number of OMS men. It was typical Ops Room stuff. I couldn’t blame Redders though. It was proving hard enough for me to keep up with the battle with the speed it was changing, let alone someone miles away with just the odd radio message and map to go on.
‘Yes, thanks for that Zero. I will extract south once the three fucking machine-gun posts there have been destroyed. Sorry if we didn’t have time to mention that.’
Another voice over the net. It was Captain Simon Doyle, commander of Recce Platoon who was out leading our sister patrol that night. When he first heard the Dshkes open up, he was over a mile away at the other end of town. He had immediately got on the radio to me to say he was coming down to help us.
‘Danny, this is Alpha Two Zero. We’re getting pretty close to you now. Sorry, mate. Had a fairly big enemy contact on our way. If you can extract back up the street the way you came into it, we’ll cover you from the main road a bit further down it to the west.’
Top news. Captain Doyle was ready and waiting to clear our escape route to the north. Simon was the total opposite of Redders — a quiet but highly confident officer, and a very good commander. He’s just the sort of person you want with you in the shit. So when he said he was there to cover our arse, I believed him.
It was time to go.
‘Prepare to move!’
The lads slipped into pairs ready to fire and manoeuvre up the street. Then, a terrified little whiney voice came over the PRRs.
‘Danny, Danny? Danny, where are you?’ It was OPTAG Pinky.
‘I’m here, you muppet.’ I looked around. He and Perky were nowhere to be seen. ‘Hang on, where the fuck are you?’
‘Danny, don’t leave us. We’ve got to get the fuck out of here.’
I had totally forgotten about Pinky and Perky. Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen them since the start of the contact. Then, a door in the wall on the opposite side of the street to the cemetery opened up, and Pinky and Perky crawled out of it. They completely disregarded my orders to get behind the cemetery wall and ducked into the nearest hiding place instead. They’d been lying in the shrubs of the garden ever since, trying to pretend they were geraniums.
I gaped in disbelief at the sorry sight as they crawled up next to me.
‘Jesus Christ, Danny. How long’s it been like this for?’
Chris answered before I could. ‘Since we got off the fucking plane. You can get up off your knees now.’
They’d got the contact they said they really wanted all right. After all their banter, they hadn’t even fired a single shot.
We set off for the rendezvous point with Captain Doyle just under a mile away, putting rounds down at flash targets on rooftops or around street corners that tried to open up on us. As we ran, I told Major Tait to take out the street lights to obscure our movement from the enemy fire. With another Benson and Hedges smouldering away through his schoolboy grin, he took to the task with relish and barely missed a single one. The irony that his day job in Al Amarah was to supervise its rebuilding wasn’t lost on him.
An OMS bullet passed through H’s trouser leg opening up a small cut. Other than that, we reached Captain Doyle unscathed. Both patrols then tracked the rest of the way down Nasiriyah Street together to meet two Warriors sent out to pick us up waiting at a prearranged junction.
Unfortunately, the Warriors were parked up under some street lights. Major Tait frightened the hell out of their crews by dashing straight up to the vehicles and hosing down the street lights with an extra long burst of automatic SA80. His blood was still up and he was loving it.
‘OK, Mr Tait, no more street lights, thanks. I think we’ve done enough now.’
‘Nae fuckin’ bother, Danny. Wha’er you say.’
As we mounted up, we could already hear the whine of ambulance sirens coming from the direction of the cemetery. At least we’d done them a bit of damage too.
Back at Cimic, Captain Doyle and I went up to the Ops Room to check in. Among other things, I had to report that my twelve-man patrol had fired 512 rounds from SA80s, 330 Minimi rounds, and five UGLs. When we walked in, Redders was nowhere to be seen. Puzzled, we asked one of the company signallers reclining on a swing chair for his whereabouts. He just smiled.
‘I’m under here, chaps,’ Redders himself replied. And there he was, with helmet and full body armour on, crouching under his desk with the radio handset in his hand. The odd mortar had fallen outside, but he was rigged up for a full-on nuclear strike. The poor sod was stuck in that room with nowhere else to go all day long; it was obviously beginning to get to him.
I took off my body armour and shirt to show Dale the bruise where I’d been shot. The golf ball bit had gone down, but it was now the size of a grapefruit and full of deep pinks and purple.
Dale and I inspected my kit to work out the mystery of what had happened. The round had torn up the strap of my brand new day sack I’d got from the Triple Canopy mail order catalogues. It had only just arrived, and at the cost of $70 too. I forgot all that once I realized it could also have saved my life. The thick rubber strap had slowed down the bullet considerably, before it then passed through the thin cotton cover of my body armour, its rubber interior, out again, and then through my shirt. Then, as Dale discovered, that’s where it had lodged, in the inside of my body armour with just its sharp lead nose poking through.
I was dumbstruck.
‘Faarkin’ ’ell, Danny. How did you escape that one, eh?’
He worked the round out with his thumb and finger tip. ‘You want to keep that, Danny. Show it to the grandchildren one day.’
I popped it in my pocket as a good luck charm, chuffed to bits with the best tour souvenir out of everyone so far.
‘Anyone got a camera?’
The next day, Ken Tait was summoned to see Major Featherstone. The OC had heard about his street light antics and wasn’t hugely impressed. Poor old Ken got a major bollocking and was banned from going out on any more foot patrols. He was heartbroken.
Pinky and Perky were strangely quiet. Nor did they ask to come out on any more patrols with Sniper Platoon. They left a couple of days later with a pair of badly damaged egos, but some very full notebooks.
After most large contacts, the boys and I would always be keen for a battle damage assessment to see how well we’d faired against the OMS. The run-in with the Dshkes was no exception, so we did our normal trick of skirting by the city’s main hospital on our next daylight patrol.
The Victoria Hospital (more of our colonial heritage) was just before Yugoslav Bridge on the south side of the Tigris. It was where all the OMS casualties were taken, dead or alive. Whenever they had a few men in there, the OMS leadership would post an armed guard on the hospital gate. They were sure we’d try to pop over to finish them off. We never went inside the hospital, because we could always get what we needed off the guard. It was also terrific fun winding him up.
‘Hello, knobhead,’ Pikey announced, after we crept up on him. Terrified, he tried to unsling his AK from his shoulder but just ended up dropping it. He was a scrawny looking little scumbag in his early twenties. A nobody foot soldier.
‘Don’t worry, we’re not going to shoot you. Just come for a chat. How many OMS men in today?’
The guard scowled at us from behind the bars of the metal gate. We’d seen this one before here and we knew he spoke just enough crappy English to understand us. Pikey gave it another go.
‘Sadr men. Britani jundi shoot how many?’
Conspiratorially, he looked over his shoulder to make sure nobody was watching, before replying in hushed tones, ‘Seventeen. Eleven wounded, six dead.’
Excellent. It had been a good night’s work after all. A look behind the guard at the hospital’s emergency entrance confirmed what he told us. The ground was littered with fresh blood-soaked dressings and discarded IV drips that none of the staff had had a chance to clear up yet.
‘Ooh. Oh dear, knobhead. Looks like we smacked your arse again,’ Pikey continued.
‘But we kill Britani jundi commander.’
‘No, you didn’t. He’s right here,’ pointing to me.
That really confused him. The OMS guy had obviously seen me talking on the radio or giving orders, and then
