He wasn’t the only casualty of the battle either.
Some Royal Artillery lads got lost after a big ambush on their patrol of Snatches. They were in a right shit state and didn’t even know where they were. Our guys went out in the Warriors to find them and ran slap bang into an ambush set up just for them.
The company commander had various bits of his body blown of by an RPG, including some fingers and a chunk of his shoulder. The sergeant major got a bullet in the mouth, and a couple of other blokes got badly hosed down.
Lee had been standing up doing top cover out the back of a Warrior’s mortar hatch. He took a single round through the heart, dying very quickly.
Lee was only twenty years old, and Sam, Smudge and H had all been through training with him. He’d died in Basra of all places rather than up here, where the fighting had always been a lot more intense. It brought us all down a peg or two, and reminded us that this uprising had become a very serious business. It was only a week old, and already there would be two spare spaces in the dining hall at Tidworth.
Just like with Ray, the overriding emotion after we heard the grim news wasn’t one of fear or panic. It was anger. The more the Mehdi Army killed our own, the more they hardened our resolve. If they wanted a fucking fight, we’d give them one.
The head shed were no different. After Lee’s death, an order went out to the whole battle group from Colonel Maer’s deputy, Major Toby Walch.
‘I want you all to be
Thanks to the new OC, we were only too happy to oblige.
For months a huge cedar tree fifty metres to the right of the front gate had been pissing us off on the roof. It degraded our view down Tigris Street, but Major Featherstone had always refused me permission to pull it down. I decided to ask Charlie Curry.
‘The problem is, sir, it obstructs our view of the lefthand edge of the pontoon bridge. That’s a common area the enemy use to approach the compound.’
‘Yeah, do it Dan. Get the Warriors to ram it over.’
Top man.
‘There’s some bits at the back gate that I want to get rid of as well, sir.’
‘Do the fucking lot of it. Lives are more important than trees.’
For the first time, we also got permission from Abu Naji to fire high-explosive rounds for the 51mm mortar off Cimic’s roof. The condition was it had to be used only as a last resort. Plopping off mini-artillery shells into the city would win us no friends whatsoever.
Our landscape gardening proved timely. As week two of the siege began, the ground attacks on the compound began to get more organized and professional. It was clear that the OMS had begun to have the sense that, to sharpen up their effect, they needed to impose some form of order on the mayhem of different militias. Soon there were heavily armed groups of around thirty coming to have a go. They’d stay for longer, and were a lot harder to deal with.
They also had the use of a lot more of the local buildings. Our neighbours around Cimic had upped and left, either of their own accord to keep their kids alive, or at the end of an OMS sandal. All of them, that is, apart from the poor old family in the corner house. Not even the OMS wanted to be in that unlucky pile of bricks.
The quality of the enemy fighter also changed. We’d killed most of the young looney tunes as well as the crap ones, and the survivors had learnt a thing or two. They stayed behind cover a lot more and used diversion tactics to occupy our fire while they’d get closer elsewhere.
Our hardest job was to locate them. Then you had to flush them out too. For every new burst of fire, the sniper and spotter pairs facing the direction it came from would replay the same conversation.
‘Can’t see a thing.’
‘All right then, where are they most likely going to be? Behind that bush? In that dark shadow there. That’s it, put a round in there, see what happens.’
‘OK, what about that window?’
‘No. I’ve got it, how about that pile of rubble? How about I put a UGL behind it instead?’
‘There they are in those ruins! Firing at us now, shit! Get your fucking head down!’ And the rounds would rake the top layer of the sandbags inches from our faces.
We upped our game, however, and whenever we could too. We were stuck in a one-way struggle, and there was no backing down now.
One thing that kept them at bay for thirty-six hours or so was the sudden arrival of fast air. After Abu Naji were forced to go down on bended knee, coalition air commanders agreed to free up jets to carry out ‘shows of force’ for us. You don’t get air assets unless there’s a lot of trouble, and they initially didn’t believe we needed them. Then a couple of pilots came over and had a look.
Fast air was assigned on call for short time windows, a couple of hours per morning or afternoon. They’d be anything from British Tornadoes, to American, Italian or Dutch F16s. You’d never know in advance. They were never going to drop their 500 or 1000lb bombs as we were right in the middle of a built-up area. In any case, we had no direct comms facility to talk to them — a must for all close air support.
To begin with, the jets were delightfully effective. We’d pass on where we wanted them to go up the chain. Then out of nowhere, a terrifying screech. Two very pointy looking things would suddenly tear across the sky at just 500 feet, practically breaking everybody’s eardrums. The enemy shat their pants and legged it in total panic. Even at that height, the jets still sounded like they were low enough to take your head off.
We’d always be able to recognize the RAF because they would fly the lowest, sometimes down to just 100 feet. The planes weren’t invulnerable to a lucky bullet, so that took proper balls. The boys greeted whoever came with a barrage of whoops and air punches.
‘Yeah, fucking right!’ we’d all shout. ‘You’re gonna get some of that!’
Seeing friends as mean looking as a pair of Tornadoes gave us a cracking morale boost. Sadly, after four or five bombless flybys, the enemy soon realized they weren’t actually going to get any of that and their powerful effect waned. After a while, they just tucked their heads down, stuck their fingers in their earholes, and carried on once the jets had passed.
So all we could do was to carry on giving it back quicker and faster. It was imperative our drills stayed one step ahead of the bastards.
I decided to kip on the roof at night. It meant I was half a minute closer to helping the guys out up there if they had to stand to. Desperate to do what they could too, a fair few of the lads started doing the same.
We held it together pretty well for the next few days, but the pressure was eating up huge amounts of mental and physical resources. At this pace, sooner or later, we were going to get tired. Nerves had already begun to fray a little, with the odd fractious comment emerging between platoons. And still the OMS screw tightened.
It wasn’t just savvy that the enemy was gaining. It was also accuracy. It was hard to ignore that our shaves were getting closer and closer. It began to feel like only a matter of time before the Al Amarah OMS paid out its first 200-dollar bonus.
Dawn came on Day 10 with me on an L96 in Top Sangar and Oost spotting for me down Tigris Street. Fitz and Sam were in Rooftop. An hour or so later, a heavy weight of AK fire hit the roof’s northern wall; the first attack of the new day.
‘Firing point definitely on the north bank,’ came the shout down from Fitzy.
‘Somewhere among the army camp ruins, I think. Can’t see it exactly yet.’
That meant they were quite close, and Fitz needed our help.
‘Right, come on, Oost, over to the north wall with me, mate.’
We grabbed our SA80s and crawled out of the sangar. Just after we reached the north wall, a high-calibre mortar round plunged straight down through Top Sangar’s corrugated iron roof, and exploded in a deafening flash of light and noise. It blew the thing to fuck. The small space where we had just been perching was peppered from top to bottom with smoking pieces of red-hot shrapnel. The sangar did its job well though, as none of the blast went
