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

Nothing happened. We kept on driving. After a couple of seconds I poked my head up, feeling foolish. The cameraman was running into a doorway as the third and final Humvee in the convoy cleared the junction.

It was at that second that the junction vanished from view in a deafening explosion and we were enveloped in a huge cloud of dust. A lightning crack of concussion went through the vehicle and our bodies. All the windows in the street shattered. Seconds later, machine-gun fire came through the dust from the other side of the junction, high and wide, and the Americans in the gun tower answered back in kind. We were already turning into the FOB gates and the FOB reaction platoon hit the streets immediately.

Half an hour later I still had a ringing in my ears as I said goodbye to the National Guard and got ready to head out with the next unit. We had been wondering whether the bomber had delayed detonating the device because he knew we would have shot the cameraman that same instant. Or, just as likely, it could even have been the cameraman himself who had been holding the bomb trigger. Afterwards I spoke to the soldier who had been in the back of the lead Humvee with me.

‘You know, if you hadn’t been there I would have shot that fucking cameraman.’

‘That’s funny,’ he said. He was an older man, smiling broadly. ‘I’d been thinking the same thing.’

That night I complained to Seamus that I had too much paperwork backing up and wanted someone else to do the last two days of patrols. Obviously none of the Yaapies could go since the task required using a digital camera◦– ‘white man’s magic’, I informed them loftily. I nominated Dai who, as a Welshman, was far more expendable than a former officer like myself.

He went off the next day cursing as always and returned thrilled that he had spent the day in the cupola of an Abrams manning the .50 cal. The day after, he came back and told us he was in love, having spent the whole day with a gorgeous female captain from a Civil Affairs battalion. We all laughed at this feeble fabrication until someone mentioned the name of the captain to Mad Dog and he confirmed that she was a well-known ‘hottie’ in the CPA.

In the meantime water pipelines were now being blown up by insurgents who had mistaken them for oil pipelines, but armed villagers started keeping an eye on the pipes and that problem soon diminished. As the warmer weather approached, more roadside bombs began to appear in our area. We informed Spartan HQ and Colonel Hind, then got on with the task of retraining our guard force in the correct actions to carry out when they discovered an IED.

Les and I had the two offices closest to the main entrance to the villa and we grew sick and tired of the Iraqi employees bouncing in very pleased with themselves saying ‘Look what I found, Mister,’ then placing an active detonator and ticking timing device on your desk.

We built a bomb pit out in the fields and the guards instructed visitors bearing gifts to place suspicious devices there and leave it for the American EOD Team (Explosive Ordnance Disposal), better known as the bomb squad. The guards themselves were under strict instructions not to touch anything; just to retreat to a safe distance and call for help. With Sammy translating, the guards sat and listened to our instructions on the ‘confirm, clear, cordon, control’ drills, but the next day would happily go off and prod and poke at whatever dubious device they could find.

That week we’d had two potentially tragic incidents. The first, in the desert at site ‘Juliet’, the guards had intercepted and captured a suicide bomber in a Peugeot stuffed with explosives. This was excellent news. When I had asked them where the vehicle was so that I could task the bomb squad, I listened in disbelief as the shift captain told me they had secured the vehicle by driving it back to their own site. It was parked outside the office. In fact, he proudly told me that he was looking at it through his office window ‘right now’.

We called the EOD Team and the Americans dealt with the device in a controlled explosion, which is normal, but still trashed the site office.

In the second incident, one of the landowners near us had sold some land to farmers and, as part of the deal, had agreed to clear the head-high grass from the site. While the Iraqi bulldozer driver he hired was working, he dug up an IED from its cache and pushed it 100 metres down the field wondering what the ‘donk, donk’ noise was as it banged against the big metal shovel.

When he finally got out to take a look, he realised it was a bomb and his first thought was… the money. If the Americans came and sealed the area all day, he wouldn’t get paid. So he continued working right next to where he’d dumped the bomb, thundering back and forth for the next four hours. Then he started to worry that he would get into trouble for disturbing the forensic evidence, so he finished the job, pushed the barrel all the way back where he’d found it and propped it up in its original position. He was pleased with his day’s work and went to inform our guards.

When Les and I arrived on the scene we astutely judged that the device was not affected by vibration. Les took a close look and disarmed it in thirty seconds. You see in movies some guy sweating bullets as he stands over a bomb with wire cutters staring at a fistful of wires pondering which one to cut. It’s good movie tension, but removing the detonator is all he needs to do.

We still had to brief the American EOD Team. The officer when he arrived wanted to know how we had been so sure that there were no booby traps on the device.

‘Just a lucky guess,’ Les replied.

‘You guys…’

‘That’s why they pay us more than you lot,’ said Les. ‘Here,’ and he gave him the detonator.

The bomb squad drove off in their convoy of Humvees and the landowner paid the bulldozer driver for his work without argument. They lit cigarettes. The sun was going down and a ribbon of dirty orange light stretched across the horizon. We all shook hands and it appeared in those few moments that things were getting better. But it was a false feeling, the kind of sensation that can catch you off guard. The Coalition Provisional Authority had made a lot of promises, but the death toll since the invasion was rising not falling and the Iraqi people didn’t blame the rebels for resisting the occupation but the Coalition for being there at all.

Attacks on foreigners and ‘collaborators’ were better coordinated, bolder and more widespread. Aid workers, at first welcomed, were becoming a target for kidnappers, a useful source of income when NGOs paid the ransom, a new brand of television porn when their bodies turned up mutilated or beheaded. There were two dozen terrorist organisations using kidnap as a weapon and a hundred criminal gangs in it for the money.

The Green Berets, based ten minutes from our villa and with whom we had become friendly, had been in Fallujah as part of the operation to suppress insurgents in the city. The US Marines had arranged a ceasefire and handed over the rubble to Iraqi security forces. The whole thing was a total mess, not just from our point of view, but from the Green Berets who’d been there in the middle of it. Over beers and barbecued lamb they regaled us with tales of leading Iraqi Civil Defence Corps troops into Fallujah against the insurgents, and also tales of ICDC refusing to fight and deserting. Nothing was ever simple.

More interesting to us was the intelligence that the insurgents hated the foreign fighters for their religious rhetoric, arrogance and the ill-treatment of local women. They were trying to kill Americans, but at the same time they were happy to lead American Special Forces to foreign fighters and on occasions killed their brother Muslims themselves. In one incident, the Iraqis in Fallujah identified a house that was smart-bombed by CF aircraft and the 28 killed were all Saudi and Syrian.