Free Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun by Iain Overton Page B

metal bristle of the borders of South and North Korea to watching British squaddies walk in stern silence in the soft fields of Kosovo, I have just one simple observation: for most soldiers, in peacetime the gun is just a thing, something they carry with them, somethingthey oil and clean, eat with, shit with, even sleep with, not something that they really talk about, unless they lose it, or a screaming sergeant makes them run with it over their heads for an hour. But in war the relationship between the soldier and the gun changes completely. This is why, in order to understand how the world of guns impacts militaries, you have to travel to war itself.

    April 2004 – I was in Basra, working for the BBC with my reporter, Sam Poling, one of those journalists who chases at stories with a ferocity that you can only admire. She and I were embedded with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, a Scottish regiment that had fought in Korea and in Aden, in the Boer War and in the fields of Flanders, and now it was raising its colours here in southern Iraq.
    We had just seen the Tree of Knowledge – a broken tree in a broken land, neglected and unloved, but the infamous tree all the same. It stood in the centre of Al-Qurnah, a small, windswept town about 70 kilometres north-west of Basra. This jujube tree was near the confluence point of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers – where they joined to form the Shatt al-Arab. It was the place where Iraqis claimed Eve had plucked that forbidden apple and with her first bite allowed knowledge to ruin paradise.
    On the day we went there the tree stood dying, plastic bags eddying around it, and boys with snot on their faces and holes in their trousers kicked the dust at its roots. But they only did this during the day, because no one walked the streets here at night, except killers. After all, this was Iraq, and this was war.
    We turned and began the long drive back to the British army base in silence, as no one likes to see paradise lost.
    Then came the gunshot: a stark, blue staccato snap and a screech of brakes and a tumbling out of the Land Rover. Out we ran, onto the sandy banks of the road, over the pebbles and plastic that littered the sides of the highway, and, breathless, we landed in a gully.
    ‘They shot at us! They fucking shot at us!’ screamed one of theBritish soldiers. They tensed and raised their rifles, but the car was already speeding away.
    We had been due to return to Britain that day, but the road to the airport was too dangerous. The army had already lost a few soldiers on the way to that baked tarmac strip, and with the threat as high as it was, the colonel said we would just have to wait. Something bitter, disconcerting and violent was happening.
    On the flight coming in I had been strapped into a stand-up harness at the front of a Hercules troop carrier. We were flying down low straight from Cyprus, and the silver line of the Qamat Ali canal glinted beneath us in the night; on either side stretched the silhouette of ancient desert lands. We were flying blacked out, a dark speck in a dark sky, but then a red button flared upon the pilot’s dashboard, and the crackle of a command came into the headset.
    ‘Incoming. Release one. Release two.’ A ground-to-air missile was fast approaching, and the pilot fired off decoy flares, lights spinning behind us into the pitch-black. Our plane tilted sharp to the right, and the threat passed as fast as it had come. But it was clear we had begun our descent into something.
    The ragheads were fuckin’ losing it, the soldiers had said to us later, and with swagger. There was excitement in their voices at the prospect of having a decent ‘contact’ to tell their mates about back home, but then you saw the youth in their eyes. They yearned for what they should have feared.
    If I was honest, I too was glad we had been shot at in such a neat little way, because journalists can’t go to a war zone and not wish to see a gun in action,