I landed at Rafic Hariri Airport at five in the morning. Friends had asked if Beirut was dangerous. I wanted to see. Basra had surprised me in the war, it was pleasant around the fighting"€”bartering for ice, chatting with locals, playing football with the children. When it did get dangerous, and ...

Three thousand miles from the fighting in Syria I was sat with Pakistanis who definitely wouldn’t be giving up their lives here in London for Raqqa. They fit somewhere inside the label of Muslim. Muslim can mean what you want it to. I bristle when I’m called one but that’s because ...

In Basic Training, we were given a set of civilian clothes which had to be worn whenever we weren"€™t in uniform. It was another uniform to make us all the same, they said. The barber's clipper performed the same function. Week One saw new recruits stand in a long line outside the camp ...

One of my sergeant majors was an airborne soldier and what he said was gospel to us. We young soldiers saw the wings on his arm and asked him what parachuting was like. He said it was the second-best feeling in the world. When we asked him the first he"€™d say, "€œWhat are you"€”fucking ...

September 11 happened as soon as I"€™d gotten to my first regiment. It was just after lunch and our full bellies were satisfied as they worked away on fish and chips, pudding and tea. The Army fed you well when at camp; in the field it was all baked beans heated in silver bags. The storeroom ...

The Army was obsessed with cleanliness. We"€™d crane our necks around the bottoms of toilets and plumbing pipes until we could see our tired faces in them. We"€™d show off our pipes to the other lads and say ours were better. Corporals wearing white gloves would test them with fingers. ...

Everything was bigger with the Yanks: their soldiers, their food, and their imaginations. I was in the cookhouse with them in Kuwait before we tore across the border. We Brits had small ration boxes and they had three times the food. We had come to fight if needed, but they had come to take over. ...

The Royal Engineers did anything the Army needed"€”from building bridges to crossing rivers, from building camps to clearing mines"€”so they needed to be tough soldiers. They needed to be able to take shit all day and all night and still carry on. They needed to never stop. There were mainly ...

Tony Blair was interrupted at the Leveson Inquiry last week by a protestor calling him a war criminal. It seems the Iraq War won"€™t go away for Blair. Leadership involves getting people to do what you want them to, even when they don"€™t want to do it. What you want them to do will be in your ...

Sunil* was a well-fed Indian shipping millionaire. I"€™d heard about him through people who worked for him. I was helping the British Army build a prison in Iraq and would wonder about Sunil. He was in charge, the workers would say, although he was hardly ever there. I knew how much he was ...