In a platoon not short on posers, Smudge took the crown. Baby faced and with bright blond hair, he was the platoon’s pretty boy. His shades were always perfectly placed on top of his head, and the last thing he’d do before we went out on patrol was check to see if his hair was OK. He also insisted on having his photo taken with every different sort of weapon he could get his hands on. But he was a very cool customer when we were in the shit, and thoroughly slick at his skills and drills. He’d make a great NCO one day.
The weight load was hard going in the heat to begin with. But the boys were a fit bunch and soon got used to it.
The souks were a fascinating sight. Market stall after market stall, all run by busy chattering shopkeepers, and grouped together by their specialities. First there were the metal stands, then the fruit sellers, vegetables, meats, spices, electricals, coffin makers; it went on and on.
As we walked about, we could also see that if only someone cleaned up all the muck and filth, central Al Amarah could be a half decent place to live in. Cafes were doing a roaring business all along Tigris Street. Men were sitting out puffing away on hookah pipes and families were having picnics in the park by the river’s edge. If you held your nose and squinted, it could be Istanbul.
We were only out for a couple of hours, because I didn’t want to push our luck.
But to our great surprise, most of the people we had come across seemed generally happy to see us. We got a lot of ‘hello misters’ and a whole load of smiles, which we of course were quick to return. Only one child got a firm cuff round the head from his father for talking to us. Even some of the women mumbled positive noises from behind their veils (which OPTAG had told us would never happen).
As we made our weapons safe inside Cimic’s front gate, Daz said: ‘I dunno, mate. Perhaps the good people of Al Amarah have got bored of scrapping with us, no matter what’s going on in Najaf. They’ve had a couple of weeks of it now after all.’
‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘Judging by last night on the roof, killing each other seems a load more fun.’
It wouldn’t be very long at all before we were both proved badly wrong.
6
The PWRR Battle Group assumed command of Maysan Province at 7.30 a.m. on 18 April 2004. It was a Sunday.
For the platoon, the day meant our first vehicle patrol around Al Amarah. We were in charge now, and everyone was looking forward to getting out and about on the streets.
It was going to be just simple stuff again. Just a bit of a drive around the main routes to get the boys used to the place, the feel of the vehicles on the streets. Our official task was also to drop in on a few police stations and make ourselves known. We set off from Cimic House at 3 p.m.
As the patrol commander, I rode in the passenger seat of the front Snatch Land Rover. Sam was my driver. Private Sam Fleming was a shy and quiet redhead. Aged just twenty, he was new to the platoon and was really just learning his way. Iraq was his first full operational tour. But he was a skilled and confident driver, and a nice lad with it.
Louey and Smudge were doing top cover for me, so Louey had a Minimi. Daz commanded the second vehicle, with Chris as his driver and Ads and H on top cover.
Daz also had a passenger in the back of his Snatch, Major Ken Tait, a Territorial Army officer from the Black Watch in his late forties. A school teacher from Glasgow, Ken was posted to Cimic House on a six-month call-up to be a tree-hugger on one of the reconstruction teams. But Ken was a true soldier. A heavy smoker, he was already bored with his desk job after only four days of being there, and asked me if he could come along for the ride and have a look about too.
We weren’t gung-ho, but we were confident and professional, and exactly where we wanted to be.
‘Remember to smile, all you happy people,’ Daz said over the PRRs as we pulled out of the front gate.
We headed north, and swept out around Al Amarah’s eastern outskirts first, before cutting back into the city centre through the southern suburbs. I got the boys to dismount to carry out a quick spot vehicle checkpoint at the road junction Blue 5.
Al Amarah’s main roads are codenamed by colours and numbers so the enemy wouldn’t know what we’re talking about if he intercepted our radio transmissions. We only ever knew a few streets by their real Arabic names. Its five main north to south thoroughfares roughly follow Al Amarah’s grid system, with the Purple route the furthest west, red next, yellow in the middle, blue after that and finally the green route on the north-eastern flank. Main junctions on each coloured route are numbered upwards from south to north. Yellow isn’t very long, so there are only four junctions on it. But red is the main arterial route through Al Amarah from Basra to Baghdad (Route 6 on the Iraqi road maps), so it has fourteen junctions. Sounds a nightmare, but imagine a bloke from Bermondsey trying to pronounce Al Muqatil Aj Asaneyya Street in a hurry.
After ten minutes, we drove off again up the Yellows, and made a right turn east at Yellow 3 onto a main road that hadn’t been given a codename for some reason. There we stopped, and dismounted for a poke about at Al Balda police station, which was one on our list. The vehicles parked up 50 metres apart, on the south side of the road. All but one of the top covers in each Snatch dismounted to watch over the patrol, as the rest of the boys inspected the ground around the vehicles for IEDs, the routine drill.
I walked over the road to the police station’s front gatehouse with a silly big grin on my face and attempted to strike up a conversation with the three officers lazing around there. I was keen to improve my crappy Arabic with the language cards we had been issued with.
The first thing that wasn’t quite right was when the cops started to look very uncomfortable as soon as I approached. They had been doing what we had been told was the usual for Iraqi policemen — sitting around lazily in the shade and not really being arsed to do anything at all. But they proved even less interested in having a chat with me. They all squirmed, and looked away.
‘Yeah, whatever then,’ I said. Probably just don’t like us. I shrugged my shoulders and walked away.
Daz approached two other coppers who were leaning on a motorbike, 50 metres down the road. They were standing in front of a well fortified compound that housed a large three-storey concrete building, painted white and divided into offices and a mosque area. Unusually for buildings in the city, it had a fresh coat of white paint and bars across every window. The front gate was made out of sturdy wrought iron, and an imposing six-foot wall ran around the whole of the rest of the exterior. Fifteen hundred metres from Cimic House, the place clearly had a pretty high status. It was just off the city’s main promenade and overlooked the Tigris River.
As I walked over to Daz, four men with big Islamic beards came out of the compound very agitated. They were shouting at us full pitch in fast, aggressive Arabic and jabbing their fingers at us. We asked one of the policemen what their problem was.
‘Their neighbourhood. Don’t want foreign jundi in it.’
‘OK, fine,’ I said. ‘Tell them they have nothing to worry about. We’ve only come to have a word with you and we’ll be leaving now.’
But instead of passing on my message, the cops jumped on their motorbike and sped off.
It didn’t take a brain surgeon to realize that things were obviously in danger of going Pete Tong. It was time to back off. We could argue the toss over our right to walk the public streets another day.
‘Back to your vehicles lads, and mount up. Top cover first,’ I ordered.
That’s when H spotted the gunman in the top window.
As he shouted the warning, the four angries were already slamming the compound gate shut with them inside it. More likely than not, it was one of them who then chucked a grenade over the wall.
It exploded largely into Daz. That seemed to be the cue for the now five gunmen in the sinister-looking building to open fire in unison. Hot lead was everywhere. Daz struggled a few yards towards me, and then collapsed into the middle of the street.
Rounds were pinging off the tarmac. But Ads and I somehow escaped them and hauled Daz into the back of the Snatch. The patrol’s two trained medics jumped on top of him immediately and began slapping field dressings on his multiple leg wounds. The first batch instantly turned bright red, and had to be doubled up with a second lot
