Cimic was a hive of activity. But we would have to hit the ground running.
Dale had gone in ahead of us, and he was in the vehicle park to greet us.
‘Right lads, listen up. You’ve got twenty minutes to sort your shit and then we’re in the sangars on guard. The Light Infantry are getting out right now. So let’s look faarkin’ lively. Sentries, have your weapons cocked, but don’t take your safety catch off unless you’re going to fire.’
The plan was to take the Light Infantry out on the trucks we had come in on. They were pissed off, and couldn’t get out fast enough. It was hard to blame them.
The rioting they had faced was up there with the worst sort of stuff the army had to contend with during the darkest days of Belfast and Londonderry, including bullets and bombs. Heavy crowd aggro was never good to come up against, but that too was all new to us and seemed pretty exciting at the time. We’d done a huge amount of public disorder training during OPTAG so we were full of confidence and determined to give a good account of ourselves.
There was just time for a quick guided tour so we knew where everything was.
As he showed us around, the Light Infantry NCO pointed out a crater where a mortar round had landed inside the camp perimeter. There was the odd bullet hole in the wooden frames of the sangars (fortified lookout posts) too. We pretended we weren’t much interested in all his battle chat. But of course, we were fascinated.
In a line to the right of the driveway before the main house itself there were a series of ten prefabricated Portakabins, eight of which were single-storey. These were the shower and toilet blocks, or offices for the Cimic teams, which were largely made up of British TA soldiers, who in civilian life were accountants or engineers. The Light Infantry NCO said Cimic House was a cushy posting for them.
‘If they’ve got to do a tour of Iraq, then what better way to spend it than safely behind a desk with us guarding their arses, eh?’ he suggested. ‘And they still get a campaign medal to go home with.’
The double-storey blocks were much larger, and were our accommodation area. Each floor was just one long dormitory, divided up into sections of four beds in each to give a little privacy. That’s where we were to sleep, said the NCO.
Only Molly Phee and Major Featherstone had their own rooms, inside one of the single-storey Portakabins. With a big grin, our guide even gave us a good look inside them too, just to make sure we knew what we would be missing out on from the start.
Molly Phee was head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) for Maysan, the province’s de facto emperor. A senior US State Department official in her late forties, Molly was liked by everyone — Iraqi and British. She was a small woman, but she had a reputation as a seriously tough negotiator, and spoke fluent Arabic. Molly presided over a team of twenty CPA officials, most of them Yanks too.
‘Molly’s all right, but you’re going to love her close protection mob,’ said the NCO. ‘A load of septics called Triple Canopy. What a bunch of fucking nob jockeys they are.’
They were Molly’s twenty bodyguards for when she went out and about. Most were ex-elite US military and of all different ages, he added. Apparently one guy claimed to be an ex-SEAL and had served as far back as Vietnam. They dressed in their own uniform of khaki slacks and black polo shirts. They all wore Oakleys or wraparound RayBans, and walked around tooled up to the eyeballs. They sounded just terrific neighbours, and we couldn’t wait to meet them.
Then it was on to Cimic House itself. A large and rectangular 1960s concrete building, 30 metres long and 15 metres wide. It’s not much to look at now, but it was probably the coolest thing in southern Iraq when it was built. For Maysan, it would have been an estate agent’s wet dream.
On the ground floor were a series of generously sized meeting rooms, which were full of CPA officials’ desks, shaped around a central courtyard of a few square metres in size, right in the middle of the building. There was even a small number of servants’ rooms.
A wide staircase alongside one of the inner courtyard walls ran up to the second floor, where there were further substantial rooms that must have been originally designed as state bedrooms. They were large and airy with big windows to allow their original occupants to take advantage of the great views over the water. Several of them were en-suite, and had big air-conditioning units pumping cool air into them. A wide balcony with white railings ran the whole way around the level. All the floors in the building were made of marble.
Most of the house’s rooms were out of bounds for us. We were also ordered to have very little to do with the minor CPA folk, on their own request. There was a lot of tension between us, and none of it was our making. They were keen for us to keep as low a profile as possible because they didn’t want the locals thinking the military had come to make war. We were supposed to be on a smiley happy peacekeeping tour, and we had to behave like it.
The nicer toilet blocks were set aside for them too.
‘You’ll also have to eat meals at different times to them,’ said the NCO. ‘It’s what they made us do. It helps them pretend we’re not here.’
I supposed that made them feel like they were really helping the people of Iraq. Twats.
The tour ended with Cimic House’s wide, flat roof. Up there hung a solitary red, white and black Iraqi flag. It was there instead of a Union Jack to prove to the locals we were there for them.
As soon as we got up there, I knew immediately where my platoon would be spending most of the next seven months. Our job was to be the eyes and ears for the company; to log, report and observe anything that looked like insurgent activity. With the most potent and longest range weapons system, we were also its best deterrent. The roof was not only the highest spot in the compound, it also had a 360-degree view over much of the city. A three-foot-high wall even ran all the way around it for cover and to rest our longs on. All in all, it was our ideal location — a sniper’s Shangri-La.
5
‘Right boys, this is our new office,’ I swiftly announced. ‘No fucker comes up here without our permission. This is sniper territory from now on. Put the word around.’
It was important to claim the roof as quickly as possible, before another platoon like Recce got the same idea.
OK, Cimic House was overcrowded, our housemates were obnoxious, and outside the walls there was a jungle. But crucially, in the roof we now had an excellent place to work. On tour, everything else comes second to that.
The more we saw of our new home, the better it got. My mood was lifting by the minute. There was a proper cookhouse with real tables and chairs, not a tent full of plastic furniture like in Camp Abu Naji. It was run by a couple of military chefs in a mobile kitchen trailer. They did everything from chips and curries to fry-ups and ice cream, and a fresh fruit bowl every day. On Friday nights, they even threw on a barbecue.
One last treat awaited us in the palm-tree-lined garden, a luxurious remnant of Saddam’s day when his governor in Maysan lived there like a prince. Ringed by its own wall and a cooling thatched veranda was a 15- metre-long swimming pool. It was fully functioning too, thanks to the efforts of previous units. A little outdoor gym had been set up beside it, with exercise bikes and punch bags.
All in all, it really was quite a promising spot — a haven of calm in a storm of shit. Having been prepared for the worst on the grim drive in, we were chuffed to bits with the place by the end of the look around. We were also delighted to be away from the rest of the battle group stuck inside Abu Naji. It meant we could do our own thing, well away from the RSM’s moaning about haircuts, saluting and all that crap.
That evening I sat on the benches outside the cookhouse beside the river with Dale. There was a patio right on the corner that overlooked the Tigris where it split from its tributary. From there, you could watch the sun set behind the palm trees while fishermen in ancient looking canoes paddled past. There was even a little table tennis table.
We treated ourselves to a fresh, cool glass of orange squash (on this dry base, orange squash was as good as it got) and put our feet up. All over the city, the mosques had started to wail to call people in for evening prayer. For a moment, sitting out there almost felt a bit like being on some Mediterranean holiday. It was certainly a pleasant change to the freezing windowless underground bunk rooms of South Armagh.
