Excellent emotive stuff, Nige.
While my desk may be more comfortable and a whole lot safer than the cockpit of your C-130 and while I do not dispute for one moment your greater understanding and experience of the psychology of fear and stress in action, I doubt that either of us have seen the inside of an infantryman's foxhole at close quarters, and to varying degrees must rely on what those of our friends who have been in action, in close combat, on the ground, tell us. And since I do have close friends and relatives who have been in action I don't need supercilious lectures from you to enable me to empathise with those doing the messy stuff out there, thanks.
While I admire your unquestioning support for your fellow serving officer, I'd say that his posession of a Queen's Commission does not make him infallible, as his e-mail has shown.
He's made some serious and extremely damaging accusations, and as a result of press coverage arising, the man in the street (believing, just as you seem to, that as a serving Para he must know what he's talking about) now 'knows' that the RAF in Afghanistan is "utterly, utterly useless." I don't regard that as being helpful or useful.
Moreover, that core accusation doesn't ring true, to me, since (joking about egos aside) I've always found the Harrier force to be an exceptionally high calibre bunch of blokes, with exceptional professional competence, even within the RAF (which I view as being a thoroughly professional organisation, albeit one that is sometimes hindered by lack of resources).
And again, I'm not looking for anyone to blame. I've simply read and re-read his muddled account, with its garbled references to RAF Harriers strafing and using WP, and haven't uncritically accepted it as 'gospel from the foxhole'. Instead I am looking at all alternative explanations and interpretations. It's clear that an RAF Harrier COULD NOT have strafed him, though it could have rocketed his position, or close to his position, though perhaps not with WP. He did seem to draw a distinction between strafe and rocketry however. You cannot simply accept what he said, and have to come up with an explanation/interpretation. Yours is that an RAF Harrier fired rockets, and that he is calling this strafe, and that an RAF Harrier did fire WP rockets.
But there are other explanations - that the aircraft he described didn't come anywhere close to hitting his position, or that the aircraft was not a Harrier at all, or wasn't an RAF Harrier.
In the aftermath of (say) a Hercules loss, you'd be enjoining people not to prejudge what had happened, and to keep an open mind, and that's exactly what I'm trying to do here.
And no, the Major is not "the boss", he's a serving officer who isn't free to shoot off his mouth however he sees fit, and who should follow proper procedure. As an experienced Para major, I'd expect him to demonstrate at least the degree of common sense, judgement and caution you'd expect from the rawest graduate from Sandhurst. Nor does the tough time he's having in Afghanistan entitle him to "sound off at the RAF," especially when he's making misleading and damaging accusations. And it's quite possible to judge him to be an unreliable witness, and to condemn his poor judgement in sending the e-mail, while simultaneously sympathising with the difficult, dirty, and dangerous job he's doing, and we can do so regardless of how incapable and inadequate we might be if we had to stand in his boots for five minutes.