Sniper One: On Scope and Under Siege With a Sniper Team in Iraq by Dan Mills

Author:Dan Mills
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Azizex666, Iraq War (2003-), Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, Military, History
ISBN: 0312531265
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2008-09-02T04:00:00+00:00

15

The only real downer across the battle group, and it wasn't a big one, was that we weren't getting any write-ups back home. Concern had been slowly growing about why there was almost no media coverage in Britain about what we were doing in Al Amarah. At first, we couldn't understand it. We'd been war fighting harder than the invasion force had to a year before, so why was no one interested?

It mattered most to the younger lads. When the newspapers arrived two weeks late (as they always did) for the dates over Pimlico and Waterloo, H was especially put out. Private Andy 'H' Hawkins was a good little soldier and always keen to impress. Like Smudge, he had a bit of an image thing. He came storming up to the roof clutching a brand new pile of papers. He hurled them down in disgust.

'I've been through every single fucking one of these papers, and there's not a fucking word about the PWRR in any of them. Not even a paragraph in the Sun and they're always the best at doing squaddies' stuff, aren't they? What the fuck is wrong with them all?'

Lads like H needed to know they were getting respect back home for being in that shit hole. They believed in Queen and Country and they wanted to go home heroes, so everyone in their local pub would want to buy them a drink.

They regularly scanned the Internet and watched Sky News for even the smallest passing reference, when the satellite dish hadn't been blown down. But for months there was nothing.

The older ones among us worked it out soon enough. It was confirmed during a visit from the brigadier who was based down in Basra. The papers weren't writing about us because they hadn't a Scooby any of this was even going on. The MoD was doing an excellent job of simply not telling them. The government had local elections in June. The last thing they needed was pictures of big old tanks on the streets in southern Iraq.

With the kidnappings and beheadings of westerners in Iraq in full swing now, it was also far too dangerous for journalists to make their own way up to Al Amarah. They needed the military's assistance. A TV crew from ITN had been flown up in early April, but the OMS had given their normal warm welcome and thrown a blast bomb at their convoy of Snatches. Nobody was injured, but they caught it all on tape and it made great viewing. That gave the sweaty-palmed media officers at Division thoroughly twisted knickers. No more press came up after that until long after the shooting was over.

We had to thank the MoD and their head-in-the-sand policy for one thing, though. It made calling home a hell of a lot easier. I'd only spoken to my girlfriend Sue once in the almost two months we'd been there. We'd all been so busy, I'd hardly had the chance. Everyone got twenty minutes' free talk time a week on satellite phones.

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