the ground are sometimes so short of supplies that they get down to one days worth of ammo, so while we find these escort missions fairly routine, they’re life-saving for our troops.
The Chinook drops off food, water and ammunition to troops based in platoon houses in the south of Garmsir, then zooms off back to Bastion at 140 knots. We have no hope of keeping up all the way, so once the Chinook is over safe desert, we slow down to a comfortable 120.
It’s common practice to make a ‘courtesy call’ to any ground units we fly past in case they are in a contact and we can help out, but as we pass the northern tip of Garmsir, before I have the chance to get on the radio, I hear Widow Five Five.
‘Ugly callsign, Ugly callsign, this is Widow Five Five. Are you on these means?’ His voice is clipped and sounds urgent.
The boys down at Garmsir have been having a hard time. It’s the most southerly point the troops have penetrated in Helmand, and everything beyond it down to the Pakistani border is unmapped Taliban land. The District Centre was set up in October 2006 and, since then, the Marines have been under attack 24/7. Far from gaining fresh ground, they are constantly forced to retreat into the old military barracks they’re using as a base. The Taliban don’t like us being in Garmsir one
little bit. The area holds the key to their troops’ entry from across the border with Pakistan, and the whole surrounding area is a gateway for the busy opium trade.
Once a bustling Afghan town, Garmsir has been deserted by the locals; they packed up and moved out long ago. It’s now a ghost town, with only the sound of gunfire to splinter the eerie silence.
‘Hello, Widow Five Five. This is Ugly Five Four. What’s up?’ I ask.
FOG is already turning back towards the platoon house location without us having to discuss it.
‘Ugly, we’ve been taking sporadic fire for a while now,’ he says. His voice sounds gravelly. ‘It’s really near, and we think it’s coming from the only two-storey building in the area.’
‘Stand by, we’ll have a look.’ I plug the grid into my keyboard unit and slave the sights to it.
FOG slowly wheels us around on top of the grid and, sure enough, we can see bright muzzle flashes from a tall, mud- coloured tower right near the grid.
Widow Five Five confirms the description and tells me that all the friendly forces are safely in the platoon house.
‘I think we should Hellfire it,’ I say. FOG agrees.
As we run in, I realize this will be my first missile in Afghanistan, the first one I fire in combat. My heart is thumping against my ribcage, pumping so hard it feels like it’s only being contained in my chest by my LCJ. We’ve fired rockets and gun before now, but the Hellfire is in a different league. Its destructive power is terrifying. It can defeat all known armour. So tanks, cars, houses, compounds — you name it; it can blow it up with the squeeze of a finger.
I double-check the target details and slave the sight to exactly the right place as FOG turns the aircraft towards the tower.
‘Four point eight clicks,’ he says.
We need to fire at the right point; not so far that the missile will miss and not so close that the enemy could fire back at
us. I aim to post it right through the window in the tower, so train the TADS on to it. It tracks it steadily.
Tm a bit nervous actually,’ I admit shakily to FOG. What if I screw this up? One of the pilots from the other flight fired a pair of flechettes completely off course on one occasion. They’d all had a right laugh at his expense and he was christened Elton, as in ‘Rocket Man’. If I missed, I’d never hear the end of it.
‘Loser, don’t mess it up.’
I check all the switches are in the right settings and prepare to pull the cold trigger.
‘Firing,’ I say.
Loosing off the missile, I squeeze the laser like it’s the only thing that matters. The flaming Hellfire hurtles away from us and we watch the impact in silence. It’s awesome; the tower literally vaporizes before my eyes. One second it’s there, and then it’s gone. I make myself feel no remorse for the Taliban inside. After all, he had been trying to kill our troops.
‘Check that out,’ I say, full of relief. Not only have I fired a ‘real’ missile (I’m the last person in my squadron to do so), but the battle-damage assessment is amazing: there’s nothing left down there except a pile of thick rubble and smoke. Hopefully that will put an end to the ever-increasing jokes about my being a ‘peace-loving’ female. I don’t consider the true enormity of what I’ve actually done. Instead I feel like I’ve won the London Marathon because finally I’ve fired a missile, done the job I’m here to do. I’m on top of the world and have a big grin plastered all over my face. I have to focus on the task in hand, though, so I push my thoughts and feelings away, lock them under the trapdoor. There’s no space in my head for anything else but the job at hand.
‘Stop smiling so much, you’ll get arrested,’ FOG says. He’s nonplussed, but he’s done it all before and immediately gets on the radio to base telling them our ETA and fuel state.
Back at base, I know we have the usual tedious debrief to
get through but, to my delight, Sergeant Tucson, the squadron intelligence sergeant, is already tied up in a debrief with some crews who’d come back from a heavy mission in Kajaki an hour ago. I picture the grim look on his face when he finds out he’ll have to debrief us as well. I have at least another hour of unwind time before I can possibly be trapped in the TPF (Tactical Planning Facility). I breathe a long sigh of relief.
Louise and I wisely spend our spare minutes looking at the Dessy website for bridesmaids’ dresses and discussing colour schemes. She likes yellow; I’m already sold on green. Then we move on to dress styles, shoes, accessories - all the important stuff.
Sergeant Tucson emerges from the debrief, looking decidedly tired, with large purple bags under his eyes, sees me and smiles, then pinches his nose shut and screws up his face. I dive behind the computer screen to hide my laughter then turn to Louise.
‘Sergeant T. reckons he can tell whether the returning crews have killed anyone just by smelling their breath,’ I say.