Hellfire. Ed Macy

      

      Ed Macy

      Hellfire

       In memory of my grandparents and their unconditional love

      Table of Contents

       Cover Page

       Title Page

       Dedication

Prologue

Air Attack, Air Attack

Arrested and Tested

Skylined With No B Ackup

Chopp Er Palmer’ S Wings

Booby-trapped In Northern Ireland

Bombing Freddie Mercury

Facing Tommo

One On One

The Hunter

       The Killer

       Learning To Fly - Learning To Fight

       Dusty Hellfire

       Mo Ose Time

       Wildman Of Helmand

       Visiting The Shrine

       The 7 Ps

       Go-go-go

       Late

       Embarrassingly Late

       Operation Mutay

       Signed, Sealed and Delivered

       Scramble

       Broken Arrow

       The Plan

       The Anti-aircraft Gunner

       Hellfire

       Siege

       Operation Snakebite

       Sniper Team

       Epilogue

       Afterword

       Glossary of Terms

       Acknowledgements

       Index

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       PROLOGUE

       TUESDAY, 4 JULY 2006

       Camp Bastion, Helmand province, southern Afghanistan

       2255 hours local

      The helicopter god was nearly out of miracles.

      3 Para’s A Company had never intended to stay in Sangin; they’d just dropped by to reassure the local elders that we were on their side. Then Intelligence reported that they’d walked right into the hornet’s nest—the Taliban’s only senior command and control location in southern Helmand—and the head shed ordered them to hold out at all costs.

      Sangin had been under siege for weeks now; the Taliban had been hammering the place morning, noon and night. Their objective was simple: to injure a British soldier seriously enough to force a casevac helicopter insertion, and take out the ‘cow’ as it landed.

      In the meantime they were amassing enough anti-coalition militia to rip the District Centre (DC) to shreds.

      Thirty or so Paras were locked down in the platoon house, running perilously short of food and ammunition. Three of them had died a couple of days ago, and another was killed this morning while trying to secure the landing site for a casevac mission launched to recover a badly injured survivor. The Taliban were a hair’s breadth away from bringing down a Chinook with its crew, surgeon, anaesthetist, and the rest of the medical team on board.

      We were called into Ops just before last light. More soldiers had been hit. One of them had spiralled from badly injured to critical. He’d last the night, but needed to be in the Bastion field hospital before lunchtime tomorrow. In any other theatre of conflict he’d have been Priority One and flown out immediately.

      Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Tootal, Commanding Officer (CO) of 3 Para, only had a brief window in which to pull out his injured and Killed in action (KIA) and replenish the DC with men and supplies. The Taliban usually attacked ferociously at night, melted away before first light, then kicked back in with snipers after morning prayers. But now they knew that a casevac was imminent, we reckoned that rest and prayers would have to wait.

      We’d been given permission to fire into known Taliban positions to prevent them from engaging the Chinooks. The enemy could only engage the landing site (LS) from two long, irrigated tree lines and a smashed-up building with four firing ports in its wall. I’d spotted a bunch of empty shells and an escape ladder there, so the ground troops