The compacted sand was like hard mud. It had looked alien before; now that it was covered in snow it looked like the moon. The snowfall turned into a blizzard. I tried to look on the bright side: at least it cut visibility down to about 150 feet.

Vehicles moved up and down all day, moving east and west as they followed the line of the pylons-civilian trucks, water bowsers, Land Cruisers, and armored, wheeled vehicles. The last two vehicles got us flapping because they came to within 600 feet of our position. Were they coming for us? Not that we could do much about it; we could hardly get up and run because there was nowhere to run to.

There were more vehicles than we were expecting, much more military activity, but that was not the major consideration now. Lying in the snow, lashed by a wicked wind, we were more concerned about keeping warm and keeping alive. We were physically exhausted and exposed to the wind. All the potential was here for a major drama. An already cold air temperature, combined with a strong wind, can produce an equivalent wind chill temperature that can kill. In a 30 mph wind, exposed flesh freezes in sixty seconds or less at just9 C. It was only much later that we learned that these were the worst weather conditions the region had experienced for thirty years. Diesel was freezing in vehicles.

From feeling secure I started to become seriously concerned. I’d seen people die in this sort of stuff. What a way to go, I thought, for the patrol to die of exposure rather than getting shot. I didn’t think I’d be able to bear the slagging.

We couldn’t sit up, because we would be silhouetted against the skyline. We were depending for concealment on the level of view: because they would have to look up, our hope was that the small wall would afford us cover as long as we kept still and kept down.

By 1100 the situation was getting out of control. We were huddled up, cuddling one another, shivering convulsively, muttering words of encouragement, making stupid irrelevant jokes. My hands were numb, frozen, and very painful. We had a mound of snow over us. It was a case now of sod the tactics, let’s try to survive. The balance was between breaking SOPs and therefore being compromised, and getting into such a bad condition that we would just die anyway. I decided that we’d have to break SOPs and get a brew on. I scraped a small hole and lit a hexy block. I filled a mug with water and held it over the flame. The heat on my hands and face was wonderful. I waved my hand to disperse the steam. I added coffee granules, sugar, and milk to the hot water and passed it around.

I immediately put on another brew of hot chocolate.

“Look at all that bloody steam,” said Dinger. “I might as well have a smoke.”

It was pathetic to watch him trying to light the cigarette. His hands were shaking so badly that he couldn’t get it in his mouth, and when he did it was soggy because his hands had been wet. He persisted, and five minutes later was inhaling contentedly, blowing the smoke into his smock to hide it.

By the time the hot chocolate came around everybody was shaking and gibbering again. The hot drink didn’t move us too many notches up the temperature chart, but it was better than a kick in the tits. Without a doubt, it had made the difference between life and death.

Come midday, vehicles were still passing. We couldn’t always see them but that didn’t matter. We’d hear them if they stopped. We tried to change around so that people on the outside who were exposed to the wind and snow had the chance to be surrounded by the others and get some body warmth. As our body core temperatures continued to drop, I realized that my speech was slurring and I was feeling very lightheaded. I was suffering from the first stages of hypothermia.

At about 1400 Mark realized that he was in deep trouble. “We’ll have to get going in a minute,” he blurted. “I’m starting to go down here.”

He was wearing less than the rest of us. All he had on his chest was his smock, shirt, and jumper, and those were soaking wet. We got around him and tried to give him our body heat. A decision had to be made, and we all had to be in on it because it affected us all: did we move in daylight to help Mark survive but risk a compromise? There were hours of daylight and we didn’t know what was out there. Or did we wait until the very last moment, when he thought he simply couldn’t take any more?

I tried to encourage him to hold on. “If we’ve got to move in half an hour, fine, but let’s try and stay here as long as we can.”

If he had shaken his head and said he needed to move, I would have got up without a murmur, but he nodded his assent.

By the time another two hours had elapsed it wasn’t just Mark who needed help. All of us were in a desperate state. If we stayed static, we’d be dead by the evening.

I peered over the wall. There was only about an hour and a half of daylight left; the cloud cover and snow would make it dark earlier. It was still snowing hard. I couldn’t see or hear anything, apart from the sight of a typically arid desert scene, covered in a blanket of thick snow.

“Let’s go,” I said.

We put in a deception plan because we would be leaving a lot of sign in the snow, though hopefully it would snow or rain during the night and destroy our trail. We headed east, then did a loop to end up going towards the northwest. The deception plan proved to be a good move because we were no more than a half mile off the position when we heard hooting and hollering behind us. We turned and saw lights. Vehicles were in and around our position.

“Shit!” Legs said. “All they’ve got to do now is follow the sign.”

But it was starting to get dark, and the tracks and footprints of the Iraqis must have got mixed up with ours and confused them.

The plan had been to head northwest after crossing the meta led road, then take the shortest route to the Syrian border. If we’d started to head northwest this side of the road, the chances were that we’d be compromised because of the movement we had seen during the day. But now the plan had to change. Water was going to be a problem soon. We’d filled up our bottles with snow, but even in the best of circumstances it takes a long time to melt and produces little water anyway. In our case, the weather was so cold that it stayed as snow and ice. You can’t eat snow. Not only does it waste crucial body heat melting in your mouth, but it cools the body from the inside, chilling the vital organs in the body core. We didn’t know where and when we’d be able to get water again. We had to get to the border as soon as possible.

The second, and more important, consideration behind our change of plan was the weather. We were on high ground, about 900 feet above sea level, and to the northwest it got higher still. The wind chill factor in these conditions was horrendous. The temperature was low anyway, but the wind took it bitterly, freezingly lower. We needed to get out of the wind, and we needed to get off the snowline. However, the chances of getting out of the wind were slim because the ground afforded no cover.

Like all water systems the Euphrates follows the low ground. The river was 400 or 500 feet lower than we were, so if we headed north towards it we would not only come off the snowline but hopefully also find protection from the wind.

We headed north. We could worry about the west a bit later; it was just imperative that we got off this high ground or we’d die.

A mile and a half from our stone-wall LUP we came off the snowline. I was horrendously pissed off. If only we could have made the extra bit of distance that morning, we wouldn’t have spent the entire day lying in snow. We still had a desperate problem with wind chill I had my shamag wrapped around my head and the compass in front of me as we marched on a bearing. My left hand was crooked with my thumb over the luminous part of the compass and my smock pulled over my hand as much as I could to keep out the cold. I cradled my weapon in my right arm. I looked down and saw that my smock had frozen solid. It was iced over like a pond. The shamag, too, was solid around my face. I wanted to adjust it, but it was as stiff as a board.