Sniper one (23 page)

I couldn't believe it. We had to sit there and wait for a Warrior to come and extract us instead.

A week later, I had taken a multiple of about ten blokes over to the north bank again one morning to investigate three large Katyusha rockets that were all wired up and ready to fire at Cimic. We were about to destroy them with a 30 mil round from a Warrior.

Suddenly, peels of gunfire erupted from the big road junction at Green 5. It was one of the boys in black's favourite ambush points. A look through the binos revealed one of our fuel convoys in the shit. Three Snatches driven by Royal Fusiliers had been escorting a couple of petrol tankers down Route 6. The tankers had managed to drive through it, but one of the Snatches had been disabled so the other two stopped to help it out.

It was some distance from us, but the Fusiliers were clearly in a lot of trouble. And anyway, it was a good chance for us to get involved in something.

We ended up having to run across 900 metres of waste ground to get there. As we jogged, I got on the radio.

'Hello Zero, Alpha One Zero Alpha. Contact Green 5. Wait out.'

Featherstone was on to me immediately.

'Danny, you're not to get involved in that contact.'

'Too late sir, we're here now,' I replied, with still 500 metres to go. Bollocks to that. We weren't going to run away from the enemy.

'Danny, for fuck's sake. I've told you you're not to get involved in that contact. I'm sending the Warriors round to pick you up.'

We reached a long three-foot wall 150 metres from Green 5 that gave us a strong position to start engaging the enemy from. They were in clumps on the junction's single- and two-storey rooftops. The weight of our suppressing fire gave the Fusiliers time to rig up a tow rope to the crippled Snatch, and within a few minutes they were all out of there.

Then the Warriors turned up. Sgt Chris Adkins was their commander, a mate of mine. He understood what was going on.

'Come on, Danny, get on the back. We've been told to get you out of here. Please, mate.'

I felt like a naughty schoolboy. As we trundled off, I saw through the Warrior's back window an RPG man running across the junction in broad daylight waving his weapon in the air. We'd let the enemy feel they'd won again.

This time I was furious. What were we wearing the uniform for? Why did Featherstone let us carry rifles if we're not allowed to use them?

It all came to a head between the OC and me one particularly hot evening thanks to a drunken Iraqi policeman.

We were patrolling in the souks off Baghdad Street when gunfire broke out just around the corner. We sprinted back to the main road to find a fat old police sergeant on a motorbike wobbling all over the place, and blasting rounds from a pistol in the general direction of anybody he saw. He was pissed out of his head.

Chris, Ads, Pikey and I waited until he'd wobbled just past our corner before we jumped out with rifles raised.

'Kif! Kif!' we shouted, which is 'stop' in Arabic. 'Assila,' we said, which is 'weapon', and pointed to the floor.

We got him off the bike and tore strips off the fat fool. He looked very sheepish. I explained to him we were taking his pistol and the keys to his bike, and he could come and pick them up the next morning from Cimic House when he'd sobered up.

As we set off back to Cimic, I relayed the information back to the Ops Room and explained the reason for the gunfire.

'Happy with that, Danny,' Redders said.

Five hundred metres down the road, Redders came back on again.

'Alpha One Zero Alpha, this is Zero. Ignore my last. Can you go back to the policeman and give him his weapons and keys back, please? Sorry, new orders. We can't be seen to be undermining the IPS.'

There was no point arguing the toss with Redders. I knew exactly whose orders they were. It was Featherstone's worst call yet. I was seething.

The cop was still sitting on his bike feeling sorry for himself. He got his pistol and keys, but I had unloaded the magazine and put the ammunition in my pocket. The cop began to giggle as we walked off. We had lost a huge amount of face with the crowd that had now gathered to watch the whole ludicrous charade.

Within ten minutes, I was on the stairs up to the Ops Room on Cimic House's first floor. I hadn't even bothered to take off my webbing or body armour. The place was very busy.

Confronted with the sea of people, I boomed: 'So what fucking dickhead made that stupid jackshit call then?'

There was total silence. Slowly, all the men in the room parted to reveal Major Featherstone leaning back in a large office chair.

'Well, actually Danny, it was mine.'

'Well that was a fucking good call wasn't it, sir? Top fucking marks.'

Total silence. Featherstone bolted up, red in the face.

'Right, Sergeant, we'd better take this outside.'

'Fucking fine with me.'

On the first floor balcony, overlooking the Tigris, we had the mother of all screaming matches. The entirety of Cimic House must have been listening to it. It would have been hard not to.

Featherstone was proper angry too now that I'd embarrassed him so badly. He was right to be. I was way out of line. But with the temper I had on, I wasn't going to admit it.

'What the fuck do you think you're doing, Sgt Mills? How dare you talk to me like that?'

'Sir, I don't want to fucking fall out with you, but that was a piss awful call. You were in the wrong.'

'Oh, you fucking think so, do you?'

'Yes I do. One, the copper was in uniform and that brings the police into disrepute. Two, he's drunk as a fart. Three, there was a good chance he was going to kill somebody. How does it look to the terrified locals if we're there and just walk on by? And how would it look if the newspapers found out that Private Smith, Y Company, was killed after Major Featherstone, Y Company, had just rearmed the drunken twat who did it? Not to mention our complete loss of face in front of the locals. He's lucky I didn't blow his fucking head off then and there.'

'Tough shit. Look at the big picture will you? We are not judge and jury in this town. We're here to help the local security forces. That doesn't mean publicly undermining them, no matter what they're doing.'

'He's already undermining himself by his actions. He's minging in uniform with a gun in his hand!'

'Well, it was my call. You've had your say now, Dan. Don't ever do that again in my Ops Room.'

The whole row was in code. It wasn't really about the copper, and we both knew it. But we also both knew it was better to have a shouting match about something minor like that than something major, like what to do when presented with the enemy. That was a row that it would have been very hard to come back from. I knew he thought Chris and I were dangerous and too aggressive. But he never once told me I was taking too many risks. And I never told him that he was overcautious and too Politically Correct.

The following morning, he came to find me.

'Danny, can I have a word? About last night, I've been thinking about it. It was a shit call, and you were right. I apologize.'

'Right, fair enough, sir. It was wrong of me to lose it at you in the Ops Room as well.'

Letting off steam relieved a bit of the tension between us. Featherstone had said sorry, and I respected him for that. He wasn't a bad bloke either, and he had a job to do too. In the cold light of day, he did have a fair point about demeaning the coppers, and I felt a bit embarrassed at exploding on him like that. Ultimately, the buck stopped with him. He was the one getting the abuse from the CPA sorts for us being too warlike, and he'd be the one who would have to write to the mothers and fathers of anyone killed. That's why they pay officers more than the rest of us.

After that, I tried to understand the OC's way of thinking a little more, and he gave me a bit more rope. There was
already more than enough fighting to be done outside of camp to bring it indoors as well.

It has to be said that the heat also wasn't really helping anyone's temper.

Just when we thought it couldn't get any hotter, it did. It was the end of the first week of June, and the temperature was already hitting 50 degrees centigrade. It was silly heat. It made every task harder, every day longer. And it was relentless.

Sentries manning Front and Rear Sangars in the middle of the day would often collapse from heatstroke. They were in the shade too. It was decided that no foot patrols would go out between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. when the sun was at its hottest. Al Amarah looked like a ghost town between those hours anyway. Even the OMS locked themselves up inside. When you did go out, you'd always take care to get the lads in the shade every half an hour or so for a quick five-minute cool-off and a water break.

The worst place of all to be during an Iraqi summer was in the back of a Warrior. Built to repel a Soviet invasion of Germany, they had no air conditioning and little ventilation. Just a heater. As soon as you got in the back of one, bodily fluids would start running straight out of the bottom of your trouser legs like a tap. Blokes cooped up together for long periods of time in a battle would often be reduced to vomiting on each other as the temperature inside got up to 80°C. Regular checks would also have to be made on the Warrior drivers on guard at Cimic's gates. They'd pass out having to sit in the front compartment next to the hot engine block.

Generally speaking, the lads will put up with anything as long as you've got a nice cool room to come back to at the
end of the day. But with the accommodation blocks still out of bounds, we didn't even have that. It was still dozens of blokes crammed into every Cimic room, hot-bedding, tripping over each other, and with the place permanently shrouded in a smelly thick cloud of body odour and sweaty socks.

Sleep became ever harder at night. No matter how knackered you were, you'd always wake up in a pool of sweat after no more than an hour or two – even wearing just your jockeys on top of your sleeping bag. It was hard to believe we had July and August – traditionally Iraq's hottest months – still to come.

News came through that there had been two weeks of nonstop rain in Hampshire. We marvelled at what that must feel like. It hadn't rained since we'd stepped off the plane.

Great little morale boosts came along from time to time that would make the heat bearable.

'Front Sangar to Ops Room,' came the excited message one day over the PRRs. 'Anyone for a jolly little punt?'

An eight-tonne truck had just turned up among a resupply convoy loaded with two brand new Mark 5 rigid raider patrol boats on the back of it. The OC had put a request in for them, but nobody believed they would ever arrive. The Mark 5s are the small flat things the Royal Marines use. Every time we wanted to go over to the north bank, we'd have to cross Yugoslav Bridge. The only other alternative was going through Aj Dayya and that wasn't sensible. Our enemy had realized that, so the bridge became their shooting alley with us as the tin ducks. The boats were great, because they allowed us another discreet infiltration over the Tigris from Cimic without even having to step out of the front gate.

We heard that, by the beginning of June, the battle group had killed a total of 280 enemy fighters in Al Amarah since
our arrival. That was an average of almost five a day. Of course, it was a tiny fraction compared to the final sum. Not bad for a couple of months' work though.

At another O Group, it was also announced that Bravo One had taken a bullet in the kidney. That got a particularly big cheer. Bravo One was the codename we had given to the head of the Al Amarah OMS. His name was Saad e Mar. He was in his forties, had a big black beard, big eyes and big ears. He carried a grenade and pistol on him at all times, even in bed. He was wanted by the coalition for all sorts, and we'd been told to kill or capture him if we ever got the opportunity.

He was also a big figure in the Mehdi Army nationally, and had been at some hoods' meeting in Najaf when they had got into a gunfight with the Americans. Sadly, he was still living to tell the tale. Patrols were all cancelled for a day as we kicked in the doors of three different houses to nick him on his sickbed. He was nowhere to be seen. We just missed him at one, and he'd escaped by vaulting a back fence. I only hoped that opened up his stitches again.

The best morale boost of all came thanks to a full colonel's arrival one day in Cimic. He'd been sent out to see us all the way from Permanent Joint Headquarters in Northwood. As more and more contact reports filtered back to them, the generals back in London had begun to appreciate the level of combat intensity we were engaged in. They thought it was time to give us a bit more of a level playing field against the OMS.

All the patrol commanders were told to report to Cimic's briefing room in the main building. The OC and Dale were there too. Sitting crosslegged on a chair was the colonel. Tall, with greying hair and cold blue eyes, he had a huge
natural air of authority. Not someone you'd fuck with in a hurry. He addressed all of us.

'First of all chaps, well done. What you've been doing out here hasn't gone unnoticed, I assure you. It's not what any of us had expected, admittedly. However, you've responded terrifically. The chiefs have huge admiration for you, and I have been asked to pass that on.

'The real reason I'm here though is to talk about the rules of engagement. Let's cut to the chase. You're war fighting out here, without anyone saying it's war fighting. What we need to know is whether you feel you can still get the job done under the existing rules. Do you have any questions about them?'

We discussed a series of different scenarios. In a normal gunman-versus-soldier situation, we told him we felt no restrictions. They were clearly endangering life so we could kill them. Other areas were a lot greyer. The OMS knew our rules as well as we did. They exploited that knowledge mercilessly, as Ads's experience with the mortar teams crossing Yugoslav Bridge showed.

The tactic that really wound us up was their regular use of unarmed men to guide mortar or RPG fire on to us in Cimic. The fuckers would stand right out in the open within easy range, knowing we couldn't shoot them. They were clearly men of authority. They'd use their position to openly orchestrate the battle and work out exactly where we were so their fire would be more accurate. We'd given them the Northern Ireland name for the scrotes who did the same thing for the IRA – dickers.