Free Apache by Ed Macy Page B

meant that we had lost respect for the daunting reality of having so much firepower at our finger tips. Not for one moment, then or since. Nobody in that war had more potential to do as much damage to human life. With that power came an equal amount of responsibility. We were fearful of being seen as gung-ho; US Apache pilots had that reputation and we didn’t want to follow suit. Every single round we put down we put down with goodreason; killing someone was a serious business.
    As we flew, I watched the Boss’s head dart from side to side as he fought to take everything in. ‘Amazing …’ he’d murmur every now and then. Occasionally, a swift question. ‘Jeez. What the hell do you call that?’
    There were no more inspiring places to fly than in southern Afghanistan. It was unlike anywhere I had ever seen before and I was still captivated by it too. The landscape was both epic and primeval; everything about it was extreme. When it was flat, it was flat as a pancake. When it was hot, it was unbearably so. The rivers were never babbling streams but vast raging torrents, and the mountains climbed straight up to the heavens, often from a standing start.
    The plan was to do an anticlockwise circuit of the four northern platoon houses where we’d spent most of the first tour: Sangin first, then Kajaki in the far north-east, Now Zad in the far north-west, and finally Gereshk, twenty kilometres shy of Camp Bastion, on the way back.
    We stuck to the safety of the desert on the way up, keeping the Green Zone to our right. Immensely fertile before the Soviet invasion in 1978–79, Helmand province had been known as Afghanistan’s breadbasket. A decade of bitter fighting against the Red Army ended that. Russian bombers smashed much of Helmand’s irrigation system to smithereens. Yet the year-round supply of melted snow off the Hindu Kush was sufficient to keep the river valley’s fields and orchards lush enough for two full crops of opium poppies a year.
    The vast majority of the province’s intensely conservative, desperately impoverished, million-strong, largely Pashtun, population were farmers – or worked the farmers’ land. The majority livedin single-storey houses fashioned from adobe and stone, often without electricity or piped water. It was an existence that hadn’t changed in a millennium.
    The Green Zone only amounted to a tiny central slice of the province. It was bordered by two great deserts. To its west was the Desert of Death and Camp Bastion.
    ‘Dasht-e-Margo …’ The Boss practised his fledgling Pashtun.
    ‘Yeah. But aircrew generally call it the GAFA, Boss.’
    ‘GAFA?’
    ‘The Great Afghan Fuck All.’
    The GAFA was an ancient, rocky seabed with a thick covering of sand as fine as dust. Nomads set up temporary shelters on it in the winter so their goats and camels could feed on the odd bush. In the summer it remained the exclusive preserve of the drug traffickers. They criss-crossed it south to Pakistan, or west to Iran, moving raw opium or freshly processed heroin to their consumers in the Middle East or Europe, leaving an endless mesh of tyre tracks behind them. It was so barren that you couldn’t tell if you were at 100 feet or 10,000.
    ‘What do you call the desert on the east side of the Green Zone, then?’
    ‘The Red Desert.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because it looks red from up here.’
    The Boss peered at our right horizon. ‘It’s actually worse. Makes the GAFA look like Kent.’
    The Red Desert stretched all the way to Kandahar: 10,000 square miles of thin, Arabian-style sand, whipped by the wind over thousands of years into an endless succession of dunes. From 5,000 feet up, its surface looked like a sea of rippling red waves. Except by twowell-known routes, the Red Desert was completely impassable, even by tracked vehicles. If you went in there, you didn’t come out again. That’s why nobody ever did. Not even the nomads.
    As we moved further north and nearer to Sangin the