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.
CHAPTER FIVE
CAMP LIFE IN IRAQ
As the weeks passed, despite everyone’s best efforts life at camp seemed to get tougher. I missed Milly and Jamie desperately. Some people may judge me for being a mum in a war zone, but my argument is
what made me different from all the dads with babies and toddlers who were also serving out there? But it’s fair to say that as a woman I was very much in the minority and as the only mum in my working group, there were times when I felt isolated as the other girls couldn’t truly understand how I was feeling.
Debbie was in her late thirties and she had no desire to be a mum, and Sally also didn’t want any kids at that point in her life, although she later became a mother. Although they’d often ask about Milly, they couldn’t truly understand how my maternal instinct left me aching to be reunited with her. I thought I’d cope better than I did but it was like a physical pain. When I chose to have a child while serving in the Armed Forces, I knew that one day I would face the prospect of leaving her, but the reality of it was much harder than I could ever have imagined. However, it was hard for the dads too. Being a woman didn’t make me any different, it’s just that, as a woman, I felt able to express my feelings much more than the men did for they’d often bottle it up.
Nevertheless, I carried a deep sense of guilt that I’d left her and that’s something I still carry to this day. I never talked about Milly when I was on duty as it made the agony of being away from her too raw and I had to concentrate all my energies on the job at hand. During work times I had to force myself into Army mode and focus on the job I was trained to do and that included suppressing my ‘mum’ mode. But during free time everyone talked about life back home and being a mum led me to form a strong friendship with another clerk, Corporal John Lewis. Tall, bald and from Grimsby, he was married with one son, although he and his wife definitely wanted more, and we bonded over stories about our kids and better halves. Because his tent was directly next door to ours, he became our male escort after the laundry was taken and no one wanted to take any chances.
Letters and welfare parcels from home were central to the bond John and I forged. Collecting your post every couple of days was hugely significant, especially if you knew something was on its way out to you, as it gave you something to look forward to. Most of my post came as ‘Blueys’ – flimsy blue pieces of paper which would arrive after a two-week delay. And Jamie was amazing, writing to me daily. Every week he’d send a letter enclosing photos of Milly and little drawings he’d done with her. Nikki would regularly send me my favourite strawberry-flavoured jelly sweets, as well as a letter with all the latest gossip. In one package another friend sent me a female blow-up doll to join our ‘women-only’ tent. ‘She’ was soon nicknamed ‘Mustafa Shag’ by one of the lads!
While the funny gifts gave everyone a laugh, it was the letters that we all looked forward to the most. Often I’d sit down outside the post room with John and we would open our Blueys together before sharing our news from back home. Everyone took an interest in the drawings and letters from each other’s kids – it was a little piece of normality and joy to share. I remember showing John a book Milly’s nursery had sent me after she made it for me.
Then, when Mother’s Day came, Jamie sent me a clip frame of photos of Milly and some art he’d done with her. I collected my parcel just before starting work with a real rough, tough soldier called Dave. As soon as he saw the wrapping, he said: ‘Are you going to bubble?’ which is what they call crying in the Army. I said: ‘No, I don’t have a clue what it is,’ then I opened it and I just bawled. Dave half-groaned and half-laughed and then said: ‘I knew you were going to do that!’ He still wanted to see my latest photos of my little girl, though, so he was a big softy, really.
Jamie would also email me photographs of Milly all the time. As he’d been deployed before, he knew how important the post and parcels were as they connected you with your life back home. He also knew how little luxuries make a massive difference when you are on deployment, so the minute I needed anything he’d get it straight in the post – including a dressing gown, and some crisps or other treats. One time I ripped my pajamas so I emailed him, saying: ‘please can you send me some new ones’ and he went straight to the shops and it was done right away.
A massive pastime was poker as the camp was dry and it was an easy way for people to occupy their minds. We played for POGS, which is a form of plastic currency as no one used small change on camp. If you paid for something at the Naafi using a dollar note, instead of getting cents you’d be handed POGS, which were little round discs that had the amount such as fifty cents or seventy-five cents written on them; this made sense as logistically the Army would struggle to carry enough loose change to support camp with so many people coming and going.
For each hand we’d play five cents in POGS, which was little more than two pence. John tried his hardest to teach me but I was rubbish. One day when we were playing I was completely down in the dumps and John asked: ‘What’s up, Hannah?’ I told him that it was Milly’s birthday the following day and although I’d sent a card, I just felt awful I wasn’t going to see her. John and some of the chefs at the canteen then hatched a plan and decided to bake an iced cake, which said: ‘Happy Birthday Milly’. They all sang ‘Happy Birthday’ and we celebrated, albeit from thousands of miles away. Of course that had me in floods of tears that they could do something so touching. There was no such thing as Skype on camp and none of us ever sent photos home – I only wanted to do that when I was safe and sound back home. But we could ring home. You’d get thirty minutes every two weeks to use on a phone card. But the lads were amazing and a lot of them would let me use up any spare minutes they had to ring Milly, which was such an extraordinarily generous thing to do.
As well as admin one of my other roles was guard duty at the local prison – a vast, grey concrete bunker on the furthest perimeter of Camp Charlie. Women soldiers were in short supply and I was told someone would be ‘dicked’ (Army slang for picked for the job) unless there was a volunteer. Keen to get out of the office, I put my hand up.
Each morning I’d be picked up by a Sergeant Major in a Land Rover and driven over to the prison, five minutes’ drive from the centre of Camp. By the time we arrived, shortly after dawn, there would be a long queue of burka-clad women waiting to see their husbands. Some of them simply wanted to come and visit, but others had an ulterior motive – they wanted to build bombs or smuggle other contraband. Blowing up the prison so they could get out was the ultimate goal for some extremists, so they would sneak in a baby’s nappy, a switch or a tiny amount of explosives. It would all come in dribs and drabs.
Due to their beliefs, the women could not be searched by men and that’s where I came in: makeshift tents were set up, where the females would all come to be checked, one by one. Translators would stand by us as we conducted searches, helping us tell the women what they needed to do. We quickly realised that when the translators didn’t turn up for work, we needed to have our wits about us as it might be a sign the camp was going to be attacked. You’d still give the women a nice smile and motion to them to take off their shoes, or open their bags. Sometimes you could sense the ones who hated us and it was a game of cat and mouse.
Once, when I bent down in an unguarded moment to pick up a woman’s shoes instead of getting her to hand them to me she grabbed hold of me by the hair and started swinging me around, leaving me screaming for help. Just outside the search tent were Welsh Guards with machine guns and it lasted just seconds, but it was enough to shake me up. The minute they entered, she let go and so despite her vicious assault there was no retaliation. Her punishment was that she wasn’t allowed in that day – we had to be better people than they were – although I never made that mistake again.
There are certain things, like that incident, that really hit home but you have a little cry, dust yourself off and then get on with it. But it was our world and there was no escaping it so the only way to survive was to go numb to what we were being subjected to at the time. That’s why when they get back home it’s often hard for soldiers to adjust – they’ve had to switch themselves off for six months in order to get through. Many of the women brought babies or toddlers to the prison with them. Kid
s are just kids and they don’t care if you are in the Army or not. They’d smile merrily and as a mum I always wanted to be as gentle and friendly as I possibly could.
But the reality of how vital our role became was brought home to me during one routine search when a mother brought along her child, wearing combat trousers. There were so many little pockets it took ages to search him and to ensure he wasn’t scared, I remember tickling him and talking to him and smiling to put him at ease as I checked each and every one of them. Then, inside a pocket I found something and pulled out a tiny switch with a little wire. Initially I thought: ‘What is that?’ assuming it might be a toy. Then, as I examined it more closely, it slowly dawned on me that it could be something far more sinister. I shouted to the armed guard, who came in and then called his Sergeant Major. He looked at it, then turned to her and said, ‘This is potentially a switch so you are not coming in today.’ That was it – she was turned away and the switch, which we feared could potentially be used in a bomb, was confiscated. She was entitled to her human rights and visiting rights just as we are over here, so the guard commander decided to let her go.
I was appalled and sickened that any mother would use her child, her own flesh and blood, as a smuggling mule, especially when it was potentially such a horrifying reason. There was no outward sign whatsoever of what she was concealing and there’s no doubt she would have come back, although I personally never saw her again. The flip side of it is that sometimes these women did things involuntarily. She may not have wanted to do it – someone could have threatened to kill her child, so you can’t judge when you don’t know the full story. I have no doubt some of the people did things because they were bad and because they believed in the cause they were fighting for at the time. Equally, others were threatened or put under pressure and they felt they had no choice.
Never Broken Page 7