‘Why?’
‘It’s my birthday today. I’m thirty-five.’
‘Really? I didn’t know that. Happy fucking birthday, mate!’
‘Thanks. I’d forgotten all about it too. Don’t worry; you can save the faarkin’ cake till later.’
The adrenalin of regular mortar incoming was enough to keep us awake through the long hours. Then, just after 3 a.m. Des spotted some heat signature through the SOFIE binos. It wasn’t too far away from us on the north bank amid the Iraqi Army camp ruins. He looked again through a SIMRAD night sight. It was a flat-bottomed truck moving slowly with its lights off.
‘Hold on, Dan. I think I’ve got something here.’
We lined up our sights in the direction where Des was looking and found the truck too.
Eventually it stopped. Five blokes got out and started unloading equipment from the back of it. Des started getting excited.
‘Hey, did you see that? It looks like they’re setting up a fucking mortar here. They’re all armed too by the looks of it. AKs slung on their backs.’
Then Des got very excited indeed.
‘Dan, Dan, Dan! I can see the fucking mortar tube. There it goes out of the truck now! Long fat fucker. It must be the 82 mil. Hey, we’ve really got the fuckers now. We’re going to fucking waste them!’
‘OK Des, keep your voice down. Range them.’
‘I’ve done that already — 550 metres.’
The mortar team had made a mistake. They’d got cocky with all their success. In their desire to get closer to us, they’d set up in a direct line of sight. Just because it was three in the morning didn’t mean we weren’t still watching them like a hawk.
‘Dan, this is really fucking it, you know?’ Des had started to pump his fist under the sandbag wall.
‘Yes I know. Right, we need to get some illume up. Dale, can you get on the 51mm mortar and do that?
‘Sure thing. Leave it to me.’
‘Think of it as your birthday present, mate.’
‘Gladly received.’
We took a few more seconds to get our weapons ready. Because there were so many of them in the team, a couple of longs wouldn’t be enough for the job. They were also close enough for us not to need them. They were going to get the Gimpy from me.
‘Fitz, you grab that Minimi. As soon as the illume goes up, open fire.’
‘Roger that.’
Calmly, we rested the machine guns’ barrels on the lip of the sandbag wall, and pressed our feet into its base for support. Then we looked through the weapons’ iron sights. The mortar rounds thumped into the river just to our left. Then Dale let rip.
They were caught like rabbits in our headlights. Right out in the open with nowhere to hide. Two of the crew were crouching down tinkering with the mortar and its base plate. The other three were humping mortar rounds from the flatbed to them.
Fitz and I opened up at the same moment. After a couple of rounds, the GMPG had a stoppage. So I threw it out the way without even safety-catching it, and grabbed a second Minimi lying beside me. With Fitzy already blazing away with long fully automatic bursts, I opened up again for all I was worth.
We aimed for the two men around the mortar tube first. I went for the one on its right, Fitzy the left. For a few seconds, they were all frozen to the spot staring up at the illume with disbelief. The tracer rounds, one in every four, did a great job in bringing us on to the targets. The bloke on the right went down first. He collapsed in a series of spasms as my rounds ploughed into him. In panic, all the bloke on the left could think of was to ram a round down the tube as quick as he could. He went down with the round still in his hand thanks to a long burst from Fitzy right into his guts. We made sure they both stayed down too, just in case. Both were riddled with another long burst.
The other three mortar men weren’t so noble. They dropped the rounds they were carrying on the spot and just legged it. After 50 metres or so, one thought he was out of the shit enough to show a little bravado and put a few rounds back at us. Pulling the AK off his back, he turned and raised it in our direction. Bad mistake. It was just the justification we needed to engage him too, so he was the next to get the good news.
Each Minimi had a bag of 250 rounds on it. We went through them at a fair pace, firing in bursts of twenty. We’d pause for a few seconds to let the working parts settle. Keeps the barrel cool. Then we’d open up again. As we fired, bullet casings spat out of the machine guns and littered the floor with a tinkling sound like confetti.
Des began shouting. ‘Danny you should see these fuckers run.’ He was jumping up and down on the spot, clearly mesmerized by the whole thing. ‘Run Forrest, run,’ he shouted at them at the top of his voice. His eyes were glued on to his binos as he watched.
Just before one illume went out, Dale threw another one up so they would overlap and we’d have permanent vision. He was swiftly working his way through a whole crate of twelve.
The remaining two mortar men managed to make it 150 metres or so to a small mud hut. Des sized the place up through the binos. The door faced us. There was a window on its righthand side, and an old car was parked outside.
‘Don’t worry guys, I don’t think there is any back way out of the hut. We can get those scumbags too.’
We trained the Minimis on its doorway. All we needed now was for them to engage us again to reclassify themselves as legitimate targets.
With less than a minute gone by, the two men bolted to the car and grabbed its front doors open, blatting away madly with their AKs in our general direction. Another silly mistake. In their panic, they forgot all the rules of their own game.
Fitzy didn’t need to be told.
We opened up again simultaneously, hosing fuck out of the car as well. Bits flew off all over it. The men quickly scampered back inside, but we carried on firing. We smashed every window, lacerated the tyres and turned the bodywork into a pin cushion. They weren’t going anywhere in that now.
Another few minutes’ silence.
‘They’re coming out again,’ Des shouted feverishly. ‘Still armed.’ So they got another long burst through the door.
Downstairs, Chris was getting in and out of his bunk like a yoyo. It was the first time we’d fired Minimis off the roof, so it was obvious to him and everybody else something pretty interesting was going on. After a burst, he’d leap up and start pulling on his boots. But then we’d stop firing just as quickly and it would be all quiet again.
Fitzy and I kept up the sporadic fire on the hut for a good couple of hours every time the blokes inside tried something on us. They were rats stuck in a trap. They knew it, we knew it. It became a trial of who was prepared to wait the longest. But we were snipers. We were used to hanging around for days on end to wait for a shot. Every time they poked their barrels out, we’d suppress them with rounds through the door. Sometimes we’d put a 7.62 round from a long through the window for good measure.
While we waited for the men, we also shredded the abandoned mortar tube in case anyone fancied picking it up.
As the periods of silence between our bursts grew longer, the extraordinary day began to take its toll on Dale. Determined to see it all out, he fought heroically against sleep but all he ended up doing was nodding dog impressions with the mortar still between his legs.
‘Go to bed, mate.’
‘Eh?’ He woke with a start.
‘You’ve done your bit. It’s beginning to get light anyway,’ I told him.
‘Er, yeah, OK then. It’s been a faarkin’ awesome birthday present. Thanks for that Dan.’
Eventually the door stopped opening. It’s possible the men used their fingernails to dig through the back wall. We never found out, because we never saw them again. Hopefully they went the same way as their mates. It didn’t
