was pretty relaxed about it all though, and the rest of the battalion too far away to ever know.
It didn’t take the OMS long to get back to their daily mortar barrages at us. After a couple of weeks, we weren’t far away from the pre-Waterloo rate of incoming. The lunatics had found — or been given by Iran — a few more 82mm mortar tubes too. We knew how to handle mortars now, so our morale was still as strong as ever. But as time went on, they slowly began to degrade our surroundings. They also took away more of our liberties.
A couple more Snatches were consigned to the scrap heap. One was fragged almost out of recognition, and the second’s fuel tank exploded after being slit open by a piece of flying shrapnel. As the mortar fire was always the heaviest in the evening, it was decided to stagger the evening meal. Each platoon went to eat at a different hour. That cut down on big queues outside the cookhouse where a lucky round could have taken out ten of us at once.
The God of War was certainly looking down on us at Cimic too, because there were some unbelievable close shaves. The cook had the closest.
A quiet and modest, tall and skinny redhead, he was known to everyone as just ‘Chef’. He worked out of a proper little aluminium kitchen trailer full of stainless steel surfaces that had been brought in by the CPA. While preparing the evening meal one night, he left the trailer for thirty seconds to pop to the store room to collect some more veg. While he was outside, an 82mm mortar round came down and tore straight through his trailer’s roof and blew the thing up. There was twisted aluminium everywhere. Chef was the hero of Cimic that night, because he didn’t sit about complaining. Instead, he cleaned the place up as best as he could and still then managed to get the meal out. The next day a field kitchen under a green tent was brought in from Abu Naji. It offered no protection at all from mortar fire. But without even blinking, Chef moved into it and carried on as normal in there.
Then there was Ray. Private Chris ‘Ray’ Rayment from Mortar Platoon had the most uncanny knack of getting mortared everywhere he went. So much so, he became known as the Mortar Magnet. Every sangar he did sentry duty in would get a round landing either directly on top of it or just feet away. Ray would always emerge bruised and covered in dust, but otherwise unscathed.
Luckily, he had a great sense of humour about it too. He’d tell everybody to steer clear of him. And whenever he left his barracks room for a sentry shift, he’d say something like: ‘Right, that’s me off now, lads. If you hear Front Sangar getting mortared, don’t worry — it’s only me.’
Ray was a gobby little so and so. He never held back on giving you his opinion about what you were doing with a sharp bit of wit. But he had a heart of gold underneath it, and that made him one of the best-loved characters in the company. Ray was also a bit of a ladies’ man, and he never gave a hoot if they weren’t good looking. ‘Any hole’s a goal’ was his catchphrase. He was the perfect private soldier. You knew he’d always do what you’d ask of him and you never needed to check.
Three other blokes weren’t so lucky. They’d crept back into the prefab accommodation block one evening to get a good night’s kip away from the sweaty mass. They knew it was out of bounds now, but they risked it anyway. A mortar round came straight through the roof and fragged the lot of them. Only a few deep cuts and some bad bruising, nothing too serious. They didn’t get much sympathy though. It was the last time anyone tried that trick.
A political crisis in Maysan at the end of May played in the OMS’s favour. Their power thrived off anarchy, whereas ours would only grow with security.
Maysan’s governor Riyadh Mahood had got out of town fast after he was heavily implicated in the murder of his own chief of police. The copper ended up with a bullet in his face during a row with the governor and his brother Abu Hatim in a hospital foyer. Styling himself Lord of the Marshes, Abu Hatim was a senior tribal chief and for two decades had led a terrorist resistance force in the province against Saddam.
The brothers were obviously struggling with the whole idea of being statesmen rather than hoods after so long. The rumour was they’d gone to lie low in Baghdad. From then onwards, exactly who the new governor should be was hotly disputed by all and sundry, not least the OMS. Endless rows in the governing council made it harder for Molly Phee to get things done.
Soon afterwards, Route 6 down to Basra was put out of bounds to all routine military traffic. Ever more successful OMS bombs and ambushes made it impossible to pass down the road in any degree of safety. As it was our main supply line, that was a big headache. Everything — men, bombs, beans and bullets — had to come in and out by Hercules aircraft via the landing strip at Sparrowhawk. It was just like living in South Armagh during the worst of the Ulster Troubles. We were surrounded by bandit country in Maysan too.
Were we bothered though? Not a bit of it. For every new obstacle, we’d find a way of dealing with it. The more the OMS tried to fuck us over, the stronger our resolve became. It was the traditional plucky British spirit, and the lads throughout the whole company were always excellent like that.
It wasn’t just stubbornness. A newspaper article stuck up on the company noticeboard by some of my platoon typified the mood. Next to a particularly ugly photo of Moqtada al-Sadr, its headline read, ‘Rebel leader warns US: I am ready to face martyrdom’.
The lads had drawn crosshairs on Moqtada’s forehead and scrawled over it in marker pen, ‘British Snipers warn: We will help you get there!’
We grew to
15
The only real downer across the battle group, and it wasn’t a big one, was that we weren’t getting any write-ups back home. Concern had been slowly growing about why there was almost no media coverage in Britain about what we were doing in Al Amarah. At first, we couldn’t understand it. We’d been war fighting harder than the invasion force had to a year before, so why was no one interested?
It mattered most to the younger lads. When the newspapers arrived two weeks late (as they always did) for the dates over Pimlico and Waterloo, H was especially put out. Private Andy ‘H’ Hawkins was a good little soldier and always keen to impress. Like Smudge, he had a bit of an image thing. He came storming up to the roof clutching a brand new pile of papers. He hurled them down in disgust.
‘I’ve been through every single fucking one of these papers, and there’s not a fucking word about the PWRR in any of them. Not even a paragraph in the
Lads like H needed to know they were getting respect back home for being in that shit hole. They believed in Queen and Country and they wanted to go home heroes, so everyone in their local pub would want to buy them a drink.
They regularly scanned the Internet and watched Sky News for even the smallest passing reference, when the satellite dish hadn’t been blown down. But for months there was nothing.
The older ones among us worked it out soon enough. It was confirmed during a visit from the brigadier who was based down in Basra. The papers weren’t writing about us because they hadn’t a Scooby any of this was even going on. The MoD was doing an excellent job of simply not telling them. The government had local elections in June. The last thing they needed was pictures of big old tanks on the streets in southern Iraq.
With the kidnappings and beheadings of westerners in Iraq in full swing now, it was also far too dangerous for journalists to make their own way up to Al Amarah. They needed the military’s assistance. A TV crew from ITN had been flown up in early April, but the OMS had given their normal warm welcome and thrown a blast bomb at their convoy of Snatches. Nobody was injured, but they caught it all on tape and it made great viewing. That gave the sweaty-palmed media officers at Division thoroughly twisted knickers. No more press came up after that until long after the shooting was over.
We had to thank the MoD and their head-in-the-sand policy for one thing, though. It made calling home a hell of a lot easier. I’d only spoken to my girlfriend Sue once in the almost two months we’d been there. We’d all been so busy, I’d hardly had the chance. Everyone got twenty minutes’ free talk time a week on satellite phones. But you had to wait in a long queue and the satellite link was often awful.
I’d barely even given her any thought. Now that I did, it felt very strange. My mind went back to her cosy house in Catterick, the walks we used to take on the moors, the laughs we had in her local boozer. It all seemed a
