The CO had decided that we’d more than done our bit, and it was time to pull us out. Exposing us to extreme combat with us in the state we were now in was simply not something he was prepared to take responsibility for any longer.
Crucially, it was a relief-in-place, not a withdrawal. The company of Royal Welch Fusiliers was going to take over our position. They’d come in with the resupply column, and we’d go out with it.
We were always going to leave Cimic at one stage or another, but when the notification of it actually came it was still funny to hear it. If given the choice at the time, to a man we would all have stayed on. The OMS weren’t beaten yet, and the fear of life in Slipper City and the RSM’s petty bollockings haunted us all.
The CO was probably right though. With the physical activity, the heat, the sleep deprivation and the dwindling supplies, we had become a force of skeletal zombies relying on little more than an intravenous drip of adrenalin to get us through.
Every man in the company had lost at least a stone during the siege, some double that. I was surrounded by odd creatures covered in grime, dried sweat and flecks of blood from head to toe, with two huge black circles around their eyes. Most worrying of all was the slightly crazed look we’d all begun to adopt — like we were all on the first rung on the ladder to insanity. No. It couldn’t last.
Most importantly, a relief was something our pride could deal with. It meant the British Army in Al Amarah weren’t losing an ounce of face.
The lads were resigned to their fate when I broke the news to them. There was a stunned silence for some time.
Pikey broke it, with the perfect comment.
‘Oh, fuck it. All good things come to an end.’
Secretly, everyone also craved some decent nosh and a good night’s kip. Almost as much as they craved killing OMS men.
At midnight, the mortaring began to pick up again. It kept up throughout the night and into the next day.
The mood was tense. Several false alarms had the whole company repeatedly standing-to. Yet by 2 p.m. that afternoon, a repeat of the previous day’s all-out assault hadn’t materialized. Instead, there was just regular sniper fire from the usual locations — old town rooftops and the north bank. Curry ordered every soldier to conserve his ammo as much as possible.
All we needed was for the OMS to lick their wounds for another twelve hours longer, and they could come at Cimic as hard as they liked. Then, the battle group would be fully ready for them again.
So Abu Naji knew what to bring in, Dale had the unfortunate task of delivering to the battalion Quartermaster a battle damage assessment on all the military equipment in the camp. It was just one long list of misery.
I sat on the house’s front doorstep beside Dale as he set up the portable satellite phone and dialled the Quartermaster’s number.
Like most in his trade, our QM would never give anyone an easy run for what he saw as his own money if there was anything he could do about it. That day was no different. He insisted on Dale giving him a description of every single thing that had been signed off to Y Company. It was going to be a painful conversation.
It started with the Portakabins. Each one separately.
‘Blown up, sir,’ was Dale’s response.
‘OK. Portakabin number two?’
‘Blown up too, sir.’
‘Really? Portakabin number three…’
And so it went on. The QM decided to change tack.
‘OK, well what about the vehicles then? Better news there I’d hope, or have they been mistreated too?’
‘We’ve only got one out of the ten Snatches serviceable now, sir.’
‘WHAT? What happened to the rest of them?’
‘Blown up.’
‘Every one of them?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you sure? Even the civilian Land Rover Discovery that we paid to have air conditioning in?’
‘Even that one, sir, yes.’
The more damage the QM heard about, the more irate he got. He could see money going down the pan left, right and centre. There goes his fucking OBE.
Dale then went on to tell him about the swimming pool, the chef’s galleys, the TV trailer, the satellite and Internet dishes, the outdoor gym and weightlifting equipment, two giant JCB generators, all the compound’s fencing and, the QM’s most beloved articles of all, the two Mark 5 speed boats.
‘No, Sarn’t Major, not your brand new boats too?’
‘Yes, sir, the boats too.’
‘But we only bought them in June. And at some considerable cost, as you well know.’
‘Yes, I do know that, sir.’
‘Are you sure they are totally unusable?’
‘You could put it like that. They’re at the bottom of the Tigris.’
‘Well, this is all very bad news, Sarn’t Major. This is an appalling waste of perfectly good military equipment. Taxpayers’ money all of it. It doesn’t grow on trees, you know.’
The QM’s rattiness had started to rub Dale up the wrong way. The bloke just couldn’t have been living on the same planet as us. He clearly hadn’t been reading any of our sit reps, and must have thought we’d only taken a couple of pot shots.
Finally, twenty-five minutes later, Dale got to the end of the list.
‘I’m not happy about this at all, Sarn’t Major. Not one little bit.’
‘Yeah, well neither were we, sir.’
There was a silence.
‘Look, can you go through everything again with me just to make sure?’
That was the final straw for Dale.
‘Look, sir, it’s real simple. Everything’s fucked, all right? Everything I’m looking at has been fucking blown up. It’s all faarkin’ fucked, and there’s not a bollocks I can do about it. Sorry, sir, I’ve got to go.’
He slammed the handset down into its bracket, breaking a small piece of plastic off the phone too.
28
Darkness fell with still no sign of another compound assault. The OMS and Abu Hatim clearly needed more than just one day to reorganize after the losses they’d suffered. Perhaps they’d been even bigger than we thought.
The message came through from Abu Naji that the resupply operation would begin at 9.45 p.m. By nine, we were all packed up and ready to go, and stood-to for the inevitable outbreak of mayhem as soon as the column put in its first appearance.
What a moment that was to be too.
The plan was really quite simple. The battle group had worked throughout the previous night to amass the greatest single column of British armour since the invasion of the country a year earlier. They were just going to pound their way through to us in the straightest and shortest line possible, with overwhelming brute force.
That meant a battalion-size war formation: an extraordinary total of seventy-two Warriors, led by the Queen’s Royal Lancers’ entire squadron of twelve Challenger II main battle tanks. Every spare armoured vehicle within 300 miles had been rustled up for the job. That meant not just the PWRR’s A Company coming up from Basra again, but a full company of the Black Watch in Warriors too. Thickly armoured and tracked CRV recovery vehicles fitted with bulldozers were coming along too. Nothing must be allowed to get in the column’s way.
All this, just to give Cimic House a fresh face and a few bombs, beans and bullets.
The route was just as simple as the plan. It was A to B. The column was simply going to come straight up
