Most people take tubes of mustard or curry paste with them to jazz up the rations, and spicy smells emanated from areas where people were doing supplementary fry-ups. I wandered around and sampled a few. Everybody carries a “racing spoon” about their person at all times. The unwritten rule is that whoever has the can or is cooking up has first go, and the rest has to be shared. You dip your racing spoon in so that it’s vertical, then take a scoop. If it’s a big spoon you’ll get more out of a mess tin, but if it’s too big-say, a wooden spoon with the handle broken off-it won’t go into a can at all. The search for the perfect-sized racing spoon goes on.

There was a lot of blaggarding going on. If you didn’t like the music somebody was playing, you’d slip in when they weren’t there and replace their batteries with duds. Mark opened his bergen to find that he’d lugged a twenty-pound rock with him all the way from Hereford. Wrongly suspecting me of putting it there, he replaced my toothpaste with Uvistat sunblock. When I went to use it I bulked up.

I’d first met Mark in Brisbane in 1989 when some of us were being hosted by the Australian SAS (Special Air Service). He played against us in a rugby match and was very much the man of the moment, his tree trunk legs powering him to score all his side’s tries. It was the first time our squadron team had been beaten, and I hated him-all 5’6” of the bastard. We met again the following year. He was doing Selection, and the day I saw him he had just returned to camp after an eight-mile battle run with full kit.

“Put in a good word for us,” he grinned when he recognized me. “You lot could do with a fucking decent sc rum-half.”

Mark passed Selection and joined the squadron just before we left for the Gulf.

“Fucking good to be here, mate,” he said as he came into my room and shook my hand.

I’d forgotten that there was only one adjective in the Kiwi’s vocabulary and that it began with the letter f.

The atmosphere in our hangar was jovial and lively. The Regiment hadn’t been massed like this since the Second World War. It was wonderful that so many of us were there together. So often we work in small groups of a covert nature, but here was the chance to be out in the open in large numbers. We hadn’t been briefed yet, but we knew in our bones that the war was going to provide an excellent chance for everybody to get down to some “green work”-classic, behind-the-lines SAS soldiering. It was what David Stirling had set the Regiment up for in the first place, and now, nearly fifty years later, here we were back where we’d started. As far as I could see, the biggest restrictions in Iraq were likely to be the enemy and the logistics: running out of bullets or water. I felt like a bricklayer who had spent my entire life knocking up bungalows and now somebody had given me the chance to build a skyscraper. I just hoped that the war didn’t finish before I had a chance to lay the first brick.

We didn’t have a clue yet what we’d have to do, so we spent the next few days preparing for anything and everything, from target attacks to setting up observation posts. It’s all very well doing all the exciting things-abseiling, fast roping, jumping through buildings-but what being Special Forces is mostly about is thoroughness and precision. The real motto of the SAS is not “Who Dares Wins” but “Check and Test, Check and Test.”

Some of us needed to refresh our skills a bit swiftly with explosives, movement with vehicles, and map reading in desert conditions. We also dragged out the heavy weapons. Some, like the 50mm heavy machine gun, I hadn’t fired for two years. We had revision periods with whoever knew best about a particular subject-it could be the sergeant major or the newest member of the squadron. There were Scud alerts, so everybody was rather keen to relearn the NEC (nuclear, biological, chemical) drills they had not practiced since being in their old units. The only trouble was that Pete, the instructor from our Mountain Troop, had a Geordie accent as thick as Tyne fog and he spoke with his verbal safety catch on full automatic. He sounded like Gazza on speed.

We tried hard to understand what he was on about but after a quarter of an hour the strain was too much for us. Somebody asked him an utterly bone question, and he got so wound up that he started speaking even faster. More questions were asked, and a vicious circle was set in motion. In the end we decided among ourselves that if the kit had to go on, it would stay on. We wouldn’t bother carrying out the eating and drinking drills Pete was demonstrating, because then we wouldn’t have to carry out the shitting and pissing drills-and they were far too complicated for the likes of us. All in all, Pete said, as the session disintegrated into chaos, it was not his most constructive day-or words to that effect.

We were equipped with aviator sunglasses, and we enjoyed a few Foster Grant moments, waiting outside the hangar for anybody to pass, then slipping on the glasses as in the TV commercial.

We had to take pills as protection against nerve agents, but that soon stopped when the rumor went around that they made you impotent.

“It’s not true,” the sergeant major reassured us a couple of days later.

“I’ve just had a wank.”

We watched CNN news and talked about different scenarios.

We guessed the parameters of our operations would be loose, but that wouldn’t mean we could just go around blowing up power lines or whatever else we saw. We’re strategic troops, so what we do behind enemy lines can have serious implications. If we saw a petroleum line, for example, and blew it up just for the fucking badness of it, we might be bringing Jordan into the war: it could be a pipeline from Baghdad to Jordan which the Allies had agreed not to destroy so that Jordan still got its oil. So if we saw an opportunity target like that, we’d have to get permission to deal with it. That way we could cause the maximum amount of damage to the Iraqi war machine, but not damage any political or strategic considerations.

If we were caught, we wondered, would the Iraqis kill us? Too bad if they did. As long as they did it swiftly-if not, we’d just have to try and speed things up.

Would they fuck us? Arab men are very affectionate with each other, holding hands and so on. It’s just their culture, of course; it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re shit stabbers, but the question had to be asked. I wasn’t that worried about the prospect, because if it happened to me I wouldn’t tell. The only scenario that did bring me out in a sweat was the possibility of having my bollocks cut off. That would not be a good day out. If the rag heads had me tied down naked and were sharpening their knives, I’d do whatever I could to provoke them into slotting me.

I’d never worried about dying. My attitude to the work I am expected to do in the Regiment has always been that you take the money off them every month and so you’re a tool to be used-and you are. The Regiment does lose people, so you cater for that eventuality. You fill in your insurance policies, although at the time only Equity amp; Law had the bottle to insure the SAS without loading the premium. You write your letters to be handed to next of kin if you get slotted. I wrote four and entrusted them to a mate called Eno. There was one for my parents that said: “Thanks for looking after me; it can’t have been easy for you, but I had a rather nice childhood. Don’t worry about me being dead, it’s one of those things.” One was for Jilly, saying: “Don’t mope around-get the money and have a good time. PS 500 pounds is to go behind the bar at the next squadron piss-up. PPSI love you.” And there was one for little Kate, to be given to her by Eno when she was older, and it said: “I always loved you, and always will love you.” The letter to Eno himself, who was to be the executor of my will, said: “Fuck this one up, wanker, and I’ll come back and haunt you.”