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

The squad ahead of us inside the front door of the villa called us forward. We slipped one at a time into the villa and paused in the lobby with its wide staircase and numerous doors. Everyone had their weapons into the shoulder, scanning through their red-dot sights. The houses all across Baghdad were squat and square, mud-coloured outside, drab inside, featureless and serviceable. The place we’d entered was a palace, or it had been before the looters got in, with high ceilings and tall arched windows looking out on the military ranks of palms on parade.

I moved to the side and knelt down where I could cover the hallways and stairs. My machine gun was a para model with a short barrel and I telescoped in the butt so that it was even shorter than the M4s the other guys were using. If we got into a fight inside the buildings every advantage counted and the smaller profile would buy me a fraction of a second. Despite the half-size 100-round belt on it I could still feel the weight of the gun and was glad I had been working out with the guys in the gym. At this rate I’d soon be ready to take on Les in an arm wrestle.

At the entrance to the first room, Navarro and the specialists stacked up in a line and on his signal charged through one after the other. I winced, thinking this was totally insane. A single enemy fighter could have taken them all out with a grenade or a burst of machine-gun fire.

I followed them in straight away, biting my tongue and keeping my mouth shut. I wasn’t an officer in the US Army; I was no longer an officer in anyone’s army. It would have been madness to start debating tactics in the middle of an action anyway. But it was always a concern to me that American tactics were so very different to those we practised in the British Army. If you were clearing a house with a section of eight Brits, two would go forward into a room while the rest gave cover. Once the room was secure, the next assault pair would take the next room and so on. Nearly ten years previously in the US I had worked with paratroopers from Fort Bragg, Rangers from Fort Lewis and Marines from Camp Lejeune, and had had the same knee-jerk reaction back then as I had that day beside the Tigris. I knew their drills, I just thought they were suicidal.

It was not so much that you risked losing five or six men instead of two, but tactics like this soaked up nearly three times as many men and unless you were assaulting buildings with three or four platoons it would be the same team that would have to clear the building, one room after the other. As we moved away from the squad covering the entrance hall and into the rooms along the corridor, there would be fewer eyes watching the hallways and other doorways, and more importantly at no stage would we be able to leave behind men to keep each room clear. A fundamental certainty in street-fighting is that the enemy will try and re-infiltrate buildings and will suddenly open up on you from rooms behind that had already been cleared. The only thing I could do was to leave the overall strategy to Gus and concentrate on looking after myself and this squad.

Navarro and his men stacked to clear the next room and to show I was a team player, I lined up with the rest of them. In under a second we piled in. As the men orientated themselves and took positions, I pointed the SAW at the next door and found myself automatically snapping out orders.

‘Keep away from the window,’ I said to the specialist silhouetted against the empty window space. I pointed to the two nearest the doorway we had just come through. ‘Take one side each and cover both ways up the hall in case someone’s coming up behind us. Potter, your bayonet’s about to fall out.’

The orders made sense and they reacted instantly. If there had been a picture of Saddam on the wall (which there wasn’t as they’d been nicked or incinerated long ago), and I’d said, don’t touch that, they would have understood why and left it alone. I also realised that they were slightly in awe of me, obviously assuming that as a private contractor I was some bad-ass, ex-Green Beret death-dealer. It was their lucky day; I was better than that, I had been a British officer.

Sergeant Navarro was on the radio to Gus and didn’t seem concerned that I had taken command of the squad. In the next few rooms I tried to keep quiet and not usurp his command, only giving strong ‘suggestions’ when I saw the guys in danger. And to be honest I did not need to say much. These men were a world away from those 82nd troopers I had trained with a decade earlier. These were experienced soldiers who had seen months if not years of active combat. I didn’t try to change their tactics. I adapted and was soon leading the way as we charged like headbangers into the next room and the next, through the ground floor and up the curving staircase to the floor above. I would run the whole exercise through my mind later and realised after the event how bloody stupid I’d been. I’d done my time. It was someone else’s turn. This was what those paratroopers were being paid for.

It was long hot work. I was dehydrated and Moss shared his canteen with me. It took three hours to go through the villas and we didn’t find a soul. Gus Gazzard couldn’t understand how the terrorists had vanished so easily but we had a theory at Spartan that made sense when I told him. One way insurgents would be able to avoid the roadblocks and pop up in this area and across the river to mount mortar attacks on the Green Zone would be through the network of underground tunnels that were said to have been built by Saddam and his family members so they could move in safety to their villas.

‘That’s what our locals tell us, but they don’t know where the tunnels are,’ I said.

‘So they say.’

We returned to the empty buildings to scout about for tunnels, to no avail. We did consider taking a look at the doll’s house building, the biggest in the complex, but it looked as if it could fall down at any second and we didn’t want to take any injuries from walls crashing down on the men. Death in accidents is as bad as death by enemy fire.

The Kiowas reported suspicious movement in a farm 200 metres further down the river. I returned the SAW to the gunner and we mounted back into the Humvees. We drove slowly through the walled garden with its fractured swimming pool and dead flower beds and out into another palm plantation behind the villa.

There were about a dozen families of squatters living in adobe shacks built from breeze blocks pilfered from the ruins and plastered in mud. They made roofs from dead palm fronds, which were the same colour as the mud, and from the distance they looked like piles of dung.

Up ahead there were two of these little shacks and 50 metres to the right of them, next to the river, and almost invisible behind the tall grass and reeds, were the flattened remains of a small villa.

The moment we emerged from the trees, we came under fire from the ruins. These guys were determined. They had not escaped through tunnels, they had been waiting for us.

The front Humvee gunner returned fire and as each vehicle behind pulled off to the side their gunners opened up as soon as they had a clear target; the sacred palm trees were shot to pieces. The two Kiowas banked hard and screamed overhead seeking cover. Ricochets and concrete fragments sprayed across the plantation, sparkling the river with splashes and landing across the two little houses. I wasn’t thrilled. This was my neighbourhood. I didn’t want to see any innocent Iraqis getting killed because they happened to be standing close to where the Americans were shooting. At the same time, these bastards were trying to kill me.

I dropped over the side of the Humvee as soon as it halted, shouldered my rifle and started firing back. I had a Heckler & Koch G3 with a mounted scope that I had ordered from the States over the Internet and had mailed to Spartan HQ in the CPA. Through the scope I could see nothing but the long grass, dust and muzzle flash where the enemy fire was coming from. I put the cross hairs on the last flash I saw and fired five rounds rapid, the heavy rifle thumping against my shoulder. I scuttled to the side to change firing positions and knelt to fire around the side of a palm tree. Although the .50 cals were turning the palms on the other side of the clearing into coleslaw, they were big, thick trees and I didn’t think an AK round would penetrate.