by Dan Mills
Ads and Pikey were two of the platoon's strongest characters.
Private Adam Somers was a 22-year-old South Londoner, and a typical cockney. He came to the army from the City, where he had worked for two years as a trader in the Stock Exchange. He traded futures and options and even used to wear a silly bright yellow jacket. But as far as we could tell from his stories, all he learnt in the City was about whorehouses. He was eventually sacked for losing £128,000 in one day, and decided to join the army to do something exciting with his life.
Ads was a cheeky sod. He used to love calling me Granddad. But he was a right charmer too, and was always the first to crack a joke. Whenever he went out on the town, he was famed for bringing back the fattest bird he could find and shagging her as noisily as he could.
More than all of that, he was an excellent soldier. He loved fighting, in or out of uniform. A keen boxer, he would never miss a punch-up if there was one going in Tidworth. And he was the most tenacious in the platoon during combat exercises. But he was also always in and out of trouble with the army over women or alcohol – the only thing that stopped him from being made an NCO.
Private Geoff 'Pikey' Pieper was twenty years old and got his nickname from his family. They were proper gypsies, and lived in caravans. He was the best fixer I've ever known, a fantastic wheeler and dealer. If the platoon ever needed some piece of equipment, I'd put Pikey on to it.
'I'll see what I can do, boss,' he'd say – and he'd always get it. Fuck knows from where, and I didn't ask. Pikey's room used to look like Steptoe's yard, or Delboy's living room. He'd always come back off leave with something off the back of a lorry to flog to the rest of the company: shirts, watches, mobile phones, perfume, aftershave, sex toys. You name it, he flogged it. He did have a bit of a bad habit of nicking things, but never off the platoon.
I found him a thoroughly good and dependable soldier, who never avoided confrontation and was a brave little terrier in a fight. But like Ads, he also had a bit of a problem with authority, especially when his temper was up. Once when we were in the pub in Tidworth, Pikey had got too much booze inside him and he pulled a knife on one of the lads after some minor argument. He would have done him too, if I hadn't stepped in.
They might make a bit of trouble for you every now and then, but both Pikey and Ads were your archetypal British Army soldier, the backbone of the nation. They may not mix very well with peacetime, but sweep them out of the pub, pick them out of the gutter, and when they sober up give them a bayonet and tell them to charge. They'll fight out of their skin for you. From the Peninsular War to Iraq, their sort were what made the British infantry the greatest fighting force in the world. And it's exactly the same today.
The next day, another convoy of eight tonners took most of Y Company into Al Amarah. Our destination was Cimic House, the opulent former home of the governor of Maysan province slap bang in the middle of the city. It had been taken over by the coalition forces, for now. It served as both the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority's headquarters and the battle group's only foothold in the city. It was a busy place.
The journey in was our very first taste of a Middle Eastern town. It wasn't a nice one. Al Amarah was the capital city that Maysan province truly deserved. It was a squalid, stinking dump.
If you're being kind, Al Amarah is a place well past its heyday – if it ever had one. At worst, it's a filthy truckstop for petrol and a punch-up, before they take off again as quickly as they can. It wouldn't surprise me if the River Tigris runs twice as fast as it normally does when it goes through Al Amarah. Nobody wants to stay there for longer than they have to.
4
The smell of the place is the first thing that hits you. And the smell of its people's rotting shit will stay with me for ever. It was everywhere. The sewage system had long since packed up and shit and piss, along with bathwater and cooking waste, ran openly down every street's drainage gutters for everyone to see and smell. Piles of uncollected rubbish were everywhere.
We gawped out of the back of the trucks at our new home. Almost nothing differentiates the city's dull blocks of single- or two-storey houses from each other, laid out on a US-style grid system. Almost every building is sand coloured – nobody seemed to bother with paint.
Most of the cars on the streets were also in a shit state, a good indication that there was little money about the place. But money or not, I could never understand how Al Amarah's 350,000 people could care so little about their own surroundings.
If what was there wasn't bad enough, the town is pretty much constantly slapped by a strong wind that blows across the empty plains. It burns the back of your throat when it gets really hot and dumps a thin layer of dust over everything.
Children were playing in the overflowing shit-filled gutters, covered in grime and dirt. 'Mister, mister,' they shouted as we went past. It's an upsetting sight when you have kids of your own the same age.
A few groups of men hanging around on street corners gave us the evil eye as we drove past. The uprising in Najaf led by Moqtada al-Sadr's militia had swiftly hardened the population's stance to our presence.
If there was one thing Al Amarah people do care for it was their religion. For a lot of them, Islam and Moqtada were inseparable. The biggest thugs in town were the holy nutcases, hired guns and vicious gangsters of Al Amarah's Office of the Martyr Sadr (OMS). Named after his father, this was Moqtada's official fan club and local HQ for the Mehdi Army. People did what they said – they paid no attention to the police who were by and large an irrelevance.
Depending on the political climate around Iraq, the OMS's fighting strength numbered anything from a hardcore of around 400, to several thousand. They dressed in black. The OMS was also a convenient umbrella under which people who wanted to resist the coalition's presence grouped. They welcomed all comers, from tribesmen with blood feuds against us to settle, to frustrated former Ba'ath party officials and jobless young men just wanting to earn a few dinars. With a lot of the male Iraqi population having undergone conscription at some stage under Saddam, most of the OMS's ranks had some form of military training.
It may be only nine miles from Abu Naji, but Cimic House took up to an hour to get to. Convoys in and out varied their routes as much as possible to avoid being caught by improvised explosive devices (IEDs), also known as roadside bombs. That could mean crossing the river three times.
When our convoy pulled up at Cimic House, the city was peaceful. During the daytime over the last few days, it had been quiet. The bad boys came out to play at night.
CIMIC stood for Civil and Military Cooperation, the army's term for reconstruction projects, improving the infrastructure and general tree-hugging. Getting Iraq back on its feet, and all that. It was the basic reason we were all there. The whole compound is around 200 metres long, from north to south, and 100 metres across from east to west, at the widest point.
On two sides, there is water. The vast River Tigris runs past its northern perimeter, and one of its tributaries passes by its western edge. Since the Tigris stretches from the northern mountains of Kurdistan down through Baghdad as well as a dozen other towns, it was thoroughly filthy by the time it reached Al Amarah. It escaped into the Arabian Gulf just past Basra. It wasn't uncommon to see dead dogs and cows floating by, as well as the odd badly bloated human body.
The main road that approaches Cimic House from the south also snakes past its southern and eastern boundary, a thick concrete wall six feet high and reinforced by Hesco bastion bollards and sand-filled bollards.
You get into the place by two gates, each preceded by a series of 50-metre-long chicanes. All traffic is filtered through them to stop suicide bombers. The front gate, two sheet metal doors, is at the southern end of the compound and was used most often. It opens onto a long wide paved driveway that leads up to the main house. It was used as the vehicle park, and it was where we debussed from the eight tonners.
Cimic was a hive of activity. But we would have to hit the grou
nd 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.
'This is all right, isn't it, mate. What does sir think of the view?'
'Well, I don't mind telling you, Danny, if it wasn't for that faarkin' toilet of a city the other side of the fence, I could spend six months here with some ease. If we have to be tree huggers, I'm all on for tree hugging in comfort. Any fool can be uncomfortable.'
Not that we thought it would ever come to it, but militarily it was also an excellent place to defend. With water on two sides, there was little chance boats would make it across without us giving them a fair pummelling first. And the front and back sangars gave good arcs of fire, not to mention our all-round view from Cimic's rooftop. Two final buildings perched on the riverbank on the northern edge of the compound completed its prospect, a tall water tower and water treatment plant.
The only downside was the Pink Palace, the governor of Maysan's office and seat of power located the other side of the road from the front gate, which we were also tasked with securing. It was an ugly two-storey block shaped in three sides of a square. It was known as the Pink Palace because it was pink. But we called it the Pink Sauna on account of how hot it got in there. If there was ever any air con in it, it didn't work now. For some reason the poor design meant almost no clean air would ever pass through it either. It stank terribly. A third-rate architect had tried to make it look like a palace, but all it resembled was a naff Arab mansion. Technically, it was the seat of the governing council of Maysan. They didn't govern anything at all, because the Americans did all that. But it didn't stop them turning up to shout at each other all the same.
I spent the rest of that first night on the rooftop with a couple of pairs who had set up their longs. Our task was to log, report and observe anything that looked like insurgent activity. Mortar firing positions were our top priority. They were easiest to locate at night because the round will give off a bright flash when it ignites at the bottom of the barrel.
