While Smudge posed for his snaps, I had a poke around Buzz’s plimsoll bag. There were three different types of round in there: the normal ‘full metal jacket’ brass ball rounds (like our green spot but a shit load bigger), some with tips painted yellow and red, and a third lot with tips painted grey.
‘Right, give us the Beast back over here. I want to know what these yellow and red ones do.’
I popped one into the chamber, pulled the cocking bolt back, and let it fly at the bridge again. On impact, it gave off a big bright yellow ball of light. Excellent. They were flash-tips, to illuminate the target so you could see where your rounds were hitting at very long distance.
Oost and Des were awe-struck, and watched every movement I made like two obedient little puppy dogs.
‘Try a grey one, Danny,’ suggested Des.
‘Yeah, let’s see what the grey ones do.’
I popped a grey one off.
Des was beside himself. ‘Wow, man! What the fuck was that bad boy?’
I had a good idea. I took aim at a car that someone had abandoned on top of the bridge. It had been bothering us there anyway. OMS fighters could use it as cover to shoot at us. At least that was my excuse.
The round piled straight through the engine casing and exploded somewhere in the middle of the block, causing a small fire to ignite. Yes. They were armour-piercing.
‘Awesome, man, awesome!’ They were Des’s new favourites.
An armour-piercing round fired from a Barrett would punch through steel with some ease. Its greatly strengthened casing and specially shaped nose do the initial damage, before the bursting charge encased within its body finishes the job.
Chris and I popped a good dozen more grey rounds through the abandoned car until we found its petrol tank. Then it properly exploded and burnt down into just a shell we could easily see through. No more hiding behind that.
Buzz was back up at dawn.
‘By the sound of things, you had a decent turn on the rifle last night, eh? I forgot to tell you, don’t use the grey-tipped rounds. They’re armour-piercing and they’re really expensive.’
Oops.
‘Ah, right. Sorry, Buzz, might be a little late for that…’
Buzz and John fitted in very well on the roof. By and large, they worked to their own remit and picked out their own opportunity targets. They didn’t need me to spoonfeed them anything. That was their discipline and expertise, and it was fine by me.
Buzz didn’t tell us much about what he did elsewhere. Out of respect we didn’t ask. It was enough for us just to know they were there with the Beast. They certainly made life a bit more difficult for the enemy’s hordes. After a few days of death-by-Beast, the OMS coordinators learnt to get their heads down and were forced to go about their warfare in subtler ways.
But the one thing Buzz and John couldn’t do much about was the mortars. Incoming shells were still our most perilous threat, and they hadn’t let up one bit. No matter how deadly the Beast’s rounds were, they still couldn’t go through two sides of a thick concrete building, and that’s where the mortar crews knew to set up their base plates.
Around the middle of week three, we seriously started to feel the pinch of their endless projectiles. Power was totally knocked out. One mortar round destroyed the big outdoor generator with a direct hit, and a second sliced straight through the underground connection to the local electricity grid. All we had left was the Ops Room’s emergency petrol generator that was just strong enough to power its essential radio equipment.
The tap water supply then dried up altogether, either from mortar damage or because the OMS turned it off; we never discovered which. Blokes started to use the bottled water for shaving as it’s part of army standing orders. Then it was realized we were in danger of running low on that too, so all shaving was knocked on the head. We all started to look like Buzz.
A lot of the bottled water supply was being lost to shrapnel damage, as the crates were always stacked along one side of Cimic. To preserve the rest, it was all brought inside the house to be stored away safely under stairs or in any secure cubby hole we could find. In that heat, it was just as important to us as bullets; and it would soon become more valuable to us than liquid gold.
Chef’s luck finally ran out too.
24
It happened one evening when Recce Platoon were at full-on scoff mode in the cookhouse. Full credit to Chef, despite the appalling levels of incoming he’d still got a hot meal out for 100 blokes once a day, every day, working under just his green field tent with no other cover. When mortar barrages started, he’d have to peg it back into the cookhouse and wait it out there. If that meant his food got burnt, he’d have to chuck it all out and start all over again.
Recce were ravenous after a tense day in the sangars.
‘Any more chips, Chef?’ someone asked.
‘Yeah, just put some on. Give us a sec, I’ll just go and get them.’
A minute after he left, a new mortar barrage struck up. Twelve shells later, he still wasn’t back.
‘Where are those bleeding chips then, Chef?’ the greedy bastard shouted.
They heard his screams then. He’d been hit by the barrage’s first round. It had come straight through the roof of the tent as he was leaving it with a big baking tray of chips in his hand. A nasty lump of shrapnel had torn straight through his leg just below the knee. It was hanging off him by little more than just the skin.
Chef lost a hell of a lot of blood, but Corky managed to save his leg.
After that, we were all down to eating just hard rations from the emergency supplies. Chef’s emergency kitchen had been blown to fuck now too. That meant nothing but boil in the bag meals. They tasted a lot better when thrown into our ‘all-in’ stews brewed up on a camping stove in a corridor, with a good dollop of Tabasco sauce.
To conserve it, all our ammunition was also pooled. Our stocks were depleting, and fast. Until then, each multiple commander had supervised his own stocks. Instead, all the ammo was called in and stored in a windowless room off the Ops Room. That way, we knew it was safe from incoming. Dale could keep an eye on how fast it was going down, and everyone knew where it was if they needed it in a hurry.
Sleep deprivation was now also becoming a somewhat serious problem. During lulls in fighting, soldiers from all the Y Company platoons were starting to fall asleep at their posts, no matter how hard they tried to fight against it.
In a bid to ease the pressure on the company and give the lads a chance of some rest, Captain Curry ordered the CIMIC guys into the sangars as well. That meant Major Ken Tait’s lot. There were less than twenty of them, a lot were warrant officers and captains, and almost all were TA. Their job was to administer the reconstruction of Maysan, and most had spent the whole tour at their desks. They came from a huge hotchpotch of regiments: Highlanders, sappers, loggies, and Adjutant General’s Corps largely. Back home, they were clerks, bank managers and solicitors. One was even a millionaire record producer. From that moment onwards, however, they were poor bloody infantry, like it or not. Here’s a weapon, now go and fucking use it.
Captain Curry assigned them two-hour stints in the middle of the night when the attacks normally died down a little.
On their first night out, Pikey got a bit cruel.
‘Hey hey! Look, here comes fucking Dad’s Army.’
Admittedly, it was funny to watch them, looking all white and pasty faced to us, venture desperately nervously out to their assigned positions for the first time. Most hadn’t fired a round in anger their whole civilized lives, let alone on that tour.
