by Peter Mercer
You do get used to situations like this. It’s funny, but when I arrived in northern Iraq I didn’t think I could ever get used to it and now that I’d been up here for only a few months (but what seemed like ages) the case was far from it. I was now having a sick and twisted form of fun – call it a downward spiral, call it whatever you like, but I was having an adventure, and a prosperous one at that. I was enjoying most of this.
Once the vehicle was blown to bits we were slightly in the shit because, as I said before, we were supposed to get permission before doing this kind of shit. You can’t just go blowing up £25,000–40,000 vehicles with no authority or permission. On this occasion we just didn’t have the time to call back to base, or I think maybe it was because we’d lost our comms; I’m not sure what the problem really was. We just left the truck on the side of the road – fucked, no use to anyone, blown to bits. We had to shuffle everyone about to fit in the guys from the now useless vehicle, which made us a bit cramped, but we just wanted to get back to the relative safety of our enclosure on camp and have some nice food (depending upon the chefs), maybe a beer or two then watch a crap copied DVD or something similar. Life was never boring at least – always an adventure.
Chapter 7
Route Recce
One morning we were summoned to see our boss. It was obviously something quite serious. When we turned up at the ops room we were told we’d been given a new task to perform: Route Recce. We all looked at each other and thought, What the hell do they mean by that? Route Recce for whom, what and where? Turns out we were going out looking for insurgents! We had been given the power by the military to go out and do VCPs (vehicle checkpoints), which meant, basically, that we had taken on a small military role. We all knew the difficult role we’d been given by the Yanks but it was something new, maybe a bit different. Suicide bombers love VCPs: easy to creep up on unchallenged, then they can just let rip with their bombs. We could all become sitting ducks yet again.
Our new task would take us through places of interest clearing the routes or making it known to the insurgents that we or the US military had a strong presence in the area – searching them out almost.
A lot of these insurgents weren’t even Iraqis: they were Egyptians and Syrians who had been paid to attack and fight the Coalition forces.
At that time, the insurgents had taken over nearly all of the police stations in Mosul and northern Iraq. Our instructions from the top of the military chain of command were not to stop for any checkpoints and to kill any person wearing a police uniform who tried to stop us. At this delicate time, eight times out of ten these would involve the bad guys. That put us in a very tricky position: we could very possibly waste the bad guys every time, but we would risk doing in a good Iraqi copper who was just trying to do his job (a very difficult one at that) in rebuilding his screwed-up country. This was a catch-22 situation. We had ourselves a predicament.
There are a lot of good people in Iraq and most of them want change. They had welcomed the Coalition forces but the situation for them hadn’t improved with the removal of Saddam Hussein. In fact, for a lot of ordinary people regularly caught up in the crossfire and seeing their homes destroyed, it was probably worse. Some are just waiting numbly in their huts for the next dictator or tyrant to come along; and, because of the poverty and terror that they’ve been through, half the people just want to get on with life and don’t seem to give a toss who runs the country. They just want a secure life. All they need is to be able to put food on the table for their loved ones. It seems to me that if you constantly hammer, torture and generally threaten a race of people over so many years they will succumb to anything. Things need and have to change sometimes, but it wasn’t up to us to do it; it wasn’t our job to bring change. Nevertheless, we were all concerned about the situation; you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t care.
We needed a new form of strategy now as we were crossing the line from bodyguard to potential mercenary. We were going to become the Yanks’ bitches, but we didn’t care. It just meant more action and more money. We’d get £50 a day more – not a lot but money’s money. It still worked out at nearly £2,000 a year extra.
Some of the companies I have worked for out in Iraq are so huge and powerful that they can change governments. I can’t and won’t talk about the companies I’ve operated for in Iraq, but I will say, and can say, that, for instance, Blackwater have almost twenty-thousand troops on call and twenty aircraft. Truly an amazing force to be reckoned with, which could overthrow certain powers.
The US forces’ special-ops teams in Iraq used to operate very similarly to us, moving fast, using soft-skinned vehicles with no doors on, but they moved only at night. They had up-to-date Level 6 shit-hot night-vision goggles, infrared capability, heat-detection equipment and other stuff. All we had were just the mad, nutty and brave little Gurkhas and the huge Fijians, willing to do anything at any time. We were, after all, hired guns, just there to keep the official death toll down. After what had happened to the four Blackwater guys who were torn apart by an angry mob in Fallujah when they were ambushed in March 2004, we needed to be fucking careful doing what we were doing. Taking on these jobs, as every PMC in war zones does, can seal your fate, and I don’t mean in a good way. At the end of the day your only aim is to come back in one piece and be able to spend your dosh back home and, if you’ve got one, to spend time with your family.
As I said, we were told the police were dodgy (we knew this from intelligence received from the CIA). The northern police commander’s official response was that 30 per cent of his officers were corrupted to some extent – not necessarily with insurgents but definitely affected by their presence.
Up to this point we’d been in quite a few contact situations, and we were having guys injured and killed on jobs, so we started buying some of our own kit – just to try to improve it a bit, really. Not that the kit issued to us was inferior, but it was just that some of it could be improved upon. Most PMC companies in Iraq supply Level 3 chest and back plates in their body armour, which will stop most projectiles, but we were issued with Level 5, which meant our vests could stop 7.62mm high-velocity rounds. However, these vests could become uncomfortable over rough ground and, since we used to take to the rough ground and desert as often as we could (because using these tactics made life for the insurgents far more difficult – harder to predict our movements and, therefore, harder to ambush us), the discomfort was ever present.
So, with our mates in the US Special Forces, a few of us swapped beer with them and acquired some of their body armour – it’s the same quality as ours but it’s a lot more comfortable to wear, and you can attach your magazine pouches to it, so doing away with the need for ammo webbing or vests. But, at the end of the day, it always comes down to personal preference.
Some guys, especially the ex-US Special Forces members of our company, bought their own telescopic sights with heads-up capability. Basically, with a normal sight you shut one eye – right or left, it doesn’t matter. With these heads-up sights you look through them with both eyes open. You can still see your target and still aim correctly. A very clever, effective piece of state-of-the-art kit. Try buying one of these fucking items in the UK and you’ll get a loud knock at the door from the plods, who think you must be a terrorist. The Americans are far more liberal and they can buy anything and still get it into Iraq.
We exploited this to the max. The Yanks used to get us anything from porno mags to personal sights and shotguns. I worked with one US Special Forces guy who even carried his grandfather’s pistol from World War Two and he’d just taken it over there with him.
Now that our equipment was more up to speed and more suited for our new tasks, we were ready to go, and, so long as the Gurkhas had a few shots of whisky on an evening and the Fijians got fed, we were sorted. I’m not saying for one instant that the Gurkhas were drunks; rather it was their end-of-day-perk – they certainly earned it.
Checking Iraqi security forces positi
ons was going to be one of our primary tasks. This was to ensure that they were (a) providing a decent and proficient presence and (b) they were actually there! It was, to most of them, just a means of earning some sort of an income, and an easy one at that. Most of them weren’t very committed to the job and to make matters worse a lot of them weren’t at all reliable, either. I think, personally, that Iraq will take a very long time to rebuild because a lot of the men in the country care only about themselves, no one else. Even though hostilities officially ended on 16 April 2003, I don’t think the country will be able to pick itself up for at least another few decades and maybe never. You now have the US military, the British military and us lot (about fifty thousand PMCs) running around this poor country. Who wouldn’t be confused and pissed off? It is certainly going to take one hell of a long time to sort out the mess that is now Iraq.
I’ve never in my life done a job as intense as this one. Baghdad was a breeze compared with this line of work we were doing up in the north. And I probably never would, with hindsight, go back to a job as mad as this. I would definitely go back to being a bodyguard but nothing like the job or missions we encountered up in the north. It was sometimes pure carnage there. PMCs can be used for most purposes and if the money’s right I’ll do most things. As in John Geddes’ book, he drove around Iraq on his own, the mad bastard. I really take my hat off to him. I’ve a lot of respect for that man. It sounds gung-ho but it’s true. It all depends upon whom you’re working for mostly, but if it was legal (or nearly) we’d consider it; and if it was viable we’d fucking do it! There are probably a lot of professionals reading this who would say different. But, as I said, if the money’s right, why not?
However, this day could be a different kettle of fish. We were armed to the teeth, as usual, and we were now on this new mission. Out through the gate we went, firing along at breakneck speed, trying to keep everyone safe and not blown to bits. We approached the first checkpoint, always difficult, but the Yanks just let us through. After that, fuck it! It was definitely mainstream dangerous for us.
Our new missions were now changing. We were now hunting down the insurgents – not just keeping a lookout for them, but actively hunting the hunters. Anyone targeting us or Coalition forces was fair game. We could take them out, no questions asked. We were, in fact, now undertaking offensive missions. We were now mercenaries, but we were all comfortable with it.
Now that our company was ‘unofficially, officially’ attached to the US military as a unit, we were very much one of their major assets. We were officially disposable troops. We had no casualty records, no fatality records, in fact no records at all. We could kill and be killed and no one would ever know or care.
Because the firing-range time with the Yanks was limited and mainly because of the immense firepower we carried, we had to do our own range, test and adjust routine in the desert because it was a lot safer this way. So this time when we went out on patrol we decided to stop and do a bit of target practice. This was normally done by taking water bottles out to approximately 1,000 metres; then the new guys would fire their M16s at the bottles; then a few of the rest of us would also have a go, if we thought we needed a refresher. Then the chain of weaponry would go up: M249, M240s and so on – you get the picture. And we were probably the most professional outfit in northern Iraq at that time. We were definitely the most heavily armed. We were the only company authorised to have automatic grenade launchers and .50-cals at that time. Because of the nature of our job, the US Army General in charge of everything and everyone thought the world of us and eventually became a good friend to us and gave us a lot of support. He, in fact, gave us the power to carry anything we wanted.
As we now gathered a little momentum in our tasks and were trying this mad new job as mercenaries, it became clear that a lot of us were probably going to peg it at some stage because this was such a high-risk and dangerous mission. Our newfound job – one of them, anyway – was, as we’ve seen, to assist in VCPs. We would need to stop random vehicles or suspects, search them and arrest them if we found something illegal. This would normally be a role for the military. However, we were given this task and we’d do our best to be humane and compassionate but, of course, deadly effective.
One morning as we started patrolling along the main highways, we were, as usual, staggered along the route at a few hundred metres apart. One of our patrols then headed off up into the mountains to reconnoitre the route ahead of us, when the other patrol, which had been instructed to go up into the mountains to do some surveillance and had gone off road up there, suddenly found itself in a contact situation. The comms crackled, ‘Contact, wait out.’ Fuck this was always bad. We’d never encountered a mild contact in Iraq. You just didn’t. Everything was normally bad or very bad and usually involved IEDs or ambush by gun-toting insurgents who were normally armed to the teeth and trying to take you out in a hail of bullets.
One of the Toyotas, in the other patrol ahead of us, had gone across a dirt track and crossed through a wadi and, unfortunately, in doing so had gone over and compressed a landmine; this in turn had blown one of the Gurkhas in the rear right section of the Toyota up into the roof, the explosion almost ripping the vehicle and our poor Gurkha colleague in half. He was, unfortunately, killed instantly. Our medic did all he could. He tried for almost thirty minutes to resuscitate him, but to no avail. The device had gone off underneath where he was sitting and had blown him upwards into the roof of the Hilux. The force had totally snapped his neck, but I was told by a medic that it was his internal injuries that had killed him. However, the three remaining Gurkhas in the vehicle had, incredibly, survived, but were in a deep state of shock. Because our US military backup was limited, we often didn’t have the means to find out what ordnance had taken us out, so most of the time we just had to get out of the area. This put us in a dilemma, as we didn’t know what to expect, but on this occasion we had to rendezvous with the Gurkhas to collect them and get them all safely back to base. We were all well aware that we could be hit by backup ambush devices. We were in a bad situation.
We arrived at the site of the explosion. It didn’t seem to be the usual sort of device we encountered, but it had still made a right old mess. However, one of the guys in the patrol was a hardened ex-SAS veteran of some twenty-two years’ service and had served in quite a few conflicts (most of the modern-day ones, in fact) and he said he’d seen these devices, or similar, in the First Gulf War. It may well have been left over from then; on the other hand, it may not.
Anyway, we had another man dead on our hands. We rearranged ourselves to accommodate the three traumatised Gurkhas and loaded our poor dead colleague onto the back of one of the trucks alongside the gunner. We considered what to do about our truck – it seemed totalled (unusable). We briefly discussed towing it back to camp but decided it wasn’t salvageable, and nor was it worth the risk of having it slow us down and make us even more vulnerable to attack, so we just blew the fuck out of it to prevent it falling into insurgent hands.
Our death toll was rapidly rising.
Although if we had to leave a vehicle it was our standard operating procedure to blow it to bits, this time it was done for us. The Hilux was well and truly fucked. The mine had ripped it in half.
It was a sombre group that eventually returned to camp. The American sentries on the gate could tell as we approached that something had gone wrong, as they could see we were a vehicle down, and the usual smiles and waves were absent, although they did shout concerned questions to us as we passed through the gates. Once we were on camp the first thing we did was to make arrangements for the Ghurkha’s body to be taken care of. Once that was arranged, we went in search of beer – and lots of it! It had been one hell of a day and we all needed a drink to settle us.
We managed to get hold of a few crates of beer and we went down to the accommodation and de-rigged. We didn’t even bother to shower. We just wanted to sit down and chat over a beer about our departed friend. We lit a
big fire and then we toasted our colleague and tried to get as wasted as we could, but not so wasted that we wouldn’t be able to function in the morning, as this job was non-stop.
This was a rather grim and unofficial tradition among us if we ever lost a mate, a bit like holding a wake, I suppose. It is never easy to lose a friend or colleague, especially one who, on numerous occasions, had saved your arse or whom you’d fought alongside. So we spent the night drinking to him, basically drowning our sorrows, and remembering every funny thing or humorous incident involving him that we could because we knew that the next day we would have to get up and carry on with our job. It seemed to help numb the pain of our loss, anyway. We all just hoped that the next evening our colleagues would not be toasting us, which was a very real possibility in this line of work. We all shed a few tears that night.
As I’ve said before, the Yanks on camp thought we were nuts, driving along with no doors on. And, if we were in Baghdad or Basra, we would be nuts, but, then, back in Baghdad or Basra we would have been in armoured SUVs. Up here in the north, however, we were in a different ball game. At any time you might have to alight from the trucks fast and get the hell out at a moment’s notice; and, because our trucks were all soft-skinned, our options were limited. We had to be quick on our toes and so it had been decided that the doors would just slow down our exit from a vehicle in an emergency contact situation.