We also prided ourselves on dressing scruffily. Even in barracks, we’d walk around without rank slides and looked generally unkempt, because that’s how we performed our special trade. We would patter around with our shirts hanging out, sleeves not rolled up and our hair and sideburns worn long. And we didn’t wear twisters in our trousers, which meant they extended down to cover most of our boots.
But we were scruffy for a good military reason. We don’t like washing our field clothes because we’ve got to smell like the ground we’re operating in. If you try and hide out in the long grass stinking of Persil, you won’t last for very long. And gaping big black leather boots aren’t great camouflage, unless you’re trying to hide on top of a tarmac road.
That makes us loathed by the Regimental Sergeant Majors the world over. They don’t like snipers because we tend not to give much of a shit about the things that really bother them. RSMs want everyone to be as smart as a pin, with shiny buttons and boots. But we’re not interested in that, because it doesn’t make you shoot any better.
Snipers have two textbook roles in modern warfare. The first is reconnaissance. Along with the Recce Platoon, snipers are the eyes and ears of the battle group. We obtain intelligence by either covert or long-distance observation, to build up a picture of the enemy’s strength and movements. Sometimes hard information can be a lot more powerful than firing bullets. You can report back tank or troop positions, and get them destroyed by artillery without even giving your position away.
The second is to take out priority targets. Our job is to cause disruption to the enemy’s battle plans and the way that they’re fighting in the best way we can. Top of the list is always the enemy’s command elements, their senior officers. That leaves them leaderless and sows confusion. The lowest priority is the humble soldier, because losing one or two of them won’t have any effect on the enemy attack. But if they’re the only targets that pop up, then you’ll kill them all the same.
We’re trained to operate anywhere, from behind your own lines, no man’s land or even well behind enemy lines to disrupt the rear. We’re always the first out, and the last in. But gone are the days of the lone sniper out in the middle of nowhere doing his own thing. Nowadays it’s all down a lot more to specific tasks in patrol groups of two, four or eight men, and sometimes the whole platoon.
Our adage is one shot, one kill. Nowhere is it truer that a miss is as good as a mile than in our business. It’s more than just a matter of personal pride. If you miss, it gives the target a chance to kill you another day.
Modern-day snipers work in pairs. A shooter and a spotter. The shooter is known as the Number One. He controls the weapon, from setting up to pulling the trigger. The Number Two finds targets for him, double checks his wind and distance calculations, and covers his arse.
The elite of the platoon were the seven qualified and badged Number Ones — me, Daz, Chris, Fitz, Ads, Longy and Oost. Everyone was trained to shoot. But if there was ever the option, the Number Ones would be the trigger men. The Number Twos were Smudge, Rob, Ben, H, Sam, DV, Des and Pikey. As mine would always be the first name on the top of the platoon admin lists, I was known in military shorthand as Sniper One.
In those first few weeks after Colonel Maer dropped the bombshell of Iraq, Tidworth was a feeding frenzy of speculation on what the tour might be like. We’d latch on to the smallest nugget of gossip like it was a revelatory message from the stars.
Dale, our Company Sergeant Major, came up with one of the best in the Sergeant’s Mess one night.
Conspiratorially, he glanced over his shoulder and then leaned in towards me at the bar.
‘’Ere, Danny, I hear the CO’s done his sums. If the current tempo of events stays the same, he reckons about one in five members of the battalion is going to get into a decent contact at some stage during the tour.’
A decent contact in our books meant a reasonably sized firefight.
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. And Abu Naji got mortared three days in a row last week too. But be careful with those little nuggets, mate, because we don’t want to scare the hens, now do we?’
He’d meant to be all grave and serious about his prized information. But when I turned to look him straight in the eye, even Dale couldn’t resist a big cheesy grin. He was just as excited as the rest of us, despite his position, and we had a bit of a schoolboy giggle to ourselves.
WO2 Dale Norman was the most senior NCO in Y Company, and by far its most respected member, officer or otherwise.
A father of three from Portsmouth, he was known as Mr Unflappable — the coolest cucumber in town. Dale was a big stocky lad, and was famed for his bone crunchingly hard hand shake. He also had a big deep voice just like Frank Bruno’s and always spoke naturally slowly, which gave him an immediate air of authority. Whenever he said ‘fucking’ though, it always came out as ‘faarkin’.
He was also a good mate of mine. We’d been in the same battalion for almost twenty years. We’d gone through most of our careers together, grown up together. He never asked me to call him sir, which I should have by the book, and he was always up for a chat when I needed it.
After Christmas leave, we went straight into three hard months of operational training under the supervision of a unit called OPTAG (Operational Training and Advisory Group), the army’s experts on life on operations. It was the routine package, a refresher course for all the military skills tailormade to suit southern Iraq. That meant helicopter drills, patrolling, vehicle checkpoint drills, riots, casualty evacuation, some basic Arabic. And a lot of smiling.
‘Iraqis are used to soldiers with guns kicking shit out of them,’ one of the instructors used to say. ‘The way we prove we’re different from Saddam’s mob is by smiling. That way they’ll know we’re not going to hurt them.’
‘So smile, you fuckers.’
We’d smile on patrol. We’d smile at checkpoints. We’d even smile jumping out of the helicopter. We smiled so fucking much our mouths would be in agony by the end of every day.
I pushed the platoon hard on the series of work-up exercises in Canada and Salisbury Plain. Iraq was a dangerous place, British soldiers were still being killed there regularly. So I reckoned I had a duty of care to give my guys the best chance possible of surviving.
There was initially some debate about whether we would even be taking our longs. Someone in the head shed had thought most of the kit Y Company used would appear a little aggressive for a peacekeeping tour. The locals would get upset if they saw us with too many pointy things. In the end, the CO agreed on a compromise — the mortars would stay in Tidworth, but the sniper rifles could come out. What we didn’t know was that mortars were just what we needed.
2
The Hercules touched down with a heavy thump on the tarmac of Basra Air Station. The pilot threw its propellers into reverse, roaring and jolting everyone forward. We’d been swapped from the Tristar to the army’s old workhorse in Qatar because the comfy passenger jet didn’t have the defensive-aid suite to land safely against the surface-to-air missile threat in Basra.
It was just after half past nine in the morning on 7 April — a year to the day since the city had fallen to the British invasion force.
Everyone had been wearing full body armour and helmets since we had crossed over the Iraqi border. As soon as the loadies opened up the doors, the warm air permeated the plane drowning out its air conditioning in a few seconds. Even without the extra weight on us, stepping out into it felt like walking into a furnace. It was still only mid-spring, but the ground temperature had already reached 40°C. From the dark interior of the Herc, Basra’s bright sunlight was blinding. And within five minutes, I was covered from head to toe in a proper sweat.
The first sight I saw was the happy smiles of some soldiers from the 1st Battalion, the Light Infantry, lined up to get on the plane we had just got off. They were the unit in Al Amarah we were going to replace. They were going home, and our arrival was the final confirmation of that. And the joy was plastered all over their faces.
As we filed by into the terminal building, one called out: ‘Hello, lads, nice to see you.’ Another asked: ‘How long you boys got here then? Six months is it? Oh dear, that is a shit sandwich, isn’t it. Did you know I’m flying out today?’
