BROKEN ARROW

Mount Darwin, Rhodesia, December 1976.

The siren goes, and the Fireforce is airborne within minutes. One K Car with a 20mm cannon. Four G Cars with twin Brownings. Paratroopers in a Dakota overhead. Somewhere in the bush below, men are pinned down and waiting for the helicopters.

Sean flies as the gunner in the K Car. Andre flies Yellow One, and he is the best G Car pilot on the forward airfield. He puts his helicopter into gaps other pilots will not try. He takes rounds through the cabin floor and keeps fighting. But Sean begins to notice small things. A pipe lit and left to go out, again and again. A fuel cap checked four times. A man who stares at bullet holes long after the danger has passed.

Then a twelve-year-old boy is shot during a contact, and the whole Fireforce hears him crying over the radio. After that day, Andre is never the same.

Broken Arrow follows these men through the last weeks of 1976: the scrambles, the contacts, the casevacs, and the long nights in the bar after last light. It is a story about bravery in the air, and about a kind of damage no one at the time had a name for.

Based on true events and written by a man who was there, Broken Arrow is a tribute to the men and women of Fireforce, and to those who came home carrying more than anyone realised.

For readers of Rhodesian Bush War history and military aviation, and for anyone who has watched someone they love carry the weight of war in silence.