Sniper one (17 page)

While we waited for the men, we also shredded the abandoned mortar tube in case anyone fancied picking it up.

As the periods of silence between our bursts grew longer, the extraordinary day began to take its toll on Dale. Determined to see it all out, he fought heroically against sleep but all he ended up doing was nodding dog impressions with the mortar still between his legs.

'Go to bed, mate.'

'Eh?' He woke with a start.

'You've done your bit. It's beginning to get light anyway,' I told him.

'Er, yeah, OK then. It's been a faarkin' awesome birthday present. Thanks for that Dan.'

Eventually the door stopped opening. It's possible the men used their fingernails to dig through the back wall. We never found out, because we never saw them again. Hopefully they went the same way as their mates. It didn't really matter. We'd destroyed the mortar team that had posed the biggest threat to Cimic. A total of 550 Minimi rounds and thirty green spot very well spent. It felt great.

As the sun began to come up, Chris, Ads and Oost appeared on the roof. They were the early morning breakfast shift and our relief.

'Well, you boys have had a good night, haven't you?'

'Sorry mate, did we keep you up?'

Battle debris lined the whole roof: spent cartridge shells, empty ammo tins and mortar crates, our abandoned rifles and machine guns, half drunk bottles of water, empty cups of tea. I finally got my head down at 5.30 a.m., on the morning of 2 May. I was shattered. We'd been up since 2 a.m. the night before and we'd gone through sixteen and a half hours of solid fighting. It wasn't bad for a day's work.

Sleep was a luxury none of us had time for though during that period. There was just too much to do. I was up, breakfasted and back on the roof by 7.20 a.m.

The US engineers had not been so lucky. But, somehow, the battle group had escaped the repercussions of Operation Pimlico without losing a single man. That didn't mean the day had been a victory. Yes, we did have a few of the big OMS men locked up, and we'd killed a lot more. And they hadn't ended up topping any coppers. It was just a bluff. But the only lasting effect of the day's events was to up the OMS's tempo of attacks on us yet further. The battle of wills was now in full flow.

Since the threat level of going out and about on Al Amarah's streets had gone through the roof, all vehicle
movement was heavily restricted. From then on Warriors would only go between Cimic and Abu Naji when they absolutely had to. Foot patrols were also reduced. But it was vital that they didn't stop altogether. We had to keep on going out – if only to show the OMS that we still could. To lock ourselves inside Cimic would be to hand the whole town over to them.

Sniper Platoon had gained a bizarre addition to our foot patrols. She wasn't originally invited to join us, but often she left us with little choice. She came in the shape of a six-month-old mangy mongrel puppy called Tigris.

The thing had been taken off the streets and semi-adopted by Molly Phee, who named her after the river. Cruel little street kids had tortured her and cut her tail off. But Molly had thoroughly domesticated her, and she would be eaten alive by the packs of wild dogs if she went out of Cimic alone now. That didn't stop her following us about playing the tough girl when we were on the streets to protect her furry arse.

She was both a help and a hindrance. Her yapping did little for our stealth profile if we wanted to move around the place quietly. But whether it was her sense of smell or not, she also had a strong sixth sense of what was around the corner. We'd often know if there was someone in wait because she would get excited and start barking. It was a handy early warning system.

I've never been much of an animal person. Dogs' fleas and shit around military camps are bad for hygiene. But I allowed her to hang around the blokes because it helped to ease the tension. Half of the company fell in love with her. Dale and Major Featherstone were her greatest fans. She became known as Tigris, Dog of War. Some of the lads got
truly pathetic. One NCO even used to shower with her and used his own shampoo to scrub the muck of the streets off her coat. It was understandable in a way. To them, she represented a domestic comfort to take their minds off Al Amarah for a few minutes. A lifeline to home.

When we were inside Cimic, the OMS knew mortar fire was still their best way to try to hurt us. So they jacked up the ferocity of their aerial bombardment. We might've killed their best mortar team, but, like snakes, many others swiftly took their place.

The traditional use of mortars on the battlefield is to suppress or kill dismounted enemy infantry. Unless they score lucky direct hits, their high explosive charges (of between eight and twelve pounds) aren't big enough to destroy vehicles or armour. Instead, they throw out hundreds of hot, sharp shards of shrapnel at high velocity – just like a giant grenade. With metal casings that are designed to fragment as much as possible, a mortar bomb can be lethal up to 50 metres away.

It's known as an area weapon; the more you can launch, the better chance you'll have of killing. That's why they totally pummelled us.

From 1 to 10 May alone, a total of 525 individual mortar rounds were fired at us. A lot went wide, short or long. Others landed inside the Cimic compound but were blinds; they didn't go off. But with that amount of incoming the OMS were always going to notch up some good direct hits.

Things started to get smashed up. The compound's generator took a real battering. That plunged us into darkness for a good few hours until a couple of talented mechanics patched it up again. The swimming pool in particular took a fair bashing, demolishing its nice thatched veranda and blowing the little outdoor gym to smithereens.

There were also two direct hits on the two-storey prefab accommodation blocks. The rounds tore through the thin plastic roofs and exploded in the middle of their long dormitories. Luckily, they hit in the middle of the day and nobody was in them at the time. Instead, shrapnel shredded kit, mattresses and the thin walls and the blast covered everything else in a layer of dust and ceiling. If they had hit in the middle of the night, they could have killed a dozen men.

It was decided from then onwards that nobody would sleep in the dormitories any longer. Too many men could have been lost at once. Instead, we all had to crash out under hard cover in Cimic House itself or the cookhouse. Mortar rounds can't dig through concrete. That meant the place quickly became a vast overflowing jungle of sweaty bodies. Sleeping mats lined every available piece of floor at night, and every soldier had to live out of his Bergen.

Because not all of us could fit into the house, platoons also had to start taking it in turn to live in the Pink Palace for a few days. That was a truly miserable experience. There was no furniture at all in the rooms we were given to doss down in. It had also begun to stink. By the second week of May, mortar damage meant the plumbing had totally packed up in the building's Arab-style squat-hole toilets. But that didn't stop the Iraqi police from still crapping and pissing in them all the same. Soon, shit and piss lined the whole of the toilet floors. Its rancid pong permeated the whole building and clung to your clothes. Sniper Platoon managed to swerve its fair share of Pink Sauna shifts because of our need to be on the roof. But sometimes we just couldn't escape it.

More incoming mortar rounds also meant our odds were shortened on personally avoiding them. Everybody was well
aware of that, especially us on the roof. But we were professional soldiers and we had a job to do. We had little choice but to get used to it. You learn to put what you can't control to the back of your mind.

For some reason, the most intense barrage of the day would always rain down on us between 11 p.m. and midnight. It became known as the 'Golden Hour'. When we heard the crump of a launch or the three-second whistle warning, the drill was to dive into the nearest sangar and get behind a sandbag. Since we worked without our helmets on because you can't see through scopes as well, we'd make a desperate grab for them next to us or hanging off our belts. If you were caught out in the open, you'd just lie flat on the ground and get your head down as best as you could. It wasn't unheard of for the occasional round to land right on the roof. There was more than one close shave.

But the more we sat out under them, the sharper our ears got at picking up the launches, and the better we got at predicting how accurate they were going to be. Listening to them for sixteen hours a day, we got very good at it. Chris, who came to Snipers from the Mortar Platoon, was a genius at it.

'Hmm, that one's coming our way,' he'd say almost academically, on hearing a crump two miles off. Then in a scream, 'Every fucker take cover!'

Clambering down the ladder from Rooftop for more water or ammo was known as running the gauntlet. You didn't hang about.

Throughout, never once did I have a shortage of volunteers to go on the roof. I never once had to order a sniper up there. On the contrary, I had to order them off it to go to bed. Just like Dale, the lads would be falling asleep where they sat with their longs still in their hands. The truth is
being up there was also one hell of a rush. We thrived on it.

Considering herself a fully signed-up member of the platoon now, Tigris the pup wasn't one to shirk what she saw as her duties up there either. She had got into the habit of coming up to the roof with us at night as well. She enjoyed its cool breeze and liked to keep us company. The feeling was mutual. So much so, that whenever we heard incoming, someone was always sure to grab her up first before diving into the sangars with the grateful mutt in their arms.

Major Featherstone was once brave enough to question our judgement on incoming mortar rounds.

The Golden Hour had just passed, and six rounds had just been thrown at us. Five had gone off causing just light structural damage to the compound. But the sixth had been a blind. You only see them if they go off. So tracking down blinds in the camp was a pain in the arse. They could go off at any stage, a minute or a month later, so they always had to be found, day or night.

Ads was on the roof. He had developed perhaps the best set of ears in the platoon. From what he heard of it, he was convinced the blind landed within the compound. Featherstone came up to the roof.

'Right guys, everyone happy the blind landed outside of Cimic?'

'Sir, I don't think so. It got in.'

'I don't think it did, Ads. If it had, we would have heard it hit something as it came down.'

'Not necessarily, sir.'

'Did you see it then, Ads?'

'No.'

'Well then. It's late and we're not going to launch a hunt
now because you've got a feeling about it.'

'OK, fair enough, sir. But I'm telling you there's a blind in this camp.'

Ads was a cocky little private, and Featherstone was the boss. The debate was over. The major got on his PRR.

'Ops Room, it's the OC. Can confirm the blind landed outside of the compound. We're all clear. I'm bolloxed so I'm off to bed.'

Five minutes later, poor old Featherstone stormed back into the Ops Room.

'Right, bin my last report. I've found the blind. It's in my fucking bedroom.'

The 60mm mortar round had come straight through the roof of his Portakabin and landed neatly a metre inside the door. It was half-buried in the floor, with its tail fin still protruding out. Someone who saw it described it as a neatly coiled dog turd. It could have gone off at any moment. If Featherstone had gone to bed half an hour earlier, he could have been dead.

Generously, he added: 'The next person who questions Private Somers' ears, I'll have court-martialled.'

From then onwards, he slept under his desk in the Ops Room under Cimic House's hard cover too.

The intensity of the fighting wasn't without the odd bit of its own comic relief.

On one occasion we were watching an OMS tractor trundle over the north bank the morning after Fitzy and I had blatted the mortar crew. It had come to pick up their bodies, and the driver didn't mind doing it in full view of us either. As he reached the spot, he slowed down. Then BANG. The tractor had gone over one of the crew's own mortar rounds, exploding it. The bloody great machine
launched up in the air in a big puff of dust, and landed on one of its giant wheels on an angle that put its axle permanently out of business. The driver was fine. Thinking it must have been us, he scrambled out of the cab and legged it. It was hilarious. Everyone on the roof fell about in stitches. To us, it was poetic justice and put the icing on the cake.

Another light moment came in the shape of Private Daniel Crucefix. When I first heard the 22-year-old Kiwi's surname, I thought it was a nickname. It proved very apt. The movement ban meant that if you weren't seriously injured, you wouldn't get an immediate medivac back to Slipper City. So there were a lot of walking wounded hanging around the place. But Crucefix really took the prize. He sat it out at Cimic for three days with a piece of shrapnel the size of a credit card stuck in his nose.

He was one of a handful who had been in the back of Pte Beharry's Warrior but hadn't managed to fit on the convoy back to Abu Naji that night. Two RPG direct hits on the back of the Warrior had blasted him in the face and helmet with shrapnel and knocked him unconscious. Corky the Cimic House medic had decided it needed to be removed by a proper surgeon. So for the time being it would have to stay there. Having a lump of metal in his face didn't make him immune from wisecracks either.

'Love the nose job, mate, it's a big improvement,' was the most popular line.

The wound must have really hurt. But Pte Crucefix didn't complain once. He even insisted on doing his bit on the end of pot shots in the sangars. That was the spirit of Cimic House. Though we were taking a heavy pounding, we weren't going to let it get us down. The OMS could go and fuck themselves. And we were all in it together.

The fighting also threw up its fair share of the totally
surreal. At times, Al Amarah resembled a scene out of a Monty Python film gone badly wrong.