It is impossible to explain how it becomes normal to go flying every day, cheating your own death while dishing it out to others. When I came back to the UK, I was struck by the gaping chasm between my home life and military life. The isolation would’ve been unbearable, had it not been for my close colleagues, who watched my back, as I watched theirs. And as I walked through the mess room every day, hundreds of eyes bore into my back, my front sodden with sweat from the heat of the cockpit. I slept two feet away from the next man down, shared communal toilets and showers, ate with them, peed into plastic bags, flew and killed within feet of my male colleagues. Our aim was to help troops on the ground to restore democracy, but in reality we were needed to help them fight their way out of trouble, raining down rockets and missiles on anything in their way.Īlongside the official job came a new list of hurdles, the worst being sacrificing every last inch of my personal space for up to five months at a time. Two years of Apache training later, I went to Afghanistan. While tactics and fighting the enemy came easily to the boys, I struggled to imagine what war would be like.īy the time I was selected, at 23, to become the first-ever British female Apache pilot, I felt the weight of the men’s expectations on me they thought I was intruding into their territory and when I walked into the bar on that first night I was completely ignored. Mastering it reassured me that I’d chosen what I was born to do, but learning the specifics of going to battle was harder. After a year at Sandhurst where I was pushed to my physical and mental limits, I spent 12 months learning to pilot first a plane, and then a helicopter. The seed was sown.ĭuring university I looked into my options and discovered that flying helicopters for the Army was the only place where women are allowed into combat on the front line. Just when I thought it would never end, I glanced up and saw a puff of smoke and a helicopter in the sky coming to pick us up. I spent my gap year with the Royal Engineers, culminating in four weeks spent in a cramped tank with four men and no shower, lavatory or hairbrush. I started out as an Army recruit at Combined Cadet Force at school, mainly to escape from my all-girls boarding house. I never planned to become a pilot, but now I can’t imagine doing anything else. I knew that if my helicopter were to be hit, I wouldn’t know anything about it.

On a daily basis, we flew through skies riddled with metal, avoiding machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades, dodging death. On a daily basis, we flew through skies riddled with metal, avoiding machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades I can’t engage in any sort of emotion about taking a life, or the possibility of being killed myself. It was a good shot, but beyond that I’ve been trained not to think. As he falls to the ground I feel satisfied. I aim and curl my finger around the familiar cold trigger, watching for the impact. I see his face, snatching glances up at me as he darts between trees, trying to hide. There is a strange intimacy when I look at the man I am about to kill. My job is to do anything and everything I can to help them get out safely.Īnd then I spot a valid target: a Taliban fighter brandishing a huge rifle, aiming it directly at the group of our soldiers. Our men run through the heat and dust, desperately looking for safe ground as they dodge bullets and fight for their lives. The scene below my Apache helicopter is one of devastation: angry flames blossom upwards from the scorched earth, and tracer slices through the air like razor blades.

Keep calm and carry on rocket girl