by H. C. Tayler
“Not sure yet,” was his muted response. “I’ve sent some blokes forward to have a look. Can’t work out where the firing is coming from, or who they are shooting at.”
A few moments later a brace of Marines appeared breathless from the undergrowth, having just scrambled the distance from the river.
“Sir, I think you’d better come and see this for yourself,” was their only utterance.
Out of curiosity I followed them back towards the riverbank, to witness a scene of unexpected barbarism. In the middle of the Shat-al-Arab waterway, struggling against the current, was a small wooden boat, 20 feet in length at the most, crammed with civilians. It was a few hundred metres downstream from us and difficult to see clearly but there must have been a score of people onboard, including women and children. Presumably frightened by the fighting in Al Faw town, these poor souls had decided to flee across the river to Iran. The Iranians, however, were having none of it. The machine-gun fire was coming from an Iranian watchtower several hundred yards back from the shore (it occurred to me afterwards that they may have assumed the boat was a military vessel; nervous soldiers who had witnessed 24 hours of fighting over the border could easily jump to such a conclusion). The first shots may have been delivered as a warning, in an attempt to get the boat to change its course. But since it had continued on towards Iran, the heavy calibre gun was now trained on the vessel; each burst of fire was smashing into the boat and into the civilians onboard. Screams and cries for help rang out across the water, barely audible above the echoes of the machine-gun fire. Engine cut, the boat circled erratically in the eddies of the river. It was riddled with holes and slowly began to sink, listing to one side as the uninjured occupants, many of whom seemed unable to swim, threw themselves into the water. Several of their number remained in the boat, either dead or too badly injured to attempt to swim ashore. The machine-gunners didn’t let up though, and bullets continued to rip into the water, killing several of the swimmers before they had got more than a yard or two from the boat. I don’t know if any of them made it back to Al Faw that night - the current took them downstream and out of sight before the firing ceased. I’m not easily shocked but I returned to my sleeping bag in silence, feeling faintly nauseous from the sight I’d seen. It wasn’t the last we would hear from the Iranians.
Soon afterwards, a crackle came over my radio from company headquarters, informing us that there would shortly be a series of air strikes in our vicinity. Several targets had been identified, primarily by the snipers operating to our north. Sure enough, a minute or two later, the air reverberated to the sound of beating rotor blades and a brace of Cobra gunships appeared over the horizon, flying fast and low as they passed over our position, bristling with rockets and cannons. I lost sight of them in the gloom as they continued north, but the huge explosions caused by their missiles destroying Iraqi tanks was music to my ears.
As if to demonstrate the wealth of firepower available to them, more American aircraft appeared a few minutes later, this time in the form of A10 “warthog” tank-busters, their huge engines making a uniquely low-pitched drone as they passed overhead. The booming from their cannons rang out over the palm groves as they made multiple passes over their targets, before turning and heading for home. As they came back over our position (it’s always a nervous moment when a US aircraft appears overhead - one can never be entirely sure when they will open fire, or in what direction), the lead aircraft barrel-rolled into the night sky, popping anti-missile flares from its belly as it went. The burning phosphorous illuminated the whole area, casting a pale white light over the palm trees and creating an odd sensation of motion as the shadows moved in harmony with the falling flares. It was harmless showboating on the part of the pilot but made for a fairly spectacular fireworks display that lent an odd feeling of security to our situation, for which I was very grateful.
With the aircraft departed, the area fell into an eerie silence. Our position was in utter darkness, just the way I liked it, and the Marines were silently manning the sentry positions. I returned to my sleeping bag, hoping the night brought no more surprises, and fell into a deep sleep.
At some point in the small hours I awoke to the sound of more machine-gun fire, again emanating from the Iranian side of the river. Unlike the incident with the boat, this time the bullets were zipping overhead, smashing into the trees and bushes and thumping into the earthworks around the shell scrapes. Fortunately the firing was only intermittent and the gun was more often trained on targets to the north and west of us. For my part, I cowered in the bottom of my shell scrape, praying that the one-foot depth of the position would provide sufficient cover. (If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to be shot at by a large-calibre weapon, you’ll know just how frightening it can be. If you’ve not had the experience, believe me, you’re better off without it.) Over the radio I could hear animated chatter between 2 Troop, to our north, and the company commander. The gist of the conversation was that 2 Troop, who were receiving the brunt of the attack, were understandably eager to give the Iranians a taste of their own medicine. The company commander, however, was taking the slightly more cautious view that Operation Telic was only supposed to involve the invasion of Iraq and he thought it somewhat beyond his authority to open up another front with Iran. 2 Troop held their fire and eventually the Iranians ceased shooting - at least for a short while. Occasional bursts rang out across the river throughout the few remaining hours of darkness, ensuring that nobody got much sleep.
By first light the Iranians had stopped firing altogether, although I remained jolly wary about venturing anyplace I could be seen from across the water. Eager to get away from the riverbank, I tagged onto a detail of men making their way back towards company headquarters to pick up a much-needed water re-supply. It was a chilly morning, the sun had yet to rise, and the landscape was shrouded in a thick, damp morning mist. I reasoned that a quick stroll would serve to get the blood flowing again and, since I was almost out of water, I wanted to ensure I was first in the queue when the new supplies arrived. Other than our patrol, no-one was on the move and the mist served to deaden any noise, leaving the area completely silent save for the crunch of our boots on the dried mud. As we approached the Al Faw-Basra road, I heard the noise of an engine approaching from the north. From the haze, travelling at speed, appeared a faintly ghoulish sight: the Company Sergeant Major, sporting helmet and goggles, travelling at speed astride his quad-bike, towing a trailer on top of which lay the rigid corpse of an Iraqi soldier who had died the previous day in a firefight with 2 Troop. To my mind, the only good Iraqi soldier was a dead one, and I should have had no compunction whatsoever in leaving them where they fell; it would save our efforts and might serve as a useful warning to others. The Sergeant Major thought otherwise though and, deciding it was unhealthy to leave bodies all over the battlefield, had undertaken the grizzly task of collecting and burying them. With a grin and a wave he zoomed off along the road in search of more work. The quad bike and trailer combination became a regular sight over the next couple of days, bouncing around the battlefield as the Sergeant Major went about his morbid business.(5)
We had barely ventured more than a hundred yards further when another droning motorcycle engine sounded, again from the north. Unlike the powerful quad-bike engine, this was the sound of an asthmatic two-stroke struggling to cope with a heavy load. Out of the mist, perched precariously atop a shiny red motorbike and grinning from ear to ear, appeared the lead sniper pair with whom I had flown into Iraq just a day earlier, long range rifle dangling by the side of the pillion passenger. On the course of their travels they had come across the bike, which had apparently been abandoned by fleeing civilians. There were no keys but after a bit of creativity with the wiring it had started at the first attempt. They juddered to a halt alongside the patrol.
“Morning fellas,” grinned the rider. “Anyone know where Unit Headquarters is located?”
“Not a clue,” I told him, “though I imagine it
’s somewhere back towards 40 Commando’s location. Nice bike you’ve got there.”
“It beats walking,” he replied. “The boys have shot all the jundies they can find up there, so we’re hoping to get reassigned somewhere new. We called in a hoofing air strike last night - did you see it?”
He didn’t wait for a reply but gunned the engine and was off, spluttering away into the mist. It was clearly going to be a very surreal day.
It transpired that the water re-supply had already been dropped off at the next road junction, which saved our legs somewhat. There was far too much to carry, so the taxi-cab commandeered during the previous day’s fighting was utilised to distribute it around the troops. I cadged a ride in it myself, thinking a visit to company headquarters might be timely, as I wanted to know a little more about the wider battle and anyway I owed them a brief on the state of the roads and the likelihood of any armoured movement along them. Riding in the taxi was certainly more comfortable than walking, although it smelled like a Spanish brothel and due to a wiring fault it was impossible to switch off the car radio, which played an unceasing medley of tuneless Arabic wailing. It was quite a relief to get out at the other end, especially as I was greeted by the company signaller wielding a freshly-made a cup of tea.
The company commander was, as expected, full of the joys of spring. All his objectives had been taken swiftly, his men had won a string of fire-fights, and the snipers, who currently fell under his command, had slaughtered everything in sight to our north, not to mention calling in a highly effective series of air-strikes. Not bad for a couple of days’ work, so I suppose he had every right to feel pleased with himself.
“Harry!” he exclaimed. “Good to see you - I gather you have been having fun with 3 Troop. Doesn’t look as if there’s any danger of an Iraqi counter-attack just at the moment, so I guess we’ll just stay put for a little while. The LCACs have been putting QDG ashore all morning so I guess you might be sent to join up with them, but I haven’t heard anything over the radio.”
For my part, now that I knew the area was safe, I was entirely happy to remain with J Company, especially as QDG’s mission was literally to go looking for trouble. The prospect of advancing northwards in a lightly-armoured recce vehicle, seeking out Iraqi main battle tanks and the like, was not a comforting one.
“Anyhow, now that the sun’s up, I’m off to take a look at the boys,” grinned the company commander, donning his helmet and goggles. He gunned the engine of his quad-bike and shot off up the road, leaving me to enjoy another cup of tea courtesy of his signaller.
The taxi returned a short while later and, not being one to look a gift-horse in the mouth, I cadged a lift back along the road towards the palm groves and my shell-scrape, hoping I might catch up on some of the sleep I had missed the previous night. In the event, my ride halted at the junction with the Al Faw-Basra road, where 3 Troop’s morning was beginning to liven up. Extensive patrolling and house-to-house searches by 40 Commando had created a small exodus of Iraqi troops fleeing to the north. Overnight, 3 Troop had managed to acquire a set of loudspeakers and, from their checkpoint on the road, Arabic messages exhorting the Iraqis to surrender were blaring southwards towards Al Faw town. Much to my surprise, these appeals had already proved successful, and several Iraqi prisoners were sitting cross-legged under the watchful eyes of the Marines, on a flat patch of wasteland close to the shell-scrapes that 2 Section had dug the previous evening. More were making their way disconsolately towards us from the town, holding aloft a series of white flags and pennants. Since no transport was available to move these souls, they faced a long, hot day in the sun - or a long walk to the PoW handling centre. 3 Troop were in no hurry to move the Iraqis; their number was swelling by the hour, so it made sense to wait until they had all been rounded up. The various rifles and pistols they had surrendered were heaped in a pile just off the road, which I was idly looking over when I noticed the ominous little spikes of a Russian land-mine poking up through the earth. Frozen to the spot, I glanced around me and was horrified to notice several others, not all as well-concealed as the first - in fact, some were simply lying on the surface of the mud-flats. I pointed them out to one of the corporal present, who simply laughed at me.
“Yeah, we spotted them last night,” he told me. “A bit worrying at first, but they’re bloody ancient - probably from the Iran-Iraq war. We just tried not to step on ‘em or hit ‘em with a shovel. Anyhow, none of ‘em have gone off, which is all that matters, eh?”
Ancient they may have been, but I didn’t fancy chancing my luck, so I gingerly retraced my footsteps back onto the road and made a mental note to watch where I was putting my feet in future.
More Iraqi fighters gave themselves up as the day wore on, until eventually there was a tidy little group of them all awaiting processing. Now that the shooting had stopped, civilian traffic also began to appear on the road, ancient cars and vans coughing their way towards Basra with cargoes of anxious passengers keen to find news of their relatives. The boys routinely searched these vehicles at the checkpoint, but none were carrying soldiers or weapons, so they let them go about their business.(6) I used my smattering of Arabic to chat with some of the locals and find out their thoughts about the invasion. Happily, most of them seemed to give it the thumbs-up which, after almost three decades of persecution was, I supposed, unsurprising. I’m not given to sentimentality - sometimes an old-fashioned dictatorship seems to be the simplest way of dealing with these foreign types - but some of the stories I heard were enough to make my toes curl. One chap pulled up in a small van, with his wheelchair-bound friend loaded in the back. The pair of them were all smiles and the driver used his limited English to announce, “Good Bush! Good Blair!” at the top of his voice, presumably in the hope that we would thereby allow him through the checkpoint. I asked what was wrong with his passenger.
“What is wrong?!” he shouted, gesticulating wildly. “Saddam! Saddam is wrong! One year ago, this man could walk fine. He was a fit man, who worked as a mechanic in the town.” More gesticulation, this time in the direction of Al Faw. “Then one day, this man makes the mistake of criticising the Ba’ath Party in front of a customer. The next day, Saddam’s people come to the garage. They say this man has insulted Saddam and he must be punished. You know what they did? They cut his legs. Here,” he pointed behind his knees, “and here,” pointing behind his ankles. “All tendons cut. So he can never walk again. So, my friend, it is very good to see you!” At this, he thrust out his hand for me to shake. It was filthy and he looked singularly unhygienic, so I declined, but I did wave him through the checkpoint without further delay.
Shortly afterwards, with a roar of dust and diesel smoke, a remarkably new-looking six-tonne Iraqi army truck pulled up alongside the checkpoint, sporting a British vehicle marker panel on the bonnet. At the wheel, grinning like a Cheshire cat, sat the lieutenant in command of 3 Troop.
“Thought you might want a hand transporting the prisoners!” he bellowed at one of the corporals above the engine noise. “We just found this hidden up at one of the farmhouses. Get the jundies loaded in the back and let’s get them to the prisoner handling centre.”
“No offence, Sir, but are you sure you know how to drive that thing?” asked the corporal.
“Well I’ve made it this far without crashing, haven’t I,” retorted the officer. “It’s just like driving a car, only bigger. Now stop dripping and get the Iraqis loaded in the rear.”
Chortling with laughter at the unexpected trophy, the Marines swiftly rounded up their prisoners and loaded them onboard. A couple of the boys clambered up with them, rifles at the ready, but it only took one look at the dejected Iraqis to know that escaping was the last thing on their minds. Most of them looked as if they had barely eaten in a week - I guessed they didn’t much mind where they ended up, as long as there was the prospect of some food and a cup of tea. The lorry roared off up the road towards the oil installations with its tailgate still hanging open, lea
ving the remaining Marines shaking their heads at the eccentricity of their troop commander.
The remainder of the day was taken up by routine patrolling of the area, which I managed to avoid, and some low-level investigating of any unsearched local buildings. By now I was pretty confident that any remaining Iraqi soldiers would either have given themselves up or fled the area, so I joined in with the building searches, hopeful of liberating a little of Iraq’s wealth for myself. It was clear that the majority of dwellings had housed soldiers at some point - there was a remarkable number of abandoned uniforms and items of equipment, not to mention ammunition. Unhappily, in terms of booty, the only thing I discovered was a wad of local banknotes, all sporting Saddam’s sombre face, nominally of quite high value but now utterly worthless. I pocketed them anyway - one never knows when these things will come in handy for bartering, especially when dealing with the yanks.
Night fell swiftly and I made my way back to my shell-scrape, determined to get some much-needed sleep. Throughout the night US aircraft clattered overhead occasionally, and flashes and bangs lit up the horizon to the northwest, but the action was miles away from us and was therefore easily ignored. Somewhere around 3 a.m. I was woken unnecessarily by one of the Marines, worried about a build-up of vehicle movement on the main road. As far as I was concerned this was nothing to do with us and certainly not an adequate reason for waking me, so I bawled him out in spectacular fashion and went back to sleep. No-one else bothered to disturb me that night and I arose the next morning feeling thoroughly refreshed.
My third day in Iraq was largely uneventful and I spent most of it loafing around avoiding work, which was remarkably easy to do, since I was studiously ignoring the radio and almost no-one in the chain of command knew my exact location. The Brigade Commander, happy that Al Faw was now secure, wasted no time in taking the fight to the Iraqis. J Company’s snipers continued to report occasional tank and artillery movement to their north and QDG had come across several large-scale Iraqi formations in the course of their recces. Rather than allowing the enemy time to regroup, the Brigade was pushing forward as fast as it could. Helicopters buzzed endlessly overhead and the road was thick with vehicles as 40 Commando increased the momentum of their push northwest towards Basra. Much as the Marines of 42 had been cock-a-hoop when we departed Kuwait, the men of 40 Commando were buzzing with anticipation as they left Al Faw. Convoys of Pinzgauers and Land Rovers crawled past J Company’s positions, all crammed with men, equipment and weaponry. Ahead of them lay around 30 miles of unknown territory, thick with Iraqi troops and armour. Behind them they left a somewhat dejected company group, which remained to take care of Al Faw town, and the whole of 42 Commando, most of whom were also hoping for a move north as quickly as possible. Frankly, the previous couple of days had given me enough bragging material for several months of drinking in the Cavalry Club and I was entirely happy to watch someone else marching off to war instead of me. I hunkered down in my sleeping bag that evening a happy man - with a bit of luck and a following wind, 40 Commando would be in Basra inside a week, and then we could all go home.