A week or two before Christmas, about 800 members of the Territorial Army (TA) found a buff official envelope among the greetings cards on the doormat. It contained formal notification that they were being called up for duty in Iraq, attached to the regular army brigade that will take over responsibility for the British-controlled southern sector in April. Many of these part-timers would effectively become frontline combat troops.
The latest mobilisation brings the number of TA soldiers, among them a significant amount of women, to have been sent to Iraq to around 13,000, constituting a truly representative cross section of British society. More TA soldiers are to be deployed in southern Afghanistan later this year. From high-flying City financiers, doctors and dustmen to truck drivers, teachers and civil servants, they were yanked off civvy street and into uniform, often at extremely short notice. Very few of them were aware that joining the “Terriers” had made them legally liable for active service: the last full-scale deployment of the reserves, during the Suez crisis in 1956, took place before most were born. At the last count, the TA was providing approximately 10% of Britain’s total army manpower in Iraq, and although five reservists have been killed and scores more wounded (specific figures are not available), the Ministry of Defence insists that motivation and morale remain high.
Yet by any measure, the war is seriously undermining the capability of a force originally established almost a century ago for “homeland defence”. With more than 6,000 reservists quitting since the beginning of 2005, the TA’s manpower is at an all-time low, and a £3m recruitment campaign on television has flopped. So far, says the Ministry of Defence, enough volunteers have come forward for Iraq duty to avoid the need to force recruits to serve there, but insiders believe this cannot be far off.
Records show that the haemorrhage began at the end of 2003, when the first batch of TA soldiers returned from Iraq after finishing their six-month tour. Though some had other reasons for leaving – financial, medical, family concerns – it is clear that the widespread unpopularity of the war in Britain was a huge factor. “I wasn’t mad-keen to go, but I’d been taking the TA’s money for years and I felt a kind of obligation,” says one reservist. But although he has no regrets, he wouldn’t dream of volunteering again. “Let’s face it – half the public think we’re out there doing President Bush’s dirty work.”
Behind a cluttered desk at the TA barracks in Taunton, Major Toby Evans tilts back his chair and recalls the moment his part-time soldiers first came under fire in Iraq. A former regular army officer, he was working on projects in the IT business when his battalion, the Rifle Volunteers, was mobilised for operational duty in the British-controlled Basra sector. The 85 infantrymen under his command in Salamanca Company were the first reservists to complete a rigorous 10-week training programme preparing them for active service. But there was no way of knowing how they would handle the initial shock of combat: very few had ever heard a shot fired in anger. “Essentially, we were expecting to learn on the job,” Evans observes.
Within a few days of arriving in Basra, Salamanca Company was mounting patrols through dusty streets simmering with tension. Islamic militants had infiltrated the battered city, intent on exploiting growing unrest among the many ordinary Iraqis enduring constant shortages of water and electricity in the sweltering heat. The army was braced for serious rioting, conceivably worse.
The first few weeks of the unit’s tour had passed quietly enough with monotonous bouts of guard duty at administrative headquarters in one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces. But everything changed on “Crazy Saturday”, May 8, 2004, when black uniformed fighters loyal to the radical Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr mounted a wave of attacks throughout Basra. “The first we knew was when a volley of rockets dropped into our compound,” Evans recalls. “When we deployed, there seemed to be gunmen on every corner.”
The reservists’ first “contact” – engagement with the enemy – soon followed. A rapid reaction squad led by Sergeant Paul Reeves, a printer from Exeter, was engaged in a fire fight with well-armed insurgents holed up in a row of houses. Early in the clash, Reeves was hit in the chest by a high-velocity rifle round: only his body armour saved him from serious injury or worse. “An inch higher and he’d probably have bought it, but he never said a word at the time,” Evans recalls. “For the next few hours, he carried on directing the attack on enemy positions.
It was only after they had been cleared that we discovered he had stopped a bullet.” Reeves’s courage and coolness under fire were later honoured with a Mention in Despatches (an acknowledgment of exceptional service).
In another incident, a Salamanca Company squad rushed to the scene of a terrorist attack in which three Iraqi civilians had been horribly injured. There was pandemonium in the street, and the ever-present threat of a follow-up ambush. “Our 18-year-old bank clerk took charge and tried to save the injured men’s lives,” says Evans. “Unfortunately, they all died, but no combat veteran could have handled things better than this untested young soldier.”
As the al-Sadr offensive intensified, the reservists became increasingly familiar with the high-pitched crack of AK-47 rifle fire and the thud of mortars being launched at their positions. “All that hard training really paid off,” recalls Corporal Andy Foster, an estate agent from Gloucester who is married with four children. “After a while, it seemed quite normal to have explosions going off around us.”
The steady, reassuring presence of Corporal Mark Hill, easily Salamanca Company’s oldest soldier, at 47, had a lot to do with this. A tall, ruggedly built former Grenadier Guards regular, Hill had served for two decades in the TA, with tours of duty in Northern Ireland and Sudan.
A storeman in civilian life, he was officially responsible for provisioning and the armoury, but insisted on doing his share of combat patrols.
