the three showers and three toilets in the prefab accommodation blocks.
Bollocks to that. We’ll use what’s left. So we started going into the Triple Canopy Portakabin for a shower instead. If they were real soldiers, they wouldn’t give a shit. But they did. Petty little notices started appearing on the door that read ‘Triple Canopy Only — NOT for Y Company use’. The fucking cheek of it. They were sleeping safe at night because we were out protecting their arses. So if we wanted a shower, we’d fucking have one. We ignored the notices, and ripped them down as we went in for the next shower.
For days they didn’t have the bollocks to say anything to our faces. Then one day, Chris was just drying himself down after a particularly nice shower in the Triple Canopy facility, when one of their biggest blokes walked in. He was very thickset, with bright red hair and a goatee beard.
Chris carried on like he hadn’t a care in the world.
‘Hey, Limey.’
At that, Chris spun round to face the redhead. He was ready for the inevitable punch-up.
‘Yes, Yank, I’m in your fucking showers. What are you going to do about it?’
‘That tattoo on your leg, man. You a sniper?’
‘Yeah. What the fuck’s it to you?’
‘I used to be a sniper in the US Marine Corps. Recon.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Yeah, really. Hold your horses, man, as we say in Texas. We got something in common.’
‘Well, my mum lives in Texas, so we’ve got two things in common. Sorry about your showers.’
‘Ah, fuck it. We’re mean sons-of-bitches for not letting you use them anyway.’
The redhead stuck out his shovel-sized hand. ‘The name’s Rob, but everyone calls me Red Rob round here. And you’ve got a small dick, man.’
Red Rob and Chris bonded right there and then. Once in the sniper brotherhood, forever in it. Within a minute they were discussing the finer points of various sniper rifles the world over. To us, being a sniper transcended anything.
The shower summit broke the ice between our two groups. Once we got talking to them, it turned out most of the Triple Canopy team were pretty good lads. There were a total of three snipers among their team. As well as Red Rob, CK was an ex-SWAT sniper from the Atlanta Police in Georgia, and Harry was a Paddy who’d served as a sniper in the British Army’s Royal Irish Regiment.
One night, Chris invited all three of them up onto the roof to have a look at how we did business.
‘Have a shot if you want, lads.’
Americans need no encouragement to start shooting at things, and the Triple Canopy lads never went anywhere without their highly customized weapons — which were perfect for the job. The favourite among them was an AK47 with a folding butt, fitted with brand new US-made telescopic sights.
All three of them were chomping at the bit. That night, it was just the few warning shots that we needed to put down to scare a few shady characters off. But the next night, Red Rob, CK and Harry came up to the roof again, and they got a kill.
It was one of the OMS’s most persistent RPG men, who had been floating around on the north bank taking us on whenever he could for the past few days. Of course, being Yanks, the kill led to a whole load of back slapping, high fiving and air pumping.
‘Get some! Who’s your Daddy?’ they bawled out into the darkness.
From then onwards, the boys came up in their free time whenever they could. Not only did we enjoy their company, but they were very welcome extra pairs of hands too when it got busy up there. None of them had lost their aim either.
When it was quiet, we just swapped war stories and obsessed over the pros and cons of our rival weapons systems; the two primary topics of soldiers bonding the world over.
Most of their armoury was Russian- or Chinese-made and had been taken off dead or captured insurgents. They’d even managed to get their hands on a Draganov sniper rifle, which they brought up one night for Chris and I to drool over. In turn, having never seen them before, the Yanks were fascinated by our SA80s.
Unfortunately, their Iraq stories were by and large better than ours, as it turned out most of them had been out for almost a year.
There were thousands of Red Robs all over the country. The fall of Saddam’s regime and the arrival of the American one prompted the biggest goldrush in the close protection industry’s entire history. Every foreign administrator, engineer or electrician needed protecting, and often by a ratio of at least four to one. They were a whole private army. And because of where their constant travelling took them they often got into more scraps than regular coalition forces. In the old days, they’d be called mercenaries. Now, they were professional security consultants.
The deal the Triple Canopy lads were on was that they’d work six weeks, and then go home to the US for six weeks. Nice life. We had seven months in the sandpit, with a poxy two weeks for our home leave. And they got paid triple our wage. They couldn’t say they were serving the Queen though. Just the Queen of Maysan.
On another occasion, Red Rob brought up his laptop to show us his home movie war clips. Many he’d downloaded off the Internet, but an impressive amount were his own. In his time, he’d accrued quite a collection. He’d filmed his pride and joy two weeks before we arrived. It was a thirty-second clip of an OMS man creeping up to Cimic’s front gate to throw a blast bomb over the walls. Just as the insurgent sprang up to deliver his package, he was shot dead on the spot with a bullet in the chest.
‘That was Jimmy’s shot,’ Red Rob explained with pride. ‘From the roof of the Pink Palace too, on an AK with just iron sights. Not bad for a geriatric.’
Jimmy hair’s was entirely grey, along with his beard. Because he also wore blue denim dungarees, we’d nicknamed him Uncle Jesse, like the old fella in
‘Yeah, right. How old do you couple of Limeys think he is?’
‘Uncle Jesse? At least ninety-four,’ teased Chris.
‘Get outta here, man! He’s fifty-nine. Saw active service in Vietnam, US Marine Corps too like me. Even witnessed the final pull-out from Saigon in ’75. Yup, fifty-nine and still going strong. Not bad for an old timer, eh? Puts your young pups in their place, don’t it?’
Our night sessions led on to all sorts of inter-unit activities. The meat heads in the company were invited to have a ‘bench off’ with their meat heads; that is, who could bench-press most weight on the machines by the pool. Louey was our star performer, despite professing to never using a weight machine in his life. Having beaten off all the other Triple Canopy competition, he finally lost to an absolute house of a bloke called Jedd, who was almost as wide as he was tall.
Then there were the obligatory photo snaps we’d take posing up with each other, to show to the folks back home. As the two founding fathers of the love-in between our tribes, Chris and Red Rob insisted on posing up together all over the compound. In the daylight, we also gave each other long and detailed lessons in assembling and disassembling our own weapons as well as how best to use them.
It was an off-the-cuff remark from Red Rob though that ended up doing more for our morale than anything else on the tour. He wanted to show his gratitude for a particularly good night’s shooting.
‘Any extra kit you guys need, you just ask, all right? We get all our stuff via mail order.’
‘Oh right, do you? Thanks very much. Can we have a look at your catalogue, then?’
We might have mercilessly taken the piss out of them for it, but the truth is no soldier can ever have too much kit. Our carping was just pure jealousy. For days, we pored over their catalogues like kiddies in a sweet shop.
We sent off for ultra comfy Desert Fox boots, Wiley-X blast-proof sunglasses, sniper’s fingerless gloves, Camelback water holders, US Marine Corps webbing, Sure-Fire torches to clip onto our rifle barrels, US Army T- shirts, day sacks, and knee pads. We just couldn’t get enough of it.
The item I was particularly chuffed about was a double magazine clip. It held two magazines together, and meant you could pop a fresh one into the rifle once the first was empty without having to fumble around in your webbing. It saved valuable seconds and proved ever handier as time went on.
Soon enough, we began to look just like Red Rob and his mates. With our longs in our hands, only our camouflage trousers still identified us as regular British Army. The RSM would have blown a gasket. Featherstone
