Hill had survived a bloody ambush in which rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) were launched at two Land Rovers. The lead vehicle was hit and burst into flames: Hill jumped from the one behind and helped organise the evacuation of several severely burnt casualties while still under fire. Two soldiers, neither from the Rifle Volunteers, later died of their wounds. Some time later, Hill was driving an unarmoured four-ton truck in a convoy heading for Salamanca Company’s base when it came under heavy attack by RPGs and small arms. The unit’s Colour Sergeant, Tony Smith, was riding “top cover” – head and upper body exposed above the cabin as he watched for snipers and roadside bombs. An AK-47 round hit him in the stomach: covered in blood, his entrails spilling out, he fell back on top of Hill. Almost immediately, Smith was wounded a second time by fragments of shrapnel. “Mark stayed very calm, radioing to base that I was a casualty,” he recalled. “They suggested that we should turn back, but Mark insisted on carrying on to the camp at top speed so that I could be airlifted directly to hospital.” Smith was operated on successfully by military surgeons, though he lost a kidney and some of his intestines. The bullet that struck him was left in place as it was dangerously close to the spine (it is still lodged in his body). Smith has no doubt that Hill’s coolness and presence of mind saved his life.
Before Salamanca Company’s six-month tour was over, it became the first TA unit in Iraq to be given full responsibility for its own area of operations, a 40-square-kilometre patch in which regular troops came under its command. Evans saw this as recognition of what the part-timers had achieved, underlined by the British commander’s decision that a regular unit would be needed to replace them when they left.
Foster recalls how a soldier from the 1st Battalion Cheshire Regiment – to which the Rifle Volunteers were attached – wandered up to him one day for a chat. “This little Scouser said, ‘’Ey, mate, you lot are pretty useful.’ I was well pleased.” Foster is adamant that none of the regulars he met ever called Salamanca Company “Stabs” – a contemptuous put-down meaning Stupid Territorial Army Bastards.
Mark Hill’s homecoming present for his wife, Lesley, was a secretly booked holiday at the Mexican beach resort of Cancun. They had been married for 23 years, had raised two children, and had birthdays close to each other in November: he wanted to celebrate the occasion in style.
On November 15, 2004, a week after they arrived in Mexico, Mark collapsed and died of a heart attack. He was buried with full military honours in the graveyard of his local church.
Without access to territorial manpower, Britain would be struggling to meet its military commitments in the Gulf. Well before the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair’s vigorous interventionist foreign policy – there were already troops in the former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan – was imposing severe strain on the armed forces. Despite warnings from the top brass about the dangers of operational “overstretch”, a series of defence reviews had progressively pared down spending on the military outgoings.
Regular infantry units, juggling with reduced budgets and recruitment problems, were under particular pressure in the run-up to Iraq: without absorbing reservists, they would have gone to war appreciably below full combat strength. While the fighting was still in progress, the then defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, axed four regular infantry battalions, citing “different challenges posed in the post-cold-war epoch”.
More than 3,000 part-time soldiers were called up for the invasion phase of the conflict, some at less than a week’s notice. The chronic shortage of trained specialists in the regular forces made reservists with skills suitable for intelligence, communications, logistical and IT work especially valuable. Medical staff were urgently required for military field hospitals, as were cooks to feed the troops strung out in the desert (which squaddies instantly christened the Gifa, or Great Iraqi F*** All).
For the first time in the TA’s history, reservists were being inserted directly into regular combat formations, rather than serving in support alongside them. The distinguished military commentator Sir John Keegan was among the stern critics of this strategy. “It is not a role of the Territorials to make good deficiencies in the regular forces during times of general peace,” he said. However cheerfully reservists answered the call, the wholesale disruption of civilian careers would inevitably hit recruitment. “At the end of the day, when politicians get their paws on defence issues, it almost always boils down to the money,” says a retired general, who asked not to be named. Although most reservists receive exactly the same daily pay on duty as their regular counterparts – £32.36 for a private, £124.41 for a major – and collect an annual tax-free gratuity ranging from £519 to £1,641, they are far more cost-effective in the field. As Britain will never again maintain a large standing army, the general reasoned, the TA should get used to providing a “permanent substitute’s bench” for operational use.
Yet as Britain’s most senior soldier, General Sir Mike Jackson, has warned, the rate at which reservists have been fed into Iraq so far could prove impossible to sustain for much longer. Current regulations rule out the deployment of TA soldiers on operational service for more than 12 months continuously over any three-year period. As a result, one serving officer complains, reservists with precious experience of Iraq and Afghanistan are off limits “just when they are most needed”. Jackson sometimes jokes that he is living proof that a stint with a TA unit – the Paras in his case – need not be the kiss of death for ambitious regulars. But within the tight, tribal world of the professional soldier, the Territorials have always struggled to be taken seriously. As Britain mobilised for the first world war, Lord Kitchener dismissed them as “an army of town clerks” – though that was before they won more than 70 Victoria Crosses.
One recently retired staff officer insists that reservations about the TA’s battlefield capacity are not simply a kneejerk reaction from an inbred military caste, “rubbishing the weekend warriors”. The truth, he says, is that modern warfare has become so intense that few reservists can achieve the required levels of fitness and fighting skills. Unlike Salamanca Company, some Territorial contingents deployed in Iraq had received no more than two weeks’ special training over and above their minimum peace-time commitment: three evenings and one Sunday a month, plus six weekends and a fortnight’s annual camp.
Once the opening phase of the war was over and the army had settled into what amounted to garrison duties in southern Iraq, a degree of friction undoubtedly developed between reservists and the regulars. A 32-year-old junior noncommissioned officer, who asked to be identified only as Jill, told the British media that she had been sickened by her experience in Basra. The regulars had treated reservists like outcasts, she claimed. “As some patrols leave, they aim their guns at the TA soldiers on the main gate and shout, ‘Kill the Stabs.’ We were made to eat at separate tables, live in TA-only tents, and when it comes to flying home [we] were often held back, with priority going to regulars. The atmosphere was terrible. I wish I’d never gone.”
