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Welcome to the
OP Telic 6 (IRAQ) Section
Battalion Articles
The following information has recently been
submitted for the next edition of the Guards
Magazine
A Sombre Mood
Lance Sergeant B Sutherland
I have written this article to help explain the mood
and feeling within No1 Company Coldstream Guards who
are currently serving with 1 Staffords Battle Group
(Task Force Maysaan) in Al Amarah. The regrettable
circumstances the Battle Group finds itself in at
present are considerably less than ideal. This was
brought home with a vengeance on the night of 16th
July when three members of the Staffordshire
Regiment who were serving in the Battle Group were
killed by an Improvised Explosive Device (IED)
hidden by the side of a road. The following night No
1 Company was tasked to make a show of strength in
the area of the previous night’s incident, and it is
this night I wish to describe.
I deployed as part of a Half - Multiple of some
considerable experience, consisting as it did of 2
Platoon Sergeants, 1 Lance Sergeant, 2 Lance
Corporals and a Guardsman. As
 we were forming up at
the guardroom we heard an almighty explosion; this,
together with a threat warning suggesting that there
was a Vehicle-Borne IED roaming around town and the
previous night’s devastating events, immediately put
my nerves on edge. At this point it would have been
difficult to speculate on the mood of the rest of my
Half – Multiple; however all the quips, one liners
and daft jokes Guardsmen are famous for seemed to
have suddenly stopped.
The Company Sergeant Major gave the order to mount
up. As our Snatch Armoured Land Rovers had been
placed out of use due to their limited armour, we
all piled into the some what cramped rear of a
Warrior Armoured Fighting Vehicle. We then set off
on the journey to the southern part of Al Amarah; a
journey which, though short in distance, seemed to
take ages. This may have been due to the extreme
heat and lack of air conditioning in the back of the
vehicle, or maybe because no one was talking. It
seemed to me that nothing was really worth saying.
The little internal light was on in the back and as
I looked round the back of the vehicle at my
companions I could see obvious concern and
apprehension in each of their faces from the most
experienced right down to the Guardsman who was shoe
horned in to the corner (I suppose rank does have
its privileges after all).
Approximately 15 minutes into the journey the
Multiple Commander, in what I believe was an
unconscious reaction to what he and each of us was
seeing in the faces of the rest, turned the internal
light off. The darkness gave me a short respite to
dwell on my own thoughts which immediately turned to
my wife and family back home and the joke I had told
them before leaving. I had told them that if they
hear it on the news before a clergyman or a man in a
suit comes to visit then I’m OK; rather distasteful
and not funny in hindsight. I suppose at the time I
had taken it for granted that because I had done
three operational tours of Northern Ireland and one
of Bosnia and never had to cock my weapon in anger
that this tour would be similar. It had dawned on me
before I even deployed that this was a very
different kettle of fish and there was a very real
threat to life. However my attitude has always been
that this is what I agreed to do when I signed on
the dotted line, and this is what I have tried to
instil into the recruits I trained in the Infantry
Training Centre at Catterick for the last 2 years, a
lot of whom are now serving in this Company.
Once we got on to the ground all the uncertainty
seemed to dissipate into thin air. It makes me smile
when I hear phases like “the training took over”,
but maybe that’s what happened. The fact that we had
spent the journey encapsulated in the back of a
Warrior not being able to see where we were or where
we were going had no doubt added to the tension but
as soon as we hit the ground it was like any other
patrol. The training we had received and the
camaraderie that only a Guardsman has all seemed to
come to the fore and nothing else mattered.
This article is only my own personal rendition of
events and others present no doubt remember things
differently. But the air in the back of that Warrior
was definitely thicker than normal that night.
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