by Dan Mills
We could hear OMS men on the far side of the cemetery cutting about, so I found the entrance along our wall and kicked the sheet-metal gate open.
'Two Minimis on the ground in here!'
That set up a proper stable firing position to stop any of the fuckers creeping up on us through the gravestones. We also started slamming UGL rounds at the remaining Dshke. Sam eventually silenced it with a fantastically well-aimed grenade that exploded just a few feet from it. The boys whooped with delight.
'Gunman on the rooftop to the south,' screamed Des. As he spoke he spun around, engaged and dropped the enemy fighter at the far end of the street who was trying to outflank us. Hmm, these bad boys are good. Good job we're better. Several more appeared where the dropped fighter had come from, as well as a taxi full of nutters blazing away too, so a couple more blokes joined Des to take them on.
I jogged back up the wall to the cemetery gate. As I'd ducked down to peer into it again to assess the scene, some very loud automatic fire opened up from right behind me.
Where the fuck's that coming from? Hang on, if there's someone right behind me . . .
Everything suddenly slowed down. To my immediate right, a patch of the wall was getting eaten. Holes in the brickwork were rapidly appearing amid little puffs of dust. They were getting closer to me. That's when I realized.
Fuck. I'm going to get some of this.
My anti-clockwise swivel to face the loud noise only got halfway. Instead, I was instantaneously picked up and hurled through the air, landing in a heap ten feet into the cemetery past the Minimi line, with a searing pain in my left shoulder.
The best analogy to getting shot is being kicked hard by a well-built mule. Forget all that crap about forgetting to feel pain. It really fucking hurts. By the time I'd worked out what had happened and managed to scramble into cover, my whole shoulder had begun to numb up.
'Danny's down, Danny's hit,' the frantic shout went down the gun line.
Fuck and shit. This is going to change everything. Had the round gone right through or not? No exit wound I could see, so looks like not. Even worse. Now someone's going to have to dig that out, if I got as far as a medic of course. I put my right fingers under my shirt collar to feel for the hot blood.
Nothing. What the bollocks? All I felt was my intact skin and the bone underneath it, and a lump the size of a golf ball rapidly growing. Mighty bizarre. Doesn't matter, no time to think about it now. What was more important was that we now had enemy on three of our four sides.
As I crawled out of the cemetery and ducked down next to him, Longy was busy engaging the bloke who shot me. I was still confused, but my savvy was returning.
'I thought you was dead, you fucker.'
'So did I, Longy. Fuck knows what happened there.'
'Some peacekeeping tour, eh.'
Redders came on the radio from the Ops Room insisting to talk. Unfortunately, he wasn't winning the three-dimensional chess game that night.
'Alpha One Zero Alpha, this is Zero. I've looked at the map. You mustn't proceed any further in the direction of the mosque. That area is out of bounds.'
Yes, as well as full of enemy trying to kill us.
'Please extract to the south, Dan.'
Excellent. To the south, Des and the others were locked in a full-pitched gunfight with an ever growing number of OMS men. It was typical Ops Room stuff. I couldn't blame Redders though. It was proving hard enough for me to keep up with the battle with the speed it was changing, let alone someone miles away with just the odd radio message and map to go on.
'Yes, thanks for that Zero. I will extract south once the three fucking machine-gun posts there have been destroyed. Sorry if we didn't have time to mention that.'
Another voice over the net. It was Captain Simon Doyle, commander of Recce Platoon who was out leading our sister patrol that night. When he first heard the Dshkes open up, he was over a mile away at the other end of town. He had immediately got on the radio to me to say he was coming down to help us.
'Danny, this is Alpha Two Zero. We're getting pretty close to you now. Sorry, mate. Had a fairly big enemy contact on our way. If you can extract back up the street the way you came into it, we'll cover you from the main road a bit further down it to the west.'
Top news. Captain Doyle was ready and waiting to clear our escape route to the north. Simon was the total opposite of Redders – a quiet but highly confident officer, and a very good commander. He's just the sort of person you want with you in the shit. So when he said he was there to cover our arse, I believed him.
It was time to go.
'Prepare to move!'
The lads slipped into pairs ready to fire and manoeuvre up the street. Then, a terrified little whiney voice came over the PRRs.
'Danny, Danny? Danny, where are you?' It was OPTAG Pinky.
'I'm here, you muppet.' I looked around. He and Perky were nowhere to be seen. 'Hang on, where the fuck are you?'
'Danny, don't leave us. We've got to get the fuck out of here.'
I had totally forgotten about Pinky and Perky. Come to think of it, I hadn't seen them since the start of the contact. Then, a door in the wall on the opposite side of the street to the cemetery opened up, and Pinky and Perky crawled out of it. They completely disregarded my orders to get behind the cemetery wall and ducked into the nearest hiding place instead. They'd been lying in the shrubs of the garden ever since, trying to pretend they were geraniums.
I gaped in disbelief at the sorry sight as they crawled up next to me.
'Jesus Christ, Danny. How long's it been like this for?'
Chris answered before I could. 'Since we got off the fucking plane. You can get up off your knees now.'
They'd got the contact they said they really wanted all right. After all their banter, they hadn't even fired a single shot.
We set off for the rendezvous point with Captain Doyle just under a mile away, putting rounds down at flash targets on rooftops or around street corners that tried to open up on us. As we ran, I told Major Tait to take out the street lights to obscure our movement from the enemy fire. With another Benson and Hedges smouldering away through his schoolboy grin, he took to the task with relish and barely missed a single one. The irony that his day job in Al Amarah was to supervise its rebuilding wasn't lost on him.
An OMS bullet passed through H's trouser leg opening up a small cut. Other than that, we reached Captain Doyle unscathed. Both patrols then tracked the rest of the way down Nasiriyah Street together to meet two Warriors sent out to pick us up waiting at a prearranged junction.
Unfortunately, the Warriors were parked up under some street lights. Major Tait frightened the hell out of their crews by dashing straight up to the vehicles and hosing down the street lights with an extra long burst of automatic SA80. His blood was still up and he was loving it.
'OK, Mr Tait, no more street lights, thanks. I think we've done enough now.'
'Nae fuckin' bother, Danny. Wha'er you say.'
As we mounted up, we could already hear the whine of ambulance sirens coming from the direction of the cemetery. At least we'd done them a bit of damage too.
Back at Cimic, Captain Doyle and I went up to the Ops Room to check in. Among other things, I had to report that my twelve-man patrol had fired 512 rounds from SA80s, 330 Minimi rounds, and five UGLs. When we walked in, Redders was nowhere to be seen. Puzzled, we asked one of the company signallers reclining on a swing chair for his whereabouts. He just smiled.
'I'm under here, chaps,' Redders himself replied. And there he was, with helmet and full body armour on, crouching under his desk with the radio handset in his hand. The odd mortar had fallen outside, but he was rigged up for a full-on nuclear strike. The poor sod was stuck in that room with nowhere else to go all day long; it was obviously beginning to get to him.
I took off my body armour and shirt to show Dale the bruise where I'd been shot. The golf ball bit had gone down, but it was now the size of a grapefruit and full of d
eep pinks and purple.
Dale and I inspected my kit to work out the mystery of what had happened. The round had torn up the strap of my brand new day sack I'd got from the Triple Canopy mail order catalogues. It had only just arrived, and at the cost of $70 too. I forgot all that once I realized it could also have saved my life. The thick rubber strap had slowed down the bullet considerably, before it then passed through the thin cotton cover of my body armour, its rubber interior, out again, and then through my shirt. Then, as Dale discovered, that's where it had lodged, in the inside of my body armour with just its sharp lead nose poking through.
I was dumbstruck.
'Faarkin' 'ell, Danny. How did you escape that one, eh?'
He worked the round out with his thumb and finger tip. 'You want to keep that, Danny. Show it to the grandchildren one day.'
I popped it in my pocket as a good luck charm, chuffed to bits with the best tour souvenir out of everyone so far.
'Anyone got a camera?'
The next day, Ken Tait was summoned to see Major Featherstone. The OC had heard about his street light antics and wasn't hugely impressed. Poor old Ken got a major bollocking and was banned from going out on any more foot patrols. He was heartbroken.
Pinky and Perky were strangely quiet. Nor did they ask to come out on any more patrols with Sniper Platoon. They left a couple of days later with a pair of badly damaged egos, but some very full notebooks.
After most large contacts, the boys and I would always be keen for a battle damage assessment to see how well we'd faired against the OMS. The run-in with the Dshkes was no exception, so we did our normal trick of skirting by the city's main hospital on our next daylight patrol.
The Victoria Hospital (more of our colonial heritage) was just before Yugoslav Bridge on the south side of the Tigris. It was where all the OMS casualties were taken, dead or alive. Whenever they had a few men in there, the OMS leadership would post an armed guard on the hospital gate. They were sure we'd try to pop over to finish them off. We never went inside the hospital, because we could always get what we needed off the guard. It was also terrific fun winding him up.
'Hello, knobhead,' Pikey announced, after we crept up on him. Terrified, he tried to unsling his AK from his shoulder but just ended up dropping it. He was a scrawny looking little scumbag in his early twenties. A nobody foot soldier.
'Don't worry, we're not going to shoot you. Just come for a chat. How many OMS men in today?'
The guard scowled at us from behind the bars of the metal gate. We'd seen this one before here and we knew he spoke just enough crappy English to understand us. Pikey gave it another go.
'Sadr men. Britani jundi shoot how many?'
Conspiratorially, he looked over his shoulder to make sure nobody was watching, before replying in hushed tones, 'Seventeen. Eleven wounded, six dead.'
Excellent. It had been a good night's work after all. A look behind the guard at the hospital's emergency entrance confirmed what he told us. The ground was littered with fresh blood-soaked dressings and discarded IV drips that none of the staff had had a chance to clear up yet.
'Ooh. Oh dear, knobhead. Looks like we smacked your arse again,' Pikey continued.
'But we kill Britani jundi commander.'
'No, you didn't. He's right here,' pointing to me.
That really confused him. The OMS guy had obviously seen me talking on the radio or giving orders, and then when I went down. Obviously he hadn't seen me get back up again though.
'Bad luck, knobhead. See you tonight then, hopefully, eh? We'll look forward to it.'
He managed a nervous smile.
17
Going out on fighting foot patrols was a real adrenalin rush, and every sniper in the platoon relished the challenge. But there was also nothing quite like the few chances we got on the tour to get out in the field and set up a proper desert observation post.
Not knowing we'd be based in a town then, we'd done masses of training for desert OPs back in Tidworth, and we'd brought all our proper kit out with us too. They only came up when we got pinged for Operation Bayswater, a permanent and rolling task to catch out mortar teams having a go at Camp Abu Naji.
Not that we liked to admit it, but Slipper City got a fair few mortar rounds and rockets chucked at it too. On the few occasions Y Company could spare us, we went down to the marshland between the camp and the city and put in a reactive OP. The most popular site for base plates was at the very southern end of the Kadeem al Muallimin estate. After Aj Dayya, it was the city's most pro-OMS estate and several of their mortar crews were known to live within it. A reactive OP meant we'd just sit and wait for them to turn up. If they did, we'd kill them.
We'd tab for three kilometres to our chosen location as a team of eight. A rear protection force of four was left about a klick behind us to watch our arses. Then the final four would creep up on our bellies for the last couple of hundred metres so we weren't seen. It was a pretty exposed area, and the only place for a hide was the dried-up river beds. We dug ourselves covertly into the dried shale and slate, and that was us for the night.
One night in mid-June, we inserted at 7 p.m. just as the sun was setting. The plan was to extract at 3 a.m. after any mortar crews who fancied some action would have gone to bed.
On our maps, we were set back around 500 metres from Purple 8, a road junction at the south-west corner of the estate not far from the town prison. Ever since the NGOs left in a hurry, the prison had been heavily fortified and then occupied by the Royal Welch Fusiliers company.
It was very much enemy territory, so it was exciting work. The challenge of not being compromised coupled with the thrill of the hunt. We were good at this, and they weren't going to spot us in a hurry. We wore our sniper smocks as camouflage. They are big baggy canvas tops with a hood and plenty of pockets. You spray them the colour of the terrain you're going to be in before you go out. Elsewhere we'd use our head-to-toe Ghillie suits, but Iraq was too hot for that. The smocks' pockets and pouches are in its sides, arms or at the back. That way when you're on your belly in the prone position, you can just reach round with a hand and grab what you want. They'd be stuffed with food, a camouflage net, secateurs, a calculator, trowels, our sling set-ups, maps and water.
Our drag bags were also laid up beside us, with the heavier stuff such as scopes and ammunition. We never went out with less than six mags for each rifle. Then of course there were our longs, set up on bipod legs.
Keeping body movement in an OP to a minimum is absolutely crucial. Movement just attracts the eye to you. If you're a fidgeter, you're no good to a sniper platoon. If you've got a problem with insects, tough shit. You learn to live with all sorts of things crawling over you. Luckily, it's too hot in Iraq at that time of year for mosquitoes. They've all been killed off by the start of May.
Lying up means controlling your bodily functions too. Sooner or later, they are going to be issues if you're in an OP for any length of time. If it's a piss you need, then you slowly roll onto your side and piss in an empty water bottle. Otherwise you or your spotter will have to lie in it for the rest of the night. If it's something else you need to do, then you reach for your clingfilm, turn over, trousers down, and off you go. It's not the most enjoyable experience for your oppo, but needs must. Once you're done, you wrap it up and pop it in your Bergen so your hide isn't detected when you leave it. A regular snipers' wind-up is to put your poo in someone else's Bergen. When they're back in camp unpacking, you can normally hear the shout for miles.
'Wharr, who's shit is this?'
If you didn't like the platoon commander, you'd shove it in his Bergen instead.
On my sniping course, I put my Number Two through even worse. We'd been in a hide on the edge of a wood in Salisbury Plain for two days waiting for a target to turn up. I'd managed to suppress the urge for the whole time, right up to the moment the target's car turned up. I couldn't believe it, it was coming and he was coming, and there was nothing either of us could do ab
out it.
There was only one option available, so I slung a quick tree hook and got into a squat. While still marking the target through the sight, I pulled my trousers down. My Number Two got out the clingfilm and held it under my arse. While semi-retching from the pong, he still managed to catch all my warm faeces, and ten seconds later I got the kill. I had to buy him a fair few pints that night just to get him to stop whinging.
Sometimes we would have to wait in the river beds until pretty late for any action. It wasn't until just before 2 a.m. that things began to stir that night.
Without any warning, the whoosh of two RPGs fired almost simultaneously about a kilometre away from us broke the night's perfect silence. They impacted with big bangs and flashes on the prison's walls. The firing point was out of our sight on the other side of the long low building so we couldn't return fire. I got on the radio to Abu Naji's Ops Room to report the contact.
'Zero, Alpha One Zero. RPG contact on Broadmoor. Firing point from around Red 8, judging by their nine-second flight time. Do you want me to collapse my current task and pursue the enemy?'
We could have a good fight on here.
'Alpha One Zero, roger your last. No, hold your current position. Two Whiskies being dispatched as QRF to Red 8.'
Bugger. Whiskies was radio code for Warriors. Five minutes later, we heard the two Warriors trundle by past us to our east up the main road into Al Amarah towards Red 8. Then the inevitable and the Warriors were engaged too. More sounds of whooshing RPGs, then a long burst of SA80, followed by the clatter of Warrior chain guns. It was a big old exchange, but, infuriatingly for us, totally out of our view so we couldn't help them out.
Then, the all too frequent message over the net.
'Contact casualty. Wait out. Two men down.'
More Warriors turned up and extracted the injured men, finally ending the battle. Later, we found out exactly what had happened.
