Sniper 1 - Dan Mills

We were told that they were peace keeping, but there was no peace to keep.

And the expenditure in 6 months of 33,000 rounds of 5.56mm ammunition by 70 men just underlines it. That was more than the invasion used. And that was a few thousand troopers.

The exploits of the 1PWRR (Princess of Wales' Royal Regiment) Battlegroup have already been the subject of one entry in this blog and that one already mentioned the subject of the siege of CIMIC House. So why do another one? I hear you cry. 'Tis simple; Dan Mills was in it.

Sergeant Dan Mills was the boss (Sniper One) of the 19-strong Sniper Platoon attached to Y Company for the duration of the months long siege. It's a relatively rare event for such specialised soldiers (the sniping course is widely agreed to be the toughest in the army) to be deployed en masse; the usual convention is to be broken down into smaller teams and attached to regular line infantry on a shopping cart system and yet as with many other conventions, Operation Telic broke this one as well.

Sited at one corner of Al-Amarah and with the River Tigris acting as a moat for three sides, CIMIC house was the former residence of the governor, then taken over by the reconstruction agency who fretted at the sight of British GPMG's being installed on the roof next to the new Iraqi flag. However, it was the British Army that had the main say in how the place was fortified and used after a particularly memorable encounter between one of Mill's fellow sergeants and a rather obnoxious character from the reconstructors. Oh, and dealing with American security contractors and their own quartermaster who's safely back behind the lines and has just been told that his precious Mk5 flat bottom boats are no more:

'No, Sarn't Major, not your brand new boats too?
'Yes sir, the boats too.'
'But we only bought them in June! And at some considerable cost, as you well know.'
'Yes, I do know that sir.'
'Are you sure that they're completely unusable?'
'You could put it like that. They're at the bottom of the Tigris.'

And that's one of the main joys of this little book; a first-hand memoir that combines periods of intense fighting - including a rare but deadly '360 contact', numerous mortarings and the odd rocket strike - and the occasional bout of hilarity
(the fake girlfriend and the OC's discovery of a dud mortar).
Being a sniper's account however it's obvious where the bias to it all lies - in feats of shooting, and the shoots recounted are nothing short of spectacular, especially when a pair of "Royal Marines" turn up with a .50 caliber Barrett rifle and explosive ammunition...

Dan reflects on what it means to be a soldier on the frontline in one of the tensest and most harrowingly difficult operations this side of Afghanistan, those precious 6 months of spring to autumn 2004. The fifty-centigrade heat, the throat-stripping dust storms, the mortars, the harrassment, the counter-insurgency at which snipers excel, the armoured resupply convoys, the gut-wrenching fear of the ammunition running out, it's all here with photographs in a mere 350 pages; but what a memorable and enthralling account; I bought this book at 20 past 2 on a Friday afternoon, started reading and when I finished it was half past six, Saturday morning. As a companion book set in the same timeframe as Dusty Warriors, it's best to read them as a pair; Warriors for the overall picture and Sniper for a particular section of it.

There aren't many books that I can read and genuinely find myself unable to put it down without diving back in to see what happens next. This is one of them.

9 out of 10