Free Dirty Deeds Done Cheap by Peter Mercer

day with some ferocity. On 27 March 2007 a truck bomb exploded, killing 152 people and injuring a further 347.
    However, for us in 2004, there was going to be a lot of resistance, but I’ll tell the whole story, to give you an idea of how bad it actually was. We were to be travelling through this place at the height of its violence. With a total area of approximately 10 square miles there were a lot of places from which we could get ambushed, bombed or shot at. At the brief before going out on patrol, we gave the lads a heads-up and told them that this was going to be a dangerous one. But nothing fazed these guys.
    As we left the gate as normal, I prepared the guys, explaining that it was likely we would have a contact of some sort today, be it a major one or minor. I just knew it was going to come at some point. We knew this was going to be a bit dodgy. You can’t expect to breeze through an insurgent stronghold without an incident of some kind. We’d studied the map and it was the only route we could travel to get to where we were going. On this particular job, we had to escort one of the American special-ops guys to the other end of the town and, hopefully, get him and us there in one piece. This job we were doing was outrageous and hard to take in sometimes, but I would be a liar if I said I wasn’t enjoying it a little bit.
    We burst out of the gate in our typical style – fast and aggressive – and then cleared the chains, so now we were definitely on our way. I was slightly apprehensive about this mission but excited nevertheless. I always worried about the guys in my team. They were like brothers to me now and I was always trying to make sure they were OK. Being responsible for the lives of four guys always adds pressure and a certain level of stress in situations like these. If or when any of our guys were killed or badly injured, you always tormented yourself with thoughts of how you could have done things differently – hindsight always being 20–20.
    As we started to travel through Mosul, we heard the occasional gunfire; we always did, but it was nothing we weren’t used to. We travelled past the familiar places on our new mission to Tal Afar. Noticeably, one of them was the giant mosque that the US government were paying to be built to try to pacify the local community. Unfortunately for us and the US troops, it was becoming popular with insurgent snipers: because of the height of the building, it had great vantage points for them. In situations like these, where you were going into the unknown, you had to be spontaneous and improvisational. A lot of the time there was no bloodshed, but the energy was often ugly and violent. You can often sense bad vibes: sometimes it’s like the calm before the storm; sometimes it’s the look in people’s eyes. It can be many things, but you know – you sense it. Gut instinct, if you like.
    We sped across this dangerous city and we were soon clearing the outskirts of Mosul when I saw two white camels tethered at the side of the road; I couldn’t believe my eyes, this place was mad. We sped along into the desert and, as we’d now cleared Mosul, everyone started to chill a bit. I radioed ‘Patrol clear’ as we cleared the town. ‘Roger. Out,’ came the reply from the patrol commander. I was still tail-end Charlie at this point. We were all a bit more relaxed now. The only threat to us was from IEDs, and there wasn’t much you could do about those except keep your eyes peeled and look for something that could contain one. But, as we’ve seen, the insurgents would hide them in the most ingenious places. Most of the time you knew one was there only when it went off, and then it was too late – you were fucked.
    When we could no longer see civilisation, we pulled over into a bit of cover and went into all-round defence (all of our tail gunners facing outwards) so the guys could have a piss stop and, you guessed it, some elevenses. They’d gone a couple of hours