Private London (Private 4)

Well, God’s grandeur wasn’t evident around us then, truth to tell. We were in a particularly devastated area on the western outskirts of the city. Blown-up buildings left, right and centre, their roofs and top floors shattered and cracked like a scattering of ruined teeth. The scars of incendiary bombs and smoke and ash and wreckage strewn all around.

The city had been literally smashed apart. But what was in the air that day was hope. Hope – maybe that was what God’s grandeur really was all along. Because without hope what do you have? The three other people in the jeep with me all had fixed grins on their faces.

In the front passenger seat was Captain Richard Smith. He was in his thirties, a husband, a father, my superior officer and a man I would have followed into the very fires of hell. And sometimes i

n the last few weeks it had felt as though that was just where we’d been.

Beside him at the wheel was Lance Corporal Lee Martin, in his twenties. An irrepressible practical joker, a man who never had a bad word to say about anyone and would give you the last pound in his pocket.

Sitting by me in the back was my fellow sergeant, Anne Jones. Cropped blonde hair, could drink pretty much any man in the unit under the table and beat most of them at arm wrestling – but had a secret passion for the romantic novels of Catherine Cookson. I’d caught her reading a copy of The Cinder Path one day and she had threatened to cut off my manhood with a rusty knife if I told anyone about it.

Each one of us had a smile on our faces as we bumped along the uneven track through the bomb-blasted area. And it wasn’t just to do with the sun beating down and the banter and jokes as though we were on our way to a barbecue. It was do with the sense of achievement. A sense of closure.

Had I been consulted I would have said that I was against us ever coming to Iraq in the first place, but it wasn’t my place to say so and I was certainly never asked for an opinion. I was in the service. I did what I was told. That was what being in the army meant.

What felt so good that day was knowing that it was all over. Finally. There would be a clean-up operation for sure, but the armies had done their part. The weapons of mass destruction would be found now. No one had any real doubt about that – not on our side, at least.

The combined forces of mainly American and British troops had brought down a despotic regime. Justice was going to be seen to be done, finally, for the long-suffering people of this blighted land.

I looked across to my right where Sergeant Jones was flicking through some photos she had taken on a small digital camera. She paused at one photo and zoomed in a little. The huge twelve-metre-high statue of Saddam Hussein, erected in 2002 as a celebration of his sixty-fifth birthday, being pulled down by US troops in Baghdad’s Firdus Square.

She had photographed it as it was being broadcast live on the TV of a small coffee bar, the set on the wall dwarfing the counter it was mounted behind. She had caught the statue mid-descent and the image was surprisingly clear.

An iconic picture. Countless hundreds like it no doubt flying round the world news, the World Wide Web. It was one of those moments in time, I thought, when everything changes. The Berlin Wall coming down. Armstrong walking on the moon. Kennedy being shot.

The fact that it had happened right across from the Palestine Hotel where the world’s reporters had been stationed didn’t even occur to us at the time, or the fact that there didn’t seem to be huge numbers there celebrating the fact.

US tanks circled the area, and rightly so: sniper fire had already stopped Marine Lieutenant Tim McLaughlin from raising an American flag the first time he had tried to do it. The war might have been over but not all the combatants knew that yet. Corporal Jones closed the camera and smiled again, shielding her eyes as she looked up at the sun.

9 April 2003, the day everything changed.

‘It’s going to be another scorcher,’ Anne said, surprising no one, as the jeep bounced in the road and the landmine buried beneath it detonated and exploded in a white-hot burst of pain and light and death.

Chapter 8

I FELT AS if I had been put in a sack and kicked around the locker room by the full linebacker defensive of the Miami Rangers.

I could feel the harsh sand clogging my nostrils, the flayed skin of my cheeks hot. My head throbbed like the worst hangover imaginable.

My eyes were screwed shut and I couldn’t bring myself to open them. I didn’t dare. I was terrified of what I might see. I could hear a low moaning sound like that of a whimpering animal and it took me a moment or two to realise that it was me who was making the noise.

I blew out a deep, ragged breath and finally opened my eyes.

The sunlight skewered them. Searing needles of pain stabbing into them. I closed them again till the pain receded.

I waited a few moments, breathing deeply, and then, shielding my eyes with my hand, I opened them again.

I was lying on my side by a burnt-out old Volvo estate that I remembered passing before the road bomb had exploded underneath us. I put my arm across my forehead to shield my eyes further from the blinding light. My whole body protested against the slightest movement. Nothing felt broken, though, as I rolled onto my hip and looked across the street.

Some fifteen feet away the hulk of our jeep was pouring thick black smoke into the blue sky like a distress signal being sent way too late.

Certainly far too late for the young driver. His right hand stretched towards me as though begging for help. His eyes lifeless as a fly crawled across his face.

Further out in the road lay Sergeant Jones. Only moments ago she had been celebrating the downfall of Saddam Hussein. Now she was as motionless as the toppled dictator’s statue. Her neck twisted at an impossible angle. Dead on the streets, killed by the same regime she herself had played a part in overthrowing. Dead before the new era she had wanted for the troubled country had even begun.

I dragged the back of my sleeve across my eyes and squinted into the sun again as I scanned back and forth around the jeep. There was no sign of my CO.

I levered myself clumsily up on one knee, wincing as the pain spiked through me again. My body was going to be black and blue with bruises, I guessed. But at least I was alive. Miraculously – I was still alive.