Dirty Deeds Done Cheap by Peter Mercer Page A

to be in a very bad way. He wasn’t one of our guys. He may just have been an innocent passer-by – we didn’t know and so we just went past him.
    Then there was a blast of gunfire from my gunner in the back seat ‘Enemy right, top of the hill, on the right!’ he shouted. Then all hell broke loose. Our whole patrol was identifying targets and the amount of fire we were putting down was truly incredible. There was, fortunately, no sign of our other call sign in the area and I couldn’t hear a damn thing on the comms because of all the gunfire. My gunner behind shouted, ‘Enemy right,’ again. We both turned around and I let off my M203 grenade launcher towards the wall, where an insurgent was clearly trying to escape over the top. I missed him by a mile but I blew a bloody great hole in the wall. (In my defence, I will say that that was the first time I’d fired an M203 in anger and we were on the move at the time.) My M240 gunner then let rip with a huge burst and I fired five or six rounds from my M16. The insurgent fucked over the wall in a spray of blood – it was messy. I figured that, because we travelled at speed, it would have been a better bet to try to use my grenade launcher and take him and the wall out, but after my first crap shot I found that my gunner already had him in his sights and sent him off to paradise (hope he got his virgins).
    We sped through the kill zone as quickly as possible once we were sure our other call sign was definitely out of there and not in trouble. Then, as we rounded the corner, going up to the main road that led to the camp, we saw two Strykers (American armoured personnel carriers) coming towards us down the hill. We screamed to a halt and cordoned off the road. We took cover and scanned the area and then communicated with the Stryker commander what had happened. They seemed hesitant to help at first, but then they called in air support for us. There was still the odd round winging about (probably snipers) and I took cover by lying in the gutter behind a large kerbstone. There wasn’t much to take cover behind and it was the best I could do. After air support was secured, I told my lads to keep popping the occasional round off into likely enemy positions, but to aim only at the high ground, no built-up areas, and to keep their heads down and not to take any stupid risks.
    When we felt that the situation was under control, we jumped back into the trucks and continued our journey back to camp. Everyone was on a knife edge all the way back. We came through camp; there was no waving this time, just the American sentries scurrying about. They knew our predicament and were concerned for us. They knew we’d been in a big contact and had sustained casualties. Fair play to them.
    We quickly unloaded all our weapons and checked that everything and everyone was OK. Apart from a few holes in the vehicles, we were fine, nothing drastic. We then drove to the ops room. As we pulled up outside we didn’t know what to expect. We had heard no news, as there was a lot of confusion, so we didn’t know what injuries or deaths had occurred with the other patrol. All the medics were legging it about outside the hospital and, from what we could see, one of the vehicles had been dragged in on its rims by an American Humvee. Its alloy wheels were ground down and its tyres were long gone, and there were bullet holes down one side. Everyone in that truck, miraculously, was fine, though. It was a very different story for 9.0 Charlie’s command vehicle and crew.
    I was still trembling with adrenalin as I got out of my vehicle. There was no smiling or laughing now – everyone was deadly serious and concerned.
    I could see some bullet holes in the Land Cruiser that had been the command vehicle and there was a hell of a lot of blood everywhere, but no apparent bomb damage. I prayed that the occupants hadn’t been too seriously hurt and I looked in the back seats (you have to remember there were no