Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (21 page)

But the danger passed as quickly as it arrived, so we dusted ourselves off and got back into the Land Rovers and drove slowly to Camp Riverside – the tidy army outpost that was about 25 kilometres away from Basra. The camp was, at the height of the Ba’ath party’s reign, the summer home of Ali Hassan al-Majid, the Iraqi defence minister and chief of the Intelligence Service. Al-Majid was more commonly known as ‘Chemical Ali’ for his use of chemical weapons in Iraq’s attacks against the Kurds, and his old home was graced with a beautiful view over swaying fields and bulrush-lined canals. Rumour had it that it was once filled with whisky sours and bubbling Jacuzzis and unspoken exploits; thoughts that would set any lonely British soldier’s mind aflame.

But just as it was a place for secret and illicit pleasures, so too
was it a place of protection from the bloody circus that was grimly being performed across Iraq. There were now high walls and watchtowers and sandbags aplenty here, and we slowly zigzagged through the protective escarpments designed to stop suicide trucks. The high metal doors of the camp were pushed open, and we were back at base. The men disembarked and walked without words to a small rectangle of sandbags. There they unclipped their magazines, making their weapons safe. They did so with easy, fluid movements, as had been drilled into them.

We headed over to the cookhouse on the far edge of the camp, the smell of frying food in the air. I made a beeline for one of the sentries defending the outer reaches and ducked into his neat sentry post, with its swollen sandbags. He smiled and leaned into his weapon, an L7 general-purpose machine-gun.
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Neither of us spoke. We looked to the west.

A boat slowly drifted down the waterway. On the deck, a dark-skinned man in a white
dishdasha
stood, his hands resting behind his back. Our gazes met, and the boatman’s eyes narrowed; you couldn’t help but see menace in that furrowing of brows. And the machine-gunner traced the boat’s slow passage downriver until the man passed around a bend and out of sight. The soldier let loose a long line of spit and winked. I turned to go, knowing what that wink meant. We were inside this camp, they were outside the camp and, until we knew differently, each and every one of them was a killer. And the oiled and cared-for machine-gun, with its ability to let loose ten rounds in a second, was a thing of protection for all of us.

The next day it got a lot worse.

We awoke before the sun and headed south as the city stirred. The cars drove, engines bull-loud, into Basra city and the platoon’s lieutenant, a young Scot from the Borders who one day talked about returning from these dry lands to help run a family fishery, shouted through the grill that separated the front and the rear of the Land Rover. Things were heating up, he said. Two of the regiment’s convoys had just been hit with rocket-propelled grenades.

This was just the start of it. By the end of that day there had been over fifteen contacts in the city – exchanges of gunfire between British
soldiers and militants. We wanted to get out to see how the day would unfold, but the colonel of the regiment said it was just too dangerous, so we waited in the main base, and each time a convoy came back in, men would tumble from their armoured vehicles, their uniforms flecked with blood, their eyes wild. They spoke in fast, breathless clichés, resting on old sayings to try to explain what had just happened.

‘It was hell,’ one said and told how his colleague had his foot blown clean off by a rocket grenade. Another had been shot in the hand. One even told how his grandfather had given him an antique coin, the old man having picked it up in these same desert lands in the Second World War. His warrior grandson had kept it in his top pocket over his heart and forgot all about it. Then his convoy was hit in a rocket attack and it was only back at the HQ, when he pulled out the coin, that he found a piece of shrapnel embedded in it. ‘That coin saved my life,’ he said.

The words spilled out from their fresh, youthful mouths, the adrenaline keen in their faces, and they told how they had let rip with their weapons, facing ambush after ambush, because this was a war that, in many ways, was being fought with the age-old technology of guns. They had become crucial weapons in this urban guerilla conflict, a place where planes or tanks or mortars were sometimes too blunt weapons of violence to use.
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The figures testify to this. It’s been estimated that 250,000 bullets were fired in Iraq for every insurgent killed by the US military.
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That works out at about 6 billion bullets being shot by US forces between 2002 and 2005.
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Indeed, so many bullets were fired by American soldiers that the three ammunition contractors who supplied ammunition to the US military had to spend almost $100 million in upgrades just to keep up with demand.
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Even this was not enough. Over 300 million rounds were bought from commercial companies, including Israel Military Industries and Olin-Winchester.
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Someone, somewhere, was making a handsome profit from the US and British incursion into Iraq. It’s no surprise that Whitehall figures put the cost of British funding of the Iraq conflict at £9.24 billion,
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or that, between 2005 and 2008, the annual cost for each American soldier there rose from $490,000 to $800,000.
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Such profits should be weighed against the numbers of lives lost in Iraq. Of the estimated 122,843 civilians killed there between 2003 and 2014, about 55 per cent died from gunfire.
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Years after leaving that military embed, when I was working on Wikileaks’ Iraq War Logs, we found that more than 80 per cent of people shot and killed in incidents at US and coalition checkpoints were civilians. Over 681 innocents died – at least thirty of them children – compared to just 120 Iraqi insurgents.
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There were other, equally terrible times when the sound of murderous gunfire penetrated the fog of war and caught the world’s attention. Like when, in November 2005, a group of Marines went on a shooting spree and killed twenty-four Iraqi civilians.
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Or when, in 2006, US soldier Steven Dale Green raped a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl after killing her parents and younger sister and then shot the sobbing teenager in the head.
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Some hear these stories and say: this is war, shit happens. But these incidents should be remembered, not least because Britain and America invaded Iraq on the slimmest of pretexts. And while nations have a right to self-defence – the argument put forward by the US and the UK – they also have a legal and moral responsibility to adhere to international humanitarian law. They have a duty to ensure arms are used appropriately and proportionately. And in Iraq they, clearly, were often not.

The tragedy of Iraq, though, is that there has been no proper attempt at investigating war crimes committed by Coalition soldiers on duty; even politicians who opposed the war and are now in power seem reluctant to open that Pandora’s box. This political silence means that, largely, the horrors of what guns do to people in war remain unaccounted for and unseen. And future politicians may all too easily forget what war means when they next send young men into the field of battle, there to face all of its iron indignation.

Perhaps this is not a surprise. Iraq was fought in the way that guerilla wars are so often fought: in the shadows, largely away from the glare of the media. On that bloody day in Basra, it got so bad that the whole camp went into lockdown, and all patrols were suspended. The army decided it was simply too dangerous to head out of the gates because of the attacks and the rioting mobs.

As the sun rose higher in the sky, and the sound of gunfire resounded in the distance, Sam and I sat down to talk. I suggested that we just get a cab to where the maddening conflict was unfolding. Sam, being the journalist she is, felt the same. Captain Johnny though, the officer in charge of the unit we were following, took us aside and told us it was a suicide mission, that the Quick Reaction Force would not come to get us if we got into trouble. Even the Iraq Civil Defence Corps colonel told us not to go. But I wanted to go, and badly. I wished to catalogue the violence, to witness what Britain’s role in Iraq had become – so we ignored their pleas. We packed up our kit and got the unit’s interpreter to call his uncle who had a cab, and headed out the gate.

As we waited, though, something felt wrong. The taxi had yet to come, and in the slow minutes that followed, my bravura turned to doubt and doubt to fear. I turned to Sam. ‘This is indeed a suicide mission.’ She nodded. We packed up the filming kit and walked back through the gates. Without the protection previously offered by British army guns, we had to leave the day unrecorded; we had little desire to film our own deaths.

Parts of this war, as with all wars, had to be reduced to silence. When the gun’s impact is so extreme, nothing will properly describe or explain it. And if you were there to describe it, then you risked too much. Looking back on those days, it feels futile for me to try to explain at all the role of the gun in that war – at least from those few grasped experiences. Just as witnessing a dozen wars would lead me to a dozen different conclusions about the role of the gun in each and every one.

Faced with such complexity, I wanted instead to focus on a place where the gun’s role was more unequivocal. So I chose to travel to a country that for the last twenty years has been repeatedly called the world’s most militarised nation.
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A place born from gunfire and existing by gunfire: the state of Israel.

The ancient port of Jaffa rose like a dusty tombstone to the south, and the sun bleached the Middle Eastern sky. It was furiously hot,
and I was poorly dressed for it. My heavy boots and shirt were draining me, but it was not the heat that caught me off guard. What surprised me were the questions, because I’ve never been to a museum before and been asked either for my passport or whether I was carrying a machine-gun. But that is what a uniformed youth wanted to know as I tried to enter the Israeli Defence Museum, a short distance from the surfer’s beaches of Tel Aviv.

I thought this museum was as good a place as any to start. The Israeli Defence Force, or IDF, had refused me an interview – mainly, it seemed, because I was an investigative journalist. I had been interrogated at Tel Aviv airport for five hours for the same reason. But I could not be prevented from seeing the guns of Israel’s history just because I was a pain.

The youth looked long at my stamped visa, a slip of paper stapled into my passport, and nodded for me to go to the ticket office, where another conscript on her two-year service was looking even more bored. It was 15 shekels, about $4, and she ushered me through with a flick of her wrist.

I walked past a turnstile, past a short line of grey, industrial concrete walls and out into a courtyard of focused, broiling air. It was over 35 degrees out, and you sympathised with the guards in their thick uniforms under the unwavering disc of a midday sun. A map pointed me to the huts I wanted – numbers 10 and 14. The first was for ‘The Six-day War’ exhibit, the other ‘The Yom Kippur War’. But I was not drawn there by the histories of Israel’s wars, I wanted to go there because these huts were filled with guns.

Perhaps it was no surprise that the IDF museum would dedicate its gun rooms to such influential conflicts in its brief history. After all, the Israeli army is awash with firearms – about 1.75 million of them.
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This works out at roughly 22 guns held by Israeli soldiers for 100 of its citizens. In Egypt that number is 2 per 100, in Jordan it’s 4.
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Perhaps just as these two historic wars define Israel, so too do its weapons.

Passing heavy artillery exhibits – field guns painted in uniform desert-brown besides small clusters of black shrub-like sculptures of welded-together rifles – I walked to the first of the two exhibits
housed in a large Nissan-style building. The Six-day War hut was dedicated to the 1967 conflict between Israel on the one side and Egypt, Jordan and Syria on the other. It was not six days long – it lasted 132 hours and 30 minutes and left Israel with the largest territorial gains of all of its modern conflicts. Sinai and the Gaza Strip were captured from Egypt; East Jerusalem and the West Bank were taken from Jordan; and the Golan Heights won from Syria. Seven hundred and seventy-seven Israelis lost their lives – their enemies lost over twenty-two times that. The sorrows of modern Israel were firmly laid down within that shortened week, and this hut, filled with cooling air and 608 revolvers and pistols from around world, embalmed its memory.

The handguns that filled this room were what I had come to see. They lined its walls in white-edged cabinets, each fixed to a perforated screen with small plastic ties. There were Israeli Uzi 9mms, American Desert Eagles, Italian 0.22mm Berettas and Belgian 7.65 Brownings. Names that conjured up forgotten violent times: Makarovs and Webleys, Mausers and MABs. At the far end, in front of a cabinet of British sea-flares, was a display for bullets, 126 rounds placed in neat rows, each section divided into different types of firing mechanisms: centre fire, pin fire and rim fire rounds.