As it was so quiet, the battle group also introduced three-day mini-breaks for us in Kuwait. They were known as Operational Stand Down (OSD) packages. It was a good idea, because it allowed us to get a much needed change of scene. By the end of July, we’d done more than six weeks of peace in Iraq’s brave new world — and we were crawling up Cimic’s walls.
Rather than going en masse, each platoon from Y Company would send a fire team of four blokes on each trip, so there would never be a manpower shortage for any specialism. My turn came on 29 July, and I went with Fitz, Des and Oost.
It was a four-hour drive to Kuwait, and we travelled down in a convoy of Snatch Land Rovers. It was a tense drive, as Route 6 still had a high roadside bomb threat. Again, old habits died hard for the more fanatical of Moqtada al-Sadr’s followers.
As we passed through the veritable dump of a city that is Basra, to our eyes it was a thriving modern metropolis. We had got too used to shitty, sleepy Al Amarah. However, it was absolutely nothing compared to the extraordinary experience of crossing the border.
Travelling from Iraq to Kuwait was like crossing a 200-year time warp. The difference between the two countries was phenomenal. One second you’re on a crappy single-lane potholed road out of the early nineteenth century, then suddenly it turns into a six-carriageway motorway from the twenty-first century, with knobs on.
In a flash, all the mud huts and filth had gone. Everything in Kuwait was brand new and clean. Every house was tiled and looked to be made from marble, and its people were happy and well dressed. It was an acute reminder of what happens when one country spends its oil money for twenty-five years on infrastructure, and the other blows it on war. Kuwait is what Iraq should have looked like. We were impressed; Saddam must have tried seriously hard to fuck his country quite to the state that he did.
We stopped just after the border at a British military post to change into the civvies that we’d brought with us and hand over our weapons and ammunition. It’s always a good feeling when you can pull on a pair of jeans after months on end in combat fatigues. Then it was down to the US Army’s Camp Doha, in the desert just to the north of Kuwait City. Endless rows of small prefab blocks that doubled up as holiday chalets, each filled with four bunk beds and nicely air conditioned. It wasn’t just Brits there, the whole of the 150,000-strong US military from all over Iraq took it in turns to do their operational stand downs at the camp too.
If you’re ever in doubt of the size of the US footprint in Iraq, go to Camp Doha. The place blew our minds. It had everything: great big cinemas, enormous gyms, Burger King, Pizza Hut, coffee shops, indoor shopping malls, soccer pitches, the works. It made our own Shaibitha look like a little corner shop. Just going on a wander and a gawp was a great unwind in itself. To us, mundane snippets of normal life that you wouldn’t blink at in the UK were utterly fascinating. There were even some decent looking birds around the place, either American servicewomen or civilian contractors. We tried hard not to gawp at them too. The only thing the place lacked was booze. But it was so stupidly hot, you didn’t really fancy waking up with a hangover anyway.
Inside the giant Naafi the size of a department store (Yanks call it the PX) was everything you could ever possibly want for service in Iraq. Videos, TVs, stereos, duvets, towels, clothes, rucksacks, boots, tents, laptops, mouse pads, video cameras, PlayStations, Xboxes, gun holsters — the lot. American ican soldiers did whole year- long tours in Iraq rather than just the six or seven months we had to do, the poor sods. We looked on in pity as they filled up their trolleys to the brim for the long haul.
Des broke the muffled calm of the place with a shout I heard from the other end of the shop.
‘Hey, Oost, man, over here! You’ve got to check out the fucking hardware they’ve got!’
He’d found the knife section. He was in heaven. It had every blade and serrated edge he’d ever dreamed of. Even some that he hadn’t. The South Africans are a lot like the Americans with their shared fascination with guns and killing tools, just a little bit more bloodthirsty.
We also had a good old laugh at their rows and rows of T-shirts. Nobody does T-shirt slogans quite like the US military, and none of them were ironic. ‘Who’s yer Bag-daddy’ was a common one. On another, there was a cartoon picture of a mean looking GI holding out a tin can with the words ‘100% genuine Whoop Ass’ written on it. In a speech bubble coming out of the cartoon GI’s mouth was the phrase, ‘Don’t make me open it.’
Des and Oost bought matching sniper T-shirts, which they cherished from that day onwards. A dirty great big rifle barrel poked out from the design on the front. On the back was printed the slogan, ‘Never run from a sniper. You will only die tired.’
That night, we stuffed our faces with burgers. The next morning I woke up feeling like shit; just totally exhausted, and I knew I was coming down with something. Typical. I get ill just when I go on a bit of a holiday.
I spent most of that day in bed. On the next, I felt a bit better so I joined the boys on a sightseeing trip into Kuwait City. It’s not an amazing place, with the only real landmark being its twin giant conical water towers. We took a few pictures and hung out on the city’s long sandy beaches, because I was still feeling ropey.
After another night of face-stuffing for the boys, while I looked on jealously, it was back up to Al Amarah. Before we set off, there was the obligatory final trip to the jumbo PX where the guys stocked up on as many consumables as they could carry. That meant dozens of bags of salted beef jerky to crates of Coke and platoon-size pouches of American chewing tobacco. We barely all fitted in around the stash. Des and Oost munched throughout the whole journey up, and by the end they were feeling as sick as parrots.
There was a familiar face waiting for us back in Cimic.
After pestering every military doctor in the UK to declare him fit for duty, Daz had finally succeeded. He got himself on the very next plane back out. We greeted him with a lot of warm handshakes, and no small amount of piss taking. Just what he had been expecting.
‘Sorry you’ve missed all the fun, mate. We were a little bit busy while you were lying on your fat arse in some cosy hospital bed.’
‘I was gutted, fucking gutted, Danny. I was getting all the sit reps in the hospital. Seething I was, you should have seen me. I just hope you slotted the fucker who got me.’
‘Don’t worry, mate. I think there’s a fairly high chance of that, at one stage or another.’
Daz was technically the 2i/c of the platoon again, but he and Chris ended up doing the job together after his return. There was a lot Daz had to catch up on, and he was the first to give way to Chris’s enormous experience.
Despite everything the platoon had been through since April, it was funny to think that Daz had still not fired his weapon in anger once. He’d never even got the chance — he was blown up in the very first attack on us. The last thing he remembered before the morphine kicked in was getting his ammo stripped off him.
Not that any of us had any idea at that moment, but he was about to get his chance.
Daz had got back just in the nick of time. So had we. Within a few days, Y Company was going to need every man it could get. One hundred and six British soldiers’ lives would depend on exactly how hard we were prepared to fight.
20
Two days after we got back from Kuwait, I still felt shit from whatever it was I’d got. Corky the company medic sent me very reluctantly back to Slipper City for a proper medical. I hated going back there, even if I was ill.
I checked myself in at the Regimental Aid Post, a single-storey concrete building. The female nurse there told me I was exhausted.
‘But I’ve just come back from my OSD, I can’t be. We haven’t done anything for bloody weeks.’
‘Doesn’t matter. You’ve probably had this coming on for a while. You’ve got a viral exhaustion infection. Good old fashioned rest is the only way you’re going to sort this one out, Sergeant. There are a few ward tents next door that are totally empty at the moment. Why don’t you take yourself off there and get some proper sleep?’
She gave me some pills.
‘Take as much time as you need. I don’t want to see you again until you’re feeling a lot better.’
There was a knock on the door, and an orderly popped his head round it.
‘Ambulance coming in from Cimic House with a head injury, ma’am. Half an hour.’
