the arrogant sods that they were, the two sergeants didn’t initially believe it did. They soon changed their minds.
16
Sniper Platoon was landed with taking the OPTAG sergeants out on our patrols for a day. Between us, we nicknamed them Pinky and Perky because after a morning in the hot sun, they looked like two little burnt red sausages.
Pinky and Perky were very gung-ho. They’d escaped their dull jobs in England for a few days and they wanted to see a bit of the enemy. That afternoon, we took them out on a long patrol right through the north bank. We walked bloody miles, it was bloody hot, but all we were attacked by was a pack of rabid dogs. Pinky and Perky were not very impressed. They also knew how to wind us up.
‘Come on, Danny, I thought you lot were supposed to be in the thick of it out here?’ goaded Pinky, who came from a posh Guards regiment. ‘Can’t you get us some action, war boy?’
They came out with us that night too. We were tasked with a joint patrol along with a multiple from Recce Platoon to show a presence around the houses of two local civilian workers in camp who had been threatened by the OMS. We set off in different directions on one loop of the town centre, and agreed to meet up in the middle.
Our very own Glasgow TA action man Major Ken Tait asked if he could come along too. Ken always jumped at any opportunity to get away from his desk. His experience with us during our first contact always made him a welcome addition.
On the streets, there were a lot of people out drinking and making merry. That was unusual, but we were told it was because a big wedding was going on in the direction we were heading. We turned west on to Nasiriyah Street, which links the Blue route with the Yellow route, and then south into a smaller less well lit road that led down alongside an old cemetery to the left.
I was looking forward to catching a glimpse of the dirty great big Iraqi bride. Instead, the road was totally empty and silent. The worst of all combat indicators. Somewhere ahead in the darkness at the end of the street, we heard a group of men run across our path, exchanging urgent whispers.
‘Standby, standb—’
I had just about enough time to get a quick warning out before the whole fucking world erupted.
A terrifying low-pitched pounding noise opened up to our left. At the same time, the top of the high brick wall next to our right shoulders began to disintegrate. A long burst of heavy machine-gun fire was ripping just over our heads and turning the wall’s upper brickwork to dust. Then, another similar hellish din opened up from a rooftop directly to our right.
They were Dshkes, a Russian-made beast of a thing that fires half-inch calibre rounds and was designed to bring down helicopters. If one of them hit your arm, it would take it right off. If it hit your body, you’d have an entry and exit hole the size of a dinner plate. And if the gunner had aimed just a fraction lower, he would have blown Pikey and my heads off. I’d never seen anything like it.
The whole patrol cowered down as the lefthand Dshke demolished a 20-metre-long strip of the wall. A flying chip of brick lodged in OPTAG Perky’s cheekbone, opening up a little cut. The gun was positioned 200 metres away on the roof of a big white house that adjoined a mosque. Between the mosque and us was the cemetery.
Though the Dshke gunner on the rooftop to our right was far closer, his fire was slapping into the road further away from us as he struggled to traverse the huge tripod-mounted weapon’s arcs into a tighter angle onto us.
I made a split-second call, and decided the most dangerous fire was coming from the mosque.
‘Everybody to the left side of the road. Take cover behind the cemetery wall!’
We sprinted over as one. Without me saying a word, Ads stopped and turned around in the middle of the road. With balls of steel, he raised his SA80 to his shoulder and lined up the Dshke gunner just above us in his sights. Five seconds later, as the gunner desperately tried to bring his rounds on to Ads, he was dropped with two single shots.
‘Target down,’ Ads announced, as he joined the rest of us, cool as a cucumber.
It was the most professional enemy ambush we had yet encountered. And it damn near worked. But half the immediate threat had been neutralized, thanks to Ads, and we could now take these bastards on. Half a dozen AKs also opened up on us from the mosque area. The drills were well practised by this stage and I didn’t need to say a word. Calmly, the lads started peering over the cemetery wall and putting rounds back at the muzzle flashes.
We could hear OMS men on the far side of the cemetery cutting about, so I found the entrance along our wall and kicked the sheet-metal gate open.
‘Two Minimis on the ground in here!’
That set up a proper stable firing position to stop any of the fuckers creeping up on us through the gravestones. We also started slamming UGL rounds at the remaining Dshke. Sam eventually silenced it with a fantastically well-aimed grenade that exploded just a few feet from it. The boys whooped with delight.
‘Gunman on the rooftop to the south,’ screamed Des. As he spoke he spun around, engaged and dropped the enemy fighter at the far end of the street who was trying to outflank us.
I jogged back up the wall to the cemetery gate. As I’d ducked down to peer into it again to assess the scene, some very loud automatic fire opened up from right behind me.
Everything suddenly slowed down. To my immediate right, a patch of the wall was getting eaten. Holes in the brickwork were rapidly appearing amid little puffs of dust. They were getting closer to me. That’s when I realized.
My anti-clockwise swivel to face the loud noise only got halfway. Instead, I was instantaneously picked up and hurled through the air, landing in a heap ten feet into the cemetery past the Minimi line, with a searing pain in my left shoulder.
The best analogy to getting shot is being kicked hard by a well-built mule. Forget all that crap about forgetting to feel pain. It really fucking hurts. By the time I’d worked out what had happened and managed to scramble into cover, my whole shoulder had begun to numb up.
‘Danny’s down, Danny’s hit,’ the frantic shout went down the gun line.
Nothing. What the bollocks? All I felt was my intact skin and the bone underneath it, and a lump the size of a golf ball rapidly growing. Mighty bizarre. Doesn’t matter, no time to think about it now. What was more important was that we now had enemy on three of our four sides.
As I crawled out of the cemetery and ducked down next to him, Longy was busy engaging the bloke who shot me. I was still confused, but my savvy was returning.
‘I thought you was dead, you fucker.’
‘So did I, Longy. Fuck knows what happened there.’
‘Some peacekeeping tour, eh.’
Redders came on the radio from the Ops Room insisting to talk. Unfortunately, he wasn’t winning the three- dimensional chess game that night.
‘Alpha One Zero Alpha, this is Zero. I’ve looked at the map. You mustn’t proceed any further in the direction of the mosque. That area is out of bounds.’
Yes, as well as full of enemy trying to kill us.
‘Please extract to the south, Dan.’
Excellent. To the south, Des and the others were locked in a full-pitched gunfight with an ever growing
