A DIGIT AWAY FROM DISASTER

SOMETIMES when bombs were dropped, enemy fighters lost their lives but some small gain was made by the Coalition.

I had no sympathy for Islamic State fighters. Isis activity, to my mind, was little short of genocide, and hard power was required to bring its vile doctrines to an end. But we had to be constantly aware of civilian casualties. A decade and more had gone by since the Gulf War of 2003, when too many lives were lost in what was euphemistically called ‘collateral damage’.

Now, in 2015-16, the pressure was acutely felt for operations against Isis to be as error-free as possible.

We were flying over Hit, a small town in Iraq, where two snipers were hunkered in separate places in the same building. We were to conduct an immediate strike — two weapons dropped on two positions simultaneously.

I was about to make the radio call to get final clearance to strike when I checked the targeting camera. As I switched between the two targets, the image jumped marginally.

I switched targets, and the image jumped back again. Something wasn’t right. Maybe I was imagining things.

The radio snapped into life. ‘Dragon, how are we looking? Is there an issue?’

‘Stand by. Just positioning for the attack now.’

I tried to sound calm but the pressure was building and I couldn’t fathom what was amiss. I had triple-checked. I was ready to drop, but something held me back. I hauled the jet away from the target.

I had done dozens of these strikes successfully. But this time I had an intuition that something was wrong.

I opened up the attack system menu and re-read the weapon coordinates again, for a fourth time. I compared them against the scribbled writing on my knee-board. Bloody hell!

From two sets of coordinates totalling 30 numbers, I had placed a single digit incorrectly, entering ‘42’ instead of ‘24’. This would cause a 20m error. The second weapon would have landed short and hit the town’s mosque.

I cursed myself as I fixed the error and released on the second run. My heart pounded as I saw the weapons skim over the mosque’s domed roof a few milliseconds before they struck.

‘Dragon, good hit on both targets. Both sniper positions destroyed. Two KIA [killed in action].’

It had been way too close. In my overly confident and weary state, I had entered critical target information incorrectly. I had been moments away from destroying a mosque. So sure of the Typhoon’s weapon system, I had ignored my own fallibility.

The jet had worked perfectly. I had not. Angry with myself, I vowed not to let my standards slip like that again.