inside got up to 80°C. Regular checks would also have to be made on the Warrior drivers on guard at Cimic’s gates. They’d pass out having to sit in the front compartment next to the hot engine block.
Generally speaking, the lads will put up with anything as long as you’ve got a nice cool room to come back to at the end of the day. But with the accommodation blocks still out of bounds, we didn’t even have that. It was still dozens of blokes crammed into every Cimic room, hot-bedding, tripping over each other, and with the place permanently shrouded in a smelly thick cloud of body odour and sweaty socks.
Sleep became ever harder at night. No matter how knackered you were, you’d always wake up in a pool of sweat after no more than an hour or two — even wearing just your jockeys on top of your sleeping bag. It was hard to believe we had July and August — traditionally Iraq’s hottest months — still to come.
News came through that there had been two weeks of nonstop rain in Hampshire. We marvelled at what that must feel like. It hadn’t rained since we’d stepped off the plane.
Great little morale boosts came along from time to time that would make the heat bearable.
‘Front Sangar to Ops Room,’ came the excited message one day over the PRRs. ‘Anyone for a jolly little punt?’
An eight-tonne truck had just turned up among a resupply convoy loaded with two brand new Mark 5 rigid raider patrol boats on the back of it. The OC had put a request in for them, but nobody believed they would ever arrive. The Mark 5s are the small flat things the Royal Marines use. Every time we wanted to go over to the north bank, we’d have to cross Yugoslav Bridge. The only other alternative was going through Aj Dayya and that wasn’t sensible. Our enemy had realized that, so the bridge became their shooting alley with us as the tin ducks. The boats were great, because they allowed us another discreet infiltration over the Tigris from Cimic without even having to step out of the front gate.
We heard that, by the beginning of June, the battle group had killed a total of 280 enemy fighters in Al Amarah since our arrival. That was an average of almost five a day. Of course, it was a tiny fraction compared to the final sum. Not bad for a couple of months’ work though.
At another O Group, it was also announced that Bravo One had taken a bullet in the kidney. That got a particularly big cheer. Bravo One was the codename we had given to the head of the Al Amarah OMS. His name was Saad e Mar. He was in his forties, had a big black beard, big eyes and big ears. He carried a grenade and pistol on him at all times, even in bed. He was wanted by the coalition for all sorts, and we’d been told to kill or capture him if we ever got the opportunity.
He was also a big figure in the Mehdi Army nationally, and had been at some hoods’ meeting in Najaf when they had got into a gunfight with the Americans. Sadly, he was still living to tell the tale. Patrols were all cancelled for a day as we kicked in the doors of three different houses to nick him on his sickbed. He was nowhere to be seen. We just missed him at one, and he’d escaped by vaulting a back fence. I only hoped that opened up his stitches again.
The best morale boost of all came thanks to a full colonel’s arrival one day in Cimic. He’d been sent out to see us all the way from Permanent Joint Headquarters in Northwood. As more and more contact reports filtered back to them, the generals back in London had begun to appreciate the level of combat intensity we were engaged in. They thought it was time to give us a bit more of a level playing field against the OMS.
All the patrol commanders were told to report to Cimic’s briefing room in the main building. The OC and Dale were there too. Sitting crosslegged on a chair was the colonel. Tall, with greying hair and cold blue eyes, he had a huge natural air of authority. Not someone you’d fuck with in a hurry. He addressed all of us.
‘First of all chaps, well done. What you’ve been doing out here hasn’t gone unnoticed, I assure you. It’s not what any of us had expected, admittedly. However, you’ve responded terrifically. The chiefs have huge admiration for you, and I have been asked to pass that on.
‘The real reason I’m here though is to talk about the rules of engagement. Let’s cut to the chase. You’re war fighting out here, without anyone saying it’s war fighting. What we need to know is whether you feel you can still get the job done under the existing rules. Do you have any questions about them?’
We discussed a series of different scenarios. In a normal gunman-versus-soldier situation, we told him we felt no restrictions. They were clearly endangering life so we could kill them. Other areas were a lot greyer. The OMS knew our rules as well as we did. They exploited that knowledge mercilessly, as Ads’s experience with the mortar teams crossing Yugoslav Bridge showed.
The tactic that really wound us up was their regular use of unarmed men to guide mortar or RPG fire on to us in Cimic. The fuckers would stand right out in the open within easy range, knowing we couldn’t shoot them. They were clearly men of authority. They’d use their position to openly orchestrate the battle and work out exactly where we were so their fire would be more accurate. We’d given them the Northern Ireland name for the scrotes who did the same thing for the IRA — dickers.
I put one scenario to the colonel that I’d witnessed on May Day while over watching Private Beharry’s abandoned Warrior.
‘How about this one, sir? An unarmed dicker in normal civvies popped out of an alleyway in front of Cimic, kneeled down in an RPG firing position, and pretended to pull the imaginary launcher’s trigger while pointing at the Warrior. A couple of seconds later, a couple of RPG warheads came flying down into the thing from out of our view. The unarmed bloke gave a thumbs-up to his mates, and fucked off. What should we do about that?’
‘Shoot him.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. He is showing just as much intent to endanger life as the RPG man himself. He is just as guilty of the action. A dicker can be a legitimate threat, so he can be a legitimate target too.’
‘What, even if he’s unarmed?’
‘I’m not encouraging wanton killing and recklessness, Sergeant. Threat to life is still the governing principle, and that must be very clear.’
The colonel smiled. ‘But nowhere in the ROE does it say you can’t shoot unarmed people.’
Something very interesting happened in that room. Without actually openly saying so, the colonel had completely rewritten our rules of engagement. He had given us tacit permission to shoot unarmed civilians if and when we felt it necessary. That was proper war fighting ROE, and it was unheard of for the sort of tour we were supposed to be on. It also had been done without ministers having to tell parliament and cause a big hullabaloo across the liberal sections of the media. The colonel was a pretty senior guy, but it wouldn’t have been his call. That would have had to come all the way down from the top.
The date of his visit was 6 June, the sixtieth anniversary of the D Day landings. It was fitting, because what he said was a liberation for us too. It was exactly what we had needed. Of course, the relaxation didn’t mean that we went straight out to drop a load of twelve-year-olds for chucking stones at us. But it did give us the ability to blunt a few of the enemy’s subsequent attacks; attacks after all that had only one intention, to kill us.
The next unarmed dicker the lads managed to get a bead on got quite a surprise.
He was spotted a few days later, in the middle of a series of concerted mortar strikes. The base plate was well out of our view from Cimic. Five mortar rounds were launched during the first volley, landing in and around the compound. Longy and Des were spotting for Oost. They’d already seen a shady-looking character watching us from a wall on the other side of the dam to the west. In his late twenties, with short wavy black hair and a neat goatee beard, he was carrying binoculars and a radio.
Longy brought Oost on to the wall 600 metres away, and the South African calmly waited for the second mortar volley to start. Sure enough, when the dicker popped up again to have a good look and radio in where the new rounds were landing, they knew they’d got their man. He was leaning out from behind the wall with the top half of his body and his right leg exposed. Oost pumped a 7.62mm green spot straight into the right side of his ribcage. It tore his insides out, and he dropped like a stone.
‘That’ll teach him,’ said Oost as he looked up from his L96’s sight. ‘You should have seen the look on that twat’s face.’
The kill had a substantial effect on the dicking. The OMS spotters wound their necks in pretty sharpish. Word spread that if you tried it on now, you were going to get your head blown off. It made their mortar aiming harder which meant more fell off target. They soon compensated by upping the rate of rounds to increase the probability of landing some in the right place.
The other visit we got from the UK at that time was a delegation from OPTAG. Two of their senior sergeants came out to do a routine inspection of the company to see if their teaching back in Kent needed any updating. Being
