Sniper one (26 page)

Bollocks he was. None of us believed a word of it. If there was one thing the fat ass was good at it was talking shit, and we'd heard that particular pile of it several times before. Neither did we have any interest in believing there might be a ceasefire. After a two-month slog, we really thought we were getting the upper hand over the OMS. Especially after that very night too, when we caught our first live terrorists in the act. It was a terrific result because we'd normally only be able to pick OMS men up off a mortuary slab. They weren't too talkative then.

Again, Sniper Platoon was in the thick of it. Showing more balls now thanks to the ROE colonel's visit, Featherstone had ordered fifty men out on a big ambush to try and trap any mortar teams at work that evening. He'd even come along too. We panned out over a 500-metre line across the north bank among the Iraqi Army camp ruins, and laid low waiting for something to happen.

When a volley of mortars was launched at Cimic a couple of miles to our east just after midnight, we thought we'd blown it for the night. Then, a wonderful stroke of luck. The mortar crew of three drove back from the job right into our line. With no idea we were there, the idiots even stopped 100 metres away to get out for a fag and a chinwag. They'd obviously pulled away from the launch site to a point of safety, and were now on a debrief.

We were on them in seconds. A pathetic lot of scrawny toerags they were too, unkempt with stubbly beards and dirty clothes. Not the OMS's shock troops exactly, but crucially alive. One froze on the spot, the other two legged it, and so my boys went straight after them and cornered
them in a house. Outnumbered and surrounded they gave up without a fight.

In the boot of their battered old red saloon car was a 60mm mortar tube, twenty mortar rounds and a dirty great big bag full of US dollars. They had just been paid.

An hour later back in an Abu Napa cell, they were singing like canaries. They were grassing up everyone they knew in the hope of shortening their jail sentence. The next morning we were all pumped up. After the frustration of the Beharry ambush, the arrest had given the whole company a massive boost. By 9 a.m., we were making the final preparations to go out and kick in a special party-size pack of doors.

That's when the Abu Naji Ops Room dropped the bombshell. A ceasefire really had been called in Najaf. Everyone crammed in front of the cookhouse TV to watch it unfold on CNN.

After two and a half months of duelling, Moqtada al-Sadr had made his move. There were less than two weeks to go until the American-led CPA was due to hand power over to a new Iraqi government. The Yanks were desperate to make it a success, and that meant doing it in peace. Moqtada knew that too. He reckoned that all he had to do was wait for the Yanks to come up with the right terms and then benevolently accept them.

He was right. The Yanks buckled, and intermediaries thrashed out the deal.

The Americans would drop the murder charges against him and pull all troops out of Najaf. In return, he would disband the Mehdi Army and renounce violence as a way of getting what he wanted. There was no doubt who the real winner was. Moqtada had broken the will of a superpower, and it made him all the more powerful in the eyes of his fanatical followers.

Amid frenzied scenes in central Najaf, he read out a statement calling on all resistance fighters to go home and stop attacking coalition security forces. Meanwhile, he was going to set up a political party and contest the elections next year.

CNN showed filmed footage of jubilant Mehdi Army fighters streaming out of Najaf's giant Imam Ali mosque and laying down their AKs in a pile. It was an astonishing thing to see, and we were all captivated. All of us, apart from Des.

'Oh no, please don't do that!' he appealed to the TV screen. 'Pick 'em up, you great big fucking chicken shits. Who the hell else is there for us to scrap with? Jack bastards.'

Yet again, events on the national picture dictated the next major turn on our rollercoaster tour. In Al Amarah, the OMS asked for an urgent meeting with our CO Colonel Maer that afternoon. All operations were suspended with immediate effect until we knew how this one was going to play out. Including our raids. Typical.

The OMS and Colonel Maer swiftly thrashed out their own mini deal and signed a ceasefire agreement. They too had to make a public statement urging no further attacks on the Iraqi security forces or us. They also promised not to hoard weapons in mosques any more, which were out of bounds to us. On our side, no more OMS men would be arrested and all outstanding warrants dropped. We would agree to respect them as an institution. In a clever political move, the OMS also got us to promise to send no more Warriors into the city.

Des and his limitless bloodlust aside, most of the company's first reaction to the shock development was one of honest relief. No matter how much we enjoyed the fight, it
had to be said we were all completely knackered. Physically and mentally. It's hard to keep up that tempo of operations for any decent period of time without it wearing you down. The Cimic compound was also in a shabby state and our kit was ragged.

That afternoon, the ceasefire terms were read out over the city mosques' loudspeakers. All of a sudden, it was bizarrely quiet. The livewire tension that we'd been living under for so long evaporated in an instant.

As a mark of our respect to the ceasefire, all combat troops were confined to Cimic and Abu Naji for a full forty-eight hours. That really brought it home to us that the war was over.

It was great to have a couple of days to sit down and have a cup of tea for once. The ceasefire also meant we could move out of overcrowded Cimic and back into the more comfortable prefab accommodation blocks. The ban on Snatch Land Rover movement was also lifted and Route 6 to Basra was reopened. That meant we could move more people in and out for their two weeks' R&R home leave, and resupply at our leisure.

Catching up on so much missed sleep was what I most enjoyed. Nights were lovely and quiet without the random explosions incoming, or the frequent mortar horn blasts to warn people not to step outside for a smoke or a pee.

But the novelty of peace wore off soon enough.

By the end of its first week, we were bored out of our skulls. Des had been right after all. We had come to understand the fighting as normal everyday life. It was anything but that, yet we had grown to love it all the same.

Our routine changed dramatically. To propel the peace, orders came down from Slipper City for us to 'decrease the military footprint'. A wonderful bit of officers' speak
meaning we had to do our best at pretending we weren't really there. We were told to try to support the police and their authority as much as possible – the same fuckers who enjoyed watching the OMS shooting at us only a few days ago. Everywhere we went, we had to wear our soft hats and berets, and it was back to endless smiling.

Broadmoor was closed down as a base and the Royal Welch Fusiliers went back to Abu Napa. Recce Platoon got sent away to patrol the Iranian border again. We were desperately jealous. They weren't scrapping with Iranian border guards or anything as good as that, but they were out and about doing something. We were sitting in Al Amarah with big false smiles on our faces and our thumbs up our arses.

Chris summed it up perfectly.

'You know what, Danny? This place fucking sucks now. There's no fun any more. It might just as well be Bosnia.'

He was right. It was Bosnia in the desert, just like any other British Army peacekeeping tour. That's fine if Bosnia is all you're expecting. But after the rush of what we'd been through, it was hard for us to swallow.

Of course, it was the OMS's definition of ceasefire. That didn't mean a total cessation of mortar strikes. Instead, they politely limited themselves to only lobbing a couple of volleys a week, to remind us they were still there. The OMS would always deny it was them, and for all we knew it might have been some tribe cross about something else instead. But old habits die hard.

After what we'd got used to, a few mortar rounds a week wasn't going to get the blood pumping again. As they came in, we tried hard to stifle our yawns.

The highlight of the day was if we went out for a boat patrol along the Tigris. At least you could see a bit of nature on its vast and timeless banks. After we'd seen all there was
to see fifteen times on the boats, that bored the arses off us too.

Then, life got even more tedious. We didn't think that was possible, but with the handover of power we realized that the start of the ceasefire was actually the good days.

Chris woke me up early on the morning of 26 June. He was furious.

'Oi, Danny, wake up, mate. I can't believe it. The Triple Canopy lads have all fucked off. Molly Phee's gone and all.'

'What? Sorry, mate, you've lost me.'

'They've gone, Danny. The CPA officials, the close protection teams, the lot of them. They all bugged out in the middle of the night without telling anyone. We're in Cimic on our own from now on.'

'Oh, right.'

'Guess what. Fucking Red Rob didn't even say goodbye. Some mate.'

It wasn't Red Rob's fault. To prevent any triumphal terrorist attack on them, Molly Phee and her entire entourage had pulled out of Al Amarah back to Baghdad in the small hours in total secrecy a few days before the official handover date. Only the CO knew.

Since the CPA was being disbanded to be replaced by Iraqi politicians, its job was done. It was a blow to us because we lost some good mates who we'd spent a lot of hours with on the roof. More importantly, the supply source of all our new sexy kit had been cut off, and that was a real bummer. From then on, we'd have to make do with the British Army routine issue. With Triple Canopy's twenty men gone we also had to fill their places. That meant more of us on guard duty and in the sangars, where they'd always have a couple of men too.

Later on when Chris went up to the roof, he discovered Red Rob had said goodbye after all. He'd left a business card along with a little note in the sleeve of Chris's long.

It read:

Seeya Limey. Sorry couldn't tell you we were leaving. 'Secret squirrel
shit,' as you'd say. If you're ever in Texas visiting with your Mom,
look me up.

PS you've still got a small wiener.

Molly Phee's disappearance was a precursor of the big event itself. To foil any nationwide terrorist spectacular, it too went ahead two days earlier than planned. In a secret Baghdad ceremony, power was handed over to the provisional Iraq government led by new Prime Minister Iyad Allawi on 28 June, at 10.26 a.m. The battle group only found out about it when it popped up on Sky News.

A public holiday was declared, and all the shops were closed.

It was another very bizarre feeling for us. From being the all-powerful invaders and conquerors of Iraq, we were now just its guests and obedient servants.

We watched city people's reaction closely in case it sparked fresh trouble against us. In fact, they seemed to be pretty happy about it all. Like us, they were also a little bemused. Iraqi people had had no say in running their own country for decades, and most of them really didn't know what to do about it. They and us wondered how the brave new world would look.

We soon found out. For us, it meant an onslaught of a million tedious rules and regulations. Our wings were well and truly clipped.

After 28 June, we lost all our powers of arrest. That was now the Iraqi police's job. We couldn't even go out on patrol in the city any more without the cops and an interpreter having to accompany us, which in itself was a massive extra ball ache. The cops often wouldn't turn up at our agreed
rendezvous. So we had to get in our vehicles, go over to the police stations, and try and persuade them to come out with us. Half the time would be spent trying to organize them, and working out again what had happened to their latest batch of weapons. When we did finally get out, they'd do all the talking at any vehicle checkpoint. We'd just sit there as back-up.

If we ever wanted to search someone's car, we had to give them special new flyers printed in Arabic and make sure they'd read it first: Stop. Turn off your engine please. Thank you. We're here to make Iraq a safer place, you know. One of our men wants to look in your boot. Do you mind? Thanks awfully, so kind of you.

It was all deeply painful. God only knows what we were supposed to do with the people who couldn't read. The locals didn't seem to give a toss about the new regulations, and they didn't bother to read the flyers either. To them, we were soldiers who wanted to look in their boot. In Iraq, when an armed man wants to look in your boot, you let him.

The peace also gave Major Featherstone a chance to kick-start his nation-building projects again, all the real Cimic stuff. He seemed a lot more comfortable with that than with combat. For us, it meant escorting the Cimic guys out to do a job, and back again when they'd finished.

As we were loading up for another escort trip, Oost told Des: 'You know what, man, if I only wanted my life to be about helping out the locals, I'd have fucking joined Oxfam.'

Chris put it another way: 'You know what, mate? This place ain't like Bosnia now. It's
worse
than Bosnia.'

Newly trained soldiers from the fledgling Iraqi Defence Force also came to man our gates at Cimic House. The place
was no longer coalition property, it was Iraqi. Iraqis therefore had to be seen from the outside world to be in charge of it. Our experience in Al Amarah had taught us never to trust any of them in uniform. The IDF's reliability proved that to be true. Some days, the soldiers didn't even bother turning up at all. On others, they'd just fuck off home early and leave the gates unmanned. They only worked when they felt like it. Nice life.

Then there was the OMS. They thrived off the handover, and made a big song and dance about what good and responsible politicians they were going to be. It was all rubbish though, and we knew Moqtada had no intention of disarming any of his followers, despite his solemn promises. On the contrary, we got regular reports that the OMS were building up another sizeable arsenal inside their HQ. There was not a damn thing we could do about it either. We were no longer the law.