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

What happened next is hard to remember, but I had the best night’s sleep I’d had in a long time and spent the morning sunbathing on the roof with a hangover. Mad Dog and Gareth had spent the night, too drunk to drive, and came out to the range full of enthusiasm for our Christmas shooting competition. They both considered themselves crack shots and were astonished when they had to dig into their wallets and hand over $150 apiece to the Yaapies.

‘Anyone would think it was Christmas,’ said Mad Dog.

‘In Seth Efrrika it’s always Christmas,’ said Hendriks.

I called Krista to wish her Merry Christmas while Les cooked Christmas lunch. We had three-quarters of a turkey; stray cats had got the other quarter while it was defrosting. Nothing else. No potatoes, Brussels, stuffing, trimmings or gravy, not even a piece of bread◦– just turkey. Ho Ho Ho. At least it was a day without lamb.

The true wealth of Iraq is its vast collection of archaeological sites. It had always been my intention to pay some of them a visit and take some photos to send to my ex-girlfriend at Oxford who’d told me Baghdad was the most beautiful city in the world.

Present-day Iraq is situated in what was called Mesopotamia and deserves its reputation as the cradle of civilisation. The fertile plains watered by the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers supported the empires of Akkad, Babylon, Sumer, Assyria, the Hittites and Persia for thousands of years before the birth of the Romans. Scholars recorded the exploits of King Gilgamesh in what is one of mankind’s first written texts. It was the site of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and legend has it that this was where Eve tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden.

In September 2003 when I’d first arrived in Iraq it would have been possible to visit a few sites, but there had been too much going on at Spartan. We were now interviewing and training guards for TF Fountain, but while this left quite a lot of free time, the hostilities in the opening weeks of 2004 made it far too dangerous to cruise around the country with my camera.

Every day after morning prayers we practised our car drills and actions on. In the afternoon we hit the CPA; it was more treacherous in the streets, but we could report our progress directly to Mad Dog and enjoy the delights of pineapple pizza at the same time.

I went to the gym and trained on the running and rowing machines, while Seamus and Les went shagging, then we all returned to the villa for roast lamb dinners cooked on the braii . I’d email mates at home to tell them what a great life I was having, then stretch out with the latest stack of pirate DVDs we’d bought from the roadside stalls in the Green Zone. Once Les got our wall projector and surround-sound system set up, we celebrated by getting Sammy and Colonel Faisal over to watch Black Hawk Down . Again.

Faisal was an old air force buddy of Sammy’s and had been working with Phil Rhoden procuring supplies. We needed a ‘Colonel’ to head up our guard force and used that old army technique of nicking the best one you could find. Faisal held the equivalent rank of brigadier and had studied at the Iraqi staff college. He was dark-skinned like Ibrahim, but a Sunni like Sammy. He wasn’t so bouncy and gregarious, but a quietly spoken natural leader who kept his opinions to himself and commanded the absolute respect and loyalty of all the Sunni and most of the Shia guards we recruited.

Our two old pilots watched Black Hawk Down as if it were live footage from a war zone and went home nodding thoughtfully, Sammy in synch with Faisal’s temperament and keeping for once his own counsel. I went to bed and was dreaming about Mogadishu when at three in the morning I found Seamus shaking me awake with instructions to pack for a PSD task.

‘Get kit for four days including food, maps and sleeping bags. Wheels up at five. That’s two hours, mate.’

‘Fuck, it’s a bit short notice, isn’t it?’

‘Dai’s been ready all afternoon. He told me you wanted to go instead.’

‘You jack Welsh wanker,’ I said to the lump under the duvet on the other side of the room. ‘There’s no ‘‘I’’ in TEAM but there’s a ‘‘U’’ in CUNT.’

‘Hey, fuck off. You’ve been moaning for weeks about wanting to go to Samarra, now’s your big chance.’ It was odd, but when he was tired or drunk his Welsh accent started to come through.

‘Samarra?’ Damn right I would jump at the chance.

‘That’s what I said.’

‘All right, but don’t fucking smoke in the room while I’m away.’

This was unbelievable good luck. Samarra had been occupied for nearly 8,000 years, but the building I particularly wanted to see was a more modern piece of Islamic architecture: the spiral tower called the melwiyeh built on top of the town’s mosque in the ninth century. It is one of the best known and most enduring images of Iraq and is represented on carvings, paintings and banknotes. Thousands of Westerners had probably bought Iraqi souvenirs with the melwiyeh on them and not even known what it was.

I had resigned myself to not seeing it. Now that it was practically within reach the night’s fatigue slipped away. Shame there were insurgent attacks in Samarra on a daily basis. I packed some extra magazines in case we ended up pinned down by an angry mob and checked the battery in my camera.

An hour after being awoken I went into the living room with my bags to find Wayne and Cobus waiting. We loaded the 4 × 4 and then went back in to make some breakfast. Our job was to act as bodyguards for the Middle East correspondent of a Japanese national TV channel while he covered the arrival of the Japanese Military Contingent (JMC), 550 non-combat soldiers making up the first deployment of Japanese troops since the Second World War.

The Japanese public had been vehemently against sending their military forces overseas for any reason and the questionable ethics of the invasion of Iraq had polarised public opinion against Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. There was such a furore over the decision it was thought that it might topple the Japanese government, especially if the JMC ran into dramas. The international press, especially the Japanese, would be covering the deployment closely.

Personally, I was surprised they were sending them to such a dangerous area.

‘Why didn’t they find a peaceful sector for them?’ I said. ‘Any Japanese casualties and there’ll be a shitstorm back home.’

‘What the fok you talk about?’ asked Wayne.

‘It’s open season in the Sunni Triangle,’ I said. ‘To be honest, I’m not that happy just the three of us are going.’

The two South Africans looked at each other, then back at me.

‘ Moenie kak praat nie, man ,’ laughed Cobus. Don’t talk shit. ‘We are going to fokken SAMAWAH, three hundret Ks south near Nasiriyah. It’s the fokken safest place in Iraq.’

‘Sa◦– ma◦– wah,’ I repeated with a sinking feeling. Not Samarra. That little Welsh shit.

‘ Ja , Samawah. Stop acting crazy, Ash, and have some breakfast.’

Wayne put a great dollop of scrambled eggs on my plate and pushed a mug of coffee across the table. I went for the pot of salt. Its shape reminded me that I was not going to be seeing the melwiyeh any time soon.

We set out before first light for the Palestine Hotel, passing through a dodgy part of town where a car bomb had killed twenty people the previous day. We wanted to be on the road to Samawah before the morning rush hour, not only to get an early start on the long journey but also because the rush hour was prime time for the suicide car-bombers.

We arrived at the hotel to find our Japanese principal, Tanaka-san, waiting behind the wall of sandbags at the Palestine entrance. Unfortunately his Iraqi press team was still fast asleep. We eventually left the hotel at the height of the Baghdad rush hour and Cobus scared the shit out of Tanaka-san as he ploughed through the traffic like a knife blade going through silk.