by Iain Overton
What we are pretty clear about, though, is that the role of the gun differs markedly from war to war. The AK47’s popularity in the Republic of Congo meant over 93 per cent of deaths were from gunshots there.6 We know thousands of civilians were killed by guns in Iraq – all too often the result of kidnappings and assassinations. But in Uganda, the conflict waged by the Lords Resistance Army – a militant cult led by Joseph Kony, which seeks to establish a theocratic state based on the Ten Commandments – shows that knives and clubs are also frequently used to murder and terrorise.
The widespread military use of explosive weapons has also had an impact. In Cambodia in the mid 1990s and in Thailand in 1980 more civilians were killed by mines than by guns. And, at the other end of the spectrum, the sheer quantity of air-dropped bombs in Lebanon in 2006 meant that less than 1 per cent of people were killed in that conflict from gunshots.7 In general, though, it’s estimated that guns account for between 60 and 90 per cent of all direct casualties in war – a heavy toll however you look at it.
The harm guns cause has also changed over time. In the American Civil War, guns accounted for about 75 per cent of combat casualties. By the Second World War only about 18 per cent of military casualties had been shot. This shift is down to a few things. The nature of warfare has changed over time: explosive weapons are much more likely to be used now than they once were, and this pushes down the proportion of those injured by gunshot. Soldiers are also now much better protected: improvements in bulletproof vests, armoured personnel carriers and helmets mean getting shot is now less likely to kill you. And soldiers are increasingly taking on targets from miles away – as the use of drones makes clear – further reducing their chances of being caught in the crossfire.
If a soldier from a relatively developed military force is unlucky enough to be shot, the swiftness of getting treatment to them has massively improved their chances of getting off the field of battle alive. Gunshot lethality prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom was about 33 per cent. Now, according to US military data, it’s less than 5 per cent. The only thing that has not changed over time is the lethality of headshots.8
The impact of guns in war also changes during the course of each conflict, and not only because surgeons are getting better at what they do. At the start of the Russian involvement in Afghanistan in 1980 about two-thirds of conflict casualties were from gunfire. By the end of the decade the Russians had learned the hard way about the skilled marksmanship of the mujahedeen, and so they kept their heads down. By 1990 only 28 per cent were from gunshots.
All of this shows one thing: that the role of the gun in soldiers’ lives has changed as much as the nature of war itself. As part of my work, I have walked beside troops around the world and I have seen that each military deployment is unique. From filming the menacing metal bristle of the borders of South and North Korea to watching British squaddies walk in stern silence in the soft fields of Kosovo, I have just one simple observation: for most soldiers, in peacetime the gun is just a thing, something they carry with them, something they oil and clean, eat with, shit with, even sleep with, not something that they really talk about, unless they lose it, or a screaming sergeant makes them run with it over their heads for an hour. But in war the relationship between the soldier and the gun changes completely. This is why, in order to understand how the world of guns impacts militaries, you have to travel to war itself.
April 2004 – I was in Basra, working for the BBC with my reporter, Sam Poling, one of those journalists who chases at stories with a ferocity that you can only admire. She and I were embedded with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, a Scottish regiment that had fought in Korea and in Aden, in the Boer War and in the fields of Flanders, and now it was raising its colours here in southern Iraq.
We had just seen the Tree of Knowledge – a broken tree in a broken land, neglected and unloved, but the infamous tree all the same. It stood in the centre of Al-Qurnah, a small, windswept town about 70 kilometres north-west of Basra. This jujube tree was near the confluence point of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers – where they joined to form the Shatt al-Arab. It was the place where Iraqis claimed Eve had plucked that forbidden apple and with her first bite allowed knowledge to ruin paradise.
On the day we went there the tree stood dying, plastic bags eddying around it, and boys with snot on their faces and holes in their trousers kicked the dust at its roots. But they only did this during the day, because no one walked the streets here at night, except killers. After all, this was Iraq, and this was war.
We turned and began the long drive back to the British army base in silence, as no one likes to see paradise lost.
Then came the gunshot: a stark, blue staccato snap and a screech of brakes and a tumbling out of the Land Rover. Out we ran, onto the sandy banks of the road, over the pebbles and plastic that littered the sides of the highway, and, breathless, we landed in a gully.
‘They shot at us! They fucking shot at us!’ screamed one of the British soldiers. They tensed and raised their rifles, but the car was already speeding away.
We had been due to return to Britain that day, but the road to the airport was too dangerous. The army had already lost a few soldiers on the way to that baked tarmac strip, and with the threat as high as it was, the colonel said we would just have to wait. Something bitter, disconcerting and violent was happening.
On the flight coming in I had been strapped into a stand-up harness at the front of a Hercules troop carrier. We were flying down low straight from Cyprus, and the silver line of the Qamat Ali canal glinted beneath us in the night; on either side stretched the silhouette of ancient desert lands. We were flying blacked out, a dark speck in a dark sky, but then a red button flared upon the pilot’s dashboard, and the crackle of a command came into the headset.
‘Incoming. Release one. Release two.’ A ground-to-air missile was fast approaching, and the pilot fired off decoy flares, lights spinning behind us into the pitch-black. Our plane tilted sharp to the right, and the threat passed as fast as it had come. But it was clear we had begun our descent into something.
The ragheads were fuckin’ losing it, the soldiers had said to us later, and with swagger. There was excitement in their voices at the prospect of having a decent ‘contact’ to tell their mates about back home, but then you saw the youth in their eyes. They yearned for what they should have feared.
If I was honest, I too was glad we had been shot at in such a neat little way, because journalists can’t go to a war zone and not wish to see a gun in action, no matter how much they wrap it in platitudes. That’s why you are there: not to film soldiers grumbling about their fat-saturated dinners or how much they miss their mothers, but to film the coursing adrenaline rush of wide-eyed terror and the sharp crack of a gun’s retort.
This is why the Iraq War, above all the others, defines my view of the military use of the gun. I had been to many conflict zones – Somalia, Pakistan, Colombia, Nagorno-Karabakh – places marked as much by war as peace. But Iraq was different. The war there, perhaps because tensions were so high and because I was unarmed and yet everywhere surrounded by guns, was compelling and vivid and unlike anything I had felt before. Guns here defined life; they were the only things that mattered.
The Americans had begun the now infamous battle of Fallujah on the day we landed: a huge assault to clear a city far to the northwest of us. Their targets were those responsible for the gruesome killing of four US Blackwater military contractors. Stumps of burned American flesh had been dragged through the streets, captured on a thousand broadcasts. And the US, as the US does best, retaliated with heavy force.
On the night of 4 April 2004, forces under Lieutenant-General James T. Conway launched a major assault to ‘re-establish security in Fallujah’, circling it with 2,000 troops. The subsequent violence had shaken Iraq, sending ripples through the country as far south as Basra.
So what started as an ordinary media embed with a British infantry regiment changed into something m
uch more dangerous, as a slow unfurling of anger and blood-revenge gripped the city. We had had bricks thrown at us by baying mobs, seen army Land Rovers transformed into black, burned-out skeletons on the lawless roads. Sam had even been attacked by one of the Iraqi soldiers the British were training. And now, in a ditch beside a village we had never heard of, we were being shot at.
But the danger passed as quickly as it arrived, so we dusted ourselves off and got back into the Land Rovers and drove slowly to Camp Riverside – the tidy army outpost that was about 25 kilometres away from Basra. The camp was, at the height of the Ba’ath party’s reign, the summer home of Ali Hassan al-Majid, the Iraqi defence minister and chief of the Intelligence Service. Al-Majid was more commonly known as ‘Chemical Ali’ for his use of chemical weapons in Iraq’s attacks against the Kurds, and his old home was graced with a beautiful view over swaying fields and bulrush-lined canals. Rumour had it that it was once filled with whisky sours and bubbling Jacuzzis and unspoken exploits; thoughts that would set any lonely British soldier’s mind aflame.
But just as it was a place for secret and illicit pleasures, so too was it a place of protection from the bloody circus that was grimly being performed across Iraq. There were now high walls and watchtowers and sandbags aplenty here, and we slowly zigzagged through the protective escarpments designed to stop suicide trucks. The high metal doors of the camp were pushed open, and we were back at base. The men disembarked and walked without words to a small rectangle of sandbags. There they unclipped their magazines, making their weapons safe. They did so with easy, fluid movements, as had been drilled into them.
We headed over to the cookhouse on the far edge of the camp, the smell of frying food in the air. I made a beeline for one of the sentries defending the outer reaches and ducked into his neat sentry post, with its swollen sandbags. He smiled and leaned into his weapon, an L7 general-purpose machine-gun.9 Neither of us spoke. We looked to the west.
A boat slowly drifted down the waterway. On the deck, a dark-skinned man in a white dishdasha stood, his hands resting behind his back. Our gazes met, and the boatman’s eyes narrowed; you couldn’t help but see menace in that furrowing of brows. And the machine-gunner traced the boat’s slow passage downriver until the man passed around a bend and out of sight. The soldier let loose a long line of spit and winked. I turned to go, knowing what that wink meant. We were inside this camp, they were outside the camp and, until we knew differently, each and every one of them was a killer. And the oiled and cared-for machine-gun, with its ability to let loose ten rounds in a second, was a thing of protection for all of us.
The next day it got a lot worse.
We awoke before the sun and headed south as the city stirred. The cars drove, engines bull-loud, into Basra city and the platoon’s lieutenant, a young Scot from the Borders who one day talked about returning from these dry lands to help run a family fishery, shouted through the grill that separated the front and the rear of the Land Rover. Things were heating up, he said. Two of the regiment’s convoys had just been hit with rocket-propelled grenades.
This was just the start of it. By the end of that day there had been over fifteen contacts in the city – exchanges of gunfire between British soldiers and militants. We wanted to get out to see how the day would unfold, but the colonel of the regiment said it was just too dangerous, so we waited in the main base, and each time a convoy came back in, men would tumble from their armoured vehicles, their uniforms flecked with blood, their eyes wild. They spoke in fast, breathless clichés, resting on old sayings to try to explain what had just happened.
‘It was hell,’ one said and told how his colleague had his foot blown clean off by a rocket grenade. Another had been shot in the hand. One even told how his grandfather had given him an antique coin, the old man having picked it up in these same desert lands in the Second World War. His warrior grandson had kept it in his top pocket over his heart and forgot all about it. Then his convoy was hit in a rocket attack and it was only back at the HQ, when he pulled out the coin, that he found a piece of shrapnel embedded in it. ‘That coin saved my life,’ he said.
The words spilled out from their fresh, youthful mouths, the adrenaline keen in their faces, and they told how they had let rip with their weapons, facing ambush after ambush, because this was a war that, in many ways, was being fought with the age-old technology of guns. They had become crucial weapons in this urban guerilla conflict, a place where planes or tanks or mortars were sometimes too blunt weapons of violence to use.10
The figures testify to this. It’s been estimated that 250,000 bullets were fired in Iraq for every insurgent killed by the US military.11 That works out at about 6 billion bullets being shot by US forces between 2002 and 2005.12 Indeed, so many bullets were fired by American soldiers that the three ammunition contractors who supplied ammunition to the US military had to spend almost $100 million in upgrades just to keep up with demand.13 Even this was not enough. Over 300 million rounds were bought from commercial companies, including Israel Military Industries and Olin-Winchester.14
Someone, somewhere, was making a handsome profit from the US and British incursion into Iraq. It’s no surprise that Whitehall figures put the cost of British funding of the Iraq conflict at £9.24 billion,15 or that, between 2005 and 2008, the annual cost for each American soldier there rose from $490,000 to $800,000.16
Such profits should be weighed against the numbers of lives lost in Iraq. Of the estimated 122,843 civilians killed there between 2003 and 2014, about 55 per cent died from gunfire.17
Years after leaving that military embed, when I was working on Wikileaks’ Iraq War Logs, we found that more than 80 per cent of people shot and killed in incidents at US and coalition checkpoints were civilians. Over 681 innocents died – at least thirty of them children – compared to just 120 Iraqi insurgents.18
There were other, equally terrible times when the sound of murderous gunfire penetrated the fog of war and caught the world’s attention. Like when, in November 2005, a group of Marines went on a shooting spree and killed twenty-four Iraqi civilians.19 Or when, in 2006, US soldier Steven Dale Green raped a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl after killing her parents and younger sister and then shot the sobbing teenager in the head.20 Some hear these stories and say: this is war, shit happens. But these incidents should be remembered, not least because Britain and America invaded Iraq on the slimmest of pretexts. And while nations have a right to self-defence – the argument put forward by the US and the UK – they also have a legal and moral responsibility to adhere to international humanitarian law. They have a duty to ensure arms are used appropriately and proportionately. And in Iraq they, clearly, were often not.
The tragedy of Iraq, though, is that there has been no proper attempt at investigating war crimes committed by Coalition soldiers on duty; even politicians who opposed the war and are now in power seem reluctant to open that Pandora’s box. This political silence means that, largely, the horrors of what guns do to people in war remain unaccounted for and unseen. And future politicians may all too easily forget what war means when they next send young men into the field of battle, there to face all of its iron indignation.
Perhaps this is not a surprise. Iraq was fought in the way that guerilla wars are so often fought: in the shadows, largely away from the glare of the media. On that bloody day in Basra, it got so bad that the whole camp went into lockdown, and all patrols were suspended. The army decided it was simply too dangerous to head out of the gates because of the attacks and the rioting mobs.
As the sun rose higher in the sky, and the sound of gunfire resounded in the distance, Sam and I sat down to talk. I suggested that we just get a cab to where the maddening conflict was unfolding. Sam, being the journalist she is, felt the same. Captain Johnny though, the officer in charge of the unit we were following, took us aside and told us it was a suicide mission, that the Quick Reaction Force would not come to get us if we got into trouble. Even the Iraq Civil Defence Corps colonel
told us not to go. But I wanted to go, and badly. I wished to catalogue the violence, to witness what Britain’s role in Iraq had become – so we ignored their pleas. We packed up our kit and got the unit’s interpreter to call his uncle who had a cab, and headed out the gate.
As we waited, though, something felt wrong. The taxi had yet to come, and in the slow minutes that followed, my bravura turned to doubt and doubt to fear. I turned to Sam. ‘This is indeed a suicide mission.’ She nodded. We packed up the filming kit and walked back through the gates. Without the protection previously offered by British army guns, we had to leave the day unrecorded; we had little desire to film our own deaths.
Parts of this war, as with all wars, had to be reduced to silence. When the gun’s impact is so extreme, nothing will properly describe or explain it. And if you were there to describe it, then you risked too much. Looking back on those days, it feels futile for me to try to explain at all the role of the gun in that war – at least from those few grasped experiences. Just as witnessing a dozen wars would lead me to a dozen different conclusions about the role of the gun in each and every one.
Faced with such complexity, I wanted instead to focus on a place where the gun’s role was more unequivocal. So I chose to travel to a country that for the last twenty years has been repeatedly called the world’s most militarised nation.21 A place born from gunfire and existing by gunfire: the state of Israel.
The ancient port of Jaffa rose like a dusty tombstone to the south, and the sun bleached the Middle Eastern sky. It was furiously hot, and I was poorly dressed for it. My heavy boots and shirt were draining me, but it was not the heat that caught me off guard. What surprised me were the questions, because I’ve never been to a museum before and been asked either for my passport or whether I was carrying a machine-gun. But that is what a uniformed youth wanted to know as I tried to enter the Israeli Defence Museum, a short distance from the surfer’s beaches of Tel Aviv.