Sniper one (27 page)

The cheeky sods got so full of themselves that one day they even had the audacity to complain about the amount of patrols we were doing with the police. They wanted us off the streets altogether. We told them where they could go on that one.

Try as hard as we did not to think about it, there was also the niggling irritation that we couldn't actually say we'd fully beaten our enemy. We fought like men possessed for more than two months and after all that we still weren't able to declare a categorical military victory against the OMS. It was unfinished business, but that's the way we had to leave it.

We even started to get necky comments from some of the more politicized sorts who worked at Cimic. Then there was the assault on Longy's hobbies. A week after the handover, the compound's caretaker, a heavily religious man,
came across a cleaner flicking through an old porn mag that he had found while emptying the bins.

'This is disgusting Western sin,' he complained to Featherstone. 'This is our country now. I am disgusted that good Muslims are subjected to this un-Islamic filth while they have to do their jobs.'

'Yes, I'm sorry, it won't happen again,' Featherstone had to promise. I had to tell the boys not to put porn in the bins after that. Which was ironic, since another cleaner, Rasheed, was a massive supplier of hardcore porn to Ads, the company's resident porn king. Ads prided himself on the title, and would always loan his porn out free of charge, which was very generous of him. He wouldn't even charge Longy, who got far more use of it than his fair share.

Ads originally came out with about twenty DVDs and fifty magazines, but that had mushroomed considerably on the tour thanks to Rasheed. There was no chance Ads would be able to take it all home with him, unless he was happy to leave everything else he owned behind, so he did a deal where Rasheed would get it all back when we left. Porn was a habit Ads said he'd picked up from his City trader days. Then, when he made his bosses money, they would take him to lap dancing clubs and pay for all his table dances.

Rasheed didn't just supply the normal stuff either.

'You like real dirty dirty movie too, Mister Ads?' he asked, after a couple of successful porn deals had gone down.

'Yeah, course we do, Rasheed. What you got?'

'Not shocking you?'

'Fuck off, Rasheed. We're soldiers. You couldn't shock us if you tried.'

He could shock us, and he did. It was astonishingly hard core, and really tested the imagination. A lot of it also looked
like it was homemade, possibly locally. There were midgets, fat women, old women, gorgeous women, ugly women, pregnant women (particularly sick), veiled women; every imaginable sort of women, getting pretty much everything done to them. Animals always seemed to feature strongly too in Rasheed's movies: dogs, horses and particularly donkeys (an Iraqi favourite).

Thank God the caretaker never saw any of those. He would have had a heart attack on the spot.

After the mother of all adrenalin hangovers that lasted at least two weeks, we slowly accepted our plight. It wasn't as if we had any choice. Our job was to just get on with it, like we did everywhere else. Look on the bright side too; in fairness, we'd had two good months of unadulterated fun so we couldn't really complain about four months of tedium.

Peace was obviously good for Iraq, and battle-scarred Maysan province in particular. The more the place moved forward, the sooner all British troops would all be able to sod off home. Our strategic aim had always been to bore ourselves out of a reason for being there. No need for fighting, no need for soldiers.

The long and blisteringly hot weeks slowly passed by. The days took on a depressingly repetitive routine. Bed, cookhouse, work, freetime; cookhouse, work, freetime, cookhouse, bed.

Work took more concentration, because our patrols were so much more mundane. Tasks seemed to last twice as long as they did before.

Meals became a high point. We lingered over them now, rather than throwing the scoff down as quickly as possible to get back to the fighting. Mealtime chat was always about the menu. The food wasn't bad and Chef would try his best
with whatever he was given, but it was always the same dishes. Fish and chips, beans, beef curry, ham with pineapple pizza, pies, spaghetti bolognese. The army prides itself on being able to give you almost the same grub whether you're in Torquay or Timbuctoo. It's great if you're in the middle of a desert; not so when the odours of an Arabic feast sizzling away in Tigris Street's cafes and kebab stalls were constantly drifting over our walls.

Nobody said anything to Chef, because we didn't want to hurt his feelings. He worked like an ox, and had won massive respect for cooking every day under just his shitty green tent for several weeks of mortar strikes after his trailer had been blown up. But he could start to see it on our faces.

'I'm really sorry, guys, I wish I could do something else for you,' he'd apologize as we trooped in.

'Rubbish, Chef. It's fucking cordon bleu, mate. Keep it up,' we'd always reply.

Sleep was now almost impossible during the day because of the heat, even after the many mortar-damaged aircon units were replaced by the engineers. During the afternoons, they would blare away on ultra cold making almost no difference whatsoever. If you got a night shift, it was just tough shit.

But what was hardest was how to fill the long hours of spare time we now had on our hands. Every single minute of it had to be spent in Cimic. There were no bars or nightclubs to go too, and certainly fuck all to see, even if we were allowed out on the town – which we weren't.

To start with, that largely meant watching a shedload of DVDs. A lot of the boys had mini-DVD players or laptops, so you'd plug in a pair of speakers and a few of you could watch together. After a while, we'd watched them all, and any new arrivals were devoured within hours by the whole company.

No matter how desperate anyone got though, they'd never sink as low as to watch a
Blackadder
DVD with Chris, no matter how many invites he'd issue. Within a week, he'd already driven the whole platoon mad by saying all the punchlines a second before Rowan Atkinson did.

Saved from the truth so as not to hurt his feelings, Chris couldn't understand it.

'What's wrong with you fellas?
Blackadder
is a comic legend. None of you got a sense of humour?' he'd ask.

Fresh newspapers too along with any other whiff of the outside world were also ravished in a frenzy. Top of the list of most desired articles after the ceasefire were brand new copies of lads' mags like
FHM
or
Loaded
. The blokes who had them sent out guarded them zealously. The rule was they'd only have to pass them on after they'd had a chance to read them cover to cover first.

Not understanding the importance of this rule, our little hairy companion Tigris wreaked havoc. Like every other dog, she had a habit of picking up newspapers and magazines and depositing them in different rooms. Unfortunately, it took weeks for anyone to work this out. So when someone's most cherished possession went missing and he'd eventually track it down to the floor of some other bloke's room, false accusations would frequently fly.

Thanks to Tigris, two lads from Mortars once ended up eyeball to eyeball after one accused the other of heinous
FHM
theft for the third time.

'Of course you fucking lifted it, it was under your fucking bed!' screamed one.

'You call me a tea leaf one more time, and I'll smash your face in,' the other replied.

'You fucking deny you pinched my
FHM
again, and I'll do you first.'

Sensing peace needed to be made, Tigris solved the riddle immediately by picking up the disputed copy of
FHM
right in front of both of them and trotting off to deposit it in another room altogether. Fisticuffs averted.

With Molly Phee's departure, we became Tigris's new owners – all 106 of us. She'd earned our full respect by then so we adopted her with pride. All the incoming rocket, mortar and sniper fire that Cimic House had attracted during the fighting had made the compound about the most dangerous place in the city for the dog to live. But she never left, despite ample opportunity. It was good loyalty, and soldiers like that.

Tigris was no fool. Now that we'd been able to move back into some of the less destroyed accommodation buildings, she plumped for Major Featherstone's bed as her sleeping quarters every night. It was the most comfortable billet in the compound by some distance. The OC never once kicked her out. He couldn't; he was the biggest sop for her out of the lot of us.

A few of the lads had also brought out PlayStation consoles. Suddenly their popularity doubled overnight. The car racing game
Gran Turismo
was the most popular. A lot of money used to change hands with the lads' eyes glued to the box and their thumbs working overdrive. Oost was the undisputed video game king. He had incredible reaction times.

There was also hefty competition on who could compile the best tour home movie.

Almost everyone could record moving images on his camera or mobile. During the fighting days, nobody had held back. We got some great scrapping shots from our roof too. Since you could edit all that on a laptop by then and even bang a good soundtrack on top of it (always heavy
rock or thrash), there were some really brilliant montages put together. It's a shame the TV news boys never made it out to us, because it was the best combat footage I'd ever seen.

One major salvation was the engineers getting the Internet up and running again in Cimic. A mortar round right on top of the satellite dish had put an end to it pretty early on. Once the CPA left and we had more space, a small room was specially set aside in Cimic for a few computer terminals. The sappers also rigged up a wireless connection, so if you had your own laptop, you could do it from your bunk. Not bad for an outpost in the middle of a war zone. I used it for sending e-mails home and keeping up with Euro 2004. Until England got knocked out in the quarter-finals again . . .

The young single lads in the platoon loved the Internet for a different reason. They spent hours on end exercising their hormonal frustrations on it. Smudge, H, Sam and Longy (when he wasn't in the toilets) all got addicted to a site called Hot or Not. On it, photos people had posted of themselves would pop up and the viewer would be asked to grade them in terms of looks from one to ten.

Cimic House would constantly echo with shouts of abuse or disbelief at the various choices the boys were asked to make.

'You're joking, Ads, she's a total minger!'

'Not as much of a pig as that last bird you gave a nine to.'

'Now she's a real honey.'

'Shut up, H. She looks like your gran.'

Then the boys discovered dating sites as well. After that, they hardly did anything else – night or day. It became an utter obsession.

The self-declared king of the electronic chat-up lines was pretty boy Smudge.

'Fucking Iraq. I'd be getting laid twice a night if I wasn't stuck out here with you losers,' he bragged.

Foolish words. Such unchecked vanity was a red rag to a bull for soldiers. Chris and Fitz were quick to meet the challenge.

Unknown to Smudge, they too joined his favourite dating site, but from Chris's laptop on the broadband connection in the Quick Reaction Force room. They signed up under the name of Natalie, aged nineteen. Natalie had measurements of 34-24-34, and a DD cup size. Then they cut out an extra busty photo of Abi Titmuss from
FHM
, uploaded it as Natalie's mugshot, and under it posted the message:

'Hi, boys, I'm Nat. I want to meet a hunky soldier serving his country abroad. Fair hair action men please. Blond on blonde action only for this little bazooka.'

It was hilarious, if a little unsubtle.

'He'll never go for it, it's too obvious,' said Fitz, as he and Chris guffawed their way through the delicate enterprise.

'Of course he will. He's Smudger, isn't he? You wait and see.'

He did go for it. Like a rat up a drainpipe. Smudge couldn't wait to tell the other lads about his find, and to warn them off her too. Natalie was his.

'Fucking 'ell, boys, there is the hottest chick you've ever seen who's just come up on the site. She's after squaddies on Ops too. She looks like a model, fucking unbelievable. Her name is Natalie. Lovely name too, don't you think? I've already messaged her, so none of you bother, OK? Anyway, she only likes blonds, and you're all too ugly.'

How he didn't recognize it was Abi Titmuss we had no idea, especially since she was on the front cover of every
lads' magazine around at that time. The reality was he didn't want to. Natalie was his dream come true.

Sure enough, the next day Natalie messaged Smudge back, with no small amount of giggling coming from the QRF room. In no time at all, they were getting on like a house on fire.

Natalie was keen to know what Smudge had been up to, and what a big brave boy he'd been. Smudge knew he couldn't give away too many operational details on an open Internet line, but he couldn't disappoint the poor woman either.

His reply: 'let's just say baby that i've seen a few things, you know what i mean? of course, i can't talk about it because it's top secret. apparently i'm going to get a big bravery medal, and the SAS want to see me too. but i don't do it for the glory. i do it because someone's got to keep the world safe haven't they?'

That had Chris and Fitz rolling around on the floor crying their eyes out.

It was only a matter of time before the messages went dirty. Smudge initiated it, and Natalie was more than happy to take it even dirtier. They discussed their various sexual preferences, with Smudge particularly keen to learn Natalie's views on one certain position that I thought was still illegal.

Worst of all, he even confessed to wishing he could give himself a blowjob so he could keep himself happy when away on tour.

It went on for a good couple of weeks. Smudge was coming up to his allotted two weeks of R&R. He had an announcement for the platoon.