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Originally Posted by The Sunday Times
The Sunday Times November 06, 2005
Behind Jeremy lines
Jeremy Clarkson admits he doesn't have the drive to become a great war reporter. But when he accompanied Gill in Iraq, he was ambushed by a host of Iraqi Top Gear fans
Read AA Gill's account: Playing with fire
Jeremy Clarkson index page
There's nothing gentle about the descent into Baghdad airport. To confuse the insurgents who lie in wait with rocket-propelled grenades and anti-aircraft missiles, the pilot of the Hercules transport plane doesn't select a glide path until he's pretty much over the runway. By which time it's more of a plummet path.
Twenty thousand feet below, four Apache gunships patrol the desert, their Hellfire missiles and chain guns ready to atomise anyone who fancies taking a pot shot at us. Meanwhile, at the airport itself, ice-white barrage balloons full of spy-in-the-sky cameras float in the dust-streaked, windless sky, monitoring the perimeter for signs of activity.
Up on the Herc's flight deck, two crew chiefs — big, hard special-forces men — stand behind the pilot scanning the skies for the telltale smoke trails left by incoming ordnance. They are fidgety and nervous. In January, an RAF Hercules was brought down by an anti-tank shell; and now we're two days into Ramadan, a good time for the Muslim fighter to die. Although on our approach the threat came from an even more dangerous quarter. "There," said one of the big guys urgently, and sure enough, bearing down on us, fast, from the west, was an American fighter plane.
To avoid the impending collision, the pilot set the flight controls to "tactical", ducked under the fighter, banked hard and, with a rush of negative G-force that lifted the crew chiefs clean off their feet and into a state of weightlessness, we started our free-fall, engine-screaming, super-fast descent into Baghdad. It's important at times like this to get the soundtrack right. Vietnam had Hendrix and the Doors. I needed something more up to date. So before setting off, I'd made a special playlist on my war-Pod. The Five Best Songs for a Combat Landing into Iraq. And so, with the Hercules hurtling towards Baghdad, in the manner of a wardrobe falling from the top of a tower block, I was listening to U2 belting out Vertigo.
Oh man, what a rush. Especially when the coalition pilot, an Italian, hauled back on the stick, sending a shudder of face-bending G through the airframe. As we weaved through the screen of helicopter gunships on our final approach, I turned to Adrian, smiling the smile of a very happy man, and couldn't believe what I saw. He was fast asleep.
And he stayed that way until we'd floated over a badly repaired pothole in the middle of the runway and, with an almighty bang, landed. The worst two war correspondents in the world had arrived in Baghdad.
Over the years we have become used to journalists being on the scene of the battle within hours of the kickoff. And I bet you've never wondered how on Earth they get there. Only the RAF flies direct from Britain to Iraq and the only planes they can use, the only ones that are fitted with missile counter-measures, are three 35-year-old Tristars. These things predate video recorders.
Nevertheless, Adrian and I were due to board one of them on a Sunday at oh-my-God o'clock. "Why," I wailed, "does it have to be so early? Why don't you forces people ever set off anywhere at tea time?" A silly question, as it turns out. They have to leave in the dark in Britain so disaffected youths from Bradford can't pass the departure time to their mates in Iraq; and they have to land in the dark as well.
It didn't matter, though, because it turned out all the Tristars were broken and the trip was in grave danger of being called off. This was horrible. When I'd first been asked to go to Iraq, my response was: "Ooh yes." Mr Bush had made it plain that the war was over and that the whole country was returning to normality. Mr Blair always makes it sound like Bourton-on-the-Water over there. But do you know what? He's lying. At present, 350 roadside bombs and 20 car bombs go off every week in Iraq. And in Baghdad alone, there are 25 attacks of one sort or another every day. So far, around 2,000 Americans have been killed in action, and that's rising at the rate of one every eight hours. Once every four hours, one of them has a limb blown off.
My insurance company reckoned I had a one-in-a-hundred chance of being killed, and charged a premium exactly twice what I'd been offered to write the story. These figures caused some concern on the home front. Adrian's girlfriend made him write a will. My wife, having discovered the insurance would only pay up if I were killed, not if I died of a heart attack, called Adrian with some very specific instructions.
"If he starts to go a bit blue, shoot him," she said. And me? I was worried about the very real possibility of being beheaded, live on the internet. I didn't think I'd be able to go with much of my dignity intact, frankly.
So as the trip was endlessly postponed, I vacillated between relief and disappointment. I wanted the thrill but I didn't want my head cut off. And then the phone rang. The trip was back on. The RAF had chartered a Monarch Airlines Airbus, which, because it had no anti-missile gubbins, would take us to Qatar.
Then it was off again. The Turks had refused permission for any military plane to overfly their country and that was that. In the end, we went to war with BA, landing in Kuwait, and then hitching a ride to Iraq on the Hercules. Cool, eh?
There were many things we could have done in Baghdad if we'd been journalistically inclined: we could have sought out the Iraqi Islamic party and those from the Conference of the People of Iraq, to find out why they're at odds with the Committee of Muslim Scholars. But instead we went tank-racing.
They were not puny little armoured personnel carriers, either. They were the real deal. Two Abrams M1A1 main battle tanks. These turbine-powered gas-hogs look complicated but, in fact, are designed so that even the most idiotic knuckle-dragging one-eyed swamp-man from Buttsville, Iowa, can get to grips with the motorcycle-style controls. Sadly, they were beyond the ken of Adrian, who, looking bewildered and frightened, set off backwards, slowly at first, then very quickly, straight towards one of Saddam's ceremonial lakes. Annoyingly, with a jolt that reared the front of the tank a full 3ft in the air, he stopped just before he hit the water, and then with a tremendous roar surged forwards as though perhaps he had suddenly caught epilepsy, or was on ketamine.
At one point, he tore past the crowd of onlookers at full speed, which might have been hugely impressive had we not seen his face. He didn't look bewildered or frightened any more. He looked like a man who was steaming at 45mph in a 68-tonne tank and couldn't find the brake pedal. He looked terrified.
The big problem in my tank was the heat. It was like sitting in the top right oven of an Aga. Certainly, it was hot enough to make the bottle of what looked like Coca-Cola I'd found on the floor seem tempting. "Can I drink this?" I asked my commander. "Well, you can," he said, "but I wouldn't because it's the driver's piss bottle." Jesus H Christ. How much sweat do you have to produce for your urine to turn the colour of Coke? Whatever, I drove the tank around for a while, feeling rather chuffed when I heard one grunt saying over the radio: "Anyone wanna guess which is the car critic and which writes about recipes?" Afterwards, Adrian was like a small boy. "I won, I won," he chanted. Nobody had been aware of a race, least of all his white-faced commander who, as we left, was seen hunched over Saddam's ornamental lake, vomiting.
After 24 hours in the fortified Green Zone, sipping tea, meeting generals and trying to sleep in the same room as A A Gill, the All England Snoring Champion, I finally stumbled onto a Big Story, only for the life of me I can't remember what it was. What I can remember is going for lunch in Uday's palace, the one where he used to feed women to his lions.
Now it's an American army canteen, so, as you can imagine, security is tight. As tight as it was when they'd checked our car in Kuwait. God, they were useless. I could have hidden an elephant in there and they wouldn't have found it. All that stood between me and my lunch in Baghdad was an adenoidal teenager who, in an irritating nasal whine, said I didn't have a pass. And then failed to do anything about it.
Over lunch — a burger, surprisingly, followed by two buckets of ice cream — someone dropped a metal tray. I heard the crash and thought: "Oh, someone's dropped a tray." But the 400 soldiers in there whipped round like Saddam himself had just burst into the room with an atomic bomb. They were a nervy bunch, and I can't say I blame them. Not when the only thing that stands between them and half a million very angry locals is Kevin the Teenager.
So what's it like to be shot at? Well, the first time, on our helicopter flight back to Baghdad airport, it was only a rocket-propelled grenade and, frankly, using one of these to bring down a fast-moving helicopter is like using a dart to bring down a hummingbird. So it was no big deal. But the second time was different. This time we were in a Lynx, sitting sideways by an open door over the ruined city of Basra, when someone fired a surface-to-air heat-seeking missile at us. The pilot, known to his men as Lord Flasheart, was chatting away when sensors on the helicopter detected a missile launch and jettisoned a fanned array of flares to provide an even hotter target than the engine's exhaust. It didn't work. The missile was still coming...
Before going to Iraq, Adrian had read a 1925 book, with no pictures in it, called Mesopotamia: The Babylonian and Assyrian Civilisation, and another, by Wilfred Thesiger, called The Marsh Arabs. Neither had really given him much insight into how a Lynx might fare in a Sam attack. So he was the colour of porridge. Me? Rather more wisely, I'd read all of Tom Clancy's work, so I knew we weren't being chased by a fearsome Sam-18. People without shoes would struggle to afford such a thing. More likely we had a 1960s Sam-7 on our tail, and those things are confused by just about everything. So, while a Lynx helicopter may be as old as a Morris Traveller, it is fast and chuckable. I therefore knew we'd get away.
I also knew that afterwards, it'd be good fun going back to the launch site to find the little shit who'd pulled the trigger. And giving him a face full of hot lead. I even selected a suitable tune on the war-Pod. Bad to the Bone, by George Thorogood.
Unfortunately, the rules of engagement for British troops serving in Iraq seem to have been written by Alastair Campbell. And are hammered home in a hard-hitting video presented, coincidentally, by the former Top Gear front man Chris Goffey. They say, in essence, that unless the enemy has already shot at you, and you're certain he's preparing to shoot at you again, you cannot shoot back. So we had to leave Sam-7 man alone, meaning he was free to come and have another go at another helicopter the next day.
Adrian thinks this is fair enough. He reckons you can't win by fighting like with like. Damn right. You win by fighting like with hate. The British have tried a soft-beret, hearts-and-minds approach in Basra, and on the day we were there we were fired at in the helicopter, mortared twice, then raked with fire from a fearsome DShK 12.7 machinegun. The Americans are criticised for their gung-ho policy, but are they inflaming the situation? Well, so far they've lost around 2,000 from a total force of 155,000. And we've lost nearly 100 from a force of around 7,800. Do the maths, and you'll find there's not much difference in the ratio, roughly one death for every 78 men.
Strangely, our chaps are remarkably cheerful, referring to difficult patrols as "sporty" and using Monopoly-board names for all the streets at their base. They don't seem to mind the threat of death, or the lack of power or the 30-second ship shower they're allowed once a day. They do, however, mind the pay. The Hercules crews get an extra £5 a day for being out there, but lose the £10-a-day fuel allowance they're paid at home. This pisses them off. It pisses them off nearly as much as the 20-minute phonecard they're given every week for calls home. Murderers in jail get 30 minutes. Then you have the squaddie who, on his two-week leave in England, was forced to take a job as a bouncer at the U2 gigs to make ends meet.
To make matters worse, those trained in close protection could leave tomorrow and get up to £250,000 a year in the private sector, guarding journalists, oil-company execs and Iraqi officials. Sure, there'd be no army medevac chopper waiting in the wings, but £250,000 a year? Tax-free?
Occasionally you see a white-faced soldier in the canteen, his hair matted with sweat, taking half an hour to eat a carrot. You think: "Christ. What have you just been doing?" I suppose if I was a proper reporter I'd have asked, but more often than not someone was in the middle of a funny story, so I never did.
Life for the troops is pretty hard. Most work 16 hours and then crash in their 12-man tent for eight. The helicopter-maintenance boys regularly pull 24-hour shifts, desperately trying to keep the mostly ancient fleet flying. Rest days are rare, and fairly useless, because there's sod-all to do. They can't leave the base for fear of being beheaded. They can't sunbathe because if they get burnt, they're put on a charge. They can't get drunk because the ration is two tins of beer a day. And they can't have sex because, they claim, 70% of the girls at the base are lesbians.
The good thing is that because they aren't allowed to do any fighting, they have plenty of time for cleaning, which means the camp is spotless. It's not well equipped, though, which was a problem for Adrian, who had brought so many changes of clothes, there hadn't been room in his bag for stuff like a towel, or a sleeping bag or a pillow. Or indeed anything you might actually need in a desert army camp. I went to buy cigarettes. The base shop only sells Marlboro reds. Why bother with low tar on a battlefield?
Interestingly, the only clothing on sale were Arctic padded jackets. Can't you just tell this is a government operation? Yes, if you then toddle off to the stores. The troops call it the Window of No, because no matter what you want, they haven't got it. Or they have got it but they won't give it to you. Tommy, our guide, had been wearing a pair of trousers two sizes too big since he arrived and can't get replacements. They didn't have a towel for Adrian. And while he was trying on some hats, which he thought would go well with his Roger Moore safari suit, there was another mortar attack. Possibly. It's hard to say for sure because the Tannoy system had obviously been salvaged from one of the railway stations Beeching closed down in 1963. It was completely incomprehensible, but we did think at one point the chap might have said "You're damned," so we donned our flak jackets and our hard hats, put the kettle on, and settled down to watch Northern Ireland vs Wales on Sky Sports. Actually, Adrian put his hard hat on. Sadly, as a joke, he'd bought one for me which was the size of an egg cup, so it wouldn't fit. But since we were indoors, on a base with a 25-mile perimeter fence, the chances of being hit seemed remote.
It seemed a bit weird, if I'm honest, being mortared while five hours away Ryan Giggs was doing football.
I felt Iraq was more interesting, if only I could find the right story. And that's hard when you're sitting in a storeroom on an army base, watching Adrian try on hats, and the only information you have is from a Tannoy system that doesn't work. You have to rely for hard news on the military, who only talk in abbreviations, so they're even less comprehensible than the public-address system.
We therefore went to the ranges to try out an AK-47. Adrian was very good, pumping round after round into the bull's-eye. I, on the other hand, was struggling to hit Iraq, so I wandered off into a nearby tent, where I found upwards of 50 Iraqis waiting for Adrian to give them their gun back.
At last. A chance to be a proper journalist. A chance to ask about their hopes and fears, and what on earth they were doing on a British base, being taught how to shoot. It turned out they had a question for me. There was much chatter, much nodding, then an expectant silence as the interpreter translated. "Who," they all wanted to know, "is the Stig?"
It seems the Shi'ites love Top Gear, so I was asked to pose for photographs. None of them was rude enough to ask why on earth another bloke wandered in and lay down at their feet so he could be in the picture too.
Finally, night fell. It's not a proper night, of course, thanks to the eerie flickering light from the burning oilfields, and the odd 40-watt bulb, which is all Iraq's feeble national grid can provide. Or, more likely, all that Gordon Brown's pathetic war budget can afford. But at least there's enough juice for the beer coolers.
Two tins. And I figured I'd be drowsy enough to get a decent night's kip in the superheated tent with old Sinus Face. The base's sniffer dogs get air conditioning. The soldiers don't. But it was not to be. At 11 o'clock, with yet another mortar attack in full swing, one of the Tristars thundered onto the runway and an army bod said we had to be on it.
I like to think the authorities were genuinely concerned for our safety. That it had been the busiest day in the whole two-year conflict and there'd been some political pressure to get the civilians out. But no. The Tristar had brought in teams from Fleet Street, along with all the big TV networks. And I'm afraid they wanted our beds for the proper journalists.
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