Notes From a Small Military - I Commanded and Fought with 2 Para at the Battle of Goose Green. I was Head of Counter Terrorism for the M.O.D. This is my True Story. Major-General Chip Chapman
The fourth was at night. Sixty exited our plane; three were injured as they attempted to distinguish between the darkness of the night and the darkness of the ground. They all suffered ankle fractures after attempting to do a ‘pointy toes’ impression of a three-year-old having a first ballet lesson. They had forgotten ‘never anticipate the ground; keep your feet and knees tight together’.
Jumps five, six and seven all took place on the same day. They required me to revisit my ‘administrative requirements matrix’ and specifically to ‘check alarm timing on clock radio’. We mustered at four in the morning for increasingly complex jump sequences with both equipment and multiple parachutists in the air from both port and starboard doors of the Hercules aircraft as we practised simultaneous stick exits. On 19 June 1981, I completed my eighth and final qualifying jump. I now had my wings to go with the red beret.
Military parachuting can be dangerous. The most senior non-combat death since the Second World War is Brigadier O’Kane. He died in a parachute malfunction whilst commanding 44 Parachute Brigade (Volunteer). A rather unfortunate exercise name was the ill-fated DYNAMIC IMPACT. This battalion drop by 1 PARA in Sardinia led to around 28 serious casualties with the paratroopers exiting in high winds into a badly reconnoitred drop zone strewn with debris. The most poignant and frequent sound you hear on a DZ, even if it is pitch black, which only serves to amplify the effect, is the scream of ‘MEDIC!!’ It comes from those who have, in the popular vernacular, ‘creamed in’ and become casualties who will not walk off the DZ under their own steam. All men want to get out of the plane as quickly as possible, for RAF pilots have to fly at low level. This entails them flying at 200ft to simulate evading radar. The buffeting this provides to the paratroopers inevitably leads to sustained amounts of sickness in the aircraft. Not all of this will land in the blue-and-white sick bags. There is nothing worse than streams of vomit splashing up and down the floor of a buffeted C-130. The smell and colour provides further contagion. Military parachuting in large numbers cannot be described as anything like sports parachuting. It is a relief when they open the jump doors and the men once again get to taste fresh air.
Wind on the ground can be as problematic as wind in the air. The first action on landing is to get rid of one of the capewells – the metal risers on either shoulder – which helps to deflate the canopy. Failure to execute this manoeuvre leads to a wind-assisted drag along the ground at speed, with all the facial and bodily abrasions that follow.
Hard landings can lead to concussion. Once this occurs, the injured party is banned from parachuting for two weeks. On a major exercise, a number of simulated parachute assaults may take place within a couple of weeks. This occurred in February 1982 when 2 PARA were exercising in Thetford. Corporal Taff Evans was concussed in the first jump, and subsequently not allowed to parachute during the remaining exercise jumps. He was confined to the drop zone at Tottington Warren as ‘hired ground support help’ when an unfortunate paratrooper landed (and was stuck) in a tree. This is not recommended. Corporal Evans raced over to the entangled jumper and shouted to him to jettison his container. The container is the ‘wrapping’ for all the operational equipment, including the fighting order and weaponry that the men use on the ground. It is the life-blood: of their rations, ammunition, medical stores, clothing, sleeping bag and any ponchos for living in the field protected from the elements. The soldier duly dropped his container, which landed squarely on the head of Corporal Evans. The medics shook their heads in disbelief as they drove the once more unconscious corporal to the hospital for the second time. He never even had the opportunity to cry ‘MEDIC!’
Corporal Evans became the 28th casualty of the February 1982 jump. It was one of those jumps where the ground party hides the wind meter under their jackets to make the jump seem within legal limits – or at least that is what we used to tell ourselves on those jumps with large casualty numbers. These figures did not include Private McVey, who did not jump, as he had passed out from extreme air sickness in the Hercules aircraft after two hours of low-level buffeting over the North Sea.
Concussions and hard landings are all amplified if forced to conduct a back landing. In the menu of landings there are really only six alternatives: a forward left, a forward right, a side left, a side right, a back left and a back right. There is no such thing as an ‘ass over elbow straight forward’ or ‘straight back’, as each jumper is required to pull on the risers on one side in order to enable a landing in the best direction, which is determined by the wind. Pulling on the risers, which spills wind from the canopy above, is also the technique to steer away from other jumpers in the crowded airspace.
Jumps involving large streams of Hercules aircraft (affectionately known as Fat Alberts) used to occur regularly on ABEX’s (Airborne Exercises). In the 1980s and 1990s there would be nine stretched Hercules which could each drop over 90 troops, with a further six aircraft dropping platforms with heavier equipment such as trucks or light artillery pieces. A typical stream would drop 792 troops in one wave – as long as the DZ was big enough. I was the Chief of Staff of 5 Airborne Brigade when our Staff Officers Handbook, the bible on planning from that era, told me that we had over 60 Hercules in the fleet. With the attrition of the fleet since that time, and the air bridges to Iraq and Afghanistan of the last 10 years, we now only have around one-third of that total.
I was CO of 2 PARA when we assembled nine Hercules aircraft for a large battalion-sized jump back into southern England from an exercise in Scotland. The weather was perfect. It was a bright summer’s day with no wind and no cloud cover – ideal parachuting weather. What we did not bank on was the incompetence of the senior staff officer of 16 Air Assault Brigade. Under the latest round of defence cuts in late 1999, 5 Airborne Brigade was disbanded and merged with 24 Airmobile Brigade. The majority of the staff of 24 Airmobile Brigade stayed in place to form 16 Air Assault Brigade. Not many of the staff knew much about parachuting. As it turned out, not many of them even knew how to tell the time.
All operations around the world (and military exercises) are timed against Zulu time so there is a common baseline for all clocks. It was the summer and we were now on British Summer Time, which is Alpha time: one hour forward of Zulu time. The staff had never been taught the ‘spring forward, fall back’ approach to understanding where the clock should be at the correct time of the year.
We commenced our activity at P minus 40 minutes (P hour is parachuting hour) with checking our equipment, hooking up and getting ready for the jump. But when we approached the DZ we were told we would have to abort: there was live firing on the ground and we would run straight into it. We would be killed by rifle fire should we jump. Our jump window had closed one hour earlier. The staff had used the wrong clock. I was furious. To give the commander of 16 Air Assault Brigade his due, he subsequently came to my office to apologise. This was one of those rare occurrences – normally the protocol is the other way round – as he metaphorically ‘placed his feet in my in-tray’. His chief-of-staff who had made the cock-up never did progress very far in the army, but the apologetic commander was a gentleman and became the Chief of the General Staff and Head of the Army as General Sir Peter Wall. I would follow him to war anywhere and at any time (as long as he has staff who can convert the time zone clocks).
You can never have too much information on time zones. In the digital era, I had four clocks on my wall in Tampa, which read from left to right and top to bottom:
| 12:31 | 16:31 | 19:31 | 21:01 | |
| TAMPA | ZULU | QATAR | AFGHANISTAN |
Confusion of time zones leads to bizarre anomalies. They forgot to adjust the clocks incrementally on the voyage to the South Atlantic during the Falklands War, so there was a four-hour time jump on our watches in one go while in the same latitude and longitude, producing a sort of ‘jet lag by proxy’. Once we had landed in the Falklands, we got up at 11am according to our Zulu time watches (in reality it was 7am local time). We attacked Goose Green at 6am on our watches: 2am in the Falklands. Video conferences may take place at a leisurely 11.00am in London but it is 6am