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

‘I suppose I’ll be training by myself in the gym every night while you two get laid.’

I walked out and Mad Dog followed to commiserate, saying that he wasn’t getting any either. As we walked down the corridor I took another look at the bustling modern hallways and the clipped efficient medical staff going about their duties. Of course, this was I-raq , so all the surgeons were packing M9 pistols in thigh holsters.

Colonel Hind had gone on leave in November and returned with the patronage of a one-star general in the Pentagon. With the general’s support, he had convinced the Project Management Office in the CPA that he was the man to run Task Force Fountain, the protection of Iraq’s water infrastructure, and to head a team to train a private guard force.

Hind now had an office in one of the plush palaces in the CPA and a staff comprising Colonel Steve ‘Mad Dog’ McQueen, who had come in as Hind’s assistant a month before, Sergeant Harvey, Hind’s driver that day when we managed to lose 21 oil tankers outside Mahmudiya, and two First Sergeants, equivalent to the rank of sergeant majors in the British Army.

When Spartan got the contract to train the guard force, plastic-wrapped blocks of $500,000 with seals from the CPA began to arrive at HQ like it was Christmas. It was just before I went home on my first leave, and I couldn’t help visualising ways of slipping one of those sealed bundles of loot in my bag to take home to Krista as a surprise.

Here darling, I couldn’t think what to get you …

It was an idle fantasy, like finding the hidden suitcase of cash in some Ba’ath Party back garden. It transpired that Mad Dog’s brother worked at the Federal Reserve, tracing stolen notes. He told me that when money vanished it was always traceable and that his brother’s department was more vigorous than the Canadian Mounties, ‘They always get their man.’ When a bill with the serial numbers from missing money turned up anywhere in the world, teams of agents would swing into action like a well-oiled machine. I wanted to know what they were doing about those lost millions from Pentagon contracts in Iraq.

‘Legal theft,’ he said. ‘Another department.’

Spartan would continue to be based in HQ in the Green Zone, where it was both more secure and easier for Adam and Angus to follow up potential PSD contracts within the CPA.

Our team, however, reporting to Task Force Fountain, would be tasked to begin training and managing a guard force that would eventually rise to 1,500 Iraqi nationals. It would be impossible to get Green Zone passes for all of them, let alone carry out any small-arms training, so we decided to set up a secure satellite location where we could live and work out in Baghdad◦– the Red Zone.

We informed Sammy of our requirements and he went off as thick as thieves with Ibrahim, our black-market arms fixer, to scout the area. They came back with a potential location in Aradisa Idah, an area in the southeast of the city between the CPA and the water plants we were going to be responsible for. The people in the district were anti-Saddam, pro-Westerners, which meant they hated Americans, but tolerated Europeans. Like all Iraqis, they appreciated the new money rolling in.

Ibrahim was a former air force officer like Sammy and spoke excellent English. He was a dark-skinned Shia with thick black eyebrows and the usual Saddam moustache. With the CF tightening security and restricting access into the Green Zone for Iraqis, Ibrahim, most of the guards and a number of the Iraqi administrative staff from HQ had volunteered to transfer to our water-management team. Ibrahim was diligent, highly motivated and, while he assured us that we were ‘his brothers’, it didn’t have quite the same ring as when those words were said by Sammy.

Sammy was at the wheel of his old Toyota when we went to take a look at the property. With the leave structure, nine weeks on, three weeks off, it was unusual that we were all there at the same time: Seamus, Les, Dai and me, the Brits; Cobus, Hendriks, Etienne and Wayne, the Yaapies. Wayne had just got in from Cape Town. He was as wide as he was tall, with dark eyes sharpened by the sun on the veldt, a shiny, bald head and a beard. Like Etienne, Wayne didn’t say much; like Hendriks, he had 20/20 vision when he looked down the sights of anything that shot bullets.

We met Shakir Ahmad, the owner of the property, and a group of local elders. Ibrahim was from the area and would be able to vet the local guards we were going to hire for our immediate security. It was important that the men we hired were either related by blood or tribal links, since that would guarantee more loyalty than the Yankee dollar. I would have preferred to live in a neighbourhood where Sammy had similar influence, but Sammy’s house was in the middle of bandit country. We scored a lot of points announcing that we were there to keep the water flowing not rob the country of its oil.

‘And they are British,’ added Sammy, standing to attention.

The old men nodded wisely like magistrates and Ibrahim had a slight look of distaste as Sammy spoke. This was a mixed area, but there were more Shia, like Ibrahim, than Sunni. Yet all of the sheikhs in the room were Sunni.

I am not sure why being British always helped. Hadn’t we and the French raped and pillaged Iraq before the Americans got in on the act? Whatever the reason, as Iraqis moved into administrative posts to prepare for the handover from the Coalition Authority to an elected Iraqi government, there were many officials who refused outright to deal with Americans. As soon as we identified ourselves as Brits, the tea was laid on and we’d discuss the pros and cons of Manchester United versus Liverpool and the chill weather before getting down to business.

The Iraqi obsession with courtesies was impressive. Even when trying to obtain information from a site under attack, I would always have to earnestly answer that I was fine, that my family’s health was fine, that all of us expats were very well indeed; then I’d have to ask the guard commander how he was, and how his wife and children were, before slipping in, ‘By the way, I hear that you are currently under attack, how many men are shooting at you?’ It could be trying at times, but these exchanges were fundamental to the Iraqi character and, when they weren’t trying to kill you, the people were friendly and good-natured.

The daily pleasantries occupied a lot of time, particularly first thing in the morning, and this drove Americans crazy. Hey, what the hell is this? Can we cut to the chase? They wanted to do things the American way.

For decades the entire Arab world had been warned by their media and their imams that the United States was spreading its own moral decadence through film, television and now the Internet in order to destroy the Muslim way of life. They saw on their TV sets Israelis armed with American M16 rifles and Apache helicopters and F16 jets killing and oppressing the Palestinians. Closer to home in Iraq they had spent ten years watching their old, their sick and especially their children dying as a result of UN embargos; deaths ordered, as far as they were concerned, directly by the White House.

Now they watched Humvees patrolling their cities, and American soldiers searching their houses; they watched steel walls with Hesco barriers going up around the CPA and now instead of Saddam and the Ba’athists, Americans were living in the marble palaces and putting their young men into the same filthy prisons; they watched boys of eighteen from Florida and New Jersey spitting chewing tobacco at their feet disrespecting both them and their women in front of everyone on the street. Over cups of morning chai in every tea shop they swapped rumours of Americans massacring civilians during firefights across the country. Shoot off a loose round in the UK and there’s an inquiry. Shoot a few ragheads in the streets of Baghdad and it just didn’t seem to matter.