James Ashcroft - Making a Killing - The Explosive Story of a Hired Gun in Iraq

We had been led to believe there would be weapons for us upon arrival in-country and were annoyed that there were none. Fuck-ups are normal. There was nothing to be done and we carried on as the escort car pulled in behind us and Mohammed led the way into Iraq.

It looked a lot like Jordan.

We were on a multi-lane highway that crossed the Mesopotamian Plain and on either side of the road there was nothing but flat stony ground as far as the eye could see. It was grey. Even the sky was grey. I was fully awake now, and as Mohammed lit up the first of his next four hundred cigarettes I realised it was going to be a long five hours to Baghdad.

Les opened the window a crack and we sat back, breathed in the dust and exchanged stories, as soldiers do.

Les’s military career was impressive. He had done both the ‘P’ (Parachute) Company and the all-arms commando course, and had been an instructor on the latter as well as an arctic warfare instructor. He was intensely proud of having been with airborne troops, but was far prouder of being commando-trained than of his para wings. He had found ‘P’ company ‘easy’ after doing the commando course. Oh and yes, he had run the London marathon three times. And boxed for the army. Holy shit.

I’d been sitting on my arse in an office for three years. Hill-walking in Scotland and cross-country running had kept me in shape but it was time to start thinking seriously about physical fitness if I was going to be working with guys like this. We talked about what threats we might face on our upcoming contracts and amused ourselves imagining the number of ways foolish white-eyes like ourselves could get blown up.

All this time, Mohammed had been well in the lead for the acting mad competition, but even he was rolling his eyeballs worriedly as Les screamed ‘Ally Akbar, KABOOM’ every time he saw a driver who looked like a potential suicide bomber. It was curiously prescient of Les Trevellick because up until then, in September 2003, there hadn’t been any suicide bombers in Iraq.

I glanced back. Our escorts were still behind us, their car so full of smoke I was surprised the driver could see through the windscreen.

Mohammed pointed at the buildings on the outskirts of a city in the distance.

‘Fallujah,’ he said.

This was a hotbed of criminals and insurgents. The United States Marines would flatten it eventually, but the name at the time meant nothing to me and could have been Arabic for ‘I was born there’, or ‘crappy brown buildings’ for all I knew. Mo lapsed into silence and nodded along to the wailing music on the radio. The songs all sounded the same. I wondered if we were listening to a special club mix that lasted a full five hours.

We carried on talking threats and tactics.

‘They don’t care if we are Brits or Yanks, mate,’ Les said. ‘They take one look at us and think we’re American-Jewish peeegs taking the dollar to come and dishonour their women and steal their country.’

We began spotting potential enemy positions overlooking the highway, and vehicles that could have been full of explosives parked on the side of the road. We overtook a taxi crawling along under its heavy load.

‘Look at that fucker, the wheels are scraping the arches.’

‘He must have a ton of Semtex on board,’ I replied. ‘And he’s cunningly disguised the bombs as a family of twelve.’

‘Suicide bombers,’ said Les knowingly, ‘fresh from Gaza.’

‘Don’t make eye contact –’

‘Too late… Ally Akbar, KABOOM!’

Mohammed winced and drove faster.

Les and I had both been to Northern Ireland several times and we discussed what tactics we would use to counter the threats we might face. We talked over several scenarios and seemed to see eye to eye on most things. This was what we were being paid for: for the experience and training we had in dealing with counter-insurgency and guerrilla tactics. It was good to know that I would be (a) doing work I was good at and (b) working with people who were just as good. We agreed on several ‘actions on’ and drills we should train in, and were looking forward to meeting up with Les’s mate Seamus, who was already in-country, to confirm them.

Like me, this was Les Trevellick’s first proper contract. He knew a great deal more about the Circuit though, as he had quite a few Regiment mates. The SAS to the public is the Regiment to everyone in the army.

‘It’s a close group,’ he told me. ‘Everyone knows everyone, so you fuck up more than once and no one will hire you. All they have to do is call around and people will say, ‘‘Oh yeah, I remember that cunt, he was useless,’’ and that’s you.’ He looked me up and down for a second as though already filing me under that category.

There was a large pool of ex-soldiers who did short-term contracts for a relatively small group of companies. When I thought about it, it was obvious that you not only had to be a good operator, but you had to get on well with the men you worked with. If much of the recommendations were based on word of mouth then even someone with a dull personality or poor personal hygiene might find it difficult to get recommended by former team-mates. Having said that, with the sudden explosion in demand for security contractors in Iraq, there were some companies hiring men by the yard, barely even scanning CVs before offering contracts.

We were passing through the little towns and villages on the outskirts of Baghdad. As we pulled off the highway and turned on to another substantial road, I could see destroyed Iraqi tanks dotted along the way. Most had their turrets blown off and were in such a terrible state I couldn’t tell whether they were T-62s or T-72s. We were silent for a while.

‘All still dug in, hull down,’ Les then grunted. I stared back at a pair of tanks that looked untouched but had scorch marks on the side. ‘Probably never knew what hit them.’

‘Apaches, you reckon?’

Les was referring to the American AH-64 gunships, a familiar sight in Iraqi skies to anyone who followed the television news during the weeks of war. They were armed with Hellfire missiles with a range of eight kilometres. At that distance death would have dropped out of the sky on unsuspecting Iraqis who wouldn’t have had a clue that there were any helicopters out there. Especially if the attack had come at night.

‘Probably,’ I said. ‘A10s would have left them looking like Swiss cheese.’

We were both acquainted with those slow-flying American tank-hunting jets armed with a fearsome Gatling gun that chewed through tanks as if they were tin cans. I had seen the remains of target tanks on American ranges up in Yakima and you could hardly tell that they had once been tanks.

We could follow the traces of the battle through the remains of the Iraqi army. Half a dozen Russian-built BMP personnel carriers were spread out across the fields to our right between the protection of the berms nearest the road and the palm plantation 200 metres away. To civvies they would just have looked like destroyed vehicles. To our eyes they told another story.

Most likely American ground forces had claimed these. We could not say whether they had been caught in the open withdrawing from the road to the safety of the tree line, or whether they had made a suicidal attack towards the advancing Americans. Both Les and I tended towards the former theory. The fact remained that they had still been moving as a group in one direction, and that meant that they had seen what killed them.

‘Tanks,’ I said to Les.

‘You sure?’

‘Aircraft would have destroyed them before the crews knew what was going on. Look how far they got. They didn’t do too badly, so they must have had time to think and act. Most of the men would have known what the Apaches had done to their tanks in the first Gulf War. If you came under attack from American jets or helicopters what would you do?’