them returning the odd round to some sporadic incoming fire. As always, the boys were my priority. Until I knew their state the bigger picture could wait.
‘Some peacekeeping tour, eh, Dan?’ said Smudge with a big grin across his mug.
Excellent. The saying was our catchphrase for the tour. After a few months of redundancy, it had become very relevant again. It also told me immediately that the boys’ spirits were as high as they’d ever been. That cheered me up considerably.
‘Indeed it is, Smudger. I put in a word with the OMS because I knew you were getting a bit bored.’
‘Good on you, Dan, thanks for that.’
‘Anyone got any kills in yet?’
They had, as well as amassing a few tales of heroics too. Again, Ads had the best one. He’d charged a building full of gunmen with just a sniper rifle in his hands and only forty rounds of green spot ammunition.
Ads had been out on a foot patrol with Major Featherstone when they’d been ambushed at a Route 6 roundabout on the north bank dubbed Red 14. It had started with a blast bomb thrown just ten metres in front of Ads, who was the OC’s point man and was armed with just his long. As it went off, a load of automatic fire came in on them.
‘Gunmen, the two-storey building 150 metres away,’ said Ads, spotting them first.
While still out in the open with Featherstone, he knelt down on one knee, dropped a gunman on the roof of the building with the single-shot rifle, and threw a smoke grenade in front of him to obscure the gunmen’s view. Both men carried on firing, the OC with an SA80, until the smoke had done its job. Over his PRR, Featherstone then ordered an immediate assault on the building and set off for it at full pelt.
Charging by Ads, he hollered: ‘Follow me, Somers.’
Ads took a quick look behind him. The rest of the patrol were now scrambling for cover where they stood. It confirmed his suspicions. Featherstone’s PRR wasn’t working and nobody had heard the order apart from him. Realizing the OC would be desperately vulnerable alone, he ran after him anyway.
The pair reached cover just beside the enemy held house, and finally had a chance to confer.
‘Good work, Ads. Right, everyone follow me… hang on, where the fuck’s everyone else?’
‘I think your PRR’s fucked, sir. There’s only me. Maybe not such a great idea to storm the house with just the two of us.’
Somewhat shocked, Featherstone agreed wholeheartedly and they pegged it back to the safety of the rest of the patrol. It was typical bloody Ads, and I thought it was hilarious.
‘Why did you do an assault with only your bleeding long and forty rounds, you crazy fool?’
Ads just shrugged his shoulders. ‘It was all I had on me, Danny.’
Once I’d got the full sit rep, I instituted a few more home improvements. Nobody had any idea how long the new crisis might last, so the CO ordered us to be ready to sit it out for as long as we needed to. If they wanted a siege, fine. We’d make Cimic impregnable.
Darkness had fallen, which gave us a good chance to add a roof to Rooftop Sangar to give it some shelter from flying mortar and RPG shrapnel. On top of the few planks of wood and corrugated iron, we slapped on two layers of sandbags and some camo netting. It wasn’t going to withstand a direct hit from an 82mm mortar shell, but it would withstand pretty much anything else.
We also built a smaller sangar on the roof of the cookhouse, which was situated about 50 metres north of the main house right on the compound’s border with the Tigris. From there, you got a better view over the dam on the west and a different angle on to the old town’s rooftops to the east. From then onwards, I put a sniping pair in there at all times, giving us three different safe points of fire now from the sangars on Cimic’s rooftops.
Then I made sure all the L96s were properly zeroed. Our lives and those of other soldiers would depend on the accuracy of our rifles so I wanted them all spot on. Normally, you go down the range to zero your weapons. We had to improvise.
That meant the corner house, yet again. On the laser ranger, the house measured exactly 100 metres away from the roof; perfect for what we needed. Its inhabitants had already taken more than their fair share of OMS mortar rounds meant for us. Now they were going to get a hefty amount of green spot as well. It was just tough shit. I made a mental note to go round and apologize later.
‘OK, lads, the target is that circular electrical box on the outside of the house’s main western wall. Can you see it? It’s white and the size of a doorbell.’
Under the cover of the next mortar attack, each sniper cracked on.
To zero a sniper rifle, you fire between three and five rounds from the same firing position at the same target, and take the volley’s average position as the mean to which your sights are set. If they’re off a little, you adjust them accordingly. Then you break the fire position, get up, and get back down into another firing position and let off another volley, repeating the process. To get the sights spot on, it normally takes three or four volleys. The idea is also to test that you are shooting properly from whatever position you need to be in.
It took a good hour. By the end of it, we had put around 400 rounds of 7.62mm into or around the white box. It would have done nothing for the family’s electricity supply. Or their nerves.
We were ready just in time.
By the end of my first full day back, the rioting on the streets near Cimic thinned out as the gunfire on the compound began to hot up. Nobody wanted to get hit in the cross-fire.
For the first few days, the attacks weren’t very well organized. They came at us either as individuals or small groups of five to ten. Fighters would try to creep up on Cimic as close as they thought they could. They’d use dead ground behind the dam, on the north bank or inside RPG alley.
‘Enemy movement spotted, wait out,’ came the warning over the PRR.
Before any sniper had a chance to get a fix on them, they’d jump out and riddle the place with full AK mags, or let rip with a wildly inaccurate RPG.
‘Contact! Get your fucking heads down!’ one of us would shout if the fire was at the roof. Then, as soon as they changed mags, we’d be back up again and putting down as many rounds as we could back at where the muzzle flashes were.
Pretty quickly, the attackers would have expended all their ammo and they’d have to bugger off again — if they were still alive.
The ground attacks would be peppered by almost constant single-round sniping from further away. For that, they used the rooftops of the old town, the hospital, the bus shelter or the Aj Dayya estate. It posed more of a threat because it was more accurate.
At that stage, still the only thing that really bothered us was the mortar fire. Up to ten separate barrages a day were being launched at us — one of the highest rates we’d experienced.
A mortar round had to be very accurate to kill anyone on the roof, thanks to our reinforcements. But the sheer weight of that sort of incoming was no small pain in the arse. It made every movement out of cover in Cimic very hard work, and people only ever got about by either sprinting like gazelles or crawling everywhere on their bellies. We became a company of high-speed invertebrates.
Largely thanks to its two water boundaries, Cimic came into its own as a natural defensive stronghold. They weren’t ever going to breach our walls fighting like that either, and the volume of incoming wasn’t unbearable yet. Also, the stronger we appeared, the sooner they’d go away, or so we thought.
‘They can’t do us any proper damage if they can’t get close to us, boys,’ I reminded them. ‘Slot as many of these fuckers as you can. They might get the message it’s not worth coming back.’
Every now and then, a gaggle of women in black dresses and veils shuffled out on to the dead ground waving white flags. The sight was a good morale boost and was always broadcast all round on the PRR. They were the body parties.
Some Mehdi Army were more obliging than others. There were a surprisingly large amount of looney tunes similar to the three we killed from the Snatches who seemed intent on martyrdom. They’d just charge us in full view blazing away any old how. It would have been churlish not to have given them what they wanted so the lads dispatched them to their seventy-two vestal virgins without any further ado.
Other fighters were a lot more devious and harder to kill.
On the north bank, they soon struck on a particularly cynical ploy of using the refugees’ mud huts and slum housing as cover points to attack us. Old women and kids would be ordered to stand at their windows or doorways at gunpoint. Hiding behind civilians has been a coward’s trick I’ve seen the world over from Belfast to Bosnia. How
