href="#u8e36f430-a6e6-5776-b120-54fa05f246d9">INTO THE DRONE LAIR
‘YOU’RE FLYING WITH ME TODAY’
SQUADRON BOSS
It is an odd feeling, knowing that I am about to watch someone be killed. Perhaps not today, and perhaps not even tomorrow, but almost certainly before the week is over I will see someone’s life ended before my eyes. Deliberately, precisely and with extreme prejudice, using a missile or bomb from an RAF MQ-9 Reaper – a drone, in popular terminology, or an RPAS to use its more technical term. The very possibility transports me to another time and place that I try not to think about too often. To a military hospital in Cyprus in 2003 where I spent five months of the Iraq War at the bedsides of the wounded, injured and dying. Maybe I haven’t thought this through properly. But here I am, not in Cyprus… in Vegas. And not to gamble. (No way. The house always wins.) My cheap casino room is merely a base from where I will venture into one of the most secretive communities on Earth.
An hour’s drive from the epicentre of Vegas’s hedonism stands Creech Air Force Base, home to an array of USAF capabilities, the most famous – or infamous, depending on your opinion – of which are the MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper. It is also one of the two places from where the UK operates its own Reapers, the other being RAF Waddington. I am about to spend several days alongside the RAF Reaper crews of 39 Squadron, with a behind-the-scenes view of the war they are waging against IS in Syria and Iraq. I cannot dignify the jihadists’ self-styled use of the bogus name ‘Islamic State’, and I’m not sure how neutral I will be as I watch events unfold. Any group that kidnaps, sells and rapes thousands of young girls, and murders Muslims and others in pursuit of its aims, does not have the hallmarks of Islam or of statehood.
The early morning traffic is accumulating rapidly as my condescending satnav guides me briefly along the Las Vegas strip and then away on a circuitous route to US95. Highway 95 takes me northwest out of Vegas towards Creech where 39 Squadron has been based since its re-formation as a Reaper Squadron in 2007.
As the Vegas suburbs give way to desert the transition comes quickly. The last signs of civilization – if that is the right word – are the power cables above the highway. High- and low-voltage cables: the twenty-four-hour pulse that keeps the city alive. No electricity, no lights; no electricity, no pumped water; no electricity, no pinging slot machines.
There are no signs of life as far as the eye can see. The car thermometer says it is 43ºC (109ºF) outside and the sky is a rich morning blue, edged with paler shades around the horizon. No clouds, no hope of rain. The road is arrow straight for miles ahead and a constant shimmer maintains its distance half a mile in front of me as the sun works its magic on the tarmac. In the mirror an identical shimmer follows me a half mile behind. Las Vegas begins to disappear. The ultimate illusion: making a whole city – this city in particular – disappear in its own mirage.
A few miles to the left and right of the road stand parallel rows of mountains. Perversely, given the desert heat, I pass a road sign that points to a distant, elevated ski resort. As my eyes follow the direction of the sign the mountains become craggy, foreboding. Their rock strata emerge from the ground at shifting angles. Immediately to my left a peak rises steeply, while for several peaks further on the angle to the land below is much shallower. I wonder about the forces that can shape trillions of tons of rock in that way over millions of years, or over just six days, according to the sign I saw earlier.
To my right a twin mountain range stands over the desert, except this time the strata are contoured – waves of rock rather than hard, straight lines. Sandstone colours are packed between the darker, harder layers. Between both sets of mountains lie desert and scrub, bisected by black tarmac. A sign to the right points towards a tribal Visitor Centre on one of thirty-two Nevada Indian reservations and colonies spread across the state.9
An upward glance spots criss-crossing vapour trails high overhead, probably commercial airliners. Much lower and far more interesting are two pairs of fighter aircraft – they look like F-16s and F-22s – flying several miles apart, one pair in close formation, the other combat formation. From their trajectory they are heading back to Nellis Air Force Base from the Nevada Training Range. I recall watching Top Gun when it first came out in 1986 and I wonder which of these pairs ‘won’ their aerial dance of death. I like to imagine that a couple of grizzled, middle-aged dudes in the F-16s whipped a pair of young guns in the F-22s. In reality, the F-22s would have released a couple of over-the-horizon missiles and ended the argument before it began. The jets remind me that this trip is about flying, not sightseeing. But the aircraft I am interested in are flying over a different desert landscape on another continent.
This is the road that thousands of Reaper and Predator crews have used over the years on their daily commute to Creech. These have been mainly USAF personnel. However, for over a decade a fair smattering of British crews have joined their number, and it is their stories I am here for.
I wonder how many of the Predator or Reaper pilots have watched fighters like these, masters of the sky, and envied the pilots who do their flying up there? How many of them have been there and done that, and are now happy to swap fighter cockpits for static cockpits: metal containers firmly anchored to the ground? Another question springs to mind from the numerous debates, discussions, media events and conferences on drones I have taken part in. How many people have no idea that Reaper and Predator ‘drones’ are every bit as piloted as the F-16 fast jets now rapidly disappearing in the distance? The only real difference is that instead of several feet between the fighter pilot’s controls and the aircraft’s engine and wing surfaces, signals from the Reaper pilot’s controls travel several thousand miles via satellite.
I put on the radio and find a local station. Someone is beyond excited about today’s sunny weather in Las Vegas, which makes me wonder if a corresponding radio presenter is equally excited about another day of snow in Alaska, thereby keeping climate karma in balance.
Then the morning show presenter introduces Coolio and I chuckle to myself. A distinctive synth riff sits over a groaning bass line and leads into the only lyric of his that I know: ‘As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I take a look at my life and realise there’s nothin’ left.’ From Psalm 23. Here I am driving through a valley of death, but now with biblical allusions to add to my self-induced mind games. Thanks Coolio.
Every military funeral I have conducted or attended has featured Psalm 23 and I visualise them in a mental torrent. Countless war memorial services flash through my mind until I settle on one I conducted in 2005 in the Falkland Islands for a small group of Welsh Guards, veterans of the 1982 war. One of them read those later words from Psalm 23, ‘Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.’ I was angry then and I begin to feel angry now. The only thing that had followed those particular soldiers throughout their lives was scarring from third degree burns and PTSD.
I try to focus on the road. I cannot see how this particular drive will distract the Reaper crews from their thoughts of the death that they regularly consider and occasionally deliver. Then slowly, finally, Creech starts to sneak into view in the distance. First, some small buildings that can barely be seen through the heat haze rising up from the road. Then, gradually, expanses of concrete, roads and runway come into view. Runway lights on their intricate frames point the way to the landing threshold. As I get closer, more and more buildings appear. And then a green sign against the mountain backdrop: ‘Creech AFB’.
I take a few moments to reflect on how long and difficult it has been to get this far. Not to make the simple drive out from Las Vegas. Rather, the process that started with a simple phone call to the RAF’s Director of Defence Studies almost a year and a half
