It was just like the bank robbery scene in Heat. It's amazing how well you remember it when you need to. But still the RPK poured lead at us. A whole burst went straight between my partner Smudge's legs just as he was stopping to turn and cover me. We looked at each other in amazement.
'Average,' I said, and we carried on. 'Go.'
It was working. They weren't hitting us, because our fire was causing so much havoc they were screwing up their aim. And it felt awesome. So we did it all the way back up to the top of the alleyway.
'Go,' screamed Smudge for the umpteenth time, adopting the cover position again. And I spun round to see 33 beautiful tonnes of Warrior sitting right there a few metres in front of me.
The methodical thumping sound of the Warrior's chain gun was slapping a target good and hard on the other side of the road, and its heavy diesel engines were still ticking over with a permanent growl. Yes please, I'll have some of that if you don't mind. The battle group QRF had turned up at last, and were waiting to extract us.
Colonel Gray was crouching down beside the Warrior, waving frantically and shouting at us to jump in.
'I need to get my other blokes in there first, sir.'
'Don't worry, Sergeant, they're all in already. Jump in quick.'
I did as I was told.
'All in,' someone shouted to the driver, and the door closed automatically with a heavy metallic clunk.
An overwhelming and incredible relief rushed through me like a drug. There were ten of us fully tooled up in a space built for seven with bodies everywhere, but I couldn't have cared less. I then realized how thirsty I was, so reached for a two-litre bottle of water and drank most of it straight down.
After what felt like a lifetime with RPGs still whooshing by overhead, as well as a lot of foul abuse to the driver from me, we finally chugged off. The Warrior tore up the hot tarmac streets with its giant tracks as it moved over them. Ten deafening minutes later, we ground to a sudden stop. What was the problem? Who was attacking us now?
The back door began to open up again. As soon as I saw daylight through it, I piled out with my three fire-and-manoeuvre lads following me close behind. We all jumped straight into a square-shaped ditch, the first cover we could see.
'All round defence, lads!' I ordered, scanning desperately for the next target. The only people near us were calm clusters of men wearing British Army combat fatigues. They were just standing around chatting. Among them was Ian Caldwell and his QRF team. What the fuck was going on? Why weren't they taking cover, the idiots?
With a broad smile on his face, Colonel Gray calmly strolled over to us.
'Stand down, Sergeant Mills. This is the new Iraqi Army's training camp on the town outskirts. You're safe enough in here, I assure you.' As he walked off, he added, 'Good drills all the same.'
It was over.
We were surrounded only by what looked like the entire battle group. A huge fleet of Warriors was in the last stages of preparation before going into Al Amarah again to establish law and order. But we'd done our bit. And another fleet of Warriors arrived shortly to run us back to Cimic.
There was one final 'fuck you' lying in wait for us from the OMS. Just as the lead Warrior in our convoy got to within 100 metres of Cimic's front gate, an IED hidden by the roadside exploded right beside it. It was an old Iraqi army 155mm artillery shell. It made an almighty bang, but none of its shrapnel got through the vehicle's armour. Instead, it just covered it in shit.
Daz had already been flown in a medivac helicopter down to a field hospital in Basra by the time we got back. He went down in the same chopper as Kev Phillips. They'd both live, we were told.
That night, we were treated differently by the rest of the company. Word had got round like wildfire what we'd been through. We had done our jobs, and we had done them well. That won us a fair amount of respect, and even a little awe. Of course it didn't last for long; they'd all get their turn soon enough.
Personally, I was just pleased as punch for my lads. The patrol had ten enemy kills that we could confirm. But, for all we knew, the real tally could have been triple that. We'd hardly had much of a chance to check many bodies for pulses. The guys had been fantastic and followed me everywhere I had asked them to go. Apart from retrieving the sensitive radio kit maybe, but that was certainly no bad thing. They'd fought like lions together, and I couldn't have asked for more. And as scary as it was at times, for all of us the adrenalin rush had been unbelievable.
After getting some scoff, I sat down alone to think it all over. I ran through the afternoon's events in my mind again and again. I wanted to work out what I'd done wrong to get us into that mess. I came to the conclusion that there was really nothing I should have done differently. We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Nobody had told us that the very building we'd dismounted in front of was the OMS's Al Amarah headquarters. Also, the OMS weren't stupid. They'd seen all the movement around Cimic over the last few days, and they would have spotted our different berets. They knew there was a new regiment in town, and they would have wanted to test our mettle. Today's events gave them an opportunity to give us our first workout.
Then my thoughts turned to the sneaky OMS fighter I'd slotted climbing over the wall.
In the movies, you're supposed to feel sorrow and remorse about having taken life. You're supposed to contemplate the tragedy of man, and all that. But the truth is the only feeling it gave me was satisfaction. That, and a bit of curiosity answered. This man along with a lot of his pals were trying to kill us. They meant my men and me serious harm and they had already badly hurt my good mate Daz. We had got them back and that felt good. I felt not a single second's guilt, neither then nor since. It was quite simply him or us, and I'm far gladder it was him.
The honest truth is I didn't give a shit about him. He was the enemy, and all I gave a shit about was that he was dead. He's wasted. Move on.
There was one more thing to do before I went to bed. I went to see the company quartermaster.
All quartermasters are tight as a gnat's chuff when it comes to giving out kit because they get good marks for saving money. Ours would give the very tightest a run for their money. While we had been stuck down that alleyway today, grenades would have come in very handy indeed on more than one occasion. I felt the day's events had earned me the right to dispense with pleasantries.
'I need grenades, and I need them fucking right now,' I told him.
It was deeply disappointing. He didn't even put up a word of argument. He just meekly pushed over a big box of the things, and I stuffed as many as I could into every pocket I had.
8
The next morning, Major Featherstone called an O Group. They were normally held in the evenings, but that day it was first thing. There was urgent business to be discussed.
Every company and battalion has a regular O Group. O stands for orders. You can do it anywhere, on the battlefield or with your feet up in barracks. It doesn't matter. It's when the head sheds all get together during an operation to discuss – or be told – how the unit is going to progress. For Y Company, it meant all four platoon commanders and their deputies, the sergeant major, and the company 2i/c.
Featherstone's O Groups were more relaxed than most. Wanting to be a man of the people, he liked to hear our opinions.
That day he began with an apology.
'First off, guys, I'm sorry we didn't have any idea the big white building at Yellow 3 where Sergeant Mills was contacted is the OMS's headquarters. Unfortunately, battle group HQ in Abu Naji hadn't seen fit to tell us that. We know now. We've got no idea how long they will want to fight us, but we do know that there's no sign to any end of the standoff in Najaf.'
Moqtada al-Sadr was still hiding out in a large Shia shrine in Najaf. He was being protected by thousands of fanatical supporters who had barricaded themselves into the shrine with him. The US military were encamped on the outskirts of the city. If they wanted al-Sadr, they would have to go in
and get him. That would mean a massacre on both sides, and both sides knew it.
Featherstone continued his speech. As he spoke, he chucked a karabiner from one hand to the other in a purposeful gesture.
'What we do know though, thanks to yesterday, is that the Al Amarah OMS have made their intentions towards us very clear. The CO is adamant that we must be able to do all we can to protect ourselves while this whole business lasts. That means we're going to stop pretending we're having a picnic here and everything's nice and dandy. Cimic House is the centre of law and order for this province, and that's the way it's going to stay – even if it has to become a fortress to do that.
'We're also going to start giving some of it back to these bastards if they want it.'
It was what we all wanted to hear. The gloves were coming off. We could stop smiling like clowns everywhere we went and start doing a soldier's job.
The mood of frustration in Cimic hadn't been helped by the RPG attack on the front sangar in the middle of the night. There is an alley directly opposite it only 60 metres away on the other side of the main road, from where the compound is most vulnerable. Without the sangar's sentries spotting him, an OMS fighter had crawled into it just after 2 a.m. and opened fire. He scored a direct hit. The grenade's explosion blew the sangar's three occupants clean out of it and onto the ground 20 feet below. All three blokes had to be medivaced out with blast injuries and broken limbs. From that night onwards, it became known as RPG Alley.
The previous day's events had also put an end to the bold prediction that only one in five of the battle group would see some proper action at some stage of the tour. It was only Day Two, and the majority of us had already been caught up in an ocean-going-sized contact. There were still officially 173 days of it to go. But if they did want a war, we were going to be ready for them.
As part of the CO's new regime, Cimic House was to be thoroughly militarized. Not only did we badly need better protection, but it sent a message to the OMS that we were here to stay.
Forced against their will to labour under the fallacy that they were on a peacekeeping tour, the Light Infantry had been prevented from doing almost anything to fortify Cimic House. That included not being able to deploy snipers on Cimic's roof, until the very end. It was all because the CPA were adamant that the place musn't look like a combat zone for the sake of the trust they were trying to build with the locals. As a result, the lads were getting homemade blast bombs regularly chucked over the compound's walls. The poor sods just had to sit there and take it.
The CPA bods weren't going to like our militarization at all – especially because the very first thing that went was their treasured views over the Tigris. We erected ten-foot-tall anti-sniper screens made out of locally made reed fencing all along the compound's perimeter. That would stop people taking pot shots at us as we moved around inside. On top of the sheeting went a thick coil of razor wire, to dissuade any suicidal nut from getting over the walls in a hurry.
The front and rear sangars were rebuilt more sturdily and filled with proper sandbags. We had to dig up most of the garden to fill them. We also threw out all the old local weaponry that the CPA had asked the Light Infantry to put in the sangars. They were lined with RPKs, AK47s, old Iraqi army boxes of ammo, and even RPGs – again, all to make the place look more Iraqi-friendly rather than foreign occupied.
Screw that. We replaced them with our own weapons. That meant a GMPG in each and NATO standard ammunition. Our weapons were tried and tested, and had been properly zeroed. The local jumble sale collection were unzeroed, we didn't have the proper cleaning kits to maintain them, and we had no idea how accurate they were.
And from now on, the front gate would be manned at all times by Y Company troops, not just Iraqi policemen. We'd seen how reliable they could be.
As the roof was our domain, my platoon was responsible for fortifying that part of Cimic. The key to sniping is being able to see as much as possible in comfort. So we rearranged it just how we wanted it. First off, we taped down all the wires up there for the radio antennas and the Sky TV satellite dish. They were trip hazards.
Then there was the crappy half sangar the Light Infantry had built. A sangar is the army term for a fortified lookout post, normally at height. We moved it from the south-west corner to the south-east, which gave us a far clearer view straight down Tigris Street. And we rebuilt it up to chest height with a base three sandbags thick. We gave it a flat roof with some timber and another couple of sandbag layers, and laid a camo net over its sides. It wouldn't have stopped a dirty great mortar round bang on target from killing everyone inside. But it did give us something to dive into if we saw or heard a mortar launch. And it gave us a little bit of protection from the heat. From then on, it was known as Top Sangar.
We also built a second half sangar on the small roof of the enclosed stairwell block that led up to the flat roof. It was just three metres square. But it was the highest point of the house and that meant we wanted to be there. We made a ladder to get up there, and gave it a three-foot wall of sandbags and a lining of mattresses. Only six blokes maximum could comfortably work in it at any one time, but it gave us another eight feet of elevation and a great 360-degree view of the town from one single position. Its position was known as Rooftop.
All this work was done in the middle of the night, so we could use the cover of darkness to climb about the place.
In the morning, the CPA bods woke up just as we were finishing off. Molly Phee had cleared the lot, so we had nothing to worry about. But that didn't stop a few of them sharing their feelings with us.
The prettiest woman in the compound by a country mile was an American CPA official called Jodie. She was young, had long brown hair, big boobs, and always wore tight denim jeans. A very nice bit of eye candy and no mistake. And just the sort of thing you don't want to see when you're trying to concentrate on a difficult job. But we all still used to gawp at her.
That morning was the first time any of us had really seen her open her mouth. And the dream was ruined in an instant.
Dale had been supervising a couple of young lads put the finishing touches to the sniper screens by the water on the western wall. Jodie flicked her hair over her shoulder and marched straight up to him.
'What the hell do you bozos think you're doing? This is not an army boot camp, you know. This is a peaceful office of the government of Iraq. You've made us feel like we're living in Fort Knox.'
'Sorry about that, ma'am. We're only doing our job.'
'You may think it's your job, but the only reason we're being attacked is because you guys are here.'
'I'm not sure that's really the case, is it, love?'
'And anyway, what sort of image does all this give the local Iraqis? They'll be scared to death about coming in here to see us now, which means we'll be back to square one.'
Then, as an afterthought: 'You people might as well be Saddam Hussein.'
Dale's a heftily patient man. But that really did it.
'Now you listen to me,' he said, his voice a low, slow rumble. 'The only reason we're here is to protect you and what you do in this place. And if we hadn't been here over the last few days, there's a middling to strong chance the OMS would have crept over the walls in the dead of night and chopped you and all your CPA buddies into little bits with kitchen knives. So go and have your breakfast, let us do our faarkin' job.'
We heard no more from Jodie about our renovations.
To prove Dale's point, we were mortared for the first time since we'd been in Cimic that day. It was a burst of four rounds, and only one landed in the camp perimeter. It exploded on the driveway with a loud bang leaving scorch marks on the tiles. Luckily nobody was around. The reality is there is little you can do if one of these things lands on you. Unless the mortar launch is close enough for you to hear its dull clump, the first you know you're getting incoming is the telltale whistle of the round coming in about three seconds before it lands. It's an intimidating weapon to d
eal with mentally because it takes your fate almost entirely out of your own hands. If you're in the wrong place, you're fucked. Simple.
One of the very few strategic negatives of Cimic House was the giant water tower within the compound right next to the main house. As the tallest building in Al Amarah, it gave the OMS's endless supply of mortar teams the perfect aiming point. Getting mortared is a nasty experience to begin with. But after a while, we learnt to stop being bothered about whether we were going to get it from the next shell and trust in fate. It was hardly as if we had a choice. With only a couple of attacks a day, the odds were still massively in our favour.
On the roof, we had to learn about our new city's skyline fast. At any moment we could be called upon by the battle group to try to bale someone out of the shit with our longs. That meant familiarizing ourselves with the view until we could see it in fine detail with our eyes closed.
From Rooftop we could see clearly for two kilometres in every direction. It was a great panorama.
Going clockwise and immediately to our west, a dam was slowly being constructed on reclaimed waste ground to control the Tigris tributary's flow. On the other side of that waterway was Al Amarah's main hospital. Further west still was the vast Olympic Stadium, a great big arena built in an art deco design that was now substantially unused. At some stage, some buffoon had decided Al Amarah actually stood a cat's chance in hell at competing with places like London, Paris, Tokyo and Sydney to host an Olympic Games, so they built it to the cost of millions. Severe delusion. That deserved sectioning.
Sweeping towards the north, a big dual carriageway road bridge crossed over the main Tigris River that ran west to east. It was known as Yugoslav Bridge because it was built by Tito. On the north-west bank was 'Vietnam Wood', a thick grove of date palm trees that had a jungle feel about it when we patrolled through the place.