Sniper one

  'Hi, Danny. I'm fine.'

  'Right shit hole this, isn't it, mate?'

  'Yeah.'

  'You going out on patrol today?'

  'Nah.'

  'Yeah, best leave it for a bit, eh, mate. No need to rush things is there?' He didn't reply. Instead, he carried on rocking backwards and forwards on the spot. There was no getting through to him. He was gone.

  We felt desperately sorry for him. Neither was it a very good sight for the young toms. Just seeing him had got a few of them thinking, and we didn't need that. It was the OC who eventually told him he had to go.

  'Look, Taff, we're going to get you out of here. You're clearly suffering. I'm going to get you back to England for a bit.'

  'Right, sir.'

  'Don't take it as a slur on your character. You're a good soldier, and you can come back when you feel ready.'

  Taff was taken out down the usual chain as a medical casualty. When he got back to the UK, he immediately signed himself out of the army. In three months, he was a civvy. He didn't even want to wait to get a proper medical discharge. We lost a good man. It was very sad for him, and very sad for the company. But nobody thought any worse of him, because it wasn't his fault.

  After Taff, the OC set up the trauma diary. It was a good idea and probably saved another ten Taffs in the company. Whenever a patrol had got into a contact, the first thing they'd do when they got back to Cimic was all go into a room with Major Featherstone and Dale. Then they'd talk through every little thing that happened, from the moment they left the front gate to the moment they came back in again. You could say anything you liked in it, from how you felt about killing somebody to how you'd shat your pants. Nobody was exempt, from privates to officers. Everything was aired in fine detail, so nothing could be suppressed.

  It has to be said though that Taff was a rare exception. Most of the company became very adept at adjusting to whatever the OMS and their allies threw at us next. As for me, well, I just loved it. War fighting was what I had really wanted to do my whole career, and here I was at last getting a chance to do it in fucking spades. That's how a lot of Sniper Platoon felt too. But that didn't make us better men than Taff. It didn't even make us better soldiers. It's just that everybody is different.

  Longy, however, had his own highly individual way of dealing with the rigours of Iraq. He masturbated. And he wanked like there was no tomorrow.

  At just five foot four inches tall, Private Sean 'Longy' Long was the smallest bloke in the platoon – despite his surname. Hence the nickname was not a little bit ironic. He got a lot of abuse for his diminutive height, which he took very well. Another soldier aged just twenty, he was one of the platoon's real characters, very popular and likeable. The only thing that let him down was his drinking capacity. He would always be the first to get totally shit-faced, so we had to look after him when we were out on the piss in Tidworth.

  Longy got heavily mothered by Ads, who felt that someone so small needed looking after. Most of it was wind-up. Ads's favourite line to Longy when out on patrol was, 'Keep low, move fast.' It had him in stitches every time.

  Ads would also tell him, 'Longy, I'm going to marry you. You're so sweet.'

  'Fuck off Ads, you poof.' That had Ads in fits every time too.

  Longy's masturbatory habits hadn't been an issue in England. When he came to Iraq though, his capacity went through the roof. He would take a porn mag or a DVD player into the loos with him at least five or six times a day. After every patrol, he was straight in there without fail, sometimes without even taking his body armour off. He would emerge fifteen minutes later with a big smile on his face. The lad didn't even have any shame at all. Ads had a regular line for those moments too.

  'You complete wanker, Longy!'

  'Yeah, fair one,' he could only reply.

  Then there was Louey and John Wedlock's way of dealing with the stress.

  Over a month had gone by since they went eyeball to eyeball on the front driveway. Word had started to go round the company that they'd even sorted out their differences. Word was wrong.

  Major hostilities broke out suddenly one breakfast. Wedlock was in the corner of the cookhouse by the taps filling up half a dozen jerry cans of water. As Louey walked past, he couldn't resist the usual quick dig.

  'Orr, hellor, Wedlock. Make sure you fill them all the way up to the top now.'

  Perhaps there was something in Louey's laid back Caribbean tones that morning that was particularly provocative. Maybe Wedlock was just having a bad morning. Whatever it was, he quickly stood up and punched Louey hard in the face twice.

  Now John Wedlock's punches aren't those of a normal man. A proper connection was more than enough to smash a bloke's jaw into small pieces. Louey swayed, but amazingly he managed to stay on his feet, and punched Wedlock back.

  Louey landed one decent blow on him before the two giants locked arms in a furious grapple. At first they pressed each other up against the industrial-sized sink in a bid for one of them to fall into it. Then the wrestle spun them both round and they went careering straight into the long line of tables and chairs where most of the company were tucking into bacon and eggs.

  Trays, plastic cups of juice, half-eaten eggs, toast, tables and chairs all went flying in every direction. Blokes desperately dived out of the way of the colossi as they smashed through everything in their way. Chris grabbed my arm and jerked me out of my seat as I had my back to the impending danger.

  'Get out the way, Danny, quick. I ain't getting in between the Swede and that brute.'

  Soon the cat calls were in full flow too. Soldiers either shouted 'Swede!' or 'Lamp him John', depending on which fighter's platoon they were in.

  Louey and Wedlock were in a heap of muscle on the floor in the middle of the room now. As one briefly gained the upper hand, he'd manage to release an arm just long enough to hurl down a horribly hard punch on the other. Then the roles were reversed.

  After four minutes of all of us letting them go for it, a sergeant from a neutral platoon decided it was time to step in. He got a few decent right hooks for his trouble. Eventually, a total of sixteen blokes finally pulled them apart.

  The whole disengagement process took roughly double the length of time of the actual fight. Louey and Wedlock were not easy men to pin down, and they made furious lunges for each other whenever they could break free of their restrainers. Each already sported huge lumps on their faces and badly cut knuckles.

  'I'll fucking crucify you, Wedlock, you fucking scum,' Louey spat at him.

  'Fuck you, Louey. I'll fucking kill you first.'

  I believed both of them.

  Both were sent to see Dale. Instead of fining them as he would have done in Tidworth, he made them shake hands in front of him and told them to fucking well sort it out. If they wanted to take out their aggression on someone, do it on the enemy. They both told Dale it was just about the pressure everyone was under, living in a small confined space and all that. But we all knew the truth. It wouldn't really matter if they were in a five-star spa hotel and retreat. They'd still want to smack seven bells out of each other.

  The only other time fisticuffs looked likely at Cimic was between us and the CPA officials' American bodyguards from Triple Canopy. It's funny to think we then ended up becoming best muckers with some of them.

  The initial antipathy was only to be expected. It went on for a good month. We didn't just think they were tossers because they all pranced around like they could be straight off a film set, although that was bad enough. Every one of them permanently wore wraparound shades and a silly array of weapons off their belts they probably didn't know how to really use. Worse than that, they acted like they were way above us in the food chain – some kind of elite military force.

  Mostly it was just vicious looks at each other. But the tension finally came to a head over the showers.

  Being smelly soldiers, we had always been banned from using the CPA and Triple Canopy's ablutions Portakabins which
were nicer than ours. Then the only one assigned to the company was put out of bounds because a blind mortar had landed in it. It meant technically the only place left for a hundred of us to wash and crap in were the three showers and three toilets in the prefab accommodation blocks.

  Bollocks to that. We'll use what's left. So we started going into the Triple Canopy Portakabin for a shower instead. If they were real soldiers, they wouldn't give a shit. But they did. Petty little notices started appearing on the door that read 'Triple Canopy Only – NOT for Y Company use'. The fucking cheek of it. They were sleeping safe at night because we were out protecting their arses. So if we wanted a shower, we'd fucking have one. We ignored the notices, and ripped them down as we went in for the next shower.

  For days they didn't have the bollocks to say anything to our faces. Then one day, Chris was just drying himself down after a particularly nice shower in the Triple Canopy facility, when one of their biggest blokes walked in. He was very thickset, with bright red hair and a goatee beard.

  Chris carried on like he hadn't a care in the world.

  'Hey, Limey.'

  At that, Chris spun round to face the redhead. He was ready for the inevitable punch-up.

  'Yes, Yank, I'm in your fucking showers. What are you going to do about it?'

  'That tattoo on your leg, man. You a sniper?'

  'Yeah. What the fuck's it to you?'

  'I used to be a sniper in the US Marine Corps. Recon.'

  'Oh, really?'

  'Yeah, really. Hold your horses, man, as we say in Texas. We got something in common.'

  'Well, my mum lives in Texas, so we've got two things in common. Sorry about your showers.'

  'Ah, fuck it. We're mean sons-of-bitches for not letting you use them anyway.'

  The redhead stuck out his shovel-sized hand. 'The name's Rob, but everyone calls me Red Rob round here. And you've got a small dick, man.'

  Red Rob and Chris bonded right there and then. Once in the sniper brotherhood, forever in it. Within a minute they were discussing the finer points of various sniper rifles the world over. To us, being a sniper transcended anything.

  The shower summit broke the ice between our two groups. Once we got talking to them, it turned out most of the Triple Canopy team were pretty good lads. There were a total of three snipers among their team. As well as Red Rob, CK was an ex-SWAT sniper from the Atlanta Police in Georgia, and Harry was a Paddy who'd served as a sniper in the British Army's Royal Irish Regiment.

  One night, Chris invited all three of them up onto the roof to have a look at how we did business.

  'Have a shot if you want, lads.'

  Americans need no encouragement to start shooting at things, and the Triple Canopy lads never went anywhere without their highly customized weapons – which were perfect for the job. The favourite among them was an AK47 with a folding butt, fitted with brand new US-made telescopic sights.

  All three of them were chomping at the bit. That night, it was just the few warning shots that we needed to put down to scare a few shady characters off. But the next night, Red Rob, CK and Harry came up to the roof again, and they got a kill.

  It was one of the OMS's most persistent RPG men, who had been floating around on the north bank taking us on whenever he could for the past few days. Of course, being Yanks, the kill led to a whole load of back slapping, high fiving and air pumping.

  'Get some! Who's your Daddy?' they bawled out into the darkness.

  From then onwards, the boys came up in their free time whenever they could. Not only did we enjoy their company, but they were very welcome extra pairs of hands too when it got busy up there. None of them had lost their aim either.

  When it was quiet, we just swapped war stories and obsessed over the pros and cons of our rival weapons systems; the two primary topics of soldiers bonding the world over.

  Most of their armoury was Russian- or Chinese-made and had been taken off dead or captured insurgents. They'd even managed to get their hands on a Draganov sniper rifle, which they brought up one night for Chris and I to drool over. In turn, having never seen them before, the Yanks were fascinated by our SA80s.

  Unfortunately, their Iraq stories were by and large better than ours, as it turned out most of them had been out for almost a year.

  There were thousands of Red Robs all over the country. The fall of Saddam's regime and the arrival of the American one prompted the biggest goldrush in the close protection industry's entire history. Every foreign administrator, engineer or electrician needed protecting, and often by a ratio of at least four to one. They were a whole private army. And because of where their constant travelling took them they often got into more scraps than regular coalition forces. In the old days, they'd be called mercenaries. Now, they were professional security consultants.

  The deal the Triple Canopy lads were on was that they'd work six weeks, and then go home to the US for six weeks. Nice life. We had seven months in the sandpit, with a poxy two weeks for our home leave. And they got paid triple our wage. They couldn't say they were serving the Queen though. Just the Queen of Maysan.

  On another occasion, Red Rob brought up his laptop to show us his home movie war clips. Many he'd downloaded off the Internet, but an impressive amount were his own. In his time, he'd accrued quite a collection. He'd filmed his pride and joy two weeks before we arrived. It was a thirty-second clip of an OMS man creeping up to Cimic's front gate to throw a blast bomb over the walls. Just as the insurgent sprang up to deliver his package, he was shot dead on the spot with a bullet in the chest.

  'That was Jimmy's shot,' Red Rob explained with pride. 'From the roof of the Pink Palace too, on an AK with just iron sights. Not bad for a geriatric.'

  Jimmy hair's was entirely grey, along with his beard. Because he also wore blue denim dungarees, we'd nicknamed him Uncle Jesse, like the old fella in The Dukes of Hazzard. Of course we were impressed, but I was never going to tell Red Rob that.

  'Yeah, right. How old do you couple of Limeys think he is?'

  'Uncle Jesse? At least ninety-four,' teased Chris.

  'Get outta here, man! He's fifty-nine. Saw active service in Vietnam, US Marine Corps too like me. Even witnessed the final pull-out from Saigon in '75. Yup, fifty-nine and still going strong. Not bad for an old timer, eh? Puts your young pups in their place, don't it?'

  Our night sessions led on to all sorts of inter-unit activities. The meat heads in the company were invited to have a 'bench off' with their meat heads; that is, who could bench-press most weight on the machines by the pool. Louey was our star performer, despite professing to never using a weight machine in his life. Having beaten off all the other Triple Canopy competition, he finally lost to an absolute house of a bloke called Jedd, who was almost as wide as he was tall.

  Then there were the obligatory photo snaps we'd take posing up with each other, to show to the folks back home. As the two founding fathers of the love-in between our tribes, Chris and Red Rob insisted on posing up together all over the compound. In the daylight, we also gave each other long and detailed lessons in assembling and disassembling our own weapons as well as how best to use them.

  It was an off-the-cuff remark from Red Rob though that ended up doing more for our morale than anything else on the tour. He wanted to show his gratitude for a particularly good night's shooting.

  'Any extra kit you guys need, you just ask, all right? We get all our stuff via mail order.'

  'Oh right, do you? Thanks very much. Can we have a look at your catalogue, then?'

  We might have mercilessly taken the piss out of them for it, but the truth is no soldier can ever have too much kit. Our carping was just pure jealousy. For days, we pored over their catalogues like kiddies in a sweet shop.

  We sent off for ultra comfy Desert Fox boots, Wiley-X blast-proof sunglasses, sniper's fingerless gloves, Camelback water holders, US Marine Corps webbing, Sure-Fire torches to clip onto our rifle barrels, US Army T-shirts, day sacks, and knee pads. We just couldn't
get enough of it.

  The item I was particularly chuffed about was a double magazine clip. It held two magazines together, and meant you could pop a fresh one into the rifle once the first was empty without having to fumble around in your webbing. It saved valuable seconds and proved ever handier as time went on.

  Soon enough, we began to look just like Red Rob and his mates. With our longs in our hands, only our camouflage trousers still identified us as regular British Army. The RSM would have blown a gasket. Featherstone was pretty relaxed about it all though, and the rest of the battalion too far away to ever know.

  It didn't take the OMS long to get back to their daily mortar barrages at us. After a couple of weeks, we weren't far away from the pre-Waterloo rate of incoming. The lunatics had found – or been given by Iran – a few more 82mm mortar tubes too. We knew how to handle mortars now, so our morale was still as strong as ever. But as time went on, they slowly began to degrade our surroundings. They also took away more of our liberties.

  A couple more Snatches were consigned to the scrap heap. One was fragged almost out of recognition, and the second's fuel tank exploded after being slit open by a piece of flying shrapnel. As the mortar fire was always the heaviest in the evening, it was decided to stagger the evening meal. Each platoon went to eat at a different hour. That cut down on big queues outside the cookhouse where a lucky round could have taken out ten of us at once.

  The God of War was certainly looking down on us at Cimic too, because there were some unbelievable close shaves. The cook had the closest.

  A quiet and modest, tall and skinny redhead, he was known to everyone as just 'Chef'. He worked out of a proper little aluminium kitchen trailer full of stainless steel surfaces that had been brought in by the CPA. While preparing the evening meal one night, he left the trailer for thirty seconds to pop to the store room to collect some more veg. While he was outside, an 82mm mortar round came down and tore straight through his trailer's roof and blew the thing up. There was twisted aluminium everywhere. Chef was the hero of Cimic that night, because he didn't sit about complaining. Instead, he cleaned the place up as best as he could and still then managed to get the meal out. The next day a field kitchen under a green tent was brought in from Abu Naji. It offered no protection at all from mortar fire. But without even blinking, Chef moved into it and carried on as normal in there.