 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
|
E-mail your letter to the editor
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
Posted Sunday, April 20, 2003; 14.23 BST
|
 |
|
jamie wiseman
| cool under fire:
Moulton's Warrior took some hits, but the captain is still smiling |
|
|
|
Dashing but modest, understated and self-deprecating — that's the approach to war the British admire most. Even in a conflict that has claimed more British lives than any since the Falklands, Her Majesty's soldiers have a gift for underplaying their daring: the colonel who swaps his helmet for a tam-o'-shanter to walk an az-Zubayr street just liberated from Iraqi control; the sergeant who, after storming a building to rescue two terrified, badly beaten, captive Kenyan drivers, comments: "They were happy to see the boys. They'd had a stressful couple of days." In the same tradition, on Day 14 of the war, Captain James Moulton of the Irish Guards, 27, stuck his head and shoulders out of the turret of his Warrior armored vehicle to draw enemy fire while driving down the lethal "mortar mile" in a suburb of Basra. By making himself a target, Moulton helped British snipers and artillery pinpoint Iraqi positions.
Moulton's vehicle, like others in the armored convoy, drew rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and AK-47 automatic rifle fire, sometimes from as near as 20 meters. Two jagged holes left in the side of his vehicle provided proof of that. "I saw one RPG going across in front of us and another from the other side bounced off us. There was a lot whizzing around our heads and into the vehicles and we took a few direct hits," said Moulton, who comes from Lymington in southern England. "I was too busy trying to identify their positions to worry about being hit, but a few were quite close." Offering oneself for target practice, he said, is "very exciting" — a clinching understatement by any standards, even British.
|
|
Previous: 
