the middle of the night without telling anyone. We’re in Cimic on our own from now on.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘Guess what. Fucking Red Rob didn’t even say goodbye. Some mate.’
It wasn’t Red Rob’s fault. To prevent any triumphal terrorist attack on them, Molly Phee and her entire entourage had pulled out of Al Amarah back to Baghdad in the small hours in total secrecy a few days before the official handover date. Only the CO knew.
Since the CPA was being disbanded to be replaced by Iraqi politicians, its job was done. It was a blow to us because we lost some good mates who we’d spent a lot of hours with on the roof. More importantly, the supply source of all our new sexy kit had been cut off, and that was a real bummer. From then on, we’d have to make do with the British Army routine issue. With Triple Canopy’s twenty men gone we also had to fill their places. That meant more of us on guard duty and in the sangars, where they’d always have a couple of men too.
Later on when Chris went up to the roof, he discovered Red Rob had said goodbye after all. He’d left a business card along with a little note in the sleeve of Chris’s long.
It read:
Seeya Limey. Sorry couldn’t tell you we were leaving. ‘Secret squirrel shit,’ as you’d say. If you’re ever in Texas visiting with your Mom, look me up.
PS you’ve still got a small wiener.
18
Molly Phee’s disappearance was a precursor of the big event itself. To foil any nationwide terrorist spectacular, it too went ahead two days earlier than planned. In a secret Baghdad ceremony, power was handed over to the provisional Iraq government led by new Prime Minister Iyad Allawi on 28 June, at 10.26 a.m. The battle group only found out about it when it popped up on Sky News.
A public holiday was declared, and all the shops were closed.
It was another very bizarre feeling for us. From being the all-powerful invaders and conquerors of Iraq, we were now just its guests and obedient servants.
We watched city people’s reaction closely in case it sparked fresh trouble against us. In fact, they seemed to be pretty happy about it all. Like us, they were also a little bemused. Iraqi people had had no say in running their own country for decades, and most of them really didn’t know what to do about it. They and us wondered how the brave new world would look.
We soon found out. For us, it meant an onslaught of a million tedious rules and regulations. Our wings were well and truly clipped.
After 28 June, we lost all our powers of arrest. That was now the Iraqi police’s job. We couldn’t even go out on patrol in the city any more without the cops and an interpreter having to accompany us, which in itself was a massive extra ball ache. The cops often wouldn’t turn up at our agreed rendezvous. So we had to get in our vehicles, go over to the police stations, and try and persuade them to come out with us. Half the time would be spent trying to organize them, and working out again what had happened to their latest batch of weapons. When we did finally get out, they’d do all the talking at any vehicle checkpoint. We’d just sit there as back-up.
If we ever wanted to search someone’s car, we had to give them special new flyers printed in Arabic and make sure they’d read it first: Stop. Turn off your engine please. Thank you. We’re here to make Iraq a safer place, you know. One of our men wants to look in your boot. Do you mind? Thanks awfully, so kind of you.
It was all deeply painful. God only knows what we were supposed to do with the people who couldn’t read. The locals didn’t seem to give a toss about the new regulations, and they didn’t bother to read the flyers either. To them, we were soldiers who wanted to look in their boot. In Iraq, when an armed man wants to look in your boot, you let him.
The peace also gave Major Featherstone a chance to kick-start his nation-building projects again, all the real Cimic stuff. He seemed a lot more comfortable with that than with combat. For us, it meant escorting the Cimic guys out to do a job, and back again when they’d finished.
As we were loading up for another escort trip, Oost told Des: ‘You know what, man, if I only wanted my life to be about helping out the locals, I’d have fucking joined Oxfam.’
Chris put it another way: ‘You know what, mate? This place ain’t like Bosnia now. It’s
Newly trained soldiers from the fledgling Iraqi Defence Force also came to man our gates at Cimic House. The place was no longer coalition property, it was Iraqi. Iraqis therefore had to be seen from the outside world to be in charge of it. Our experience in Al Amarah had taught us never to trust any of them in uniform. The IDF’s reliability proved that to be true. Some days, the soldiers didn’t even bother turning up at all. On others, they’d just fuck off home early and leave the gates unmanned. They only worked when they felt like it. Nice life.
Then there was the OMS. They thrived off the handover, and made a big song and dance about what good and responsible politicians they were going to be. It was all rubbish though, and we knew Moqtada had no intention of disarming any of his followers, despite his solemn promises. On the contrary, we got regular reports that the OMS were building up another sizeable arsenal inside their HQ. There was not a damn thing we could do about it either. We were no longer the law.
The cheeky sods got so full of themselves that one day they even had the audacity to complain about the amount of patrols we were doing with the police. They wanted us off the streets altogether. We told them where they could go on that one.
Try as hard as we did not to think about it, there was also the niggling irritation that we couldn’t actually say we’d fully beaten our enemy. We fought like men possessed for more than two months and after all that we still weren’t able to declare a categorical military victory against the OMS. It was unfinished business, but that’s the way we had to leave it.
We even started to get necky comments from some of the more politicized sorts who worked at Cimic. Then there was the assault on Longy’s hobbies. A week after the handover, the compound’s caretaker, a heavily religious man, came across a cleaner flicking through an old porn mag that he had found while emptying the bins.
‘This is disgusting Western sin,’ he complained to Featherstone. ‘This is our country now. I am disgusted that good Muslims are subjected to this un-Islamic filth while they have to do their jobs.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry, it won’t happen again,’ Featherstone had to promise. I had to tell the boys not to put porn in the bins after that. Which was ironic, since another cleaner, Rasheed, was a massive supplier of hardcore porn to Ads, the company’s resident porn king. Ads prided himself on the title, and would always loan his porn out free of charge, which was very generous of him. He wouldn’t even charge Longy, who got far more use of it than his fair share.
Ads originally came out with about twenty DVDs and fifty magazines, but that had mushroomed considerably on the tour thanks to Rasheed. There was no chance Ads would be able to take it all home with him, unless he was happy to leave everything else he owned behind, so he did a deal where Rasheed would get it all back when we left. Porn was a habit Ads said he’d picked up from his City trader days. Then, when he made his bosses money, they would take him to lap dancing clubs and pay for all his table dances.
Rasheed didn’t just supply the normal stuff either.
‘You like real dirty dirty movie too, Mister Ads?’ he asked, after a couple of successful porn deals had gone down.
‘Yeah, course we do, Rasheed. What you got?’
‘Not shocking you?’
‘Fuck off, Rasheed. We’re soldiers. You couldn’t shock us if you tried.’
He could shock us, and he did. It was astonishingly hard core, and really tested the imagination. A lot of it also looked like it was homemade, possibly locally. There were midgets, fat women, old women, gorgeous women, ugly women, pregnant women (particularly sick), veiled women; every imaginable sort of women, getting pretty much everything done to them. Animals always seemed to feature strongly too in Rasheed’s movies: dogs, horses
