‘Hi, Danny. I’m fine.’
‘Right shit hole this, isn’t it, mate?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You going out on patrol today?’
‘Nah.’
‘Yeah, best leave it for a bit, eh, mate. No need to rush things is there?’ He didn’t reply. Instead, he carried on rocking backwards and forwards on the spot. There was no getting through to him. He was gone.
We felt desperately sorry for him. Neither was it a very good sight for the young toms. Just seeing him had got a few of them thinking, and we didn’t need that. It was the OC who eventually told him he had to go.
‘Look, Taff, we’re going to get you out of here. You’re clearly suffering. I’m going to get you back to England for a bit.’
‘Right, sir.’
‘Don’t take it as a slur on your character. You’re a good soldier, and you can come back when you feel ready.’
Taff was taken out down the usual chain as a medical casualty. When he got back to the UK, he immediately signed himself out of the army. In three months, he was a civvy. He didn’t even want to wait to get a proper medical discharge. We lost a good man. It was very sad for him, and very sad for the company. But nobody thought any worse of him, because it wasn’t his fault.
After Taff, the OC set up the trauma diary. It was a good idea and probably saved another ten Taffs in the company. Whenever a patrol had got into a contact, the first thing they’d do when they got back to Cimic was all go into a room with Major Featherstone and Dale. Then they’d talk through every little thing that happened, from the moment they left the front gate to the moment they came back in again. You could say anything you liked in it, from how you felt about killing somebody to how you’d shat your pants. Nobody was exempt, from privates to officers. Everything was aired in fine detail, so nothing could be suppressed.
It has to be said though that Taff was a rare exception. Most of the company became very adept at adjusting to whatever the OMS and their allies threw at us next. As for me, well, I just loved it. War fighting was what I had really wanted to do my whole career, and here I was at last getting a chance to do it in fucking spades. That’s how a lot of Sniper Platoon felt too. But that didn’t make us better men than Taff. It didn’t even make us better soldiers. It’s just that everybody is different.
Longy, however, had his own highly individual way of dealing with the rigours of Iraq. He masturbated. And he wanked like there was no tomorrow.
At just five foot four inches tall, Private Sean ‘Longy’ Long was the smallest bloke in the platoon — despite his surname. Hence the nickname was not a little bit ironic. He got a lot of abuse for his diminutive height, which he took very well. Another soldier aged just twenty, he was one of the platoon’s real characters, very popular and likeable. The only thing that let him down was his drinking capacity. He would always be the first to get totally shit- faced, so we had to look after him when we were out on the piss in Tidworth.
Longy got heavily mothered by Ads, who felt that someone so small needed looking after. Most of it was wind-up. Ads’s favourite line to Longy when out on patrol was, ‘Keep low, move fast.’ It had him in stitches every time.
Ads would also tell him, ‘Longy, I’m going to marry you. You’re so sweet.’
‘Fuck off Ads, you poof.’ That had Ads in fits every time too.
Longy’s masturbatory habits hadn’t been an issue in England. When he came to Iraq though, his capacity went through the roof. He would take a porn mag or a DVD player into the loos with him at least five or six times a day. After every patrol, he was straight in there without fail, sometimes without even taking his body armour off. He would emerge fifteen minutes later with a big smile on his face. The lad didn’t even have any shame at all. Ads had a regular line for those moments too.
‘You complete wanker, Longy!’
‘Yeah, fair one,’ he could only reply.
Then there was Louey and John Wedlock’s way of dealing with the stress.
Over a month had gone by since they went eyeball to eyeball on the front driveway. Word had started to go round the company that they’d even sorted out their differences. Word was wrong.
Major hostilities broke out suddenly one breakfast. Wedlock was in the corner of the cookhouse by the taps filling up half a dozen jerry cans of water. As Louey walked past, he couldn’t resist the usual quick dig.
‘Orr, hellor, Wedlock. Make sure you fill them all the way up to the top now.’
Perhaps there was something in Louey’s laid back Caribbean tones that morning that was particularly provocative. Maybe Wedlock was just having a bad morning. Whatever it was, he quickly stood up and punched Louey hard in the face twice.
Now John Wedlock’s punches aren’t those of a normal man. A proper connection was more than enough to smash a bloke’s jaw into small pieces. Louey swayed, but amazingly he managed to stay on his feet, and punched Wedlock back.
Louey landed one decent blow on him before the two giants locked arms in a furious grapple. At first they pressed each other up against the industrial-sized sink in a bid for one of them to fall into it. Then the wrestle spun them both round and they went careering straight into the long line of tables and chairs where most of the company were tucking into bacon and eggs.
Trays, plastic cups of juice, half-eaten eggs, toast, tables and chairs all went flying in every direction. Blokes desperately dived out of the way of the colossi as they smashed through everything in their way. Chris grabbed my arm and jerked me out of my seat as I had my back to the impending danger.
‘Get out the way, Danny, quick. I ain’t getting in between the Swede and that brute.’
Soon the cat calls were in full flow too. Soldiers either shouted ‘Swede!’ or ‘Lamp him John’, depending on which fighter’s platoon they were in.
Louey and Wedlock were in a heap of muscle on the floor in the middle of the room now. As one briefly gained the upper hand, he’d manage to release an arm just long enough to hurl down a horribly hard punch on the other. Then the roles were reversed.
After four minutes of all of us letting them go for it, a sergeant from a neutral platoon decided it was time to step in. He got a few decent right hooks for his trouble. Eventually, a total of sixteen blokes finally pulled them apart.
The whole disengagement process took roughly double the length of time of the actual fight. Louey and Wedlock were not easy men to pin down, and they made furious lunges for each other whenever they could break free of their restrainers. Each already sported huge lumps on their faces and badly cut knuckles.
‘I’ll fucking crucify you, Wedlock, you fucking scum,’ Louey spat at him.
‘Fuck you, Louey. I’ll fucking kill you first.’
I believed both of them.
Both were sent to see Dale. Instead of fining them as he would have done in Tidworth, he made them shake hands in front of him and told them to fucking well sort it out. If they wanted to take out their aggression on someone, do it on the enemy. They both told Dale it was just about the pressure everyone was under, living in a small confined space and all that. But we all knew the truth. It wouldn’t really matter if they were in a five-star spa hotel and retreat. They’d still want to smack seven bells out of each other.
The only other time fisticuffs looked likely at Cimic was between us and the CPA officials’ American bodyguards from Triple Canopy. It’s funny to think we then ended up becoming best muckers with some of them.
The initial antipathy was only to be expected. It went on for a good month. We didn’t just think they were tossers because they all pranced around like they could be straight off a film set, although that was bad enough. Every one of them permanently wore wraparound shades and a silly array of weapons off their belts they probably didn’t know how to really use. Worse than that, they acted like they were way above us in the food chain — some kind of elite military force.
Mostly it was just vicious looks at each other. But the tension finally came to a head over the showers.
Being smelly soldiers, we had always been banned from using the CPA and Triple Canopy’s ablutions Portakabins which were nicer than ours. Then the only one assigned to the company was put out of bounds because a blind mortar had landed in it. It meant technically the only place left for a hundred of us to wash and crap in were
