GROUPS AND SINGLE DECORATIONS FOR GALLANTRY
Duncan and crew shortly after Taliban assassination attempt, RPG damage visible.
‘You’re not exactly going to make the cover of Vogue yourself mate! I retort. ‘How fucking lucky were we, though? Two RPGs nearly hit us! I guess we were lucky that we were only hit by small arms, although I reckon it must have been a .50 cal to take out the blade like that.’
The two of us unstrap ourselves from the machine that almost took us to our deaths, and walk through the cab and down the ramp. Coops and Bob are standing there looking at the aft disc.
‘Fucking hell, Frenchie, look at the twist on that blade,’ says Coops and I look up to see a massive chunk of it missing. The whole outer end of one of the blades has ceased to exist.
‘How the fuck could a .50 cal do that? I ask. ‘That was no .50 cal,’ says Coops. ‘We’ve been hit by an RPG!’
I look at Alex and all the colour has drained from his face. He looks like he is in shock.... I look at the aft pylon and there are huge football-sized, RPG-shaped holes through both sides of it, and that’s when my blood runs cold; it feels like it’s turned to ice in my veins..... It can’t have armed - if it had, it would have taken the cab out in a huge fireball and there’d be nothing left. It’s hit the aft head in an upward trajectory, passed clean through both sides of the aft pylon and travelled up and through the blades.
I walk around the cab and when I take in the extent of the damage, I can’t conceive of how we stayed aloft after the incident. We’ve been hit by three separate weapons systems: as well as the RPG passing through the pylon and taking out part of the aft rotor, we’ve taken a significant degree of shrapnel damage, seven or eight rounds of .50 cal and some 7.62 mm. In total there are thirty-four holes in the aircraft.
The thoughts are coming thick and fast as I play it back in my mind. I saw a Toyota Hilux and jinked the aircraft left suddenly, a second before we were hit... I shiver as I realise that that probably saved our lives, because the RPG would have hit us square on otherwise. The angle at which it hit means it didn’t arm; it struck us more of a glancing blow.... I mull over the irony of our call sign, Black Cat Two Two. To take an RPG and have it punch a hole through your rotor - that’s got to be all nine lives lost in one go.’ (Ibid)
Despite what had happened, the crew decided to return to tasking and were up in the air again the following morning. Later that day ‘German’ survived another RPG trap attack.
R...P...G!
Duncan was coming to the end of his tour, however, he was to be engaged in one last major operation - Oqab Sturga (Eagle’s Eye), 23 May 2008. The latter was a night raid, with four Chinooks flying in pairs with Apache support. They were to move hundreds of troops to disrupt the Taliban south of Musa Qala. Flying with Townsend as his co-pilot and ‘German’ as his wingman, Duncan and crew were faced with a horrifyingly familiar situation just six days after being hit:
‘I transition and start to fly over a wadi at around 100ft when my peripheral vision catches a massive flash to the left, and the fabric of time stretches and becomes elastic. It’s ‘bullet time’ and everything slows.
‘R...P...G!’ I shout, but the words seem to take forever. It’s flying straight for us and I watch its fiery tail describe a lazy line behind it. I’m transfixed as I watch it s...l...o...w...l...y and inexorably head for the cockpit.
I look down and see it through the glass panels below my pedals as it flies under my feet. It’s so close, I feel I could put my hand out and grab it. The tail crackles and sparkles as it passes underneath me, jetting purple and yellow fire that is close enough for the reflection to dance across the instruments in the control panel. My NVGs show it in green, but it’s close enough that I can see it through the gap where the tubes meet my eyes.
www.dnw.co.uk
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