keep track of him. But the news was good. Having lost a lot of blood he had been in a critical condition when he arrived at the Basra field hospital on a Chinook. But the surgeons had done a great job of putting him back together, and he was expected to make a full recovery.
He was now in Selly Oak hospital in Birmingham, where all military battle casualties go. He’d also heard what we’d been going through since he left. He was furious he was missing all the fun. Apparently, he had already pissed the doctors and nurses off considerably by continually demanding to know the date when they would release him so he could get back out. A proper soldier.
Inside the platoon, the only teething problem we were having was Gilly. He was another new arrival for the tour and was a lazy bastard. Like Louey, Gilly had been attached to us as a driver. But if we’d won the lottery with Louey, with Gilly we’d lost the ticket. He was a 27-year-old recruit to the British Army from the Caribbean. He had made a mistake in joining the infantry, and he knew it. Sitting in trenches wet and tired all day long wasn’t his bag at all. But the real problem for me was that he couldn’t hack Iraq. Its extraordinary pace exposed him as the crap soldier he was. He could hide that easily enough in Tidworth. He was a quiet character who was just happy doing as little as possible for his money. But in Iraq there was nowhere to hide. If you didn’t give your all while everyone around you was, they’d notice pretty quickly. It meant you would become an extra burden, and we didn’t need that. Gilly would do everything he could to avoid going out on patrol, and he absolutely hated leaving camp. The thought of it terrified him. And he hadn’t even been shot at yet.
He couldn’t drive either. I learnt that the very first time he drove me around Al Amarah. He had no confidence behind the wheel of a Snatch. He kept tailgating cars in front, which is dangerous because it means you won’t be able to manoeuvre around them if something happens. Then, as we approached the police station we’d planned to visit, I told him to hang a left into its driveway. Gilly turned right instead, straight into a garage. He was as nervous as a virgin on prom night. He’d got himself in such a state he was no longer listening to me.
‘Gilly! What the hell are you doing? I said turn left, not right.’
‘Sorry boss.’
I’d seen enough. ‘Right. Stop there. Gilly, get out and get in the back. Sam, get out the back and get behind the wheel. Now, Sam, take us into the police station please.’
Gilly didn’t drive for anyone again.
A few days later, he asked me for a transfer. Someone had obviously told him you got an easy life in the Royal Logistics Corps. It was bollocks, because loggies get shot at as much as the rest of us. But none of that stopped Gilly from going on and on at me about wanting to join ‘the RLCs’.
‘Gilly, do you even know what RLC stands for?’
‘Er, well, er…’
‘You haven’t a fucking clue, have you? When you know a bit about the new unit you want to join, come back and see me, you silly sod.’
We were in a combat zone now. The company needed all the blokes it could get, even if they were as useless as Gilly. If he couldn’t do anything else, he could hump water or ammo about the place. There was certainly no shortage of shitty jobs to do in Cimic. Passing him on to the RLC would also just be passing on the problem to some other poor sergeant in a loggies regiment. Perhaps Gilly just needed some more time to adjust. It was a brand new experience for all of us after all.
Gilly aside, in just a short time the battle group had made considerable progress in learning how to defend itself against the OMS and their tactics. In fact, we were getting pretty good at it. But there was also no ignoring that instead of it abating, the level of OMS-orchestrated violence against us was only increasing. Rapidly. The frequency of their attacks on patrols was going up day by day. At night, more and more mortars would thump in. The more we hurt each other, the greater the animosity on both sides. Notwithstanding events in Najaf, our own little war in Al Amarah began to develop a healthy life of its own. Every time the OMS escalated it, the battle group was forced to react.
On a vehicle patrol around the OMS stronghold suburb of Aj Dayya, a blast bomb was thrown at my Snatch. A long burst of machine-gun fire also rattled just over the heads of the two top cover. The bomb exploded a fraction early, a second before we would have driven into its full blast. But it still scorched and fragged the Land Rover’s right side and windscreen. It was a close call. But it also proved to be the death knell for Snatches.
After the carnage that resulted from our first vehicle patrol along with the ever-increasing roadside bomb threat, it was decided that troops inside Snatches were too vulnerable. All Snatch Land Rovers were banned from leaving Cimic. Our patrols were to be on foot from now on. That way we would have more visibility around us and we could get into cover quicker. Warriors would be dispatched to extract us in an emergency, if we couldn’t fight our way out.
For that purpose, two Warriors turned up at Cimic on permanent attachment. The forty-minute trundle from Abu Naji was too long for patrols in the shit to wait. They also provided the base with another excellent layer of protection. One was stationed just inside the front gate, and one ditto for the back.
Warriors are built to carry ten men: the driver, gunner, and commander and seven dismounts in the back. They were seriously ageing by then, but they still provided some handy firepower. The chain machine gun was gravity fed, loading long belts of 7.62 into itself upside down. It’s fired by the gunner stamping on a pedal under his foot.
Hence the popular phrase among us in a contact, ‘Give ’em some fucking pedal.’ In the turret next to the chain gun was the Warrior’s main armament, a 30mm Rarden cannon. With a range of 1,500 metres, its high explosive rounds would silence most enemy positions that fancied engaging us. But it was never easy to fire something as powerful as that in the middle of a built-up city. We didn’t want to kill everyone.
Of course, the CPA bods made more irritated noises about us putting a couple of tanks on their lawn. But they didn’t complain with any real conviction any more. With the fighting on the increase, even they were secretly quite pleased to see them there now.
At the very end of April, our official mission in Al Amarah was hit by another serious setback. For the last two days in a row, some of the civilian NGOs’ 4?4 Land Cruisers had got badly shot up. On both occasions, gunmen lay in wait for them at Red 11. It was a major road junction on Route 6 just over the river from the OMS’s HQ building. It was inconceivable that anyone else but the OMS could have been responsible.
The two organizations they had got were the American Heart Foundation and the Mines Awareness Teams. Both had been totally unarmed. One of their workers was shot in the leg. He lived, but it made the NGOs finally decide they couldn’t stay any longer amid the town’s rapidly deteriorating security. It was simply too dangerous for them to do any meaningful work. As a group — and with little regret — they packed up and left. This was bad news for us because it meant the only people left to rebuild Al Amarah now was us. Because of the fighting, most of our reconstruction effort had ground to a halt too. And that was really the only reason we were there in the first place.
That night, Cimic took its heaviest pounding yet from the OMS mortars. They opened up from three different positions just before midnight. They also used an 82mm tube on us for the first time. Previously, they had only chucked 60mm rounds. But an 82mm is getting on for the same sort of calibre shells used by light artillery guns. It was set up among the slums of the north bank and made a hell of a racket too. One of its giant shells scored a near direct hit on a Snatch in the vehicle park. It tore the arse out of the thing.
While we hunkered down under hard cover during the ferocious mortar strike, the operations officers at Abu Naji were already hard at work. For the CO, the NGOs’ disappearance was the last straw. We had let the OMS take the initiative this far. But enough was enough. It was time for the battle group to attack.
Operation Pimlico was planned to begin at 2 a.m. the next morning, May Day. It turned out to be a very bad joke. But the Abu Naji planners could never have foreseen what was to happen that day. None of us did.
On paper, the plan was a good one. We represented law and order, and the OMS were the criminals. So that’s how it was decided to treat them.
Intelligence had revealed that six of their main players lived on the same shitty estate, the Kadeem Al Muallimin, in the south-west of the city. So we were going to go in and arrest them. But it was to be done in the dead of night for the maximum element of surprise. The arrest teams — a company of Royal Welch Fusiliers in Saxon armoured cars from Abu Naji who were attached to us for the tour — would be in and out before the city even woke up. If they did, Y Company would hold the fort in Cimic. The operation was named after a London tube station because all of ours on that tour were. No significance, just the easiest names for everyone to remember.
