Generation Kill

Generation Kill is a very good book written by the Rolling Stone journalist Evan Wright, who sat in the back of a Humvee as part of a US Marines' Recon unit operating far behind enemy lines in the second Gulf War.
The people behind The Wire have turned it into a very good mini-series; it doesn't paint the Marines (or all of them, anyway) in a particularly good light, but its honesty is extraordinary (and probably not replicable in the UK, for a variety of reasons).
The latest episode featured the unit busting through to an Iraqi airfield in an attempt to beat 'a unit of British paratroopers' to that particular prize.
In Foreign Fields contains an interview with the man who was leading those Paras (actually a mixed Pathfinders force) called Sgt Mark Heley. Mark won an MC for his part in the British attempt to reach the airfield. Here's his story from the book:

SERGEANT MARK HELEY, MC

CORPS OF ROYAL ENGINEERS

AS the Fusiliers were working to secure the area around Basra, other forces were pushing further north.

Among them was Mark Heley, an experienced Patrol Commander in the Reconnaissance Troop of 23 Regiment (Air Assault).

His job – with his team – was to provide engineer-based intelligence for 16 Air Assault Brigade. Sgt Heley and his patrol were mounted in un-armoured, stripped down ‘WMIK’ Land Rovers, and operated well in advance of the main body of the Brigade throughout the ground war. Of the 21 days of hostilities, there was only one day when he and his patrol were not ‘danger close’ to the enemy and they often found themselves miles from friendly forces.

On March 23, on a joint patrol with the Brigade’s Pathfinder Platoon, Heley and his team became cut off from the Brigade 40 kilometres behind enemy lines. They had been sent north to check out an airfield which was being touted as a possible drop zone for soldiers from the Parachute Regiment. Advancing beyond Coalition lines – where US Marines and the US Army were stuck in very heavy fighting – they hit the road.

It was dark, and almost immediately they were ambushed in a carefully-prepared killing ground. It turned out to be the first of many such traps they would drive through. Astonishingly, no-one was injured, but eventually it became clear that heavily-armed enemy forces were now out hunting them. As they approached a village where the Iraqis were preparing a huge final ambush – which would likely have been a death-trap – Heley and his colleagues pulled off the road into the pitch black desert. They watched a convoy of heavily-armed Iraqis race by; trapped, they realised their only option was to fight their way back south; in their path, the same ambush killing grounds they had already battled though.

I joined the Army at 16 and was a sergeant at the time of Operation Telic One.

I was patrol commander for an advance recce element of 16 Air Assault Brigade, made up of guys from the Royal Engineers and members of Pathfinder Platoon. Our main job was to advance ahead of our own lines to see what the enemy was up to. We were operating in an infantry role, but the idea was that we would be able to relay-back Engineer-specific intelligence about things like bridges, roads and minefields. The British Army has always liked boots and eyes on the ground, where the Americans, say, prefer to rely more on satellite photos and other aerial recon. To my mind, there’s no substitute for a bloke seeing things with his own eyes.

We’d also bring in fire from the artillery on to enemy armour, where necessary, and pick up intelligence from talking to the locals after the Iraqis had pulled out of a given area. I remember one time there was a little girl who was badly burned and we treated her. It was simple hearts and minds stuff, but it worked – in those early days, it was like it was when they liberated French towns in the Second World War…flowers and happy people everywhere. We’d get shot at a bit. One time when the CO turned up to speak to us we got sniped, but at the time we had two snipers of our own with us and they took the guy out. But nothing too bad.

On March 23, we were south east of An Naziriyah, which is a town about 150 kilometres – about 100 miles – inside Iraq. Another 150 kilometres north there was an airfield at a place called Qal At Sukkar. The plan was for elements of the brigade to jump in to this airfield, to give our forces a foothold further into the country. In the event, the weather was too bad, with sandstorms and poor visibility, so this was changed to a drop using helis. Anyway, our patrol was tasked with recce-ing this airfield. It had been used in the previous Gulf War, and also in Saddam’s war with Iran, so it needed to be checked for mines and other ordnance. Plus, obviously, potential enemy forces. They must have known it was a likely spot for us to go into.

We got on to the main highway that went up to An Naziriyah. At that point, we were behind the Yanks, who were up ahead and hopefully pushing on through the Iraqi Army. Ideally, they’d go up past Qal At Sukkar and we could just slot in behind them and secure the airfield.

In fact, American forces had run into serious opposition at An Naziriyah and were fighting for their lives. Armoured vehicles had been destroyed, a large number of men were dead and others wounded.

As it turned out, we got to An Naziriyah and the Americans were still fighting, and fighting hard. There was a lot of resistance and we sat with one of their recce elements and watched the US Marine Corps Cobras getting stuck in. It wasn’t all one way by any means: the Marines were soaking up so much heat it was unbelievable. It was like a scene from Hamburger Hill…burning vehicles and buildings everywhere, and hundreds of US soldiers.

Well, we couldn’t sit round all day, so at about 4pm we moved up. The country is cris-crossed by rivers and canals and there were a lot of bridges we’d need to cross on the way to Qal At Sukkar. We got to the first one, and halted – obviously you have to be extremely careful when you’re driving through the lines, especially when there is still a lot of fighting going on around you. The brigade would have been in touch with the US command, letting them know we were coming, but you still proceed with caution and identify yourself.

This particular group of Americans had run into a determined lot of Republican Guard at this point and had basically come to a standstill. They were good fighters, some of the Iraqis, very good in fact. Quite often it was only our superior technology, air power and armour that made the difference. This group of Yanks had taken a lot of casualties – they had 10 or 20 blokes dead, more injured. The other side of the bridge, you could see an M113 armoured personnel carrier had been taken out, it was sitting there smouldering, with all inside killed. We got out to talk to the US commander and as I stood there a little Iraqi lad came over, with rounds going off not very far away, and handed over a set of dog tags from one of the dead Marines. I remember thinking it would have been a fantastic photograph, Time magazine stuff, except that people would have thought it was stunted-up.

The American said, ‘Where are you guys going?’

We said, ‘We’re going up there.’

He looked at us like we were mad. ‘You’re going up there? In those?’

There were nine of us, in three open-topped WMIKs Land Rovers. Obviously, they’re very vulnerable but we could move quickly and we weren’t that worried. Our best defence was speed. It’s very hard to hit something that’s going fast, especially with an RPG or even a rifle.

‘That’s RPG Alley,’ he said. ‘Every time we go down here we get hit. Be careful.’

So we moved up – I was in the middle Rover – and within about two minutes there was a pop and we had a puncture – there was a lot of debris and fragments all over the road. We can drive flat for a while, so we carried on and not long after we got to another bridge. There were more Americans here, and a couple of Abrams tanks sat there. It turned out that this was the Coalition limit of exploitation for the night.

We needed to change the flat, because if something happened we’d be right in the s***, so we got cracking. The tankies saw what we were trying to do and they came up alongside us and shielded us on the bridge while we swapped the wheel, which was good, and it wasn’t long before we on our way again. It was getting dark, now, and we had night vision on. The feeling was that the Iraqis probably wouldn’t have such good equipment, or any, so that gave us a big advantage. But we were on edge, after what the American officer had told us: you think, Any minute now.

After a while, we came to a village split by the main drag. The street lights had all been shot out, except for a couple of hundred metres where they were on; as we hit this lit area, we took some incoming fire, an RPG over the top of the vehicle, and a few shots. It felt sporadic, like they weren’t all that interested…as though they’d heard all the fighting down the road but they knew it was over for the night so they were just chilling out.

But as we got further on down the road and went through more villages – all with the same pattern of a stretch of road which was lit up – the fire got heavier and heavier each time, and it became clear that these were deliberately-prepared killing grounds and the Iraqis were communicating with each other, letting the people a couple of Ks further on know we were coming. It got quite surreal…almost like being in a war film or an exercise.

In all, they fought through six major contacts, each of them carefully-prepared; a hail of RPGs, machine-gun fire and even anti-aircraft rounds were fired at him and his men. Before long, a large group of heavily-armed Iraqi forces were speeding along the road behind them, hoping the trap the patrol in another killing ground further ahead.

We’d got about 40 kilometres when a couple of cars came past us. We couldn’t engage them, but it was clear that they were scouts. They nipped ahead, did a U-ey and came back before peeling off into what looked like some sort of base. At that point, we decided to get off the road. Turns out this was a very good idea, because we were just short of a place called Ash Shatrah, the next large town north of An Naziriyah and we think we’d have been hit very hard there if we’d carried on. We plotted up in the darkness in a palm grove, a river to our backs, facing the road, just waiting.

A few minutes later, six or seven vehicles, civvie cars and 4x4s, sped past; in the back of one of the pick-ups was a 12.7mm Dushka, a Russian-made heavy machine gun, and the rest of them were full of blokes with weapons.

We didn’t have a pop at them, because why expose yourself? Obviously, they were now well aware that we were in the area and given that we were now a long way ahead of the last US forces we’d seen we were quite vulnerable and exposed, and we needed to think about extracting. It was very quiet, except for this dog barking constantly from somewhere among a few houses not far to the south of us. We set up the satellite comms so we could get back to brigade and ask for some air cover to bring us back in.

It takes some time, so while we were doing that one or two daft ideas got thrown around.

There was a young officer with us and I think he had read too many thrillers, to be honest. He said, ‘Have you got any explosives with you?’

I said, ‘You know I have.’

We had a lot of plastic explosives on board – probably 50kgs plus – so that we could clear any mines on the airfield.

‘What we’ll do,’ he said, ‘is we’ll blow the vehicles, swim the river and tab to the objective.’

I just looked at him.

Then one of the Pathfinder lads said, ‘Or I could go down to the house where the dog’s barking, we’ll steal a car and some clothes and all that, and we’ll jump in it and drive back up the road.’

I just thought to myself, This isn’t happening. It’s always a mistake when you give people too much time to think.

Just then, Brigade came back to us and said they couldn’t give us any air. That was a little bit disheartening. We were a bit stuck there, out on a limb 40 kilometres ahead of the Yanks, behind enemy lines and they weren’t willing to put any air cover up.

Eventually, they realised they would have to brave the ambushes they had already driven through.

The officer, me, an ex-Signaller Pathfinder corporal called Tricky and Nathan Bell – the Pathfinder Patrol commander, an ex-Parachute Regiment sergeant who also got the MC – got our heads together and came up with a plan. Which was simply to drive straight back down the road the way we’d come. Our thinking was that they wouldn’t be expecting us, because the last time they’d seen us we were heading north with their mates in hot pursuit, so the element of surprise, plus our speed and the firepower we had, meant we should be OK. We went back to the vehicles and I briefed my guys as regards all the actions-on, what should happen in every eventuality, so everyone knew what was happening. Then we moved back on to the road. We used lights this time, so that we could go that bit quicker, and just waited for it.

As soon as we came around the first corner, we saw the lights where they’d lit up the killing area, and all hell broke loose.

It was like being on the range, but down the wrong end. There were bullets flying everywhere; there were dozens of them shooting at us from about midnight to nine o’clock. Some of them were firing from the darkness down alleyways, and all you could see was the muzzle flash, but others – who hadn’t really thought it through – were visible in the street lighting. We could see them in trenches dug in in front of the houses and in the houses themselves. There was a hell of a noise and loads of tracer zipping over our heads. There were a lot of RPGs, too – the rear vehicle saw one go under ours and bounce off and explode and another four went over the top of us.

We immediately responded. The guy on our .50 cal, Al Edin, was having problems with it. It’s a really important piece of kit, especially in situations like that. The .50 cal round does a lot of damage – it’s half an inch in diameter and they say that if it even passes within a certain distance of you it will do something. You fire that at people and they are in serious trouble and they don’t want to know. But within a couple of rounds he had a stoppage and ducked down. I yelled at him, and he got back up, went through the drills, cleared it and was OK. And straight away I can remember big holes appearing in these houses and chunks of masonry exploding everywhere, which felt good. You always want to be giving it back to them. was on our front-mounted GPMG, doing the same thing.

Heley was himself struck in the chest with an AK47 round; his citation says he “merely carried on returning fire.”

I didn’t realise it at the time, but an AK round went through my TAM (Tactical Aide Memoire) and into the pistol I had on my chest webbing, striking where the cartridge comes out of the ejection port on the pistol, smashing that totally and ending up buried back in the book.

I’ve still got the book at home – that and the pistol probably saved my life. Funnily enough, I took my family to the Imperial War Museum shortly after the war, and there’s a section there with things like that – a cup that saved a guy, a helmet with a big dent in it and so on. And my youngest lad piped up, ‘Hey, dad! You’ve got something like that!’ And everyone started looking at us, which was a bit embarrassing.

As I say, at the time I had no idea I’d been hit. I was returning fire on the GPMG and it just threw me off, knocked me back. I said to the driver, Ginge McLaren, ‘I think I’ve been hit!’ But it was confusing, because I didn’t feel anything. And I quickly dismissed it as I had other things to worry about.

Somehow we got through it with no injuries or serious damage, though the vehicles had all taken multiple hits, including one to the GPMG on the rear Rover, and a couple of guys later found rounds in their Bergens. For some reason it was our night – they were just bad shots, I think. I’d like to think that if it had been the other way around, we would have taken three Land Rovers of Iraqis out and stopped them quite quickly.

After the first contact, we noticed cars on the side tracks stopping and flashing their lights, obviously to signal to people at the next ambush that we were on our way, which wasn’t massively reassuring.

At one point, a pickup truck pulled across the road to block our way, but they left a metre or so gap between us and the verge so we were able to nip round it. As we did so, we opened up on it and shredded it, as we did on a few vehicles that tried that. If we stopped, we were dead, simple as that, so we weren’t stopping for anyone.

It was a massive adrenaline rush; you always wonder how you’ll react to being under fire. I had been shot at before in Bosnia and Northern Ireland but that was nothing compared to the weight intensity of this. For years you train for this, and all of a sudden you’re there. I didn’t really feel scared, probably because of the adrenalin and there wasn’t time – I was just very focused and calm. I do remember repeatedly thinking, I have got to get through this for my wife and the boys. My wife and I have been together since we were 15 or 16 – 22 years – and I’ve got three lads. I didn’t want to die out there, miles from them.

We got through, and every ambush we hit after that was exactly the same, only more intense. They came roughly every 4-5kms. The last and worst one we think was a barracks: we were opened up on from there by an anti-aircraft gun. Not a Dushka, it was something much bigger than that. But as I say, at the speed we were going, up to 60mph, we were hard targets to find. I was using the GPMG quite sparingly, just squeezing off three to five rounds at each target. Even so, I got through about 800 rounds. Of course, in the same way it’s hard to be hit, it’s hard to hit people at speed, so I couldn’t really tell what effect we were having, other than we were putting rounds into their positions and it was making them keep their heads down. There was a hell of a lot of AK and machine gun fire, as well, and the walls of this barracks were no more than 50m back from the road, so it was very close range stuff.

We pushed through there and passed a bus coming back the other way, I think carrying injured from their front line. We took a left fork, to bring us back round to where the Americans were, and there was one last bunker on that corner; they opened up on all of us as we went by. We were all massively high on adrenaline and all three vehicles poured masses of fire into that bunker and completely destroyed it.

The next danger we faced was the Americans. We slowed right down, kept our lights on and pushed all our guns away from us, holding our hands out where they could be seen. Nathan Bell went forward in the front vehicle, got out when he was challenged, told them who we were and brought us forward, and that was it.

The Americans were brilliant. They were going, ‘You guys…we’re so glad you’re OK!’

They were quite emotional, actually, having lost so many of their own men that day.

They said: ‘You guys are crazy driving in those things.’ They couldn’t understand the concept of no armour.

We stopped in the middle of the Americans, or just behind their line, and got into our sleeping bags. No-one had said anything up until then. And as we lay there, we all just looked at each other and burst out laughing. We were like, ‘F***ing hell, can you believe what just happened?’

This incident was just one example of what his citation calls his “outstanding leadership and extraordinary resilience and bravery.” It goes on to say, “He always volunteered for the most demanding patrols and despite the dangers managed to relay timely and critical information back to the Brigade. Sgt Heley is one of a very rare breed; able to overcome his own fears in spite of the threats around him and yet lead by personal example.”

I went back and I wrote up the two young guys who were in my vehicle, the driver Spr Ginge McLaren and the gunner LCpl Al Edin, for medals. They were both engineers, only in their early 20s, and they didn’t lose it. Ginge was really scared, particularly at first, which was understandable, but I kept talking to him constantly – ‘You’re a good driver, keep going!’ – and he did a brilliant job. Al had a nightmare on the .50 cal when his weapon jammed, but I could see why, you’re stood up there, a hell of a target. But again, he got back up and came through it. Two really good lads.

I was a bit embarrassed to be written up myself. I was older, more experienced and felt really I’d just done my job. To be honest I was going to reject it, but I went in and saw Lt Col Chris Tickell, our CO at the time. He’s a brilliant bloke, a brilliant commander whom I’d known since he was a young lieutenant, and he sat me down and explained how he felt maybe I did deserve it. The medal stays in its box in a drawer, and I certainly don’t mention it unless someone asks, but it was a great honour to get it. I had a really good day at Buckingham Palace, meeting the Queen; I took my wife, her mum and my mum. My wife’s mum absolutely loved it. She’s getting on a bit, really loves the royals and loved being there, so that was nice.

I left the Army not long after Telic One and, funnily enough, I’m now back in Iraq working in private security, chaperoning people in and around Baghdad. Iraq was, and continues to be, an eye-opener for me. Life out there…there are people dying every day, and when my son comes home with a problem at school, you think to yourself, With the best will in the world, that is absolutely nothing.

People in the UK have no real worries. The Iraqis have no electricity, no water; there are people dying left right and centre, being blown up. But I talk to people at home and I don’t think that they are that bothered or interested. If there’s a big car bomb, and a lot of people die, and it’s reported, yes. But everyday stuff doesn’t really get written about. I don’t think the majority of the public give a toss about Iraq or even our squaddies, which is bad. I’d like to think I’m wrong but I don’t think people are that bothered.

My wife says I’ve changed since Iraq. She’s probably right. It’s not the thought of killing people – I would never go looking for it, but if it is a case of, if I don’t do it to him he is going to do it to me…well, I don’t want to die. I like living. I don’t know whether that’s wrong. I know it bothers some guys. One thing it does, it puts it all into perspective. I think I have changed, but it’s for the better. Life is too short, that’s my attitude now.