Never Broken (7 page)

What I hadn’t expected about camp life was that it wasn’t totally self-contained and insular. Every day locals would turn
up at one of the gates to be employed in various roles inside the camp as contractors. Some hated what you stood for, and particularly as a woman, as pretty much every adult female we saw from outside wore a hijab or a burka. We weren’t allowed to walk around in groups of less than four because of the perceived risk, so it meant that if you wanted to go anywhere on camp you had to have someone with you. You were also warned there was a risk of snipers and that one had shot at quite a few of the boys outside camp. Outside camp mortars and IEDs were an ever-present threat.

When there was a death or serious injury the whole camp would be shut down into what was known as ‘Op Minimise’. When Op Minimise kicked in, the Internet and phone lines would be shut down and there would be no communication with the outside world. This would ensure they could inform the family of the deceased or injured before you rang up your own family and said: ‘Somebody died here last night and I know who it is.’

Op Minimise happened regularly during the worst times. And quickly I learned the signs that there was bad news coming. The office would go a bit quiet beforehand, then the Commanding Officer would make a solemn announcement. Initially there were no names, only their Army numbers. Tears were rare – at least in public – but always there was an overriding sense of sadness that would spread throughout the camp. Often I felt: ‘What a waste’ and you felt for the families who would receive the news they would have prayed wouldn’t happen.

The longest Op Minimise was in place after a huge IED absolutely destroyed a tank. It was miles from the camp, near Basra city, but still we all heard the bang. At first it was so
loud that I thought the camp itself had been hit. We all waited for the mortar alarm to go off, but it didn’t. The IED was so huge there was no chance of anyone surviving. Tragically, the whole team of four was killed, including a female soldier who was a friend of Prince William’s.

For days afterwards the camp was locked down with no contact with the outside world and inside everyone was in mourning for the loss. Morale hit rock bottom after that as we all felt for their families. It hit the female soldiers even harder if there was a possibility that a woman was among the dead. You thought you knew the worst the insurgents could do and then they still had the ability to shock you with something as extreme and horrific as that.

That incident brought home to every one of us the horror of war. While we didn’t know everyone who was killed, every death or injury affected us all as we realised someone’s loved one was gone and we also knew that next time it could be someone we knew… or even ourselves. The truth was, life generally in Iraq was absolutely horrific. Aware they could be engaged at any moment by insurgents the guys faced nightmares on patrol. However, despite the threat of IEDs, snipers and mortar and rocket attacks, they unflinchingly served their country. Their courage is extraordinary and I have so much respect for them as it’s such a hard job.

After a few weeks I was moved to another area of the camp, called Camp Charlie. There, I joined two other women inside one section of living quarters, made up of huge sand-coloured tents. Each of the shared living quarters was divided by a wooden wall so that you had privacy; a corridor ran the length of the tent. I was the only mum in my working group. There were three of us in my room: a forty-something flame-haired
soldier called Debbie Hill, who was the bubbliest Territorial Army Private you’ve ever seen, and Corporal Sally Allison. They became two of my closest friends out there, along with another soldier, Corporal John Lewis, whose tent was nearby and who used to keep an eye out for us.

Unlike the Anderson Shelters, these tents had no overhead protection so the ‘powers that be’ devised a way for us to avoid getting shrapnel wounds if a mortar or shrapnel whizzed through them: we all had to build our own ‘Concrete Coffin’. First, we were taken to collect a series of breeze blocks, which we then had to drag into the tent. Then you’d build yourself a two- or three-block high wall around your bed space. You were also offered a camp bed, but John explained to me that everyone turned it down and chose to sleep on the floor in their sleeping bag – the risk was that if a mortar bomb hit, the shrapnel could slice through the tent and kill you. So inside your Concrete Coffin you had more protection the lower to the ground you were – unless you took a direct hit, of course.

Inside our ‘coffins’ we were also handed a mosquito net and a hard mattress. Above the space you had to pin an A4 piece of laminated paper with your name, number and rank on it. That way, if anything happened to you, or if your accommodation was bombed, there would be a way of tracking who was supposed to be there. The coffin became home for the duration of my tour. To try and make it a little less grim I used Blu-Tack to plaster it with photos from home of Milly and little drawings and paintings she’d done at nursery. Everywhere I went, I always carried a photo of her under my body armour next to my heart.

Whenever I got a chance I’d ring home and tell Jamie what was happening and I loved to hear Milly’s voice. ‘I miss you
and I’ll see you soon,’ I’d tell her. She used to say, ‘I miss you too mummy.’ It was so bittersweet, as while I was over the moon to hear from her my heart was breaking because I missed her so much. It was like a physical pain.

Mum also posted me a pink shower curtain, so I hung that makeshift over the top of my bed. It wouldn’t have won plaudits as a design feature as it looked awful, but for me it was a reminder of real life back home.

Day to day, though, life was pretty grim. Showers and loos at Camp Charlie were worse than festival standard so you’d always wear flip-flops – even in the shower. There was a ‘Portaloo man’ also known as ‘the sh*t man’, out of earshot, who drove around with huge ‘hoovers’ that sucked the poo out of the loos each day. Often they were so full you’d have to kick the front of them to get the poo to settle so that you could sit on the toilet without it touching your bum.

The women had their own shower block, subject to there being running water. Even then you couldn’t escape the reality of where you were. There was one occasion when Debbie and I were having a shower and the mortar alarm went off and we had to lie on the bathroom floor, lathered up, completely naked and then talk awkwardly to each other until the threat passed. We’d rather have our lives than our dignity.

Because it was so grim, something of a Blitz spirit existed around camp. Among fellow soldiers there was a strong sense of community and you’d soon get to recognise faces, although not every face was as welcome as others. For instance, every morning there was a little Iraqi guy who would stand outside the front of the female tent, holding two electrical wires. Each day we’d walk out on the way to breakfast and he’d say hopefully: ‘Electrics?’ He wanted to have a little wander
through the female tent if someone gave him permission, probably imagining we had all kinds of flesh on show. But he never stood a chance of fulfilling his fantasy for we didn’t even have electrics in the tents.

On another occasion an Egyptian contractor – so ironically, not a local – sneaked into our shower block and hid inside a cupboard. One girl screamed when she heard a noise and that dirty little man, realising he’d been rumbled, burst out from under the sink and scarpered. It was reported to the Royal Military Police and within an hour he’d been caught – security was so tight. He would have been sacked and that was the end of it. I always made sure I checked the cupboards in the shower block before having a wash after that.

After two months I’d fully grasped what being in a war zone is really like. Six people had died, and on the grapevine I’d heard that Allies had reportedly killed more than seventeen Iraqis directly involved in attacks on the camp or its residents. We were never told the full figures, but the camp rumour mill was rife with information about things that had taken place.

The weird thing about war is that you have spurts of activity, where you are running on adrenaline and you are full of fear and then there’s a lot of downtime where you aren’t really doing much and so you have to entertain yourself and it gets quite boring. The downtime is, in some ways, just as hard, as you are trying to process what is happening around you, but you can’t as it’s so extreme and you don’t want to offload on each other as you might tip someone else over the edge. Debbie would try to devise mad ideas to keep everyone’s spirits up. Along with her kit she’d managed to cram in a belly dancing skirt and she used to dance, jiggling her belly and bottom in the tent with the two of us – even though
there was no music – to have us in hysterics and break the monotony.

Debbie was a beautician in Civvy Street and while she was a brilliant soldier she was also a girly girl like me, so when she discovered that Boots The Chemist would deliver to BFPO addresses she was the first to place an order. As a treat she ordered Veet cold wax – the stuff in the roll-on bottle – so that she could host a girls’-only waxing party. By then everyone was getting a bit of leg regrowth. As she was trained on the professional kit, she was confident that she could do the job.

On the night it arrived, I was first to have a go. Instead of a nice beauty parlour bed, she got me to lay on the dirt on the floor of the tent before she started rolling cold wax down my leg. I immediately started yelling – it was more painful putting the cold wax on than pulling it off. We started laughing so hard in the tent I was doubled over when the mortar alarm went off. Immediately the laughter stopped. We had to throw on our body armour and helmets and I lay there with half-waxed legs, thinking this wouldn’t be a very dignified way to go. Then, as we continued to wait for the all-clear, I became desperate for the loo. You can’t just stroll off to the toilet block when you are in the midst of a potential mortar attack so I had to grab a plastic bag and have a wee in it, while my legs were still sticky and covered in wax. It was a really undignified moment and afterwards I vowed never to have my legs waxed in a war zone again, but you can’t be a princess over the call of nature when you are in a conflict zone.

Another issue was that tap water would regularly run out on camp as it was delivered by lorry each day and pumped into massive underground tanks. By mid-afternoon when everyone had showered, more often than not, the water was gone. So
if you wanted to guarantee a shower, you needed to be up at the crack of dawn. If we didn’t get up in time we found out a way to improvise: shower using bottled drinking water. We came up with the idea when Sally brought us all bright green face masks when she came back from two weeks R&R. After a lovely pampering session we went to the showers and there wasn’t even a drop of water so we had no way of getting it off. So we improvised and stacked the bottled water in the forty-degree sun outside our tent, waited for it to heat up and then used it to wash it off. From that day on, if we missed the shower water, we’d have bottled water hot showers.

The pampering sessions may sound frivolous, but in reality they were anything but. They were a great way to keep your sanity in the pressure-cooker atmosphere and a real treat for we had nothing. Another time my mum sent some Boots No7 nail varnish, which became the most prized contraband in camp. Obviously, we weren’t allowed to put nail polish on our fingernails but loads of the female soldiers had red toenails under their steel toe-capped boots. The ultimate in decadence, it was a way of keeping our spirits up.

A few months into my deployment Debbie also went home for two weeks R&R, where she dreamed up another morale booster. Not only did she come back with face cream, she also brought me a special gift: Norman the Gnome. My new friend, complete with a fishing line, stayed outside our tent for five weeks and even became an unofficial camp mascot.

One day we woke up and discovered that Norman had been kidnapped. Determined to repatriate him, we went to the Admin office armed with a photo of him and posted up missing posters all over the camp. Even the British Forces Radio got involved in a campaign to rescue Norman. After
a week we received a phone call from the Quartermaster, saying: ‘I think I’ve got something of yours here.’ It turned out one of the little Iraqi guys had found Norman in a portable loo and thought he was there for the taking so had taken him home for this garden in downtown Basra. Then he’d seen the missing posters, panicked that he was going to lose his job as they were paid good money, so he came clean and brought Norman back, pleading not to be sacked.

So Norman once again lived quite happily on our doorstep for a few weeks until he was kidnapped again. This time we received a ransom note that he would only be returned if we delivered twenty-five cans of Coca-Cola. So we headed to the Naafi – the camp tuckshop – and left the drinks at a designated location. But we were double-crossed and Norman wasn’t freed and all the Cola was pinched! We then started receiving letters from all over Iraq: including of Norman sat on a toilet, riding the top of a tank and even on R&R, back in Britain!

As we got further into my deployment the laughs became fewer as the camp began to receive more rocket and mortar attacks and one hit just outside of where I worked. Luckily I wasn’t in when it happened but later on I saw my boss and he looked scared, the first time I’d ever seen him look like that, and it frightened me. It was clear to us all that had it been a different time of day there might have been a different outcome. Everyone realised they had a sell-by date and that no one could be confident they were 100 per cent safe. I knew I had to get on with the job I’d trained to do, but I hated it and I developed a cold sore from the stress of it all. We were in a constant state of extreme pressure and anxiety for we literally didn’t know what was going to happen next. Morale was low and the only thing that kept us going was the fact that we all
had each other and so we started to settle into some sort of routine. We were building a haphazard family and starting to make a life within the compounds of camp.