Making a Killing by Ashcroft James

Author:Ashcroft, James [Ashcroft, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: War, History
ISBN: 9780753547748
Goodreads: 16556872
Publisher: Virgin Digital
Published: 2007-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

The true wealth of Iraq is its vast collection of archaeological sites. It had always been my intention to pay some of them a visit and take some photos to send to my ex-girlfriend at Oxford who’d told me Baghdad was the most beautiful city in the world.

Present-day Iraq is situated in what was called Mesopotamia and deserves its reputation as the cradle of civilisation. The fertile plains watered by the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers supported the empires of Akkad, Babylon, Sumer, Assyria, the Hittites and Persia for thousands of years before the birth of the Romans. Scholars recorded the exploits of King Gilgamesh in what is one of mankind’s first written texts. It was the site of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and legend has it that this was where Eve tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden.

In September 2003 when I’d first arrived in Iraq it would have been possible to visit a few sites, but there had been too much going on at Spartan. We were now interviewing and training guards for TF Fountain, but while this left quite a lot of free time, the hostilities in the opening weeks of 2004 made it far too dangerous to cruise around the country with my camera.

Every day after morning prayers we practised our car drills and actions on. In the afternoon we hit the CPA; it was more treacherous in the streets, but we could report our progress directly to Mad Dog and enjoy the delights of pineapple pizza at the same time.

I went to the gym and trained on the running and rowing machines, while Seamus and Les went shagging, then we all returned to the villa for roast lamb dinners cooked on the braii. I’d email mates at home to tell them what a great life I was having, then stretch out with the latest stack of pirate DVDs we’d bought from the roadside stalls in the Green Zone. Once Les got our wall projector and surround-sound system set up, we celebrated by getting Sammy and Colonel Faisal over to watch Black Hawk Down. Again.

Faisal was an old air force buddy of Sammy’s and had been working with Phil Rhoden procuring supplies. We needed a ‘Colonel’ to head up our guard force and used that old army technique of nicking the best one you could find. Faisal held the equivalent rank of brigadier and had studied at the Iraqi staff college. He was dark-skinned like Ibrahim, but a Sunni like Sammy. He wasn’t so bouncy and gregarious, but a quietly spoken natural leader who kept his opinions to himself and commanded the absolute respect and loyalty of all the Sunni and most of the Shia guards we recruited.

Our two old pilots watched Black Hawk Down as if it were live footage from a war zone and went home nodding thoughtfully, Sammy in synch with Faisal’s temperament and keeping for once his own counsel. I went to bed and was dreaming about Mogadishu when at three in the morning I found Seamus shaking me awake with instructions to pack for a PSD task.

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