by The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time;Fighting Wars
the big debate out here at the moment is whether Iraq is having a civil war, the simple answer is not quite, but what is happening is a sort of warm-up bout in the Baghdad-Balil corridor extending out west into the Al-Anbar province. there‘s usually about 40 dead a day in the area, the nice recent touch was the vehicle suicide bombing of a school football match where the fucker actually drove right into the middle of the penalty area (and was offside).
the theory over in camp PROSPERITY (you’ve got to love the Americans, their other bases are LIBERTY, FREEDOM and VICTORY—i couldn‘t do 16 months out here without a sense of irony!) is that if we can win the next three months and win Baghdad, we can win full stop, if not then … who knows? What effect flooding the streets of a relatively compact and hostile city with 7,000 battle hardened troops who are all seriously pissed off that they just had their tour extended by five months and lost the deposit on their holiday to Miami remains to be seen but we’re in a good position to jump in and watch the fireworks.
which leaves me with a question—for the ladies
imagine, if you will, the Liberty Pool. at any one time we reckon there are about 70-100 people chilling there, mostly US Army, then us and then Georgians and Ukrainians, South American contractors and a handful of coalition embassy personnel. The soldiers and contractors, by and large, are naturally fit, healthy young men who’ve been working off the natural frustration of being far from home and loved ones by putting in long hours in the gym waiting for the latest FHM to be sent from home. and then place yourself and one other friend in the middle of the pool in bikinis!
enter stage right the two American nurses who sauntered all the way round the pool this afternoon, breathtaking in bikinis with rifles slung over their shoulders and arses that would have converted our interpreter.
it’s a strange scenario, especially when the next black hawk thunders in to the hospital next door and the shadow and the big red cross on the side reminds you just as you attempt the back flip with twist that some poor fucker somewhere just lost a leg.
The 0-60 life we lived in Baghdad—Liberty Pool in the morning, patrol at night, mortar attack in the morning, quiz night in the ‘Duck and Cover’—was not unpleasant. A soldier is never alone, but we spent an awful lot of time with our thoughts. Looking out over the city from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier—watching the choppers hovering like flies over the Council of Representatives, the Iraqi parliament building, or walking the lines in BSU, I’d notice the rich plethora of distractions the boys had conjured up. Strenuous in the gym or slightly less so round the pool table and dart-board, the endless DVDs and PSPs and Xboxes which guys would start playing war games on after they came back in off a real patrol. The constantly evolving banter, unique and inane competitions and elaborate gags and wind-ups, plots to shave Gdsm Heavens and the hotly contested 2006 Baghdad Open Underwater Swimming Competition (which was won by Major S. C. E. Wade, beating Lt J. C. Harrison into a poor second whatever his mummy might say). My e-mails home had become an essential part of my routine. We evolved ways of finding privacy in a world which denied it, of processing thoughts during the long hours with nothing else to do but think, perched precariously atop of situations it was far from healthy to think too much about. Surrounded by daily danger, daily graphic reminders of arbitrary violence and shocking mortality, our skin hardened, our sense of humour grew ever more flippant and tasteless, our coping mechanisms tended to the dark. Our job wasn’t exactly suited to introspection, but our pattern of life virtually forced it.
Life in BSU wasn’t trigger-happy, but it was spicy because of where we were and what was constantly going on in the back garden. We’d only been in town a couple of weeks when we took Seb out to the Al-Rashid for his leaving meal and barely noticed the sign at the maitre d’s desk asking for weapons to be unloaded please before you sit down. Like Gombauld in Huxley’s Crome Yellow , I personally found Baghdad as thorough a holiday from all the ordinary decencies and sanities, all the common emotions and preoccupations, as I ever want to have.
Nothing Beside Remains
In the car park of FOB Prosperity stood two massive bronze cast Saddam heads, falling apart now and graffitied by each unit coming through, gazing out with what I liked to imagine were scaly eyes on to the pistol range the Yanks had built in the back garden of his palace. There was something eloquent in the destruction of all that was grandiose, only the startlingly modernist and strangely beautiful Tomb of the Unknown Soldier unscathed by the violence, perhaps out of a soldier’s respect for his enemy but more likely so that the token Georgians had something to do, surly guards making up the numbers in the ‘Coalition’ to keep the UN happy and Russia off their backs. Down at Crossed-Swords looters had already stolen half of the Iranian helmets that had dangled macabre in nets from the giant fists, gory remnants of the Iran- Iraq war. It was said that the parade ground itself had been paved over the bodies of Iranians, which might or might not have been profound but given what was going on down south didn’t unduly bother us.
In July the Surge kicked off, Baghdad Security Plan II, which was privately being talked about in the Brigade Tactical Operations Centre as an all-or-nothing last throw of the dice. ‘Like cleaning your room,’ one of the guardsmen remarked with dry but accurate wit as Seb explained that things would get worse before they got better. Sure enough, the crumping explosions increased and the morgues got fuller but the boys were more concerned by the rumours from home that the wives back in Aldershot had set up honey-traps to catch the cyber love-rats flirting with other women on Internet dating sites.
Those few members of the company not addicted to myhotfriend. com amused themselves with the endless stream of inaccurate or completely-missing-the-point stories which filtered through from the press back home. The most recent had been the increasing coverage of Snatch and all its glorious inadequacies. Someone had obviously realized that a vehicle designed for the streets of Ulster wasn’t at its best in the Arabian desert, and suddenly the papers were up in arms for protection for ‘our boys’. Which was gratifying and we knew from the QDGs’ bitter experience of being blown up to be true, but which missed the point somewhat. We drove round Baghdad in Snatch while the Yanks drove round in Stryker—a vehicle so hard it made our precious Warriors look like prams—but I knew which I’d rather be in.
The IED threat was not the issue. Yes, the IEDs were as blind as landmines and the Snatch was not what you wanted to be in if you got unlucky with one, but by that stage the Iranians had taught the militia how to make ones capable of knocking out armour as well so it was nearly six-to-five and pick ’em. What the campaigning mothers back home weren’t taking into account, the shades of grey in which we lived and never saw in the press, was what message your vehicle sent. Drive a Snatch Land Rover, freshly armour-refitted and desert-cammed with two guys on top-cover, down Oxford Street and you’ll get a reaction, some stop and stares. Drive a fucking tank past Selfridges and the whole world will stop. Angry kids might come and throw a stone at a Snatch, they might not, but if we’d rolled around outside the Green Zone in tanks it would have been phone for the petrol bombs, Henry, and no school that afternoon.
The problem for us was not our kit, it was that, as the city got hotter, there was less for us to do. We lay by the pool watching the CIA guys hanging out of the doors of the Little Birds sweeping low over the loungers and leering at the nurses. Wankers, we thought, but we’d have loved to be up there ourselves. Having come all that way, longed so much for the excitement of Baghdad, we were coming round to a crushing realization: for all that Baghdad was tense, exotic and top-trump-winning in the post-tour mess-boasting sessions, we weren’t going to have a fight.
We watched fights, stood off from them, jumped into the aftermath of them, but still weren’t in them and deep down, therefore, couldn’t know, couldn’t answer all the questions we thought might get asked of us at ‘war’. Marlow, inevitably, used a sports metaphor. Sat back on our student arses, we’d watched the invasion of
Iraq, and it was like watching a big fight on the TV. So something had clicked, and we’d joined the supporters club, learned the jabs and blocks at Sandhurst and watched more fights on TV with a sense of an insider’s knowledge. And then we’d got out to Iraq, turned up to the Arena on a big fight night and soaked up the atmosphere, but from the stands. In Baghdad we were ringside, maybe even the trainers, applying the sponge, living each hook and wincing with each hit, but we still hadn’t been in the ring.
The daily Baghdad SITREP cheerfully reported one morning that some 1,855 bodies have been delivered to the city morgues in July—a nice record high, up 300 on last month.
The next slide said that attacks across the city were up 40 per cent, which we knew full well because we’d all been woken that morning by the mother of all eardrum-bursting thuds. The blast had sent the company, and most of the Green Zone, shooting out of bed, sick with adrenaline and heart-pounding, arse-doing the 50p/5p routine. Thorold had come bundling in naked from the shower across the way, diving under his bed as the alarm sirens started, cursing the barbarity of insurgents who launch attacks so early in the morning.
Once the all-clear sounded we took coffee on the banks of the river and watched the blossoming clouds of smoke that were the initial bomb on the market in Karada and the follow-up, timed perfectly to hit the emergency services’ response. The sky was alive with angry choppers and even fast air, and we all privately wondered how massive a blast must be to feel so big from what turns out to be a good couple of hundred metres.
With the slides and the bombs and the changes in personnel it felt like the tone started to change. Piers arrived from Afghanistan with tales of zips in the wire and ten-hour engagements, encircled camps of Paras groggily watching the sun rise over heaped piles of Taliban bodies surrounding their perimeter with the machine-guns still hot from the night’s festivities, which only heightened the familiar insidious sense of creeping boredom.
The boredom of watching as the Yanks go out and hammer the city while we patiently wait for another trip into the Red Zone and kid ourselves that we came here to swim not fight, when we’d all rather do our swimming in Cornwall or Blackpool.
Boredom in comparison to the tales of the medics patching up IED victims, eyes half-hanging out as they’re rushed in to the Ibn Shaid CSH (combat support hospital), where we lend a first-aid hand with the battle casualties that come in from the night before and gag and look away while tourniquets are pulled tight and limbs amputated from wide-eyed Marines.
Then again it might just be that the diving board is broken.
Piers was a senior captain freshly back from a tour with 3 Para in Afghanistan, and his stories round the evening camp fire were really making us feel inadequate. The media, initially distracted by Lebanon (which it seemed from the papers that made their way out to us was viewed at home as somehow more ‘tragic’ than what was happening in Baghdad—we could only assume because a few rich hippies had their honeymoons in Beirut) and the faux indignant outrage that Iran had a hand in things (as if that was a surprise to any of us after months of intelligence reporting down south that the Iranians trained, equipped and ordered attacks against us down there; they might as well have had T-shirts made) had just got hold of Christina Lamb’s breathless reports of the fighting, and the first returning waves of Toms, wide-eyed from the ‘fuck-me’ of the whole Herrick experience, were causing people to sit up and take notice.
Baghdad had been exciting, had been many of the things that Shaibah had not and was a tick in the box we were so desperate to get that the mere action of ticking it had been satisfaction enough. But Piers was up there to relax. Piers was taking a break and enjoying the calm after Afghanistan, and something in his eyes as we prised the ‘zips in the wire’ stories from him betrayed that it hadn’t been stuff to boast about in the same way we planned to boast about Baghdad. Piers was there to give his weapon a rest, and for all the hoo-hah and bangs of ‘the Surge’, the truth of it was that in months none of us had so much as shot a stray dog.
In the spirit of the Reading Club we joked away our days and evenings, playing Fives against the bomb-proof walls in full helmet and body-armour, confusing Harrison with Trivial Pursuit and annoying the CSM’s timetable, switching lunch for dinner in the perennial officers vs. sergeants, dinner vs. tea debate (which we finally won by bamboozling him entirely with the concept of ‘supper’). Not normally one for superstition, I resolved to give up on Don Quixote; in three months I hadn’t got past the first hundred pages and I was still in one piece, so maybe it wasn’t meant to be. Sunbathing could be done more openly in the chilled atmosphere of Baghdad, although the corrimec roof felt vulnerable to the mortars, and we insisted for decency that Harrison retain at least his pants. With no one left to tease, I resorted to winding up the Yanks, leaving my copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s Kingdom of Fear anywhere they might find it and disapprove of what one incensed major called his ‘unpatriotic and insidious rantings’. HST seemed pretty spot-on for Baghdad, although you wouldn’t have needed the drugs, and what with the cigars that Piers had brought in all we needed was cowboy hats for our top-cover patrols.
On my last night I sat out on stag to drink the last of it in, my last night with the Inkerman Company, who had proved to my delight that my long-held belief that you could treat soldiers like grown-ups was not misguided naivety. X Platoon were my first platoon, ‘No Frills Platoon’; no fuss, no bullshit and fuck me if we weren’t the go-to platoon for a job that needed doing well. Damn, I didn’t want to be leaving. Up in the sangar I wondered if it was unhealthy, this seemingly contagious disease we all had. No sooner had our itch for an operational tour been satisfied than we were looking for the next level. We flicked through Piers’ snaps of the rugged mountains of the Hindu Kush and the dusty nothing that flanked the Helmand River and forgot our own carefully crafted montages of convoy ops in Basrah and runs down Irish before we’d even finished them. I was sat in a sangar, cradling a machine-gun in the most dangerous city in the world and already longing for whatever extra Afghanistan would bring.
My ride out hooked north over the slums we had never penetrated on our patrols. Cattle being herded down the concrete streets totally unfazed by the gun battle raging nearby in Man-sour. In a space which must have been cleared by a bomb it’s rubble, not jumpers, for goalposts but at least the kids were playing football and not up at Route Pluto, where the Big Red 1 had just arrived, and it was all kicking off again. Baghdad was everything we wanted it to be, and not quite, and I think part of why I wasn’t more frustrated by this was the worrying thought that, if I had been firing my rifle out there, what would it have been for? In Iraq we had seen a war, been in a war, but perhaps it was for the best that we still hadn’t fought in one.
At the entrance to Baghdad International Airport, next to the now infamous Palace of Abu Grahib, is a statue of what looks like an angel—it’s a long way from home.
5
All Things Come
At 291605LAPR2007 we got ambushed on the dam.
In retrospect, nothing—between the moment we climbed steeply out of Baghdad, already sweating with homecoming anticipation, and the moment we touched down in Afghanistan—mattered.
At Sandhurst and Brecon we’d fired rifles aplenty, at wooden Hun’s-head targets and stencilled likenesses of Wehrmacht storm-troopers. In Bosnia no one had so much as shot a rifle in our vicinity. In Iraq we hadn’t properly fired ours. Everything, everything for the record-short six-month interval between getting back home and deploying to Helmand had been about the actual fights we were going to have, about the commanding officer’s address splashed in bold across the Sun to our secret delight: ‘Some of you won’t come back.’
At 291605LAPR2007 we got ambushed on the dam. Op Silicon had begun, and the Junior Officers’ Reading Club had downed books.
2.v.2007—Op SILICON
pause for breath, if not for shower or change as twenty minutes in this puny camp will supposedly mark the transition from o
ne Op to the next, not that any of us will notice because we’re too encrusted in dust and the bullets being fired at us won’t take any notice of the planners’ semantic details.
the thing about SILICON is that it’s nice and clean, conjures up images of hi-tech industry gleaming in plate-glass offices on some beazley M4 corridor. Op SILICON might have been more appropriately called the Battle for Gereshk, except even that geographical definition would have included the lazy fuckers back in this camp who jumped in their comfy beds when a stray RPG came too close but to whom the names of Deh Adam Khan, Habibollah Kholay, the Dam and the Canal would still mean nothing.
and as things wound down after three weeks parked out on the Dam and the locals started flowing back in on donkeys, whole families teetering on motorbikes or entire villages piled twenty high on the back of ancient tractors, we frolicked in the river, all dog-tags and topless bandanas because fuck it we’ve all been living, sleeping, eating and killing on top of each other for the past three weeks. Only the little girls smile and wave, flashes of bright green or pink in the incongruous Sunday-school landscape of compounds that would have been comical if we hadn’t fought tooth and nail through them days earlier.
ambushed on the canal road before the show had even started as we supposedly snuck into position the night before. RPGs exploding with a boom to kick start the hearts which stopped as the pinging and whizzing overhead we realized were incoming rounds from three directions and there follows a lost hour of charging around as the vehicles get stuck on the skyline and the Afghans, too stupid or brave to move them into cover, just get stuck in with raining hell back in all directions so we’re not sure whose bullets are bouncing at our feet as I grab my driver and charge up to the Dam to try and coordinate the fight. As soon as it seems to have started it’s stopped and the Afghans have even brewed up chai by a pond as if nothing has been happening and until I drink it I don’t realize how thirsty or pumped I am and Christ we haven’t even started.
