by Peter Mercer
The next day I was transferred by plane to hospital in Germany, where I spent the next few weeks recuperating. I had a lot of time to think about my circumstances and to decide whether or not to go back. I considered telling my parents about it, but then didn’t, because I didn’t want to worry them. I’d already misled them about what I was really doing out there and if I told them I was injured they would be frantic. What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. In fact to this day I haven’t told them, but I guess now the secret’s out!
During my time in Germany I was extremely bored. The only light relief was from the nurses, who were friendly enough but were very busy – they had a lot of other patients to look after who were more seriously injured than I had been. I spent my days reading and sometimes talking to the other patients. I was bored stiff and couldn’t wait to get back to work. All this idleness was making me feel guilty – about the lads I’d left behind and how they might be doing. I felt totally isolated and cut off from everything.
It was a relief when I was finally discharged and able to get back to Iraq. Now you may think that this is a funny thing to say, but I’d got so immersed in my life back there that I really was missing it, and I was missing my stupid dog Kasper and my patrol teammates. Call me crazy but I was itching to get back to it.
Chapter 13
Over Christmas
Christmas was coming, and I can’t say that thoughts of the festive period were particularly gripping any of us. I’d been nursing some very sore ribs during my enforced time out. Most of us were single, so it really was of no importance to us. Sure, I’d miss my family (my parents and sister), but I wasn’t really that bothered. I was now totally focused on this job – it was as if I had been encapsulated, as if we were all living in this bubble and the real world outside Iraq had pretty much faded away.
We cooked for ourselves quite a lot of the time on camp, and a few of the lads even had cooking hobs in their rooms. We often had impromptu barbecues, too. But it was a real treat for everyone when the Gurkhas cooked for us. Their speciality seemed to be curried goat – not sure if that was because of the availability of goats here or a genuine preference. The only problem was that the goat in question had to be alive!
The first time I saw how they made their curry I was nearly sick. They would stand the goat up, stroke it to pacify it, and then, when it was calm and relaxed, one swoop of their kukri would lop off the goat’s head clean off. The goat still stands up for a few seconds – as if the body hadn’t quite caught up with the fact that it’s dead – and then it falls over. This seemed really sick to me but I guess it was all right, actually, because the animal never knew what had hit it. After they had killed the goat they would skin it and gut it – that was basically all the preparation they did for the meat. Then the rest of the goat was just chopped up into more manageable bits – bones and everything. It seemed that the goat was in the pot and cooking in minutes.
The Gurkhas then created and cooked the most glorious of curries – everyone looked forward to one! The Gurkhas loved their curries, that and whisky! To encourage them to continue providing us all with these fantastic curries we even built them their own cooking area outside their accommodation one quiet afternoon.
Now, while we all were looking forward to this meal, we had one small problem: we now had to acquire a goat and, worse still, it had to be alive! We had a bit of luck here, as we needed to make a run up to Kurdistan near Turkey, so we thought that while we were there we would stock up on some booze and see if we couldn’t buy a goat for ourselves! Once we managed to get one and had got it back to camp, we couldn’t see the problem in keeping it alive for a while – after all we heard that goats will eat pretty much anything. So the plan was try to see a goat farmer in the desert on the way back from Kurdistan, and buy a goat off him. Goat farming seemed to be just about the only life you saw out in the desert, anyway.
So, following our usual mad dash out of Mosul, which this time was uneventful, we arrived in Kurdistan and managed to grab the booze; now the only thing left for us to acquire was the goat! Once out of Kurdistan we started to scour the countryside for a goat herder; it wasn’t long before we found one! As we approached I think he shat himself a little bit – he looked absolutely terrified seeing all these heavily armed mercenaries coming towards him. We managed to reassure him that all that we wanted was to buy ourselves a goat. He was so relieved he insisted on giving it to us for free.
Now this could have been a tempting situation but actually, with our own personal morals, we forced him to accept what the Gurkhas assured us was more than a reasonable price for the goat – I suppose they would know, it being one of their favourite foods. Their absolute favourite food, bizarrely I thought, was hot dogs!
Goat purchased, we had to get the thing back to camp. The only way to do this was to put it in the back with the gunner on one of the gun trucks and tie the thing up. It must have made quite a comical sight to any onlookers – that we had a live goat with us. The goat tried quite hard to chew and eat the gunner’s trousers – much to the amusement of us all. We eventually managed to keep it away from our poor gunner, though not before it had nibbled quite a large hole in his pants.
The Gurkhas entertained us on the way back through the desert with a funny story about a village in Nepal where alcohol is totally banned because the locals there were known to be so fiery when they got drunk they had regularly got out their machetes and kukris and attacked each other to settle their arguments. We proceeded to drive back through Mosul with no trouble at all and the gunner, especially, was pleased to unload the goat, which by this time had also pissed and crapped pretty much everywhere.
The Gurkhas took the goat off and tethered it to a stake in the ground. Being a team leader, I was able to delegate the nasty job of cleaning out the back of the vehicle. But what the hell – you have to have a few perks, and asking someone else to clean up goat shit definitely counts as a perk! However, being an animal lover, I nonetheless still found it hard to see these things being killed.
Another interesting thing happened while we were in Kurdistan shopping for booze and our goat. We were wandering around the marketplace – not looking for anything in particular – when a mate called me over to a stall. He had just been offered a mini Uzi machine gun. This particular gun was about 8 inches long and looked immaculate, almost brand-new. The stallholder nearly shat a brick when Phillipe grabbed hold of it and disassembled it in front of him in seconds – to check that all the working parts were moving freely, that it was in order, was the real McCoy and would actually fire. The stallholder wanted $250 for it.
We all gathered around and talked about it – it turned out that none of us, apart from Phillipe, had ever fired one of these guns before. We were all keen to try it out and we decided that $250 was a bargain, and if we all clubbed together we could buy ourselves a fun Christmas present. So we asked Phillipe to put the Uzi back together and we all turned out our pockets and managed to get the money together. We had to club together to do this because we never carried much cash with us – there was no need usually. The stallholder was now grinning at us, totally confident that he had made a good sale today. We probably paid more than he would have made by selling it to a local, but what the fuck! This appeared to be a brand-spanking-new mini Uzi and we were all raring to have a little blast on it and have a laugh. After all, we knew that you can’t hit shit with these things because they’re an open-bolt-action weapon and are so very short (hence notoriously inaccurate), their only advantage seeming to be the rate of fire you could put down. We decided we all wanted to try it out on the range. Just for a giggle, really.
Once we had scraped the money together we asked the cheerful stallholder for some 9mm ammo (these things eat ammo at an alarming rate, firing about twenty rounds per second). He grinned broadly and told us that he actually hadn’t got any and we would have to look elsewhere. The git smiled at us and he wished us a good day. So now we had our mini Uzi but no sodding am
mo – how fucking annoying is that? We decided that we might be able to scrounge some back at camp, so we left the market. I was looking forward to having a go with it and had visions of various movies I’d seen running through my head (unprofessional as fuck, I know). Yes, it all sounds a bit immature for a hardened soldier and now a mercenary, but all it was for us was a bit of fun and a bit of relief – nothing serious, just a giggle.
Christmas was almost here. We’d got our goat and an Uzi and we were feeling relaxed, but northern Iraq doesn’t stop for Christmas, so we had to keep on our toes. Everything was now set for a good party – and then we received some bad news. On the camp a couple of miles up the road – Mosul Airport camp actually (called Marez) – an Iraqi employee had gone into the mess hall; he’d body-packed himself with explosives and coolly joined the most crowded area – the queue and servers – then detonated his device. His actions resulted in the deaths of twenty-nine US Marines and had blown a huge hole in the mess hall.
To make matters worse, this man had been a trusted employee for months and months, possibly over a year. He had even befriended some of the Marines he eventually killed. It is sickening, but it does show the power of religious beliefs when a person who knows you, whom you even think of as a friend, blows himself to pieces, killing himself and his friends. A betrayal like that makes everyone look sidelong at the local people working around them. It is so bad for morale with this underlying tension and unspoken accusations hanging around everyone. It was a terrible shock to all of us, as we had eaten in that mess hall on quite a regular basis – the Fijians needed feeding and stocking up all the time! It could easily have happened to us – a true shock for us all. The violence here never stopped.
I used to feel really bad for some of the American troops I met over in Iraq. A lot of them were there for the full eighteen-month tour – that’s one hell of a long time to be away from your loved ones. I knew that the US military recruited a lot of its troops from within very poor or underprivileged areas of the US. Often, joining the military is the only employment these young men and women can get and they see it as a way to escape their life and an opportunity to travel and see the world. Often, they don’t really expect to get posted to Iraq or Afghanistan, but in this day and age those are the main places you are likely to be sent. Most of the young recruits just want the easy life.
The US military appear to do this on purpose, because it’s easier to recruit people from low-income communities than from the middle classes into the forces. The middle-class families have more options and are less likely to seek a career in the armed forces because the money is not that good. I am in no way slagging off any American troops – I have served alongside them many times with pride. However, you can’t help but feel for these really young lads and girls, who had probably never left the US before and then they find themselves in one of these hellholes with real people shooting real bullets at them and really trying to kill them – and pretty often succeeding.
With Christmas coming up and our bosses trying to keep our spirits up, one of them thought it would be a lark to dress us all as Father Christmas (Santa Claus to our American friends). I don’t think that the insurgents were going to find it quite as funny. So we approached the local tailors to see if they would be able to make up the suits for us. We weren’t trying to wind up the Muslims or anything like that, just trying to give ourselves a little seasonal boost and hopefully have a laugh doing it. Now this may not have been the smartest idea we’ve ever had, but what the hell! We were just doing it for fun. The tailors we employed were all local Iraqis and they didn’t seem to have a problem with making the suits for us.
The suits eventually turned up along with about a hundred Father Christmas hats for the Gurkhas and Fijians. I’ve got to say that the suits looked more than a little strange, as they appeared to be just big red boiler suits with a couple of Father Christmas logos stitched on the back (which wouldn’t be visible once you’d put on your body armour, anyway) and they were shit quality as well. The hats were OK, though, and there wasn’t time to get anything else now, anyway.
We got together to make the decision about when to wear them. It was extremely likely that over the Christmas period we could be locked down. That means we would not be allowed to leave camp. It was predicted that the insurgents were more likely to try to wreak havoc over the Christmas period, when morale among the Coalition forces was lower as people missed their families more. As it happened, the Americans did decide that attack was imminent and placed the camp in lockdown. No one was going anywhere.
It was decided to wear our Father Christmas outfits on any mission we could, because the object of dressing as Father Christmas was mainly to cheer up the Americans troops on camp who were really missing their families at this time of year. After all, we could choose to go home on leave at any time, but they couldn’t. It should be a laugh for everyone apart from the Iraqis, who would probably have a total sense-of-humour failure. Never mind, eh!
We had only one mission over the Christmas period, and that was just to escort another security company across town. Mosul was so dangerous that we were often tasked with escorting other companies and sometimes even the US military across this mad place. Since we were financed by the Americans, we did whatever they asked of us. If there were no missions we would sit around camp, go to the gym, train, whatever. Over this festive period, even the American troops were going to limit their venturing out. The insurgents’ offensive was building up and nobody was moving around much. We didn’t look for trouble. If we could find the easy life, it was even better.
Our guys, however, were chomping at the bit, as we were all getting a bit bored, and to relieve this boredom we wanted to keep working. Most of us had an attitude of ‘bring it on!’ So, on 24 December we, the expats, donned our Father Christmas costumes and all the Fijians and Gurkhas put on their elf hats and we went up to the ops room for our brief. The guys from the other security company we were to be escorting that day couldn’t believe their eyes. Here we all were, dressed as Father Christmas, wearing body armour and armed to the teeth, accompanied by the meanest-looking, best-armed elves you’d ever want to meet. They, on the other hand, were immaculately dressed wearing looks of total astonishment on their faces. They thought we were taking this piss, but you had to keep a sense of humour in this most dangerous of places in order to keep your sanity.
After the escort briefing we all mounted up and arranged the other company’s vehicles in the centre of our convoy. We then proceeded to the entrance of the camp. Every American trooper we passed seemed to be in hysterics and clapped us as we went by. We certainly had put a smile on their faces (which had, after all, been one of the main points of wearing our costumes). We arrived at the main gate and the sentries were gobsmacked. ‘You guys are joking, right?’ was the question posed by the incredulous sentry. We just smiled and started loading up and generally getting ready for the off. They fell about laughing. At least we’d put a smile on a lot of depressed US soldiers’ faces.
We tore out of the gate with the other company in the centre of our convoy. We were under no illusions that this wasn’t going to be dangerous, and probably a lot more so than usual, as being dressed as Father Christmas wasn’t going to help us: it could be classed as provocation. While the other company’s men were feeling a bit bemused by our being dressed as Santa and his elves, we still exited in our normal style: safety catches off, ready, as always, for any eventuality.
As we cleared the entrance of the camp the other company, driving in their fully armoured, fully equipped SUVs, turned on their flashing blue lights (which were mounted in the grilles). We told them, in no uncertain terms, to turn them off straightaway. We didn’t use this tactic, as it was bad for us, and, after all, we were in charge – this was why we had been employed by them in the first place, to look after them.
The US military wouldn’t let these companies travel through the north at this time of year without the ‘Father Christmas Protectio
n Outfit’, so what we said was gospel. If they didn’t like our arrangements, they didn’t travel. It was our mission.
Because the north of Iraq was so dangerous, we were often asked by the Americans to escort other PMCs in and out of these trouble spots. We now had what you could call a full military role and were called or nicknamed ‘G Company’ by the Yanks (unofficially, of course). We had a level of firepower that no other private security company had, or was allowed to have. We were packed with the best-trained guys you could get and the Yanks knew this and were always going to exploit it. Fair play to them: it would keep their own troops safe and we were, after all, there by choice and for the money.
As we sped through town we could see a lot of jaws dropping at the sight of us all decked out in our Christmas getup. It was funny if not a little embarrassing. I was a little concerned that wearing a bright red suit when there might have been snipers ready to take a pot shot at us was hardly a brilliant idea – nothing like making yourself an easy target – but, then again, even if we’d worn black they could have got us. The other factor that was slightly troubling me was the potential embarrassment of being taken out (injured or killed) while dressed as Father Christmas.
After we’d dropped off the other company at the airport, we peeled off and gave them a wave. The drop had gone remarkably well and without incident. We then headed back for a lovely relaxing evening and the prospect of our Christmas Day and the party; and we were also looking forward to a great, if a little chewy and bony, goat curry.