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

It made the convoys even more obvious since they created huge voids in the traffic flow. It gave them some defence against VBIEDs, but it was a shit way of avoiding IEDs planted under or next to the road because the trigger man could see them coming from miles away. Bombs planted in parked cars would inflict a terrible toll on men and vehicles over the next few months.

Even with bombs a daily reality on the streets of Baghdad, we still didn’t fancy the new GMC. It would have attracted too much attention for one thing and, for another, it was an up-armoured model not purpose-built for PSD tasks with brakes and suspension under specification for the three and a half tons of armour and chassis. Now we had it we didn’t want to send it back and kept it parked up at the back of the villa as our last-ditch bug-out vehicle. We would discover in the summer that when the electricity and hence the air conditioning failed in the house and it was still 45°C at night, that you could sleep in the GMC quite comfortably with the engine running and the air-con on full power.

Armour was a good idea though and we tasked our Iraqi welder to find us some steel plating for our CAT truck. We tested it on the range and found that we needed a thickness of at least 12mm to stop AK rounds. You could get away with two 5mm plates bolted together with rubber spacers, but the outer layer degraded under fire and the weight saving was negligible. I also doubted that it would stop 7.62 long from a PKM. One day the welder came in very excited with some 6mm steel plate. Sammy translated that he had just stolen it from an old Iraqi army base. After my initial disbelief I took it down the range and found that it had been specially tempered. Everything bounced off it, 7.62 short, long and NATO, as well as 5.56mm. Nothing marked it at all. We were in business.

Our trusty Nissan Patrol received an armoured compartment and doors as well as head-plates, all of which were invisible from the outside. The vehicle was both bulletproof and IED-proof; we cut in gun ports and were then still able to retain the ability to shoot from inside the vehicle. Our BMW received a modification in the form of a solid steel ‘nudge’ bar we welded directly to the chassis. Painted black, it looked just like a normal bumper, but would allow us to ram our way out of most situations without risking damage to the engine.

Fortunately our covert profile and good route selection would mean that we would not be running into trouble any time soon.

Unfortunately I was about to experience how the CF patrolled. They had no choice whether to go high or low profile. You couldn’t disguise a Humvee.

Order had been restored to Baghdad after operations by Coalition Forces against Sadr’s militia, including the bloody four days after the initial revolt in which the enemy lost 302 KIA and 234 WIA for CF losses of 11 KIA and 86 WIA. That was just in Baghdad. CNN showed very little of the successes and was obsessed with gay marriages in Massachusetts so we were constantly on the phone to Mad Dog for intel updates.

The incoming 1st Cavalry wanted a local guide to show them the water infrastructure sites around Baghdad. Colonel Hind volunteered his help, by which he meant Spartan’s help. Angus had agreed as this would put Spartan in closer contact with local military commanders and engineers, as well as Iraqi officials being groomed to take over security and management. When Angus called Seamus and suggested I volunteer, I knew my old buddy from the Dukes expected a subtle business offensive if I got the chance.

What happened was I spent ten hours a day for ten days on the road, being passed from unit to unit as we patrolled from sector to sector. With just under a hundred hours on the road with the CF, I suppose I should count myself lucky that we were only contacted four times.

In those ten days I experienced a wide variety of US vehicles, rattling around in Bradleys, heavily armoured Humvees and gazing in awe at the blue-force tracker system when in a command Humvee. I watched a satellite photo of Baghdad streets with mobile icons depicting CF vehicles moving up and down them. It was so detailed I was sure that if I stuck my arm out of the window and waved I would see it on the screen.

One afternoon I was patrolling through the Zafariniyah district with a National Guard unit from Florida; friendly, good soldiers. We were driving the old, load-carrying Humvees, the same vehicles Gus’s platoon had been using, but without the benefit of steel plates welded along the side. I sat in the rear bay of the lead vehicle with a couple of guardsmen with our backs against the wooden slats of the sides. I was just thinking that this would be a shit vehicle to get blown up in when we turned into a street leading to their FOB (Forward Operating Base) and the First Sergeant called back from the front.

‘OK, Ash, we’ll be back at the FOB in two minutes.’

As we pulled into the street I did a double take. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. It was a busy midweek afternoon in central Baghdad, but for two or three hundred metres, the street was deserted. A clear combat indicator. To even the most junior British soldier who had done a week in Northern Ireland, mental alarm bells would have been going off.

‘Something’s wrong. Stand by.’

I did not ask the driver to stop since we might already be in the middle of the killing area for a shoot. I did an automatic Belfast sweep of the area, looking for command wires and potential IEDs. As a route regularly used by the CF◦– in fact one of the FOB’s gun towers had direct line of sight of the street◦– any IED would have to have just been dropped by the side of the road. They would not have risked the time needed to bury it. By some miracle, there was no rubbish in the street, no debris, no piles of building materials. The road was bare and there were no drainage culverts to stick things under.

My G3 was in my shoulder. I scanned the empty windows and rooftops over the top of the scope with the safety off. If someone popped up with an RPG I would only have a split second to drop him before he fired. The two soldiers with me knew I was serious. The colour had gone from their cheeks, but they were doing their job, aiming their own rifles at the houses as we sped by. I kept peering ahead, looking for potential IEDs, when I saw a fat Iraqi in a brown leather jacket stepping out from a doorway up ahead. I pinned him in the cross hairs on my rifle and was sorely tempted to pull the trigger. ‘You bastard,’ I hissed. The fat guy had two cameras strapped around him and was videoing us with a third camera. He was a self-styled journalist, one of the vultures filming attacks for the insurgents to post video footage of CF troops getting blown up on the Internet.

Beyond him was a major road junction that was empty of traffic from all the roads leading into it. Beyond observing that there were no cars/VBIEDs parked there, I could not see an obvious suspect device. I concentrated on keeping my sights on the cameraman. He was waving at us to slow down.

‘Stop, stop, stop,’ I shouted at the driver over the engine and the noise of the slipstream.

‘Fuck that, we ain’t stopping for him,’ the First Sergeant shouted back, misunderstanding my reasoning. ‘We’re nearly there.’

I was certain that there was an IED on the junction and, if I was going to die, then that fucking cameraman was coming with me. I leaned completely over the side of the Humvee and took aim as we drove towards him. He dropped the video camera and held up his hands, backing away. We were nearly at the junction.

‘Get down,’ I roared at the two men with me.

There were sandbags on the floor of the vehicle. One of the guys dropped flat. The other kept his weapon on fatty, the same as me. The soldiers in the two vehicles behind us had realised something was up and were also covering him. The SAW gunner had taken his weapon off the cab and was resting it on the side wall, also pointing it at the cameraman. My Humvee driver zoomed over the junction and I made a split-second decision not to shoot. I was very conscious of the men in the vehicle watching my actions. To all intents and purposes I would be murdering an unarmed civilian and there were three Humvees full of witnesses. I grabbed the guardsman sitting up next to me, pulled him down into the sandbags and waited for the BOOM.