Free Dirty Deeds Done Cheap by Peter Mercer Page A

now with no food and they needed topping up! We got the flasks out. We tried never to use the same place to stop at twice within, say, a month to prevent the insurgents from getting familiar with our movements and planting booby traps or mines.
    The temperature was coming up a bit now and the sun was warming the desert by a few degrees. After some coffee and some American MRE (meal, ready-to-eat) rations, we loaded up and carried on. Everyone was now feeling recharged and raring to go. I was mentally going through my contact drills and did a few radio checks with the other call signs. I reiterated to the lads that something would probably happen (major or minor I couldn’t say; after all, we weren’t fortune tellers). They all now had their serious heads on – this was almost coming up to show time.
    We were now about 5 kilometres away from Tal Afar and could clearly see the outskirts of the city. Also, we had started to drive past some basic little huts by the sides of the road, complete with wild dogs barking and running out at us. This was new territory to us and we didn’t really know what to expect, so, a few kilometres later, before we got to this hellhole, we pulled over and had a pow-wow. There wasn’t much to plan for. The main reason we’d stopped was to make sure everyone was ready for a bad firefight. Minutes later we were tearing off again into the unknown. We were averaging about 60 m.p.h. and we’d got our spacing spot on. Everyone was covering his arc of fire. I put my thumb on the safety catch of my M16 and popped a 40mm grenade into the breach of my M203 grenade launcher.
    We were now approaching the edge of the city and my concentration was honed. Everyone started hard-targeting (moving the weapon in the direction you are looking), scanning for likely ambush positions. The main road coming into town was actually really quiet. As our convoy approached we were fired upon from quite a distance – nothing serious as of yet, but we couldn’t afford to take any chances. Any way you looked at it, it was incoming fire and a 7.62mm round can be effective up to 1,600 metres. That’s not too far off a mile. Even if they couldn’t see us properly and they just sprayed a burst of automatic gunfire in our direction, there was a very real chance that a stray round could hit one of us.
    There were wadis (valleys or dry river beds) either side of the road which we could drive the vehicles into, if needs be, and turn around if we had to, or take cover in if things were to get too serious. The insurgents’ fire at this time wasn’t effective, though, and we weren’t 100 per cent sure it was even aimed at us, as there were American patrols in the area and they (the insurgents) could be having a pop at the Yanks rather than at us. But it made it more difficult for us to be sure if we were the targets, because we couldn’t identify where the insurgents’ fire was coming from. We carried on regardless. In the next moment the vehicle in front of us swerved. Hmm, this was not at all normal.
    It was etched on my consciousness how badly and rapidly situations could deteriorate in Iraq. My worst fear of all was capture, for this would surely mean days or weeks of horrific torture followed, almost certainly, by beheading. I’d rather top myself. For any contractor working in Iraq this would be the absolute worst-case scenario and it was just totally unthinkable.
    The front vehicle came to a stop on the side of the road. The front right-hand-side wheel and tyre had been shot out. We had a choice: torch and blow up the vehicle and leave it for dead, or assess how effective the insurgent attack was and then stay and fix the tyre. We were quite a way from the enemy fire point, which we’d assessed was a block of flats to our right (a good 1,000 metres away). We didn’t want to let rip with the M19 grenade launcher or the .50-cal and take the complex totally out because, knowing the insurgents, that block of flats could be