IN FOREIGN FIELDS: Heroes of Iraq and Afghanistan in their own words by Collins Dan

Author:Collins, Dan [Collins, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monday Books
Published: 2010-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

Lance Corporal Chris Balmforth MC relaxes in an accommodation tent in Basra. Days earlier he had been involved in a huge firefight with insurgent ambushers.

I’M 27, MARRIED WITH a young baby, and I live in Birmingham. I joined the Army 10 years ago as a 16-year-old boy soldier. My dad and my uncle were in the regiment before me - my uncle was a recce troop commander in the first Gulf War, and he was in a Scimitar which was destroyed by an American A10 in a blue-on-blue. He survived, but he had shrapnel in his leg, a big hole through his helmet - it got blown off, and the only reason it didn’t take his head with it was he didn’t have the chinstrap done up - and had part of his wrist ripped away... they stitched it to his chest to keep the tissue alive and now he has chest hairs growing out of his hand, which is quite funny.

When I first got over to Iraq, I spent my first three months up in Maysan. For a while, I think we were actually the furthest north of all British soldiers, up above Al Amarah in a little camp at a place called Al Sharki, stuck right out in the desert, but mostly we were at Al Amarah. Through all our time there, we only ever came up against demonstrations, mostly out near the Pink Palace, the local municipal HQ... people complaining about a lack of jobs and that sort of thing. I think we had one RPG incident, where someone was seen near the camp with a launcher. I was guard commander that night; I remember Trooper Wilks fired his GPMG to deter them, and they scarpered before they got the RPG going; as they fled he fired a flare, and the bloody thing nearly went into our cookhouse. We still laugh about that. So it was really, really quiet.

On any tour, you’re a bit apprehensive. It takes a couple of weeks to learn about the area and feel at home, and eventually you just get used to the place and the level of activity and it just becomes normal. I’d have to say that it was so easy that our drills started to slacken and we became a little complacent.

Then we went down to Basra. We were based in Basra Palace, a nice big camp, lots of space and beautiful compared to what we had been in, and it was still quite chilled. We started working with the SOD (Special Operations Directive), the Iraqi special police. Our job, basically, was to teach them how to be special police. They were proper cowboys. We were only trying to teach them basic skills, like, when you go out on patrol make sure that you load your weapon in the loading bay, silly little things that we get taught very early on but which they just couldn’t understand. They’d cock their rifles at anything, or you’d catch them squinting down

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