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

‘ Kullish zeeyen, alham dul’illah .’ Very good, thanks be to God. He beamed with pride and saluted.

I told Sammy to instruct the guards to clean weapons before letting them go for the day. They had two pick-up trucks. I let them have my vehicle after checking with Gus that he could give me a ride back to the office. Ali looked crestfallen that there would be no opportunities to earn another $100. The thirty recruits with their guard officers piled on to the trucks and bounced off over the fields, raising a huge cloud of fine dust.

I called Seamus on my IRAQNA.

‘Hello, mate, I have sent our guards back to the office. I’m with Gus giving him a brief on the plantation. They’ll drop me off later.’

‘OK, mate, roger that.’

Gus wanted to take a look at the area and see if he could find any useful evidence, cartridge cases, vehicle tracks, anything that might spice up his report or lead him to the bad guys. I could have gone back with Sammy, but it was a nice afternoon, brisk not cold. I had been cooped up in the office and I needed some fresh air.

Gus was looking at the trees in the distance through binoculars. It was a wide area that ran along the banks of the Tigris and stretched back two or three Ks. Between the plantations there was a disorderly scattering of fields and smallholdings where squatters scratched out a living with a vegetable patch and a few chickens. They had moved into the area since the end of the war and were not part of the local community or our early warning network of informants and farmers. It was an area where the insurgents had regularly cached arms and launched mortar attacks on the Green Zone.

Gus gave me the binoculars. There was nothing to see, just the wall and the tops of the trees. I told Gus what Sammy had told me, that the date palm was the symbol of life in the desert. When the Prophet Mohammed was in the wilderness, he had survived solely on a diet of dates and the palm was considered sacred by Arabs. Saddam’s plantation was sacrosanct and Iraqis got quite shitty if anyone damaged the trees.

‘That’s a good guy you’ve found.’

‘Yes, Gus, and he’s our good guy.’

He smiled. I had read his mind. Gus Gazzard had an interpreter from Titan with him, a young Iraqi in blue jeans, a button-down shirt and American body armour. His English, I would discover, was terrible and I couldn’t help wondering if he was playing both sides of the fence. I had no worries about Sammy disappearing. Although Titan Security was paying their interpreters a hell of a lot more than we were even paying our officers, they had the social stigma of working for the Americans.

I was pointing out the boundaries of the Ministry of Water property when two enemy popped up at different points on the plantation wall and opened fire. Bullets snapped by my ears and ploughed up explosions of dust around us. I threw myself on to the ground in the firing position, making my body as small a target as possible. I couldn’t believe this was happening. We were a full platoon with six Humvees carrying a variety of belt-fed weapons. If we needed more guns, two Kiowa Warriors remained overhead.

Most of the shots coming in thudded in the dirt just in front of us. I saw one guy go down with a whomph , hit in the chest, and his buddies answered with a barrage of withering fire that pockmarked the wall; fragments spouted from the wall in explosive gouts of dust and I could barely hear Gus shouting orders over the fusillade of shots.

I sent, ‘Contact, wait, out,’ over the radio, before realising that none of the guys was likely to have their handsets switched on. I didn’t bother with the phone. With all the firing it would have been impossible to hear anything. All of a sudden my earpiece crackled into life.

‘Ash, Seamus, send sitrep, over.’ Obviously they could hear the firefight at the office and he must have switched on his radio immediately.

‘Ash, roger, contact, contact. Two enemy with AKs 300 metres east of range, Charlie Foxtrot is returning rounds, wait, out.’

Returning rounds was an understatement. The wall had been filled with holes where the enemy firing positions had been. After five seconds the platoon ceased fire under the shouted orders of Gus and their sergeants. They were all lying or kneeling down, cheeks welded to stocks and eyes looking through sights at the wall. Three men were around the soldier who had been hit. He was gasping and writhing on the ground.

The rebels were outnumbered, outgunned and in no position to take on a platoon. Was this insanity, religious fervour, financial? We had heard on the Karrada grapevine that insurgents who took out an American and could verify the kill would get $1,000. Where there’s turmoil there’s always plenty of money. Saddam in his day would send thousands of dollars to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. He’d gone, but in Saudi Arabia there were banks brimming with blood money and the silent majority wanted the white-eyes out of the sacred holy lands. This war was never going to end. Like the South Africans, I wanted to pay off my mortgage and get the hell out of there.

I kept my eye on the plantation wall and was pleased to observe at the same time that the two Humvee gunners who had been facing away from the direction of the shots were still watching their arcs.

When the barrage from the Americans stopped, one of the insurgents put his AK back over the top of the wall and fired an unaimed burst that went miles into the sky above us. Every single soldier snapped off a single shot at that section of parapet except for a .50 cal gunner who tried to drill through the wall.

The Kiowas were doing passes over the plantation and I was surprised that Gus Gazzard was not in direct communication with the helicopters. He was on his company net talking back to his Brigade HQ. They spoke to the pilots and passed the reply back down the line to Gus. It seemed as if Rumsfeld’s transformational military strategy had not yet filtered all the way through to the front line. Later on Gus would tell me that they were lucky to have such a quick link with only one relay. Some frontline units had to go through a chain of four or five relays to communicate with air assets. Some units had direct communications while others had no comms at all.

The guy who had taken a hit was OK, saved by the ceramic plates in his vest. He was bruised but revved up and ready to go and track down our attackers.

‘Let’s do it,’ Gus said. ‘I can’t leave you here, Ash, you’re going to have to come with us.’

Contractors were not allowed to accompany CF units on missions but this was different. I happened to be with them when they came under contact. My only other option was to walk home.

‘No problem, but if anything happens, take my body back to Spartan and throw it over the fence,’ I told him.

‘I wouldn’t do that, Ash.’

‘You’d better, or Krista won’t get the insurance money.’

We were under strict instructions that no expat was to leave company locations except with other members of the team. If I got slotted, I was only covered if I was working in a Spartan team. Lieutenant Gazzard twigged.

‘Hey, nothing’s going to happen.’

‘I know that. But that’s only because I’ve just told you.’ I was wondering why the insurgents were taking on such a superior force. I waved at the wall. ‘You know this is likely a come-on for a trap in there.’

‘Yeah, but we’re still going to go get them.’

I stepped up into the back of the Humvee and we set off bouncing over the sand berms with the Kiowas sweeping low overhead.

There are at least seventeen official variants of the Humvee in use with the US Army. Gus’s platoon had the lightest and least armoured. There were two with enclosed passenger compartments and turret rings mounting a .50 cal and a Mk19. All the others, including the one Gus and I were in, were load-carrying transports with unarmoured cabs and an open load bay at the back. His company had welded steel plates across the doors and down the sides of the load bay to have some basic protection against shrapnel. The floor was lined with sandbags and spare flak vests.