by Peter Mercer
I’d had enough excitement for one day, so, after the usual debrief, we had a few beers and tried to relax. I then went to my room to watch some crap copied DVDs, and soon I was fast asleep.
The CIA safe house was getting a lot of attention from the insurgents now and, as I said, getting shot at daily and often bombed or mortared on a regular basis. The CIA were getting sick and tired of this and I’m sure the Gurkhas and Triple Canopy weren’t too chuffed with the situation, either. Eventually, it was decided that the safe house wasn’t safe any more, as it was becoming too dodgy. So we were tasked to go up there and stand guard while they blew all their stores up. It was unbelievable; they had decided that they were just going to put all their computers and delicate information in the house’s cellar and surround it all with a load of plastic explosives and then detonate it – which would, it was hoped, just blow the crap out of everything in the place (and likely demolish most of the building as well).
Our job was to escort a civilian coach to the safe house and back again. After the normal mad dash across town, we tore through the gates and screamed to a halt in the compound. We discovered, when we arrived, that they already had all the wheels in motion. Everyone was already all packed up, the explosives were being laid and they were all ready to go – even all the Gurkhas, who would now be coming to work with us. Once the explosives were detonated the huge complex was just going to be abandoned. Anyone would be able just to go in and take it over – it wouldn’t be long before squatters moved into any usable parts of the building that were left (there were a lot of homeless Iraqis).
We cleared the area and the spooks set about destroying their gear, which seemed like a waste to me but the information and equipment were, apparently, too sensitive to be moved. It was decided, higher up the chain of command, that if we’d crashed with it or lost any of it on the way back to camp, and it then fell into the insurgents hands, it would have been disastrous. Hence the decision to blow the crap out of the lot of it. I still thought it was an unnecessary waste, but you don’t argue with the CIA.
The charges and explosives were set and everyone was ready for the off. These explosives were very hi-tech and we asked if we were needed to hang around and do the detonation, but we were informed that it was all going to be detonated by remote control once we were clear of the complex. Everyone loaded up and we tore out of the gates expecting the worst at any minute. It was a very tense moment, as the insurgents had lookout posts observing the complex and would obviously know that something big or at least out of the ordinary was going on. There was a very real chance of ambush.
All the Gurkhas and Triple Canopy guys were in their vehicles and we fled. All of a sudden there was a burst of gunfire, then another – we’d been sussed! As usual, it was hard to identify where the fire was coming from and we frantically scanned the area trying to pinpoint where the bastards who were trying to kill us were concealed. It was very dodgy to say the least. Then we heard the thunderous blast behind us – the CIA had obviously done the deed and blown the house.
Two rounds then hit our vehicle. Luckily, they struck our homemade armour on the driver’s door and didn’t penetrate it. It was definitely a case of so far, so good. We ploughed on with crossed fingers that we would not encounter any IEDs or mortars. So here we were, six of our vehicles, a busload of Gurkhas, one very scared coach driver, two trucks full of Triple Canopy guys and one vanload of CIA guys, and we were getting incoming fire. We were making a huge target of ourselves, which was not an ideal position to be in, but we’d been in worse before and at least we’d not been hit by an IED – not yet!
As we rounded a bend on our way back towards camp, we saw four insurgents legging it. That was it for our guys. They clicked straight into attack mode. As the insurgents were running, a hail of various kinds of bullets from our teams hit them in the back – it seemed as if everyone had opened up on them, all using different weapons. I can’t even recall how many shots were fired but I know it was a lot, and it was over in moments. All four of these insurgents were killed, shot in the back. This is not strictly honourable but they had been shooting at us and all four of them were carrying weapons and seemingly hell-bent on killing us. They had AK-47s and RPK light machine guns, so they obviously weren’t out for an afternoon stroll! I guessed that we’d surprised them in the act of setting up an ambush for us. Lucky for us; unlucky for them.
We were now much nearer the safety of camp and were just starting the approach when we had more incoming fire. Then my gunner on the back fired his M19. Now, when this thing went off, it made the whole truck rock and the explosions it caused were incredible. I bet those fucking insurgents didn’t know what had hit them. The M19 was tearing chunks out of the hills they were hiding in. The insurgents had the element of surprise on their side – but that was it. With our superior firepower we soon had the upper hand. After my gunner had let rip with the automatic 40mm grenade launcher there wasn’t much left of that cliff and – lo and behold! – all the incoming fire had stopped.
We carried on driving at breakneck speed, trying to make it back to camp in one piece. So far, so good – we’d had no casualties, not even any minor injuries. As we came haring back towards the gate, the sentries did the usual: they dropped the wires and chains and gave us a friendly wave; these sentries were all now our good mates.
As we pulled up, the unthinkable happened. We had all got out of the vehicles to unload, and the gunner on the back of my truck (the guy operating the M19 grenade launcher) also went to unload but he had forgotten that he still had one up the spout! Basically, he was still ‘made ready’, so when he fired off the action he fired the weapon, and it discharged a round. Well, it’s policy and training to point your weapon in a safe direction when you’re unloading it, in the event that, if you fuck up your drills and forget (which he had) and do an accidental discharge, you won’t shoot and kill someone.
My gunner, probably down to all the adrenalin from the recent contact, didn’t carry out his drills correctly. He went to clear the weapon and fired off a round of high explosive into fuck knows where! These things have a range of approximately 1,500 metres, so it could have gone anywhere. Some poor fucker, or family, could have had a rude awakening – or even worse.
Not one of the Brits I worked with out there had ever had an ND (negligent discharge), but, then again, we were supposed to be far better trained than most. It is far better to have an ND into a sandpit at the gate than to launch some sort of high-explosive projectile into the unknown. This was a monumental fuck-up. However, because we weren’t military, he couldn’t be charged. As punishment for his mistake, what we did was give him all our really shit chores to do for the next week. We had to be seen to do something.
That incident reminded me of when I was working with the Royal Ulster Constabulary (now called the Police Service of Northern Ireland) in Belfast when I was a young marine. We (our team of marines) had a cottage just across the road from the camp pub. It was a pub mainly for the forces on camp. That evening we’d just come off patrol and had headed straight for the pub while the RUC officers had gone into our cottage to make themselves a few cups of tea (this wasn’t out of the ordinary, as we let them use the kitchen), when one of the RUC officers went to unload his weapon. He did this in the kitchen and had pointed his Browning 9mm pistol towards the ceiling, then fired off the action, but he still had one up the spout. The result, because of his fuck-up, was that the round that he discharged went up through the ceiling and straight through both legs of one of my mates. Incredibly, our mate was so pissed that he was still asleep and totally unaware that he had been shot.
The RUC officer came running over to the pub, where we were drinking in the bar, and told us what had happened. We were all a bit drunk and we thought, to begin with, that he was just trying to wind us up. He eventually managed to convince us that he was serious and we all ran back over the road to the cottage. We charged up the stairs and into the bedroom and found Simon still drunk, very mu
ch fast asleep and totally unaware that he had been shot.
That particular RUC officer was subsequently removed from the firearms squad while an inquiry was launched. Don’t know what happened to him after that, but it goes to show the damage that can be done when the proper procedures are not strictly adhered to.
Anyway, back to Iraq. With everyone safely through the gate now we could chill and hopefully get some nice food. The Yanks had just had a food resupply, so we knew that the grub was going to be good for a while at least. On our way to the chow tent we dropped off the guys and all our major weapons back at our accommodation.
Then, just to really piss us off, we heard the sound of incoming mortars. Those fucking insurgents never let up. They were always having a pop at us in some way or another. We all legged it for cover. I heard three more rounds strike but by that time we were safely inside our air-raid shelter, which also doubled as the Gurkhas’ kitchen. We heard another three rounds drop. We were just going to hang tight, safe in our shelter, but then we heard that some of the American soldiers on camp had been injured.
Because of our close ties, and friendships, with the American military our medics decided to go and offer whatever help they could. They ran up to the hospital to help out. We waited in the shelter until the mortars stropped coming down.
Later, the medics came back to tell us that nobody had been killed in the strikes but that there had been some very nasty injuries. Mortar strikes on camp were quite common but were, more often than not, ineffective. It was rare to get injured on camp. Those American soldiers had just been very unlucky.
Chapter 6
Shopping in Kurdistan
Shopping trips in Iraq are non-existent. Only crazy nutters have tried it. However, in Kurdistan (as I’ll call it for the purposes of this book) it’s possible. Kurdistan is an area situated right up in the northernmost part of Iraq, very close to the Turkish border. Shopping is possible here for many reasons, one of which is that it’s ruled with a fist of iron by the Kurds and, if you’re an Arab or an insurgent, you’ll be found out (they have their own clandestine ways of finding this out – some legal, some not so).
The Kurds are a different breed and they run their part of Iraq totally differently from the south. They run the place with efficiency and with very little violence. They have their official and unofficial ways of policing this, but it seems to work for them. I’m not saying there’s no violence, but compared with the rest of Iraq they seemed pretty well sorted. Whenever we entered Kurdistan, we were always welcomed with a wave and a smile by everyone. The local kids used to run up to us full of curiosity and questions. What I found amazing about the kids we came across up there was that they all seemed to speak English perfectly.
We often went up through there on our way up into Turkey to buy vehicles, to replace ones that we’d had to blow up or had been shot to bits. We’d travel peacefully through the Kurds’ territory and then on to the Turkish border. Once you got just past the border there was, unbelievably, a Toyota dealer – he was our main man. We’d turn up, as always, armed to the teeth, but we were inside Turkey and so we were pretty safe. We’d hand over £25,000 or $55,000 in cash. Then we had to drive the Hilux, Land Cruiser, whatever, back through Kurdistan and then back through Mosul; but the unlucky driver of the new vehicle had no armour and no guns on the back. All he had were a couple of crazy Fijians sitting in the back with M16s, but we still had the doors on, which wasn’t good – not for them at least.
Once, we’d managed to get the truck back to the camp, the doors were soon taken off and the welding torches and cutting tools came out and it was A-Team time. It looked so very funny: just as in the old A-Team TV series, we even had our own Bosco (‘BA’) Baracus, in the shape of this giant Fijian (though he didn’t wear quite so much bling as BA) and it goes without saying that we had plenty of crazy fools!
Huge plates of steel were then welded onto the back to protect the gunner, and more plates were welded inside the driver’s door. It was fucking mental. Our vehicle area on camp looked like a scrapyard: there were smashed windows in every corner plus hundreds of wheels, dozens of doors and quite a few trashed vehicles. We had no qualified vehicle mechanics on our team, just guys who had learned a few skills in their home countries by doing a bit of DIY. But I tell you what: it all worked. Considering the number of contacts we went through, we were effective. Our homemade armour worked, and it worked very well. Considering we had to be self-sufficient and were working in this fucking dangerous place with little or no Yank support, I think we were doing OK.
Up in Kurdistan we could relax though. We’d park up and go through the market stalls, just wearing our body armour and pistols. It was hilarious when you could go into a supermarket, which were all equipped with metal detectors on the doors, and we obviously had our pistols and spare magazines on (some of the lads still carried their M16s), but the staff would just give us a smile and a wave and let us through, which always sent the metal detectors beeping like mad. There was nice subdued music and local people out doing their daily or weekly shopping pushing trolleys around. Then we’d walk in wearing body armour, helmets and weapons! It must have been truly an absurd sight to behold, but I suppose that, because these people had been brought up with war and had had a tyrant for a leader for many years, they were used to the sight of guns and armed personnel. It seemed to me that not a lot fazed these people.
We spent as much time as possible in Kurdistan because of the tranquillity we enjoyed and the friendliness shown by the local people towards us. Kurdistan became our own safe haven, a place to have a calm moment and a relaxing time. There was a local restaurant that we would often frequent, which always served us great food – in fact as much as we could eat for about $20. Shopping was a bit like being on holiday in Turkey, with people hassling you to buy stuff (which could be a bit of a nightmare with the more persistent market stallholders).
There were always kids crowded around us trying to look at and touch our guns. They seemed very intelligent and were usually very smartly dressed. These kids were always pleasant and polite – more than can be said for some of the kids back home in the UK. As we often travelled up to that part of Kurdistan, some of the kids became familiar to us and we became quite attached to some of them and built up something of a rapport. It was certainly relaxing and refreshing to come to this part of Iraq and chill, because we all knew with certainty that when we left we were going back to a very bad place and we didn’t know if all of us were going to make it. We seemed to run this gauntlet almost daily. Not nice but essential.
But walking and browsing through the Kurdistan markets was truly amazing. The hustle and bustle, the people, the stalls – you could have been in a place anywhere in Europe. The people up there were relaxed and living in harmony – a harmony they had created themselves. So here we were having a bit of relaxation and chilling out from the carnage of work in northern Iraq, knowing that the journey back would be no picnic.
On the market stalls you could buy anything, and I mean anything. It seems that a lot of the supply trucks for the US military would be attacked by the insurgents and the booty from these raids would end up on some of these market stalls. I knew that all of this was not necessarily legal or just, but I was just doing my bit to support the local economy and I was a mercenary, so what the fuck! At the end of the day, whatever was nicked, stolen, call it what you will, it was going to end up in some market, somewhere, somehow, so we’d be fools not to buy it, and if we didn’t buy it someone else would. Trucks were getting raided and blown up all the time, so it really didn’t make any difference.
In war-torn Iraq, you could buy anything – AK-47s for $50, Uzis for $100. However, it was mainly in Kurdistan that we’d stock up on satellite phone equipment and beer. And we would always try to incorporate a trip here if our missions took us anywhere near the area. As soon as we were given a mission to go near to Kurdistan and we arrived in one piece, it was happy days.
On one occasi
on, as we started our travels back from Kurdistan, I witnessed one of the weirdest things I have ever seen in a danger zone in my life. There were two cyclists in the middle of the desert, fully kitted out with state-of-the-art bicycles, looking for all the world as if they were taking part in the Tour de France – it was wicked! These two guys were tanking along and as we overtook them I shouted a warning.
‘Do you guys know you’re heading into fucking Mosul?’
‘Yeah – we live there,’ was the reply!
These lads must have been very powerful (probably religious clerics of some sort) but they were fit and were firing along at a rate of knots all the same. Still it was so unbelievable to see these two immaculate cyclists wearing all the top gear going along a desert road towards the most dangerous place on the planet! Truly outstanding.
Along our route back to Mosul we passed a huge dam. It was built to provide hydroelectricity and apparently supplied most of northern Iraq’s power. It really was most impressive and beautiful to look at. There is, surprisingly, a hell of a lot of water in Iraq, most of it found in the natural lakes, but they built big dams to store even more.
On one return trip we were travelling back into the very bad bandit country that could possibly and probably would seal some of our fates – nothing nice. Next thing, bollocks! Bang, bang, boom! Our truck in front swerved – another contact, maybe, or it could just be a puncture, but maybe not. This time it was only a small roadside device that had almost missed us, but we survived again with no apparent casualties – a few cuts and bruises but nothing terminal. It had been a very small IED. Yet again, we had been travelling too fast to notice it. It seemed amazing but we could find nothing to retaliate against. We ended up having to stop, as it turned out the lead vehicle was actually shagged. While the IED hadn’t damaged any of the guys inside, it had, unfortunately, knackered the vehicle. We went into all around defence mode yet again while we put some plastic explosive in the vehicle and trashed it, then got the hell out of the way. However, we didn’t get permission to do this, so we’d probably be in for another bollocking from the boss. We were going through pick-up trucks as if there were no tomorrow (up to that point in 15 months the job up north had gone through 27 vehicles).