Dan Mills - Sniper One

Abu Naji had everything working soldiers needed inside it. A permanent cookhouse with three different hot meal choices per sitting, together with strawberry cheesecake and ice cream for pudding. To wash in, there were permanent, air-conditioned and tented shower blocks with hot and cold running water most of the day. And there was even a small R&R tent, rigged up with a dirty great satellite TV dish. But it was still very basic, and mind numbingly claustrophobic. You couldn’t leave the compound unless you were on official military business, and even that meant taking weapons, body armour and helmets with you. Shaibitha felt a very long way away.

I tracked down my oppo, the Light Infantry’s outgoing sniper platoon commander. I thought I might as well use the time before the rest of the platoon arrived to do the proper handover I promised Featherstone. It was a good job I did it then too. His name was Sid.

‘Hello mate, I’m Dan. I’m here for a couple of days, so if you’ve got time for a decent chinwag over a brew maybe…’

‘Yeah, pleased to meet you. Look I’m sorry, fella, we’ve got an hour and then I’m out of here on the next fucking bus. So what do you want to know?’

We sat down on the floor of his accommodation tent then and there. It wasn’t exactly the world’s longest handover. I tried to get as much out of him about the lie of the land as I could. We went over the maps of the city. In the last three or four weeks, he and his boys had been all over the place doing observation jobs on suspected ring leaders for all the crowd trouble. They had been run ragged.

As he heaved his Bergen over his back, Sid added: ‘I expect you’re going to have some fun in the next couple of weeks if it stays like this. I’ve got to dash or I’ll miss the plane. See you in another life.’ And off he went.

Abu Naji wasn’t to be our home. So as soon as the rest of the platoon caught up with Daz and me two days later, we would get straight into Al Amarah where Y Company was to be based.

And because it wasn’t our home, in true soldier’s fashion the boys started taking the piss out of the place the moment they arrived. Compared to the city where we’d hoped the real action would be, they’d decided it was just another REMF hang out.

‘Eh, lads, look at this place,’ said Pikey, as he jumped off the lorry and dusted himself down from the journey. ‘It’s fucking Slipper City here.’

‘No, it’s not, it’s Abu Napa,’ quipped Ads.

So that was it. The unsuspecting tourist resort of Aya Napa in Cyprus had just given its name to British Forces HQ, Maysan Province. From that moment onwards, nobody in the platoon called it Abu Naji ever again.

Ads and Pikey were two of the platoon’s strongest characters.

Private Adam Somers was a 22-year-old South Londoner, and a typical cockney. He came to the army from the City, where he had worked for two years as a trader in the Stock Exchange. He traded futures and options and even used to wear a silly bright yellow jacket. But as far as we could tell from his stories, all he learnt in the City was about whorehouses. He was eventually sacked for losing £128,000 in one day, and decided to join the army to do something exciting with his life.

Ads was a cheeky sod. He used to love calling me Granddad. But he was a right charmer too, and was always the first to crack a joke. Whenever he went out on the town, he was famed for bringing back the fattest bird he could find and shagging her as noisily as he could.

More than all of that, he was an excellent soldier. He loved fighting, in or out of uniform. A keen boxer, he would never miss a punch-up if there was one going in Tidworth. And he was the most tenacious in the platoon during combat exercises. But he was also always in and out of trouble with the army over women or alcohol — the only thing that stopped him from being made an NCO.

Private Geoff ‘Pikey’ Pieper was twenty years old and got his nickname from his family. They were proper gypsies, and lived in caravans. He was the best fixer I’ve ever known, a fantastic wheeler and dealer. If the platoon ever needed some piece of equipment, I’d put Pikey on to it.

‘I’ll see what I can do, boss,’ he’d say — and he’d always get it. Fuck knows from where, and I didn’t ask. Pikey’s room used to look like Steptoe’s yard, or Delboy’s living room. He’d always come back off leave with something off the back of a lorry to flog to the rest of the company: shirts, watches, mobile phones, perfume, aftershave, sex toys. You name it, he flogged it. He did have a bit of a bad habit of nicking things, but never off the platoon.

I found him a thoroughly good and dependable soldier, who never avoided confrontation and was a brave little terrier in a fight. But like Ads, he also had a bit of a problem with authority, especially when his temper was up. Once when we were in the pub in Tidworth, Pikey had got too much booze inside him and he pulled a knife on one of the lads after some minor argument. He would have done him too, if I hadn’t stepped in.

They might make a bit of trouble for you every now and then, but both Pikey and Ads were your archetypal British Army soldier, the backbone of the nation. They may not mix very well with peacetime, but sweep them out of the pub, pick them out of the gutter, and when they sober up give them a bayonet and tell them to charge. They’ll fight out of their skin for you. From the Peninsular War to Iraq, their sort were what made the British infantry the greatest fighting force in the world. And it’s exactly the same today.

The next day, another convoy of eight tonners took most of Y Company into Al Amarah. Our destination was Cimic House, the opulent former home of the governor of Maysan province slap bang in the middle of the city. It had been taken over by the coalition forces, for now. It served as both the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority’s headquarters and the battle group’s only foothold in the city. It was a busy place.

The journey in was our very first taste of a Middle Eastern town. It wasn’t a nice one. Al Amarah was the capital city that Maysan province truly deserved. It was a squalid, stinking dump.

If you’re being kind, Al Amarah is a place well past its heyday — if it ever had one. At worst, it’s a filthy truckstop for petrol and a punch-up, before they take off again as quickly as they can. It wouldn’t surprise me if the River Tigris runs twice as fast as it normally does when it goes through Al Amarah. Nobody wants to stay there for longer than they have to.

The smell of the place is the first thing that hits you. And the smell of its people’s rotting shit will stay with me for ever. It was everywhere. The sewage system had long since packed up and shit and piss, along with bathwater and cooking waste, ran openly down every street’s drainage gutters for everyone to see and smell. Piles of uncollected rubbish were everywhere.

We gawped out of the back of the trucks at our new home. Almost nothing differentiates the city’s dull blocks of single- or two-storey houses from each other, laid out on a US-style grid system. Almost every building is sand coloured — nobody seemed to bother with paint.

Most of the cars on the streets were also in a shit state, a good indication that there was little money about the place. But money or not, I could never understand how Al Amarah’s 350,000 people could care so little about their own surroundings.

If what was there wasn’t bad enough, the town is pretty much constantly slapped by a strong wind that blows across the empty plains. It burns the back of your throat when it gets really hot and dumps a thin layer of dust over everything.

Children were playing in the overflowing shit-filled gutters, covered in grime and dirt. ‘Mister, mister,’ they shouted as we went past. It’s an upsetting sight when you have kids of your own the same age.