by Neryl Joyce
There were several other teams present, but they kept to themselves. Although we were all from the same company, there were some ‘inter-racial’ issues going on. A few members of my team seemed to have something against the Americans. I’d almost go so far as to say they were racist. I don’t how else to explain it. Some thought the Americans were too gung-ho and their tactics were too aggressive. A few of the Brits on my team didn’t like Americans because their ideology and values differed to their own. They told me that, until I’d worked with a mixed-culture team, I couldn’t understand the fundamental differences.
I thought this kind of attitude had been stamped out years before. It definitely wouldn’t have been tolerated in the Australian Army. I decided I wasn’t going to be part of their war. I’d make friends with whoever I wanted, and judge people on the basis of their personalities, their skills and the value they could add to a team.
I slowly sipped my beer. It was nice to have a drink, but I didn’t want to down too many. I was still a newbie and I didn’t know my colleagues very well. Ghost brought me over another drink before I’d finished my last, while the other team members filled me in on some of the team gossip.
Just before I’d arrived, two women on my team had been fired. I was told that they were flirty pissheads, and not up to the job. Considering these guys were getting smashed right in front of me, I disregarded the comment about the women being drunkards. I was, however, curious to hear about the women’s tactical skills. Ghost said the problem was that the women had had minimal experience with high-powered weapons and were struggling to use them. The truth was that before starting with the company they had been civilian bodyguards working the London circuit.
I was gobsmacked. How the hell did someone without military experience get a job in a combat zone? Putting unskilled operators on the team endangered the client, the team and the women themselves. It was probably for the best that they’d been turfed. As for the tales of their drinking and flirting, I was sceptical. Guys tend to exaggerate details like that, especially if the woman in question isn’t flirting with them. There are two sides to every story, and the women’s was never told.
By now most of my teammates were well and truly relaxed. Money Shot came over to tell me I would have no problems on the team if I kept going the way I had been over the past week. I had already zeroed my weapon and conducted a marksmanship shoot for the team’s project manager. Sim was impressed with my results, as I’d kicked the butts of most of my teammates. The other team leaders said they were happy with my performance and considered me an asset. I was feeling very good at this stage. It felt as though I’d been accepted as a member of the team, and that I could be relied on to do my job.
I was halfway through my second can of beer when it was decided that the team would go to a bar. We drove a short distance to the Bunker Bar, a privately owned establishment located within the Green Zone. As soon as I got out of the car, I could hear the thump-thump of a bassline.
The walls inside the bar were lined with decommissioned weapons. I considered them precious antiques and wished I had a collection of them on my walls at home. The bar was jam-packed with other civilian security teams. There was only one other woman there. I felt a little intimidated.
Being the only PSD chick the men would have seen in a while, I was attracting a lot of attention. I kept close to my teammates. Ghost began introducing me to other teams as his wife. I played along; it was the easy option for keeping unwanted guys away.
Eventually we called it a night and went back to the team house. It had been fun. I had got to know my teammates better and it seemed as though we’d be able to gel. I could also tell that Ghost was developing a tiny crush on me, but I wasn’t interested in any entanglements just yet. It was more important to be taken seriously as one of the team.
Romance could wait a little longer. Even though it had been more than three years since Bruce had broken up with me, I was still terrified of taking a chance with someone else. Heartbreak is brutal. I had to be sure before I got involved. Ghost seemed nice, but he also came across as a player. Did I really want to get mixed up with a guy like that?
*
One night, a week or so after the barbecue, Sim gave us a head-sup about the major task he’d mentioned. It was our first big operation: one of our clients had a meeting in Kirkuk, a city in northern Iraq, and we had to get him there safely. Details were still sketchy at this stage. It would be up to Sim’s second-in-command, Smokey, to flesh out the plan. Smokey had spent many years working as part of a high-profile American organisation. He had been highly decorated for his work and was well respected in those circles. Smokey was under a lot of pressure from the company directors to make this mission happen, but even so his tactical approach was greatly flawed.
The plan involved the CAT, the client, Smokey and me flying into Kirkuk on a military helicopter. The rest of the team were to drive in their soft-skinned vehicles so that the client would have something to drive around in. As the commander of the CPP unit in the Australian Army, these kinds of operations were my bread and butter. My blood ran cold when I heard these orders. Kirkuk was practically the wild west, and the route between it and Baghdad was nicknamed ‘the road of death’. Militant groups stalked the road and ambushes, kidnappings and worse were commonplace.
It was suicide to have the team drive all the way to Kirkuk in soft-skinned vehicles. Our contract had major military support allocated to it for exactly these kinds of missions. Where were the armoured vehicles? Why weren’t we arguing for the meeting to be moved to a safer place? If there was really no way around it, then surely the CAT should travel by road with them. If our team was attacked on the road, there would be no backup forces, and no reaction force to come to their rescue. They would be literally on their own.
I had to talk to Sim. From a couple of conversations we’d shared, I got the impression he had been unsure about the mission from the start. We had a very frank chat and he understood my concerns straightaway. He had tried to have the operation cancelled due to its risky nature, but the company was not going to have a bar of it. The company had only recently won the contract and did not want to refuse the first major task the commissioners had requested. Sim was told that the Kirkuk trip would go ahead as planned. In consolation, the team was given one armoured vehicle. It was to be used to transport the client once he arrived in Kirkuk.
The rest of the operation’s planning was shambolic. People were being switched between vehicles and positions. No one really understood just what was going on. I was cut from the team with a few others at the last moment, but the rest of the guys had to see it through. Security contractors will usually do whatever they are asked to, no matter how perilous or unsafe. No one wants to be thought of as a scaredy cat.
The team arrived back safely from Kirkuk two days later. Sim resigned soon after. He said he wasn’t willing to be part of a company that placed its employees in dangerous situations just to curry favour with clients. There were other ways of completing the mission, but the company had not been willing to listen.
As the project manager, Sim was responsible for the safety and welfare of the team. It was his job to ensure the missions were well planned and executed. The heads of the company effectively took that power away from him. As a leader, you must be able to live with the decisions you make and their consequences. Evidently, Sim couldn’t live with the choices he’d been forced to make.
The guys came home in one piece and that was what mattered to me at the time. They each swore they’d never, ever go on a mission like that again. They had been lucky that time, but luck doesn’t last forever.
ONE NIGHT, as the team was sitting in the lounge room receiving orders for the next day, a huge boom tore through the night air. The windows shook and the sound reverberated around the room. I braced myself for the onslaught of more mortar rounds, and, sure enough, they fell. There had been several mortar attacks over the past week, with shells falling close to the comm
issioners’ workplace – so close, in fact, that standing outside the Convention Center, I could see the wisps of smoke rising from where they’d landed.
I didn’t know if it was the still of the night that made this one seem so near, or if it had indeed landed just outside our house. Our new project manager, Cat, ordered us to check on our clients living in the Green Zone. A team of us armed ourselves to the hilt and donned helmets and body armour before getting into two of our vehicles. There’s nothing like leaving the relative safety of bricks and mortar and stepping into a soft-skinned vehicle during a mortar attack to get the blood going.
We turned into the street where three of our clients lived, and were met immediately by US military forces. A mortar had landed right in the middle of the street, causing massive destruction. Smokey got out of the car, lit up a cigarette and began taking photos of the area. The rest of us provided perimeter protection. I crouched down next to a fence and awaited further orders, but none ever came. Smokey was busy talking to the clients and taking snapshots.
A female client, Number Three, had been visiting her house to check on how renovations were progressing, as she was hoping to move into it soon. Her timing had been bad. As soon as the mortar hit she fled back to the Red Zone. Our Number Two client, who lived a few doors down, had taken off in his car to God knows where, presumably somewhere safer than his house. Our Number One client wasn’t too fazed by what had happened. He didn’t want to be moved from his home to a safer building, and insisted on staying.
It was incredible that we were in charge of the commissioners’ safety, yet had only limited influence over their movements. Two commissioners had taken off into the unknown, and the third wouldn’t budge from his own home, despite the danger. They did their own thing, and only fell under our protection when it suited them. I really struggled with this part of the work, but Baghdad was the clients’ home, and they knew it better than us. They trusted us and I supposed we had to trust them too.
Ghost came to check on me and said that the mortar had landed right near Number One’s house. A guard had been hit in the neck by some shrapnel from the blast and a child who had been playing outside had also been hurt. I felt a mother’s pity for that innocent little boy.
While I waited for Smokey to finish sucking on his cancer stick, I noted a man running towards a small group of people who had gathered in the street. He was dressed in a long white robe splattered with mud. I looked closer to see that it wasn’t mud, but blood. I heard a great scream, followed by wailing. Several women, covered from head to toe in black, huddled together and began keening. The sound vibrated throughout the cold night air. Something bad had happened.
The sorrowful howl didn’t stop. It grew louder and louder, and steadily more hysterical. A US military interpreter went over to the women, but they were in no condition to talk. The blood-soaked man told him that the little boy who had been playing outside when the mortar hit had died on the way to hospital.
I could only imagine how those women felt. The pain must have been unbearable. I could feel it digging into my heart. If anything like that ever happened to Kane, I wouldn’t have hesitated to exact my revenge.
The wailing continued, and eventually Smokey signalled for everyone to head back to the team house. We hadn’t been home more than ten minutes when another three mortars hit. Straightaway we were in the vehicles again, driving to the commissioners’ street. This time, one of the mortars had landed on Number Two’s house.
At least we knew that Number Two, who was still at large, hadn’t been blown to smithereens. Number One still refused to leave his home and no amount of convincing by Smokey would make him budge. There was nothing more we could do. Not wanting to stick around a mortar drop zone in our soft-skinned vehicles, we returned to the house. There were no more mortar attacks that night, and all the commissioners lived to tell the tale.
From then onwards, each night before we went to bed we had to physically check on all the commissioners living in the Green Zone. I am sure this annoyed the commissioners. I know I would have been irritated if I had a security team interrupting my family dinner each night to see if I was still breathing.
One night, Spitfire and I were tasked to perform the check. By this stage, we were no longer knocking on the commissioners’ doors and disturbing their family time. We basically just did a drive-by to see that things looked okay. After completing the check, we turned onto the main road and drove towards our team house. It was 9 p.m. and there were not many cars or people about. The US military had imposed a curfew, and if you travelled at night you risked being shot at or arrested. An American civilian had been shot at the previous night. He wasn’t killed, but it proved that the military was serious about enforcing the curfew.
We weren’t too far from home when large number of cars pulled out from a side street. They sped up until they were right behind us, and started driving in an erratic fashion – fishtailing all over the road with their horns honking. I looked behind us: Iraqis were hanging out of the car windows, yelling, screaming and throwing their arms around in the air. There were about ten vehicles in total, and they took up the whole road. I pulled my AK-47 close to me, but there wasn’t much I could do with it while I was driving.
Spitfire grabbed his weapon and released the safety catch, although he kept it low and out of sight of the other drivers. I kept the vehicle steady and continued on our route back to the team house – any sign that we were panicking could have bad consequences. We couldn’t identify any weapons in their vehicles so we didn’t want to fire any warning shots.
I was feeling tense by now. It was dark, we were alone and being trailed by wild Iraqis. As the cars caught up to us, they began to surround our vehicle. I looked out my window and an Iraqi man called out to me. He spoke in Arabic and I didn’t understand a word but he looked excited and happy. The honking increased and more cars overtook us.
These people were not insurgents; they were wedding guests. It was Eid, the end of Ramadan, and they were celebrating someone’s marriage. The wedding party took off, still honking, and disappeared into the night. Spitfire and I both breathed a sigh of relief.
AS TIME WENT ON, I began to settle into a routine. Often I’d be rostered on to do the security picquets at the Convention Center. On my days off, I’d hit the gym, write long emails to Kane and watch old Star Trek episodes on DVD. It was strange how quickly living in a war zone became ordinary.
There were some differences between how my life had been and how it was now. Ghost was openly flirting with me, which I wasn’t completely averse to. It was nice to have some male attention – it had been years since I’d been in that situation. I didn’t turn many heads back home, but, all of a sudden, it was like I was the most desirable person in the country. As one of the very few Western women around, I had the sense I could have had a face like a shoe and yet still found someone interested in me. The attention by Ghost was flattering and overwhelming. I didn’t really know how to handle it so I kept things light between us and just focused on my job.
There was plenty to keep me occupied. Number Two was flying out of the country and needed to be taken to the airport: it was time for a BIAP run. I tied my headscarf around my neck, ensuring it was tightly secured. I felt a little limited in terms of head movement but, once I got used to it, I was fine. I hopped in the back seat of the advance vehicle with Spitfire, and we arranged our kit so we could access it easily. As we were wearing our body armour and chest webbing, and carrying an assortment of weapons, it was an extremely squashy fit. After piling the medical kit and spare ammunition onto the seat between us, our movement became even more restricted.
We made ourselves as comfortable as we could, and then Merlin and Swamp jumped in the front. Swamp was an ex–British forces guy in his early twenties. He was extremely smart and planned on studying medicine once he finished his contract in Iraq. He was a terrific team member: incredibly switched on, understood orders, and could be relied on to make good judgment c
alls. Swamp was the soldier that every commander wanted on their team.
With Swamp behind the wheel, we drove to Number Two’s house to pick him up. As the advance vehicle in our team, we were the first of the three cars in the convoy to pass through the last checkpoint before we left the Green Zone. We drove slowly for the first few hundred metres, making sure the other two cars had made it through okay. Once they had cleared the checkpoint, Swamp stepped on the accelerator and we were off.
I was holding my weapon left-handed. It was one of those awkward things you had to do when sitting on the car’s right-hand side. As a rightie, this took a little time to get used to, but there was no way around it: if we were attacked from the right, it was essential that I return fire as quickly as possible.
It wasn’t so bad firing left-handed, except for the ejected brass rounds. When you fire a weapon, the brass casing from the ammunition gets ejected out the side of the weapon. If you’re right-handed and firing a right-handed weapon, the casing shoots away from you. Fire that same weapon in your left hand, however, and the hot brass casing can hit you right in the face. A face full of hot brass would be the least of my problems, though, if we were attacked.
“RV one,” Merlin said, as we hit Route Irish. “RV two,” he continued. ‘RV’ meant ‘rendezvous’ in military lingo. In the army, it was typical to identify several landmarks as rendezvous points. Then, in the instance you were attacked and your vehicle disabled, you would return to the last RV point and wait for help to arrive. If after a certain period no one came, you would return to the previous RV. This would continue until either help arrived or you were back in a safe area.
I spoke to Merlin a little later, saying I thought that someone had mixed up their military jargon. The RV points that he called over the radio were landmark checkpoints, not RVs. We were not expected to return to these landmarks if our vehicles were disabled and we were running for our lives. In fact, if we got into trouble, our orders were to commandeer a vehicle and drive away from danger. These landmarks were just checkpoints so that everyone knew where we were located along Route Irish.