they justified that against the allegedly moral aim of their jihad was beyond me.
The scumbags hadn’t counted on Fitzy though. After a day or so of us seeing this, he came up with an idea.
‘I can do one of those sods, Danny. If you flush them out, I’ll keep my eye on the door.’
‘You sure, mate? Wasting some old Doris’s kid by mistake isn’t going to help our cause much, you know.’
‘Positive.’
I took his word for it. There was one mud hut on the north bank that the fighters were particularly fond of, about 600 metres to our north-west. We waited for the next ‘holy warrior’ to go inside it and push out the human shields.
Ten minutes later, one turned up. He was a well-built bloke in his forties with a bushy beard. Most likely a longstanding OMS stalwart. Once he was inside, Fitzy and I lined up our longs on the building from Rooftop Sangar. I took aim at the open window two feet to the left of the door, where we’d seen the guy’s muzzle flash. Fitzy concentrated solely on the door frame.
‘Ready, Fitz?’
Thirty seconds of silence, as he studied every single centimetre of the possible target area in turn and mentally banked the lot of it.
Fitz took a last calm deep breath. ‘Ready.’
I put a round right into the window’s top righthand corner, behind which I could see straight on to the back wall.
There was a commotion inside. It worked. Convinced we were going to waste him in there, the gunman came out the door crouching low behind a twelve-year-old girl. Brandishing his AK in his right hand, he pulled the screaming child’s body close to his with his left arm wrapped around her neck. Crablike, he began to slowly shuffle both of them along the building’s front wall.
Fitzy let him move three feet before he released his round, immediately pulling the bolt back to drop another in the chamber if he needed it. He didn’t.
The bullet ripped into the very middle fleshy part of the OMS man’s lower neck, exactly in between both collarbones. It made a big old mess, slitting a major artery and spraying fountain arcs of blood over the back of the girl’s head and down her face for a second or two until she threw off his weakening grip. He gradually sank down the wall to the floor, choking violently, and making feeble efforts to stop the blood flow with both hands; it just spurted out between his fingers instead. Thirty seconds later, he was dead.
‘Sorry, mate,’ came Fitz’s brief verdict. ‘Fucked with the wrong platoon, didn’t you.’
By the fourth day of the siege, stocks in Cimic were getting low and we needed a hefty resupply. Because the violence was still increasing every day, Abu Naji decided they didn’t want to make a habit of sending Warrior convoys into the city if they could possibly avoid it. Instead, they loaded an entire company of Warriors up with as much rations and ammo as it could possibly carry to last us for as long as possible.
The convoy got through to us in the early hours of the morning, after the predictable hefty slapping on the way, even though they came via the greatest round-the-houses back route possible. It took us all two full hours to unload everything from them.
‘That’s your lot, lads,’ said C Company’s sergeant major as his growling Warriors prepared to set off back to Slipper City. ‘Go easy on that lot. I don’t fucking fancy doing this journey again just to give you guys second helpings of ice cream.’
At that stage, we weren’t particularly bothered at the prospect of not seeing them for a while. We felt very comfortable in Cimic with our veritable new powder keg. Boxes of 5.56mm, 7.62mm ball and green spot, UGLs, L109 hand grenades, 51mm HE mortar rounds and dynamite (Just in case) lined the stockroom’s walls from floor to ceiling. We had enough ammo to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Anyway, the solitude was just another exciting challenge for us.
‘Eh, it’s just like the Alamo here now, innit?’ quipped Pikey. ‘Fuck ’em all. We’ll do a better job without those armoured pansies interfering anyway.’
It was still early days then. A week later, Pikey had shut his big gob. We all had.
22
The resupply also brought us something else: a new OC.
Major Featherstone was exhausted. He hadn’t had a break since we arrived in Al Amarah, and Ray’s death coupled with the frenzy of the last four days had really knocked the remaining energy he had left out of him. Still under heavy protest, he eventually gave in to the Commanding Officer’s insistence that he take some leave. It became obvious even to him that he wasn’t going to be any use in command for much longer.
Out went Featherstone on the Warriors, and sadly three of my snipers with him too: Ads, DV and H. Their R&R was also long overdue. All three volunteered to stay, but since we had no idea how long this was going to last I told them to go while they still had the chance.
In came Captain Charlie Curry. Up until then, Captain Curry had been the battle group’s Operations Officer based in Abu Naji. Of medium build and height, he was in his mid-thirties with short dark hair, tinged with flecks of grey. He smiled a lot, and was generally thought of as a decent bloke. It was only when he actually got stuck into the job at Cimic that we realized what a fantastic leader he was too.
He proved this on his very first morning. After ordering everyone under cover, he walked around the whole compound personally picking up every single blind mortar round we had at that time and throwing them all in the river.
Blinds considerably hindered our movement around Cimic because you couldn’t go anywhere near the bloody things. Just because they hadn’t gone off when they’d landed didn’t mean they were necessarily duds. The slightest movement could explode them, killing anyone within a 20-yard radius. It was a job that normally had to be done by calling out the ATO from Abu Naji. It was very dangerous, and one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen an officer do. It was also great leadership — as the man would have known — and won him a lot of friends immediately.
Captain Curry was not a man for all the PC bollocks that I felt had hindered us in the past. He made quick decisions with total confidence, and he let us be as aggressive as we wanted. A breath of fresh air, and the man for the moment.
The new boss bought himself more brownie points with us by insisting on joining Dale who was taking out a fighting patrol that very night.
By day, we battened down the hatches at Cimic. Night was a different matter though. We exploited the darkness to push out fighting patrols around the city to take it back to the enemy whenever we could. The best form of defence is always attack and it was important not to let our opponents feel 100 per cent comfortable on Al Amarah’s streets.
There was never a need for a sophisticated plan to have a go at them. Mostly, it was just a case of stealthily creeping up on the OMS’s favourite mortar base-plate sites, the places we had coded Gold, Silver and Bronze. You’d be assured of a decent contact with mortar teams setting up or their pickets. Never Zinc though, which was the park opposite the OMS building at Yellow 3. The building now doubled as the uprising’s battle HQ and had been so heavily fortified we couldn’t get anywhere near it.
To our delight, Captain Curry encouraged as much of this as possible.
‘The CO wants us to go out and keep the enemy on their feet. You’re the best fighters in the battalion, so let’s give these fuckwits a bit of payback, shall we?’
That was despite Curry getting into a dirty great contact on his rookie outing with Dale on the north bank. My snipers saved his arse from the rooftop, so he swiftly found out what we could do for him too. From then onwards on their way back in, the fighting patrols would also raid RPG alley and its offshoots to blunt any night-time assaults being prepared at the time.
Bad news in Al Amarah then was never far away though. The day after Captain Curry’s arrival, we got another wheelbarrow load of it.
Private Lee O’Callaghan, a young lad from the battalion’s B Company, was shot dead by insurgents in Basra.
