Sniper One by Dan Mills

Author:Dan Mills
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2007-06-25T04:00:00+00:00

It didn’t take the OMS long to get back to their daily mortar barrages at us. After a couple of weeks, we weren’t far away from the pre-Waterloo rate of incoming. The lunatics had found – or been given by Iran – a few more 82mm mortar tubes too. We knew how to handle mortars now, so our morale was still as strong as ever. But as time went on, they slowly began to degrade our surroundings. They also took away more of our liberties.

A couple more Snatches were consigned to the scrap heap. One was fragged almost out of recognition, and the second’s fuel tank exploded after being slit open by a piece of flying shrapnel. As the mortar fire was always the heaviest in the evening, it was decided to stagger the evening meal. Each platoon went to eat at a different hour. That cut down on big queues outside the cookhouse where a lucky round could have taken out ten of us at once.

The God of War was certainly looking down on us at Cimic too, because there were some unbelievable close shaves. The cook had the closest.

A quiet and modest, tall and skinny redhead, he was known to everyone as just ‘Chef’. He worked out of a proper little aluminium kitchen trailer full of stainless steel surfaces that had been brought in by the CPA. While preparing the evening meal one night, he left the trailer for thirty seconds to pop to the store room to collect some more veg. While he was outside, an 82mm mortar round came down and tore straight through his trailer’s roof and blew the thing up. There was twisted aluminium everywhere. Chef was the hero of Cimic that night, because he didn’t sit about complaining. Instead, he cleaned the place up as best as he could and still then managed to get the meal out. The next day a field kitchen under a green tent was brought in from Abu Naji. It offered no protection at all from mortar fire. But without even blinking, Chef moved into it and carried on as normal in there.

Then there was Ray. Private Chris ‘Ray’ Rayment from Mortar Platoon had the most uncanny knack of getting mortared everywhere he went. So much so, he became known as the Mortar Magnet. Every sangar he did sentry duty in would get a round landing either directly on top of it or just feet away. Ray would always emerge bruised and covered in dust, but otherwise unscathed.

Luckily, he had a great sense of humour about it too. He’d tell everybody to steer clear of him. And whenever he left his barracks room for a sentry shift, he’d say something like: ‘Right, that’s me off now, lads. If you hear Front Sangar getting mortared, don’t worry – it’s only me.’

Ray was a gobby little so and so. He never held back on giving you his opinion about what you were doing with a sharp bit of wit. But

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