Sniper one (24 page)

I put one scenario to the colonel that I'd witnessed on May Day while over watching Private Beharry's abandoned Warrior.

'How about this one, sir? An unarmed dicker in normal
civvies popped out of an alleyway in front of Cimic, kneeled down in an RPG firing position, and pretended to pull the imaginary launcher's trigger while pointing at the Warrior. A couple of seconds later, a couple of RPG warheads came flying down into the thing from out of our view. The unarmed bloke gave a thumbs-up to his mates, and fucked off. What should we do about that?'

'Shoot him.'

'Really?'

'Yes. He is showing just as much intent to endanger life as the RPG man himself. He is just as guilty of the action. A dicker can be a legitimate threat, so he can be a legitimate target too.'

'What, even if he's unarmed?'

'I'm not encouraging wanton killing and recklessness, Sergeant. Threat to life is still the governing principle, and that must be very clear.'

The colonel smiled. 'But nowhere in the ROE does it say you can't shoot unarmed people.'

Something very interesting happened in that room. Without actually openly saying so, the colonel had completely rewritten our rules of engagement. He had given us tacit permission to shoot unarmed civilians if and when we felt it necessary. That was proper war fighting ROE, and it was unheard of for the sort of tour we were supposed to be on. It also had been done without ministers having to tell parliament and cause a big hullabaloo across the liberal sections of the media. The colonel was a pretty senior guy, but it wouldn't have been his call. That would have had to come all the way down from the top.

The date of his visit was 6 June, the sixtieth anniversary of the D Day landings. It was fitting, because what he said was a liberation for us too. It was exactly what we had
needed. Of course, the relaxation didn't mean that we went straight out to drop a load of twelve-year-olds for chucking stones at us. But it did give us the ability to blunt a few of the enemy's subsequent attacks; attacks after all that had only one intention, to kill us.

The next unarmed dicker the lads managed to get a bead on got quite a surprise.

He was spotted a few days later, in the middle of a series of concerted mortar strikes. The base plate was well out of our view from Cimic. Five mortar rounds were launched during the first volley, landing in and around the compound. Longy and Des were spotting for Oost. They'd already seen a shady-looking character watching us from a wall on the other side of the dam to the west. In his late twenties, with short wavy black hair and a neat goatee beard, he was carrying binoculars and a radio.

Longy brought Oost on to the wall 600 metres away, and the South African calmly waited for the second mortar volley to start. Sure enough, when the dicker popped up again to have a good look and radio in where the new rounds were landing, they knew they'd got their man. He was leaning out from behind the wall with the top half of his body and his right leg exposed. Oost pumped a 7.62mm green spot straight into the right side of his ribcage. It tore his insides out, and he dropped like a stone.

'That'll teach him,' said Oost as he looked up from his L96's sight. 'You should have seen the look on that twat's face.'

The kill had a substantial effect on the dicking. The OMS spotters wound their necks in pretty sharpish. Word spread that if you tried it on now, you were going to get your head blown off. It made their mortar aiming harder which meant more fell off target. They soon compensated by upping the
rate of rounds to increase the probability of landing some in the right place.

The other visit we got from the UK at that time was a delegation from OPTAG. Two of their senior sergeants came out to do a routine inspection of the company to see if their teaching back in Kent needed any updating. Being the arrogant sods that they were, the two sergeants didn't initially believe it did. They soon changed their minds.

Sniper Platoon was landed with taking the OPTAG sergeants out on our patrols for a day. Between us, we nicknamed them Pinky and Perky because after a morning in the hot sun, they looked like two little burnt red sausages.

Pinky and Perky were very gung-ho. They'd escaped their dull jobs in England for a few days and they wanted to see a bit of the enemy. That afternoon, we took them out on a long patrol right through the north bank. We walked bloody miles, it was bloody hot, but all we were attacked by was a pack of rabid dogs. Pinky and Perky were not very impressed. They also knew how to wind us up.

'Come on, Danny, I thought you lot were supposed to be in the thick of it out here?' goaded Pinky, who came from a posh Guards regiment. 'Can't you get us some action, war boy?'

They came out with us that night too. We were tasked with a joint patrol along with a multiple from Recce Platoon to show a presence around the houses of two local civilian workers in camp who had been threatened by the OMS. We set off in different directions on one loop of the town centre, and agreed to meet up in the middle.

Our very own Glasgow TA action man Major Ken Tait asked if he could come along too. Ken always jumped at any opportunity to get away from his desk. His experience with us during our first contact always made him a welcome addition.

On the streets, there were a lot of people out drinking
and making merry. That was unusual, but we were told it was because a big wedding was going on in the direction we were heading. We turned west on to Nasiriyah Street, which links the Blue route with the Yellow route, and then south into a smaller less well lit road that led down alongside an old cemetery to the left.

I was looking forward to catching a glimpse of the dirty great big Iraqi bride. Instead, the road was totally empty and silent. The worst of all combat indicators. Somewhere ahead in the darkness at the end of the street, we heard a group of men run across our path, exchanging urgent whispers.

'Standby, standb—'

I had just about enough time to get a quick warning out before the whole fucking world erupted.

A terrifying low-pitched pounding noise opened up to our left. At the same time, the top of the high brick wall next to our right shoulders began to disintegrate. A long burst of heavy machine-gun fire was ripping just over our heads and turning the wall's upper brickwork to dust. Then, another similar hellish din opened up from a rooftop directly to our right.

They were Dshkes, a Russian-made beast of a thing that fires half-inch calibre rounds and was designed to bring down helicopters. If one of them hit your arm, it would take it right off. If it hit your body, you'd have an entry and exit hole the size of a dinner plate. And if the gunner had aimed just a fraction lower, he would have blown Pikey and my heads off. I'd never seen anything like it.

The whole patrol cowered down as the lefthand Dshke demolished a 20-metre-long strip of the wall. A flying chip of brick lodged in OPTAG Perky's cheekbone, opening up a little cut. The gun was positioned 200 metres away on the
roof of a big white house that adjoined a mosque. Between the mosque and us was the cemetery.

Though the Dshke gunner on the rooftop to our right was far closer, his fire was slapping into the road further away from us as he struggled to traverse the huge tripod-mounted weapon's arcs into a tighter angle onto us.

I made a split-second call, and decided the most dangerous fire was coming from the mosque.

'Everybody to the left side of the road. Take cover behind the cemetery wall!'

We sprinted over as one. Without me saying a word, Ads stopped and turned around in the middle of the road. With balls of steel, he raised his SA80 to his shoulder and lined up the Dshke gunner just above us in his sights. Five seconds later, as the gunner desperately tried to bring his rounds on to Ads, he was dropped with two single shots.

'Target down,' Ads announced, as he joined the rest of us, cool as a cucumber.

It was the most professional enemy ambush we had yet encountered. And it damn near worked. But half the immediate threat had been neutralized, thanks to Ads, and we could now take these bastards on. Half a dozen AKs also opened up on us from the mosque area. The drills were well practised by this stage and I didn't need to say a word. Calmly, the lads started peering over the cemetery wall and putting rounds back at the muzzle flashes.

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.'