Bravo two zero (13 page)

    I could see everybody preparing. They knew what to do. Bergens came off, and men checked that all pouches were closed. It's no good running to attack and finding out when you get there that you have no magazines because they've all fallen out. They checked their weapons and carried out the drills that were second nature. We were probably no more than seconds away from contact. I looked around for a deeper depression in the ground than the shallow scrape I was in.

    The darkest minute is just before the firefight starts.

    You can't see a thing. All you can do is listen, and think. How many of these things are going to come? Are they going to trundle straight up onto you-which is what they'll do if they've got any sense-and just turn the machine guns on you like a hose? There was nowhere to run.

    We'd just have to fight. The screech of armored tracks and the scream of the engines' high revs rolled around us. We still didn't know where they were.

    "Fucking let's do it! Let's do it!" Chris screamed.

    I was overwhelmed by a sudden feeling of togetherness, of all being in this shit together. I had no thought of dying. Just of: Let's get through this.

    People have survived ambushes through pure aggression. This was going to be the same. I pulled apart the tubes of my 66 and made sure the sights had popped up. I put it beside me. I checked that my mag was on tight, checked that my 203 had a bomb in it. I knew it was there, but I couldn't help checking. It made me feel that bit more secure.

    Basic instinct makes you want to keep as low as possible, but you have to look up and around. I raised myself into a semi squat Each bloke was bobbing and moving around within his own 30-feet square trying to get a better vantage point and see what was coming. The earlier you can see it the better: then the awful dread of the unknown evaporates. This can work against you. You might see it's much worse than you anticipated, but it's got to be done.

    I heard myself shouting: "Shit! Shit! Shit!"

    There were shouts all along the line.

    "See anything your end yet?"

    "No, can't see jack shit."

    "Fuck it! Fuck it!"

    "Come on, come on, let's get this done!"

    "Are they here yet?"

    "No, fuck it."

    "Fucking rag heads."

    Everyone was concentrating, listening hard to locate the vehicles.

    Whoof!

    Everyone at my end ducked.

    "For fuck's sake, what was that?"

    In answer, right at the other end of the patrol, Legs or Vince fired off another 66.

    Whoof!

    Even if the Iraqis hadn't known we were there, they did now. But the boys wouldn't have fired without good reason. I strained my neck and saw that on the far left-hand side an APC with a 7.62 machine gun had come down a small depression that was out of sight of our end. Vince and Legs had the vehicle coming at them head-on.

    "Fucking let's do it! Let's do it! Let's do it!" I screamed at the top of my voice.

    It felt good all of a sudden to have got off the first round. I didn't know if I was shouting at them or at myself. A bit of both, most likely.

    "Come on! Come on!"

    A second APC with a turret-mounted gun opened fire all along the area.

    It's not nice to know you're up against armor and vehicles with infantry on board. All you are is a foot patrol, and these anonymous things are crushing relentlessly towards you. You know they carry infantry, you know all the details about them. You know the driver's in front and the gunner's up top, and he's trying to look through his prism, and it's difficult for him and he's sweating away up there, getting thrown about trying to aim. But all you can see is this thing coming screaming towards you, and it looks so anonymous and monster like magnified ten times suddenly because you realize it's aiming at you. They look so impersonal. They leave destruction in their wake. It's you against them. You're an ant and you're scared.

    The APC nearest me cracked off more rounds, firing wildly. One burst stitched the ground about 30 feet in front of me.

    In the British army you are taught how to react when the enemy opens fire: you dash to make yourself a hard target, you get down, you crawl into a fire position, find the enemy, set your sights at the range, and fire. "Reaction to Effective Enemy Fire," it's called. That all goes to rat shit when you're actually under fire. It always has done for me.

    As soon as the rounds come down, you're on the floor, and you want to make the biggest hole possible to hide in. You'd get your spoon out and start digging if it would help. It's a natural physical reaction. Your instincts compel you to get down and make yourself as small as possible and wait for it all to end. The rational side of your brain is telling you what you should be doing, which is getting up and looking to see what's going on so you can start fighting-there's no point just lying there because you're going to die anyway. The emotional side is saying, Sod that, stay there, maybe it'll all go away. But you know it's not going to and that something has to be done.

    There was another sustained burst from the machine gun. Rounds thumped into the ground, getting closer and closer to where I lay. I had to react. I took a deep breath and stuck my head up. A truck had stopped 300 feet away, and infantry were spilling out of the back in total confusion. They must have known we were there because they'd heard the 66s and the turret-mounted guns were in action, but the small-arms fire they put down was only in our general direction.

    There seemed to be no communication between the APCs. Both were doing their own thing. Infantry jumped out of the back, shouting and firing.

    They weren't entirely sure where we were. But even so, there was enough incoming from their direction to keep our heads down. If you're hit, there's not a lot of difference between a confused round and one that was deliberately aimed.

    There was more hollering and shouting, from us and them. The firefight had to be initiated. It's no good just lying there and hoping that they won't see you or go away, because they won't. What they'll probably do is start coming forward and looking for you, so you've got to get on with it. It takes maximum firepower, balanced with ammunition conservation, to win a firefight. It's a question of you getting more rounds down than them and killing more of them initially, so they either back off or dig their own little holes. But their firepower was far superior to ours.

    The APC stopped. I couldn't believe my eyes. It was using the machine gun as a fire base instead of coming forward with the infantry and overwhelming us, which was wonderful.

    Everybody was getting the rounds down. The Minimis were fired in bursts of 3-5 rounds. Ammunition had to be managed. Two 66s were fired at the truck and found their target. There was a massive shudder of high explosive. It must have been very demoralizing for them.

    Decisions. After this initial contact, what are you going to do? Are you going to stay there all the time, are you going to move back, are you going to move forward? We'd have to do something, or we'd all just face each other firing-they'd take casualties, we'd take casualties, but we would come off worse simply because we had the least number of men. This might just be the first gang coming forward; there might be another rifle company coming up behind: we didn't know yet. The only thing to do is go forward, or you'll be sitting there in a standoff until you run out of ammunition.

    I looked over at Chris. "Let's fucking do it! Are you ready? Are you ready?"

    He shouted down the line, "We're going to do it! We're going to do it!"

    Everybody knew what had to be done. We psyched ourselves up. It's so unnatural to go forward into something like that. It's not at all what your vulnerable flesh and bone wants to do. It just wants to close its eyes and open them again much later and find that everything is fine.

    "Everything Okay?"

    Whether people actually heard further down the line didn't matter: they knew something was going to happen, and they knew the chances were that we were going to go forward and attack this force that vastly outnumbered us.

    Without thinking, I changed my magazine. I had no idea how many rounds I had left in it. It was still fairly heavy: I might have only fired two or three rounds out of it. I threw it down the front of my smock for later on.

    Stan gave the thumbs up and stepped up the fire rate on the Minimi to initiate the move.

    I was on my hands and knees, looking up. I took deep breaths, and then up I got and ran forward.

    "Fuck it! Fuck it!"

    People put down a fearsome amount of covering fire. You don't fire on the move. It slows you up. All you have to do is get forward, get down, and get firing so that the others can move up. As soon as you get down on the ground, your lungs are heaving and your torso is moving up and down, you're looking around for the enemy, but you've got sweat in your eyes. You wipe it away: your rifle is moving up and down in your shoulder. You want to get down in a nice firing position like you do on the range, but it isn't happening that way. You're trying to calm yourself down to see what you're doing, but you want to do everything at once. You want to stop this heavy breathing so you can hold the weapon properly and bring it to bear. You want to get rid of the sweat so you can see your targets, but you don't want to move your arm to rub your eye because you've got it in the fire position and you want to be firing to cover the move of the others as they come forward.

    I jumped up and ran forward another 50 feet-a far longer bound than the textbooks say you should. The longer you are up the longer you are a target. However, it is quite hard to hit a fast-moving man, and we were pumped up on adrenaline.

    You're immersed in your own little world. Me and Chris running forward, Stan and Mark backing us up with the Minimi. Fire and maneuver. The others were doing the same, legging it forward. The rag heads must have thought we were crazy, but they had put us in the situation, and this was the only way out.

    You could watch the tracer coming at you. You heard the burning, hissing sound as the rounds shot past or hit the ground and spun off into the air. It was scary stuff. There's nothing you can do but jump up, run, get down; jump up, run, get down. Then lie there panting, sweating, fighting for breath, firing, looking for new targets, trying to save ammo.

    Once I had moved forward and started firing, the Minimis stopped and they, too, bounded forward. The sooner they were up ahead the better, because of their superior firepower.

    The closer we got the more the Iraqis were flapping. It must have been the last thing they expected us to do. They probably didn't realize it was the last thing we wanted to do.

    You're supposed to count your rounds as you're firing, but in practice it's hard to do. At any moment when you need to fire, you should know how many are left and change mags if you have to. Lose count and you'll hear a "dead man click." You pull the trigger, and the firing pin goes forward, but nothing happens. In practice, counting to thirty is unrealistic. What you actually do is wait for your weapon to stop firing, then press the button and let the mag fall, slap another straight on, and off you go. If you are well drilled in this, it's second nature and requires no mental action. It just happens. The Armalite is designed so that when you've stopped firing, the working parts are to the rear, so you can slap another magon and let the working parts go forward so that a round is taken into the breech. Then you fire again, at anything that moves.

    We had got up to within 150 feet of them. The APC nearest me started to retreat, gun still firing. Our rate of fire slowed. We had to husband the rounds.

    The truck was on fire. I didn't know if any of us was hit. There wouldn't have been a lot we could do about it anyway.

    I couldn't believe that the APC was backing off. Obviously it was worried about the anti armor rockets and knew the other one had been hit, but for it to withdraw was absolutely incredible. Some of the infantry ran with it, jumping into the back. They were running, turning, giving it good bursts, but it was a splendid sight. I fancied a cabby myself with my 66, and discovered that in the adrenaline rush I'd left it with my bergen. Wanker!

    At the other end, Vince was up with Legs and still going forward. They were shouting to psych each other up. The rest of us put down covering fire.

    Mark and Dinger stood up and ran forwards. They were concentrating on the APC ahead of them that they had hit with their 66s. They'd scored a "mobility kill"-its tracks couldn't move, though it could still use its gun. They were putting in rounds hoping to shatter the gunner's prism.

    If I'd been in his boots, I would have got out of the wagon and legged it, but then, he didn't know who he had pursuing him. They got up to the APC and found the rear doors still open. The jundies hadn't battened themselves down. An L2 grenade was lobbed in and exploded with its characteristic dull thud. The occupants were killed instantly.

    We kept going forwards into the area of the trucks in four groups of two, each involved in its own little drama. Everybody was bobbing and moving with Sebastian Coe legs on. We'd fire a couple of rounds, then dash and get out of the way, then start again. We tried to fire aimed shots. You pick on one body and fire until he drops. Sometimes it can take as many as ten rounds.