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.