The lo adie gave the thumbs up and said something into his headset. The aircraft started to lift and I jumped. I hit the ground and looked up. The heli was climbing fast with the ramp still closing. Within seconds it was gone. It was 2100 and we were on our own.

We were on a dried-up riverbed. To the east was flatness and dark. To the west, the same.

The night sky was crystal clear, and all the stars were out. It was absolutely beautiful. I could see my breath. It was colder than we had been used to. There was a definite chill in the air. Sweat ran down the side of my face, and I started to shiver.

Eyes take a long time to adjust in darkness. The cones in your eyes enable you to see in the daytime, giving color and perception. But they’re no good at night. What takes over then are the rods on the edge of your irises. They are angled at 45 degrees because of the convex shape of the eye, so if you look straight at something at night you don’t really see it: it’s a haze. You have to look above it or around it so you can line up these rods, which then will give you a picture. It takes forty minutes or so for them to become fully effective, but you start to see better after five. And what you see when you land and what you see those five minutes later are two very different things.

Vince with his hoods was still out giving cover. They had gone out about 30 meters to the edge of the rise of the wadi and were looking over. We moved off to the side to make a more secure area. It took each of us two trips to ferry the berg ens jerricans, and sandbags.

Mark got out Magellan and took a fix. He squinted at it with one eye. Even small amounts of light can wreck your night vision, and the process must start all over again. If you have to look at something, you close the eye that you aim with, the “master eye,” and look with the other. Therefore you can still have 50 percent night vision, and it’s in the eye that does the business.

We lay in all-round defense, covering the whole 360degree arc. We did nothing, absolutely nothing, for the next ten minutes. You’ve come off a noisy, smelly aircraft, and there’s been a frenzy of activity. You have to give your body a chance to tune in to your new environment. You have to adjust to the sounds and smells and sights, and changes in climate and terrain. When you’re tracking people in the jungle you do the same: you stop every so often and look and listen. It happens in ordinary life, too. You feel more at ease in a strange house after you’ve been in it a little while. People indigenous to an area can sense instinctively if the mood is ugly and there’s going to be trouble; a tourist will bumble straight into it.

We needed to confirm our position because there’s often a difference between where you want to be and where the R.A.F put you. Once you know where you are, you make sure that everybody else in the patrol knows. Passage of information is vital; it’s no good just the leader having it. We were in fact where we wanted to be, which was a shame, because now we couldn’t slag the R.A.F when we got back.

The ground was featureless. It was hard bedrock with about two inches of rubbly shale over the top. It looked alien and desolate, like the set of Dr. Who. We could have been on the moon. I’d been in the Middle East many times on different tasks, and I thought I was familiar with the ground, but this was new to me. My ears strained as a dog barked in the distance.

We were very isolated, but we were a big gang, we had more weapons and ammunition than you could shake a stick at, and we were doing what we were paid to do.

Bombing raids were going on about 10-20 miles to our east and our northeast. I saw tracer going up and flashes on the horizon, and seconds later I heard the muffled sound of explosions.

Silhouetted in one of the flashes I saw a plantation about a mile to our east. It shouldn’t have been there, but it was-trees, a water tower, a building. Now I knew where the barking had come from. More dogs sparked up. They would have heard the Chinook, but as far as any population were concerned a helicopter’s a helicopter. Problems would only come if there were troops stationed there.

I worried about how good the rest of our information was. But at the end of the day we were there now: there wasn’t a lot we could do about it. We lay waiting for signs of cars starting up but nothing happened. I looked beyond the plantation. I seemed to be staring into infinity.

I watched the tracer going up. I couldn’t see any aircraft, but it was a wonderful, comforting feeling all the same. I had the feeling they were doing it just for us.

“Fuck it, let’s get on with it,” Mark said quietly.

I got to my feet, and suddenly, to the west, the earth erupted with noise and there was a blinding light in the sky.

“Fucking hell, what’s that?” Mark whispered.

“Helicopter!”

Where it had sprung from I didn’t have a clue. All I knew was that we’d just been on the ground ten minutes and were about to have a major drama. There was no way the heli could be one of ours. For a start, it wouldn’t have had its searchlight on like that. Whoever it belonged to, it looked as if it was coming straight towards us.

Jesus, how could the Iraqis be on to us so quickly?

Could they have been tracking the Chinook ever since we entered their airspace?

The light seemed to keep coming and coming. Then I realized it wasn’t coming towards us but going upwards. The bright light wasn’t a searchlight; it was a fireball.

“Scud!” I whispered.

I could hear the sighs of relief.

It was the first one any of us had seen being launched, and now that we knew what it was, it looked just like an Apollo moon shot, a big ball of exhaust flames about 6 miles away, burning straight up into the air until it finally disappeared into the darkness.

“Scud alley,” “Scud triangle,” both these terms had been used by the media, and now here we were, right in the middle of it.

Once everything had settled down, I went up and whispered in Vince’s ear for him to call the rest of the guns in. There was no running or rushing. Shape, shine, shadow, silhouette, movement, and noise are some of the things that will always give you away. Slow movement doesn’t generate noise or catch the eye so easily, which is why we patrol so slowly. Plus, if you run and fall over and injure yourself, you’ll screw everybody up.

I told them exactly where we were, and confirmed which way we would be going, and confirmed the RV that was forward of us. So if there was any major drama between where we were now and our proposed cache area and we got split up, everybody knew that for the next twenty-four hours there was a meeting place already set up. They would go north, eventually hit a half buried petroleum pipeline and follow that till they hit a major ridgeline, and we’d meet there. It had to be that vague because anything more precise would mean nothing to a bloke in the middle of the desert with just a map and compass: all the map shows is rock. After that, and for the next twenty-four hours, the next RV would be back at the point of the landing site.

Now we had to patrol up to the proposed cache area. We did it in a shuttle, as we had practiced, four blokes ferrying the kit, the other four giving protection, then swapping over. Because we were patrolling, everything had to be done tactically: we’d stop, check the ground ahead, and every couple of miles, when we stopped for a rest, the 4-man protection would go out; then we’d check the kit to make sure that we hadn’t dropped anything, that all pouches were still done up, and none of the sandbags had split.

The water was the worst because it was like carrying the world’s heaviest suitcase in one hand. I tried mine on the top of my bergen until the strain on my back got too outrageous. But then, nobody said it would be easy.