HIRED GUNS

In early 2004, six black SUVs bolted down the main road into Baghdad, weaving past other vehicles at a frenetic pace. Too slow and an insurgent watching from one of the ruined buildings lining their route could detonate an IED, or improvised explosive device.

Baghdad had fallen to American troops in April 2003, a year earlier. Operation Iraqi Freedom — the invasion of Iraq by a United States-led coalition — had birthed a destabilising insurgency throughout the country. Although the operation had moved into a “reconstruction phase”, Baghdad remained deeply unsafe. In March 2004, three suicide bombers positioned around al-Kadhimiya Mosque in Baghdad’s north had simultaneously detonated their vests, killing at least 58 worshippers and injuring more than 200 others. Military personnel operating in Baghdad were trained to treat anyone who approached them as a potential suicide bomber and to consider every building a potential insurgent hideaway.

Two Kiwis sat behind the SUVs’ tinted windows. They had arrived in Iraq just hours before. The convoy was rushing them from the airport to their accommodation, where they would start new jobs as private military contractors — what some would call mercenaries.

“[We] were heading down the main street. I can’t remember which street it was, one of the main streets into Baghdad City,” recalls one, who I will call Rawiri. The road was likely “Route Irish”, the hazardous 12-kilometre stretch between Baghdad International Airport and the semi-protected Green Zone in the central city. In 2005 the New York Times compared driving down Route Irish to “a form of Russian roulette”.

Partway along their route, the convoy was fired on by insurgents in the surrounding buildings, armed with AK-47s. Even though the SUVs were heavily armoured, there was a risk of a “complex attack”, where small arms fire, belt-fed machine guns, IEDs and rocket-propelled grenades would combine to form what Rawiri calls “a death trap”.

Rawiri grins. “And it was then, I was sitting there thinking, ‘Man, what the hell are we doing here? Should have just stuck to Call of Duty.’”

The three children began to scream. “I think some of them might have been shot as well, I’m not sure.”

But this was what Rawiri had wanted. He had dedicated much of his adult life to the New Zealand Army. After leaving school in the late 1980s to work as a dairy farmer, Rawiri joined the artillery. At 18, he was posted to 161 Battery, which shared Papakura Camp with the elite Special Air Service. “We were very competitive. In rugby, boxing. We did the military marathon in 1991, where we ran 42 kilometres carrying 20kgs, to break the Guiness [World Record].”

The first New Zealand combat unit to go to Vietnam, 161 Battery had a reputation as a high-performing fighting force. Within months, Rawiri was training to deploy to the first Gulf War. But the call never came: our contribution was limited to