Major Featherstone was once brave enough to question our judgement on incoming mortar rounds.
The Golden Hour had just passed, and six rounds had just been thrown at us. Five had gone off causing just light structural damage to the compound. But the sixth had been a blind. You only see them if they go off. So tracking down blinds in the camp was a pain in the arse. They could go off at any stage, a minute or a month later, so they always had to be found, day or night.
Ads was on the roof. He had developed perhaps the best set of ears in the platoon. From what he heard of it, he was convinced the blind landed within the compound. Featherstone came up to the roof.
‘Right guys, everyone happy the blind landed outside of Cimic?’
‘Sir, I don’t think so. It got in.’
‘I don’t think it did, Ads. If it had, we would have heard it hit something as it came down.’
‘Not necessarily, sir.’
‘Did you see it then, Ads?’
‘No.’
‘Well then. It’s late and we’re not going to launch a hunt now because you’ve got a feeling about it.’
‘OK, fair enough, sir. But I’m telling you there’s a blind in this camp.’
Ads was a cocky little private, and Featherstone was the boss. The debate was over. The major got on his PRR.
‘Ops Room, it’s the OC. Can confirm the blind landed outside of the compound. We’re all clear. I’m bolloxed so I’m off to bed.’
Five minutes later, poor old Featherstone stormed back into the Ops Room.
‘Right, bin my last report. I’ve found the blind. It’s in my fucking bedroom.’
The 60mm mortar round had come straight through the roof of his Portakabin and landed neatly a metre inside the door. It was half-buried in the floor, with its tail fin still protruding out. Someone who saw it described it as a neatly coiled dog turd. It could have gone off at any moment. If Featherstone had gone to bed half an hour earlier, he could have been dead.
Generously, he added: ‘The next person who questions Private Somers’ ears, I’ll have court-martialled.’
From then onwards, he slept under his desk in the Ops Room under Cimic House’s hard cover too.
The intensity of the fighting wasn’t without the odd bit of its own comic relief.
On one occasion we were watching an OMS tractor trundle over the north bank the morning after Fitzy and I had blatted the mortar crew. It had come to pick up their bodies, and the driver didn’t mind doing it in full view of us either. As he reached the spot, he slowed down. Then BANG. The tractor had gone over one of the crew’s own mortar rounds, exploding it. The bloody great machine launched up in the air in a big puff of dust, and landed on one of its giant wheels on an angle that put its axle permanently out of business. The driver was fine. Thinking it must have been us, he scrambled out of the cab and legged it. It was hilarious. Everyone on the roof fell about in stitches. To us, it was poetic justice and put the icing on the cake.
Another light moment came in the shape of Private Daniel Crucefix. When I first heard the 22-year-old Kiwi’s surname, I thought it was a nickname. It proved very apt. The movement ban meant that if you weren’t seriously injured, you wouldn’t get an immediate medivac back to Slipper City. So there were a lot of walking wounded hanging around the place. But Crucefix really took the prize. He sat it out at Cimic for three days with a piece of shrapnel the size of a credit card stuck in his nose.
He was one of a handful who had been in the back of Pte Beharry’s Warrior but hadn’t managed to fit on the convoy back to Abu Naji that night. Two RPG direct hits on the back of the Warrior had blasted him in the face and helmet with shrapnel and knocked him unconscious. Corky the Cimic House medic had decided it needed to be removed by a proper surgeon. So for the time being it would have to stay there. Having a lump of metal in his face didn’t make him immune from wisecracks either.
‘Love the nose job, mate, it’s a big improvement,’ was the most popular line.
The wound must have really hurt. But Pte Crucefix didn’t complain once. He even insisted on doing his bit on the end of pot shots in the sangars. That was the spirit of Cimic House. Though we were taking a heavy pounding, we weren’t going to let it get us down. The OMS could go and fuck themselves. And we were all in it together.
The fighting also threw up its fair share of the totally surreal. At times, Al Amarah resembled a scene out of a Monty Python film gone badly wrong.
One afternoon, we were in the middle of a particularly heavy mortar bombardment and gun fight with some OMS on old town rooftops. I was with a few sniper pairs in Rooftop Sangar facing the threat towards our south. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted movement to my left. I turned to see a bloke on a bicycle calmly pedalling down the northern riverbank in the direction of Cimic. He was around forty, with dark hair, and was wearing a grey dish dash. It was obvious to everyone within five kilometres that we were on a serious two-way range. But he didn’t seem to give a monkey’s. He wasn’t even in a particular hurry.
I stared at him for a few moments. Then, just as he passed by Back Sangar, a mortar round landed three metres away from him right in the middle of the road. It blew him off his bike, and ripped most of his left leg clean off. Quick as a flash, he jumped up again balancing on the leg he still had. He picked up the mangled bicycle, then picked up the severed leg, popped it under an arm, and hopped off down an alley wheeling the bike alongside him. The shrapnel must have severed a main artery, because he left a long trail of claret behind him. With that rate of blood loss, he was probably dead within minutes.
A few of the other lads had also seen it. We just stared at him in shock and utter disbelief as he hobbled away. No way was he leaving that bike for some tea leaf to pinch, no matter what state he was in. It made me feel a bit sick.
I radioed it in, like I had to. Another stupid, pointless death.
‘Ops Room, Rooftop. You’re not going to believe this.’
The more I thought about it, the angrier it made me.
He wasn’t the only one either. It was the way a lot of the city’s population behaved during heavy combat. On another occasion, a fat woman carrying a big bag of shopping waddled right down the middle of a road that divided us and the OMS fighters. We all stopped shooting while she passed. It was like they’d all had a lobotomy on the parts of their brains that flagged up danger. We kept on having to tell ourselves that combat on their streets wasn’t new to them. They’d lived through three major wars in the last twenty years. And on top of that there was the normal daily tribal scrapping. The air might be full of hot lead and shrapnel. But as far as they were concerned life still had to go on. In a way, they were right.
Worst of all, there were the utterly innocent civilian victims of the fighting, who had no choice but to sit it out and take it all. They were the law abiding peaceful sorts who just wanted to get on with feeding their children and staying alive. Most were appallingly poor. The longer it went on, the more we began to feel for them.
I felt sorriest for the family who lived in the house right on the corner at the end of the block that faced Cimic’s back gate. Because they were the closest building to the water tower outside of our compound, they were hit time and time again by stray mortar rounds meant for us. Rounds ploughed down onto their roof, off their walls and into their small back yard. The house was made out of concrete and could withstand direct hits. But soon a crack appeared on its front wall. Every time it got hit again, the crack got bigger and bigger. With sadness, we used to chart its progress down the wall.
God knows what it did to the family’s nerves. The whole lot of them had to live inside this shitty little house. At least three kids, grandparents and all. They didn’t have a pot to piss in. It was just their plain bad luck that someone had gone and put up a fucking British base right on their front lawn.
One day we popped over the road to see if they were all right. We asked if there was anything we could do.
They told us they had hated Saddam and they were pro-coalition forces. But no matter how many times we asked, they refused to leave their godforsaken mortared-up house.
Heartbreakingly, the man explained: ‘This is our home. There is nothing else. We have nowhere else to go.’
It was no way to live. For them or us. The truth was, despite the odd foot patrol, we too had become little more than prisoners in Cimic. The longer it went on, the more we realized that 1 May had been an outright victory for the OMS. The day’s events had pushed their fighters out on the streets. They had stayed on them, while the
