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.
There is a set of sights on the 203, but you don’t always have time to set it up and fire. It was a case of just take a quick aim and get it off. The weapon “pops” as it fires. I watched the bomb going through the air. There was a loud bang and showers of dirt. I heard screaming. Good. It meant they were bleeding, not shooting-and they’d become casualties that others now had to attend to.
We found ourselves on top of the position. Everybody who could do so had run away. A truck was blazing furiously ahead of us. A burnt-out APC smoked at the far-left extreme. Bodies were scattered over a wide area. Fifteen dead maybe, many more wounded. We disregarded them and carried on through. I felt an enormous sense of relief at getting the contact over with, but was still scared. There would be more to come. Anybody who says he’s not scared is either a liar or mentally deficient.
“This is fucking outrageous!” Dinger screamed.
I smelled petrol and smoke, and pork-the smell of burning bodies. One Iraqi lolled out of the passenger seat of the truck, his face black and peeling. Bodies writhed on the ground. I could tell the 203s had done their job by the number of fearsome leg injuries. When they go off, slivers of metal are blown in all directions.
All we wanted to do now was get away. We didn’t know what might be in the next wave. As we started moving back to the berg ens rounds kicked into the ground behind us. The surviving APC, a half mile away and surrounded by bodies, was still firing, but ineffectively. There was no time to hang around.
7
Night would be our cover, and it would be dark soon. The APC had backed off but was moving forwards again. Infantry followed in its tracks, firing wildly. We heaved the berg ens onto our shoulders. There was no point going south because they would have guessed that was our direction of travel. The object of the exercise was to put as much distance between them and us as we could. The only way to go was west, which meant running the risk of coming into line of sight with the S60s.
We wouldn’t be patrolling now. We would be moving as fast as we physically could with berg ens on to get out of the contact area. It was an infantry maneuver known as getting the fuck out.
Two trucks with infantry turned up from our east, came over the brow, and spotted us. They braked, and soldiers spilled out of the back and started firing. There were maybe forty of them, which was a colossal amount of fire bearing down on us.
They started coming forward. We turned to the east, got rounds down at them, and moved backwards to the west, firing like maniacs. Fire and maneuver, fire and maneuver, but this time away from them: two men turned round and ran, then turned to give covering fire for the other two.
We were going up a gradual slope. As we hit the brow we came into line of sight of the AA guns on the northwest position. They started firing with a deep, booming bass sound. The 57mm rounds screamed past us, all of them trace red The shells thundered into the ground, blasting rubble all around us.