reality was we had largely been forced to abandon them. It meant the OMS were the ones in real control of the city now.
We couldn’t allow that to happen. So the planners at Abu Naji went to work again. This time, they came up with a proper solution. In the early hours of the morning of 8 May, the battle group launched its second major offensive on the Office of the Martyr Sadr in little more than a week. And it was truly awesome.
13
There was one major reason behind our second offensive’s stunning success. This time, we held nothing back. We went to war, and with every single weapon we fucking well had at our disposal. None of this peacekeeping one-arm-behind-our-backs shit any more. As the Yanks say, it was whoop-ass time.
It had even been given the name of a decent tube station this time. It was called Operation Waterloo.
Full credit to the Slipper City planners, they did some serious telephoning around before this one began. Everybody we knew was invited to the party. The battalion’s A Company, who had been sitting down in Basra as a reserve force for the division, were called up for it.
Beautifully, brigade had managed to lay their hands on six Challenger II main battle tanks for our squadron of Queen’s Royal Lancers attached to our battle group for the tour. The tankies were delighted. It meant they could bin the poxy Snatch Land Rovers that they hated and get back to doing what they did best. But when the news went round Cimic that we were going to have six times 62 tonnes worth of hurt on our side, I promise you we were happier.
But best of all, a US general in Baghdad agreed to loan us two AC130 Spectre gunships as close air support for the night. Spectres have been around since the end of Vietnam. They have the normal frame of a basic propeller-driven Hercules transport aircraft. But mounted on it is a devastating array of machine guns, cannons and various hi-tech sensors. Their poor vulnerability from ground rocket and missile fire means they can only come out to play at night. But it’s well worth the wait. They are quite simply flying dragons of doom.
The Spectre smacks anything that moves for you, no matter how big or small, with three different weapons systems. Its two twin 20mm Vulcan Gatling guns spit out 7,200 rounds a minute each. They dump so much brass on the aircraft’s floor that their gunners have to use shovels to clear up the spent cartridge casings at the end of the night. Then there’s the larger 40mm Bofors cannon, firing 100 rounds a minute. But its piece de resistance is a 105mm howitzer. It fires any 44lb shell, from concrete-penetrating rounds to airbursts, at a rate of ten rounds a minute. To feed that lot, the plane carries up to 10 tonnes of ammunition per sortie.
Flown and operated by a crew of thirteen, the Spectre can either be called in by forward air controllers on to specific targets or plod around happily self-generating its own. It can even engage three different targets at the same time, if you’d like it to.
We’d never seen one in action before. To say we were looking forward to that would be the understatement of the century.
Waterloo was also given an H hour of 2 a.m. But this time we weren’t trying to avoid a confrontation. Instead, we went out looking for one. It was a ballsy trap for the OMS leadership, with their own bloated egos as the bait. The battle group was going to go right into the town centre as tooled up as possible, and just sit there on the OMS’s doorstep. It was hoped that would cause them such affront, they wouldn’t be able to resist a full-out assault. Once they were out in the open, we’d destroy them with overwhelmingly superior firepower. Essentially, it was come and have a go if you’re hard enough. And there was even a classic snipers’ job for us to do written into the plan too.
I briefed the platoon on the plan in Cimic’s QRF room before we left.
‘OK lads, this is what’s going to happen. The two Warrior companies from Slipper City are going to form the main attack column. At the tip of it will be four Challenger IIs.’
‘Awesome,’ chimed in Des. Ever a fan of firepower.
‘They’re coming in via the front door, right up the Red route. The main road junction at Red 11 is where they’re going to stand and fight. If it’s aggro you’re after, we all know they’re going to get it there.’
Not only was Red 11 the OMS’s favourite ambush point, but it was also only 500 metres from their HQ over a big bridge on the other side of the Tigris. As a meeting of two major dual carriageways, the expansive shape of the junction also gave any defender very clear 360-degree arcs of fire.
‘Now our job. We’re to mount a blocking screen between the town centre and the main source of the OMS’s manpower, the Aj Dayya estate. Our orders are to take up covert positions at Blue 11 overlooking the roundabout there, report enemy reinforcements, and destroy them if need be.’
Pikey’s gypsy nose was already twitching.
‘Err, Danny, isn’t that where Captain Hooker’s lot got so badly smacked the other day?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Excellent. Fucking bring it on.’
‘Now we’ve no idea what’s going to come out of the Aj Dayya. Might be an army of them, or might be nothing. That’s what we’re there to find out. One thing’s for sure though — we’re guaranteed another grandstand view of the party again.’
We infiltrated as stealthily as we could in the darkness, first down Baghdad Street and then via a series of back alleys we knew. We didn’t bother knocking on any doors. We just quietly climbed up the exterior of our chosen tall houses from their back gardens, giving each other a hand as we went up. We didn’t want their owners to find out we were there until the morning.
We were spread out over the flat roofs of three houses in an arc facing east across the Tigris that gave us a good view into the estate. We were all on our bellies with our longs and vision aids set up and ready to go.
Set back from the roundabout is a large bronze statue of a horrible great fat ugly woman. She is Al Amarah’s most famous resident. During the Iran–Iraq war, she killed a dozen Iranian soldiers by blowing herself into tiny pieces alongside them. Over the years, the myth had perpetuated, and now the locals proudly boasted that she killed 1,000 Iranians. Kids who played around her in the daytime used to look up at her in awe. It summed up the city for us: a place that hero worships fat ugly suicide bombers.
As the minutes slowly ticked down to H hour in the perfect silence of those early morning hours, I got butterflies in my stomach. I wasn’t scared; I just really wanted the plan to work. After everything they’d done to us, we were desperate to see the OMS get some payback.
Three minutes after 2 a.m., we heard the first cracks of AK fire to the south.
‘Fucking get some of it, you wankers,’ whispered Ads to himself beside me. I clearly wasn’t alone in my feelings.
The armoured column was entering the city. After being caught napping the last time, the OMS now posted spotters at night. They soon roused the ranks, and within fifteen minutes all hell had broken loose again.
Lines of red tracer and the flashes of RPG rockets poured down on the convoy. But this time, it was taking no prisoners. I followed the convoy’s progress by listening in to its lead Challenger’s radio reports on my Clansman.
As each junction on the road was approached, enemy positions on or around them were hosed down by the tanks’ chain guns first, and then stormed by infantry dismounts in the back of the Warriors. Their job was to clear any remaining RPG nests and remove hidden booby traps the heavy vehicles couldn’t see. It was pure mechanized urban warfare, tanks and infantry working side by side to seize a town by its short and curlies.
‘Enemy destroyed, Red 6 clear,’ reported the tank commander. ‘Dismounts loading up now. Proceeding to Red 7.’
And just as the Americans had promised, there circling high above the convoy as it made steady progress north were the two Spectre gunships.
The Spectre crews really earned their pay that night. To the battle group, they were worth their weight in gold. The permanent low pitched drone of their four propeller engines was constantly reassuring. We couldn’t see the convoy itself, but we knew exactly where they were from where the Spectres laid down their devastating fire. As long as the OMS men weren’t shooting from civilian houses, they would pulverize them as soon as they were stupid enough to show themselves.
