and H on top cover.
Daz also had a passenger in the back of his Snatch, Major Ken Tait, a Territorial Army officer from the Black Watch in his late forties. A school teacher from Glasgow, Ken was posted to Cimic House on a six-month call-up to be a tree-hugger on one of the reconstruction teams. But Ken was a true soldier. A heavy smoker, he was already bored with his desk job after only four days of being there, and askedme if he could come along for the ride and have a look about too.
We weren't gung-ho, but we were confident and professional, and exactly where we wanted to be.
'Remember to smile, all you happy people,' Daz said over the PRRs as we pulled out of the front gate.
We headed north, and swept out around Al Amarah's eastern outskirts first, before cutting back into the city centre through the southern suburbs. I got the boys to dismount to carry out a quick spot vehicle checkpoint at the road junction Blue 5.
Al Amarah's main roads are codenamed by colours and numbers so the enemy wouldn't know what we're talking about if he intercepted our radio transmissions. We only ever knew a few streets by their real Arabic names. Its five main north to south thoroughfares roughly follow Al Amarah's grid system, with the Purple route the furthest west, red next, yellow in the middle, blue after that and finally the green route on the north-eastern flank. Main junctions on each coloured route are numbered upwards from south to north. Yellow isn't very long, so there are only four junctions on it. But red is the main arterial route through Al Amarah from Basra to Baghdad (Route 6 on the Iraqi road maps), so it has fourteen junctions. Sounds a nightmare, but imagine a bloke from Bermondsey trying to pronounce Al Muqatil Aj Asaneyya Street in a hurry.
After ten minutes, we drove off again up the Yellows, and made a right turn east at Yellow 3 onto a main road that hadn't been given a codename for some reason. There we stopped, and dismounted for a poke about at Al Balda police station, which was one on our list. The vehicles parked up 50 metres apart, on the south side of the road. All but one of the top covers in each Snatch dismounted to watch overthe patrol, as the rest of the boys inspected the ground around the vehicles for IEDs, the routine drill.
I walked over the road to the police station's front gatehouse with a silly big grin on my face and attempted to strike up a conversation with the three officers lazing around there. I was keen to improve my crappy Arabic with the language cards we had been issued with.
The first thing that wasn't quite right was when the cops started to look very uncomfortable as soon as I approached. They had been doing what we had been told was the usual for Iraqi policemen – sitting around lazily in the shade and not really being arsed to do anything at all. But they proved even less interested in having a chat with me. They all squirmed, and looked away.
'Yeah, whatever then,' I said. Probably just don't like us. I shrugged my shoulders and walked away.
Daz approached two other coppers who were leaning on a motorbike, 50 metres down the road. They were standing in front of a well fortified compound that housed a large three-storey concrete building, painted white and divided into offices and a mosque area. Unusually for buildings in the city, it had a fresh coat of white paint and bars across every window. The front gate was made out of sturdy wrought iron, and an imposing six-foot wall ran around the whole of the rest of the exterior. Fifteen hundred metres from Cimic House, the place clearly had a pretty high status. It was just off the city's main promenade and overlooked the Tigris River.
As I walked over to Daz, four men with big Islamic beards came out of the compound very agitated. They were shouting at us full pitch in fast, aggressive Arabic and jabbing their fingers at us. We asked one of the policemen what their problem was.
'Their neighbourhood. Don't want foreign
Daz also had a passenger in the back of his Snatch, Major Ken Tait, a Territorial Army officer from the Black Watch in his late forties. A school teacher from Glasgow, Ken was posted to Cimic House on a six-month call-up to be a tree-hugger on one of the reconstruction teams. But Ken was a true soldier. A heavy smoker, he was already bored with his desk job after only four days of being there, and askedme if he could come along for the ride and have a look about too.
We weren't gung-ho, but we were confident and professional, and exactly where we wanted to be.
'Remember to smile, all you happy people,' Daz said over the PRRs as we pulled out of the front gate.
We headed north, and swept out around Al Amarah's eastern outskirts first, before cutting back into the city centre through the southern suburbs. I got the boys to dismount to carry out a quick spot vehicle checkpoint at the road junction Blue 5.
Al Amarah's main roads are codenamed by colours and numbers so the enemy wouldn't know what we're talking about if he intercepted our radio transmissions. We only ever knew a few streets by their real Arabic names. Its five main north to south thoroughfares roughly follow Al Amarah's grid system, with the Purple route the furthest west, red next, yellow in the middle, blue after that and finally the green route on the north-eastern flank. Main junctions on each coloured route are numbered upwards from south to north. Yellow isn't very long, so there are only four junctions on it. But red is the main arterial route through Al Amarah from Basra to Baghdad (Route 6 on the Iraqi road maps), so it has fourteen junctions. Sounds a nightmare, but imagine a bloke from Bermondsey trying to pronounce Al Muqatil Aj Asaneyya Street in a hurry.
After ten minutes, we drove off again up the Yellows, and made a right turn east at Yellow 3 onto a main road that hadn't been given a codename for some reason. There we stopped, and dismounted for a poke about at Al Balda police station, which was one on our list. The vehicles parked up 50 metres apart, on the south side of the road. All but one of the top covers in each Snatch dismounted to watch overthe patrol, as the rest of the boys inspected the ground around the vehicles for IEDs, the routine drill.
I walked over the road to the police station's front gatehouse with a silly big grin on my face and attempted to strike up a conversation with the three officers lazing around there. I was keen to improve my crappy Arabic with the language cards we had been issued with.
The first thing that wasn't quite right was when the cops started to look very uncomfortable as soon as I approached. They had been doing what we had been told was the usual for Iraqi policemen – sitting around lazily in the shade and not really being arsed to do anything at all. But they proved even less interested in having a chat with me. They all squirmed, and looked away.
'Yeah, whatever then,' I said. Probably just don't like us. I shrugged my shoulders and walked away.
Daz approached two other coppers who were leaning on a motorbike, 50 metres down the road. They were standing in front of a well fortified compound that housed a large three-storey concrete building, painted white and divided into offices and a mosque area. Unusually for buildings in the city, it had a fresh coat of white paint and bars across every window. The front gate was made out of sturdy wrought iron, and an imposing six-foot wall ran around the whole of the rest of the exterior. Fifteen hundred metres from Cimic House, the place clearly had a pretty high status. It was just off the city's main promenade and overlooked the Tigris River.
As I walked over to Daz, four men with big Islamic beards came out of the compound very agitated. They were shouting at us full pitch in fast, aggressive Arabic and jabbing their fingers at us. We asked one of the policemen what their problem was.
'Their neighbourhood. Don't want foreign
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