Dirty Deeds Done Cheap

by Peter Mercer

  Because we were now pretty much in the desert and totally in the middle of nowhere, all the team leaders decided to let the lads have a bit of target practice with the heavy weapons. These are so powerful and formidable that there weren’t any ranges around on the American camps that we could use to practise on, so when we had time, and it was safe to do so, we’d let our gunners let rip in the desert. Each team let each other’s know what they were doing and we gave each other strict arcs of fire and identified some targets well away from each other. I chose an outcrop of rocks about 800 metres to our right. We were already made ready, so my gunner set his sights, took his safety off, then boom, boom, boom! Three rounds of 40mm high-explosive grenades went hurtling towards the rocky outcrop. He had almost a direct hit and a huge dust cloud rose up. A split second later we heard the impact (sound does take a while to travel). That was good enough for me. My gunner had one more burst and by then he’d obliterated the rocks. Target practice now over, we reloaded and then ate a few more snacks.

  After about an hour and four cups of coffee, we heard over the sat phone that the other teams’ mission had been cancelled, so they were now on their way back. Good news all around. This would mean we would maybe make a late lunch back on camp, which made the guys cheer up enormously. The other teams would be passing through our position in approximately thirty minutes, so we prepared to move. The plan was to let the other teams pass, then, fifteen minutes or so later, we would follow on. This would split us up and make sure that there wouldn’t be twelve vehicles all travelling in a line – which would obviously make one mother of a target for an insurgent with his hand on a trigger to detonate an IED or for someone keen on ambush.

  Twenty to twenty-five minutes later we could see the other teams approaching in the distance and, as they came past us, one of our lads mooned at them and the rest of us gave the finger – the usual sort of greeting that we gave to each other. We were always trying to have a laugh and a piss-take at every opportunity. It was a good way to destress. We briefly chatted to the other team on the radio and confirmed our plan. As they sped past we sat tight and watched them approach the outskirts of town. I was feeling hungry now and was looking forward to a nice lunch.

  As we mounted up in our trucks we heard a loud boom in the distance, then saw a huge cloud of black smoke. My heart sank and I started to chant my mantra in my head, ‘No! Fuck, fuck, fuck!’ Then it came over the comms network. It was a broken message: ‘Nine Zero Charlie, contact, wait out.’ It was a contact report from our mates. They’d been hit. The other team were in deep shit: they’d been hit, and hit bad. That was one hell of an explosion they’d gone through and, if we could see it 5 kilometres away, it must have been a big bastard of a bomb – very bad. In a second we were off and trying to maintain radio silence. This was so that if the call sign in trouble needed to pass on information to the American HQ our comms chatter wouldn’t interfere. Then came a message over the radio: ‘Nine Zero Charlie, contact report: we’ve been hit by an IED outside the CIA building and are coming under effective enemy fire.’ It is such a distressing, helpless feeling, to hear one of your call signs (your friends, your mates) in trouble and you’re not there to help. There was thick black smoke billowing up into the sky now, and as we approached we could hear the firing, and lots of it! We had a lot of bother on our hands! We were going in to kick arse or get our arses kicked; we were heading into the unknown but we had to go – it was our friends in there!

  We had to make a split-second decision: whether to go firm and wait for a request for assistance or go into the kill zone and assist. What a predicament! There could be nothing and nobody left alive to rescue in there. They could have all been taken out for all we knew. Fuck it! We were going in – it was our mates in there, right in the middle of that shit storm. We were all chomping at the bit and eager to go and help out when Frank, our patrol commander, gave the nod and that was it: safety catches off, and we were away. We could now see bits of the car that had obviously contained the IED. I could see the engine block, wheels, tyres and a big bloody crater where it had been. ‘Watch and shoot lads!’ I shouted. ‘Any fucker with a gun who’s not one of ours, kill ’em!’

  We drove past the remains of the car and saw that there were a couple of clearly dead bodies (with limbs missing) nearby; it was pretty grisly. Then I saw a man on his knees, really distressed and with no shirt on, wearing only ripped trousers and covered in blood. When I looked closer I saw that his arm had been taken clean off. He was crying. He looked to be in a very bad way. He wasn’t one of our guys. He may just have been an innocent passer-by – we didn’t know and so we just went past him.

  Then there was a blast of gunfire from my gunner in the back seat ‘Enemy right, top of the hill, on the right!’ he shouted. Then all hell broke loose. Our whole patrol was identifying targets and the amount of fire we were putting down was truly incredible. There was, fortunately, no sign of our other call sign in the area and I couldn’t hear a damn thing on the comms because of all the gunfire. My gunner behind shouted, ‘Enemy right,’ again. We both turned around and I let off my M203 grenade launcher towards the wall, where an insurgent was clearly trying to escape over the top. I missed him by a mile but I blew a bloody great hole in the wall. (In my defence, I will say that that was the first time I’d fired an M203 in anger and we were on the move at the time.) My M240 gunner then let rip with a huge burst and I fired five or six rounds from my M16. The insurgent fucked over the wall in a spray of blood – it was messy. I figured that, because we travelled at speed, it would have been a better bet to try to use my grenade launcher and take him and the wall out, but after my first crap shot I found that my gunner already had him in his sights and sent him off to paradise (hope he got his virgins).

  We sped through the kill zone as quickly as possible once we were sure our other call sign was definitely out of there and not in trouble. Then, as we rounded the corner, going up to the main road that led to the camp, we saw two Strykers (American armoured personnel carriers) coming towards us down the hill. We screamed to a halt and cordoned off the road. We took cover and scanned the area and then communicated with the Stryker commander what had happened. They seemed hesitant to help at first, but then they called in air support for us. There was still the odd round winging about (probably snipers) and I took cover by lying in the gutter behind a large kerbstone. There wasn’t much to take cover behind and it was the best I could do. After air support was secured, I told my lads to keep popping the occasional round off into likely enemy positions, but to aim only at the high ground, no built-up areas, and to keep their heads down and not to take any stupid risks.

  When we felt that the situation was under control, we jumped back into the trucks and continued our journey back to camp. Everyone was on a knife edge all the way back. We came through camp; there was no waving this time, just the American sentries scurrying about. They knew our predicament and were concerned for us. They knew we’d been in a big contact and had sustained casualties. Fair play to them.

  We quickly unloaded all our weapons and checked that everything and everyone was OK. Apart from a few holes in the vehicles, we were fine, nothing drastic. We then drove to the ops room. As we pulled up outside we didn’t know what to expect. We had heard no news, as there was a lot of confusion, so we didn’t know what injuries or deaths had occurred with the other patrol. All the medics were legging it about outside the hospital and, from what we could see, one of the vehicles had been dragged in on its rims by an American Humvee. Its alloy wheels were ground down and its tyres were long gone, and there were bullet holes down one side. Everyone in that truck, miraculously, was fine, though. It was a very different story for 9.0 Charlie’s command vehicle and crew.

  I was still trembling with adrenalin as I got out of my vehicle. There was no smiling or laughing now – everyone was deadly serious and concerned.

  I could see some bullet holes in the Land Cruiser that had been the command vehicle and there was a
hell of a lot of blood everywhere, but no apparent bomb damage. I prayed that the occupants hadn’t been too seriously hurt and I looked in the back seats (you have to remember there were no doors on our vehicles). It was obvious from the mess inside that one of the Gurkhas (or both) had been badly hurt or, worse, killed. There were obvious bone fragments in the footwells and on the back seat. There were bullet holes on both sides and a rip in the front passenger seat. But, as it turned out, one round had totally penetrated our armour and had passed through the back door, going right through the unfortunate Gurkha, and then carried on into the vehicle commander, Frank. As I was looking at the damaged vehicle I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was my boss. He told me that Frank had been shot in the right-hand side but he didn’t know how bad it was. It was all very confused. You have to remember that we weren’t bodyguard teams with armoured SUVs. We were carrying out a military role but more often than not without the military backup. It seemed crazy to some people.

  From the limited information we had it looked like a few rounds (not many but enough) had hit the Toyota: one round hitting the Gurkha on the driver’s side, the other going in through the back door then through the back seat and through the pelvis of the Gurkha, then carrying on through the back of the front passenger seat, hitting Frank in the right-hand side of his abdomen. I had looked at the bone and blood in the back seat and just assumed the worst, as it didn’t look at all good.

  The medics in the camp hospital (which was conveniently situated opposite our offices) were working hard to stabilise the two Gurkhas. Then we heard the great news that Frank was OK. He came out of the hospital holding his side, looking a bit sore and sorry for himself. ‘Let’s have a look then, you poof!’ someone said. Frank lifted up his T-shirt to reveal a massive round bruise, which looked sore as hell. It looked to me as if he’d been hit with a squash ball! All the Fijians then gathered round and held hands and prayed, as they always did; everyone joined in. Even after the prayers, you could tell the lads were still worried about the two Gurkhas, though. There had, after all, been a lot of blood and bone.

  We were then told to stand down and de-service all the kit. We’d got off 3,500 rounds of various types of ammunition on this contact, which is an incredible amount. This de-service included the vehicles, which would have to be checked over, and we also had to hose out all the blood. We didn’t have any spare vehicles on camp so it was important that they were kept running and in as good order as possible. If one was really trashed or we’d had to blow one up, we’d just have to travel up to Turkey to buy another one.

  After all the commotion, the prayers and the chin-wagging, all the team leaders then got together and we had a discussion to see if, with hindsight, we might have done things any differently. It was eventually concluded that the situation couldn’t have been avoided; it happened, and nobody could have predicted or prevented what had occurred – it was just one of those things in this fucked-up place. We just had to move on.

  After the trucks had been checked over, we drove down to our accommodation, all of us now in a bit of a sombre mood. I greeted Kasper the dog, unlocked my front door and went inside. I took off all my gear and then sat down on my bed and tried to mentally absorb what had just happened. I was still deaf as a post from all the firing. I couldn’t hear a fucking thing over the ringing in my ears. Also, I was still shaking from all the adrenalin – well not so much shaking as a gentle, tiny tremble. I still felt edgy and ready to go, though – my adrenalin was still pumping. I made myself a coffee and stripped my weapons down to clean them. I didn’t feel hungry any more and we had a big debrief scheduled for 16.30, so I just put some chill-out music on and got on with my admin work.

  If you don’t keep M16s clean you can get quite a few stoppages, but they have a device fitted to them called a forward assist, which means that, if the round isn’t located in the chamber correctly, you can hit this device with the palm of your hand and physically force the round into the chamber. This comes in handy. As with the British SA80, if you do get a stoppage, you have to go through the rigmarole of a stoppage drill. So I set about cleaning my guns. These were our life-lines.

  Later that afternoon we had a call from one of the surgeons to say that both the Gurkhas would pull through. Apparently, one of them had a bad leg injury and the other had a shattered pelvis. Not good, but both guys would fly back to Nepal after being flown to a hospital in Germany. I felt much better after hearing that news. It picked my spirits up and I knew that everyone felt the same. Apparently, during the firefight, even after the terrible injuries they received, the two Gurkhas had refused to lie down and take it easy – no, not at all. They had carried on. Hard little fuckers, from witness accounts – they’d fought all the way back to the camp! They’d both lost a hell of a lot of blood and both had horrific injuries and they must both have been in terrible pain, but they had carried on fighting – incredible.

  At 16.00 the same day, all the team leaders involved in the contact went up to the American citadel. We weren’t allowed in there normally, because, being Brits, South Africans, Zimbabweans and so on, and therefore not US citizens, we couldn’t be vetted by the US government for security clearance. Only the Yanks who were part of our outfit could get clearance. This was why our main boss was an ex-major in the US Special Forces, so he ran the show and he usually went to all our briefs. However, on this occasion, we had been given express permission from the top to get clearance for entry into this place. Something big was going on and I was about to find out what.

  We all entered the citadel, which was situated inside one of Saddam’s buildings and looked – and was – very grand. As we all looked around the place, an American soldier came up and spoke to our boss and all of us then followed him upstairs. At the top of a winding staircase we entered what must have been some sort of conference room. Everyone sat down and a big projection screen dropped down. What we were about to watch would blow our minds.

  People were pouring in and the room rapidly became packed. There were probably around fifty people of all ranks, and we knew that whatever was about to happen was, obviously, of great importance, because we four team leaders were sitting in prime positions right at the very front, while captains and majors in the US Army stood at the back. But I suppose, after all, it was we who stood to get the crap blown out of us.

  After everyone was settled the room fell silent and in walked four plain-clothes American guys. I recognised two of them as CIA and I assumed the other two were the same or from some other sort of government intelligence agency. They introduced themselves as OGA and started to explain the mystery of why we were all here.

  First, before they went into their spiel about this mystery, they proceeded to show us a film. It was of our convoy coming under attack! It was obvious that it had been taken from CCTV footage from a camera outside the CIA safe house. At first, we couldn’t believe what we were seeing. First of all, it showed the first and second Toyotas of the other call sign passing by their building, then, just as the third vehicle was going past, there was a huge fireball, and smoke covered the screen. We then saw the other vehicles taking evasive action. You could see the muzzle flashes from the weapons (there was no sound on the film), then they all took off. I then saw our patrol come bombing through. We all sat there in the room totally gobsmacked. The reason we’d been brought together, we were told, was that the OGA wanted to inform us that they’d known there was a bomb there and that we’d personally been driving past it every day for over three days! Wankers!

  Then they showed us another film which they had shot over the previous three days. It made for incredible viewing. It showed three men pushing an apparently broken-down car towards the gates of this so-called safe house. Then they had left it parked right outside the entrance – and I mean right outside, next to the left-hand post of the gate. One man had then got down on his knees and stuck his hand under the rear bumper and then stood up again – he was obviously arming the bomb! The film was then fast-forwarded
to the following evening and then the same three men appeared and again one got down under the bumper and, obviously, disarmed the bomb, unbelievable! Then they pushed the car out of the way. This routine went on for three days.

  Unbelievably, the US military and CIA had known but hadn’t informed us. The bomb had been meant for the CIA or US Army – so they’d just done their best to avoid it. We couldn’t believe what we were hearing and seeing. We had been driving past that bomb for two days in a row. In the end the insurgents must have thought, What the hell! – and figured that they had been sussed, as the Yanks were clearly avoiding it, and had decided to have a go at us instead.

  This was a massive, massive blunder and the lack of communication was infuriating. We were all fuming. We’d nearly lost three mates because of their incompetence or lack of care. We couldn’t comprehend that they’d been watching this bomb being pushed in and out for days and the intel hadn’t filtered down to us. Everyone, and I mean everyone, had known about this except us. Cheers, guys! There were lots of apologies that day and we set the wheels in motion to make sure something like that would never happen again.

  We didn’t have a body count for that day, either insurgent or civilian. It was confirmed that the guy I had seen on his knees with his shirt and arm missing had died. In hindsight, I should have finished him off – he was in a right mess – but I couldn’t. I’m not put together like that. I couldn’t kill an innocent unarmed civilian. Besides, we weren’t paid to look after civilians, much as we’d sometimes have liked to. It was a really bad situation out there, but it was out of our hands, out of our control.

  We did have one bit of luck that day. It seems that the American military were going to come in guns blazing until they knew and confirmed it was us. We could have been wiped out by both sides. So not a bad day for us after all, though I’ve got to say that we didn’t feel particularly lucky, given the circumstances.