I was born in London in 1982. I grew up in the UK and Germany with my younger sister, Carey Mulligan (whom I believe has since done a bit of acting). I read history at Oxford, followed by about eleven minutes as north London’s worst teacher. The school in Enfield was like The Hunger Games. My one outlet was weekends with the Territorial Army, bayonetting straw-filled dummies on Salisbury Plain.
It was December 2005. With an impressive disregard for the fact that Iraq wasn’t so much teetering on the brink of a civil war as standing in thin air ten feet clear of the brink and staring comically at the camera, Wile E Coyote style, the British government had just made a very hefty troop commitment to Afghanistan.
The army needed troops and, judging by the number of mobilisation letters now going around the TA, we were well past barrel-scraping territory. In fact, it seemed a lot like the barrel was upside down and being banged on the bottom to see if any dregs fell out. It was clear that if I wanted, I could be one of those dregs. Aged 23, I volunteered for a seven-month tour.
Thursday, January 5, 2006, London
Mobilisation paperwork arrived today; an envelope marked “On Her Majesty’s Service”. I will deploy to Iraq in April on Operation Telic 8, with a regiment called the Queen’s Royal Hussars (QRH). They are based in Sennelager, Germany, and I am to get myself out there to join them for predeployment training as soon as possible.
Tuesday, January 10, Sennelager
I arrive in Sennelager having done a bit of research on the QRH, and am beginning to feel a sense of impostor syndrome. The QRH have been to Iraq before. Not to mention Kosovo, Bosnia and Northern Ireland. They are probably one of the most operationally experienced units in the army today.
I think back to my four weeks of panicked TA officer training at Sandhurst. We’d gone through the motions with patrols and platoon attacks, but a month is not long to learn how to be a soldier. I reassure myself that whatever the grown-ups want me to do in Iraq, it will be in keeping with my limited military skills. Probably something in the operations room or some kind of liaison job.
Wednesday, January 11, Sennelager
I will be leading a fighting troop in Basra. My new squadron leader, a major called Jonty, delivers the news as if he’s telling me I’ve won the Thunderball draw. Apparently B Squadron are short of an officer, so I’m now Third Troop leader. I try not to be sick in my mouth. It’s not like I haven’t led a troop before. But that was cosplaying around Wiltshire with half a dozen TA soldiers, all of whom would go back to being accountants or electricians on Monday morning, no matter how many times I got them “killed”.
I walk to the tank park to meet the troop. I introduce myself as their new troop leader — glossing over the fact that last week I was a humanities teacher — and stammer a few details about the next months’ training that Jonty has just told me about. I’m not expecting anyone to leap onto a chair and start shouting, “O Captain! My Captain!”, but these lads are showing all the visceral emotion of pensioners who’ve fallen asleep listening to Test Match Special. On the other hand they don’t look visibly mutinous either. And I haven’t thrown up all over my shoes. So I’m counting it as a win.
Sunday, April 16, Basra Air Station
We’ve flown to Basra in southern Iraq. A hugely fat RAF corporal clambers onto a box for our arrival brief. He cracks a tired gag about the local time being 0030, “but you will probably want to set your watches back 300 years”. Which earns him nothing but bored stares from the squadron. He then reminds us that the airfield is being mortared regularly and that if we hear a siren, we are to put on our helmets and take cover. “Aye, behind you,” someone mutters, which does get a laugh.
Saturday, April 22, Shaibah
We will be based in Shaibah Logistics Base, a few miles out in the dirty, greyish desert to the southwest of Basra, for the tour. I’m sharing a tent with the other troop leaders: Godders, Brooksie and Mike.
As well as the accommodation, there is a gym, a cookhouse and a tent with a TV and a game of Risk with half the pieces missing. This has been optimistically dubbed the Recreation Area.
Finally there is “ALI SHOP”, a cabin run by the eponymous Ali, who is beaming, squat and would make Del Boy look like Jude the Apostle. It’s stocked to the ceiling with soft drinks, DVDs and plastic keyrings. What Ali lacks in possessive apostrophes he makes up for in an absolute disregard for copyright law; the covers of all this year’s big film releases already line his shelves (though I’m not sure I recall the bit in Pirates of the Caribbean where a shirtless Indian Jack Sparrow fires an Uzi into the air). We haven’t been there five minutes before he has sold us a TV and a box set of Glee.
Just across the taxiway from our new home, called Tiger Lines in honour of the regimental nickname for the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, sits the Welfare Village. The centrepiece is a café that does hot drinks, snacks and allegedly — if you ask a particular female barista — discreet sexual favours. This causes great excitement among the boys until it transpires that the barista resembles a moody Sir Ian McKellen.
Wednesday, April 26, Shaibah
We are in the troop leaders’ tent, slowly working out that the TV Ali has sold us does not in fact work, when there is a distant thump. “What the f*** was that?” I ask. “Door,” says Godders. “Mortar,” says Brooksie. Then comes another bass thump. “Mortar,” all of us say simultaneously.
We know the drill: body armour, helmet, take cover on the floor. But that sounded like it was a long way away, and no one wants to look like a massive jessie. Particularly not when it’s their first time. So everyone is careful not to fasten up their body armour any quicker than anyone else. Then we lie on the floor and giggle.
There are four more thumps, none of which seem particularly close. Five minutes pass. There are no more thumps. We sit up, unsure what to do next. Mr Kite, the squadron sergeant major, pokes his head inside the tent. “Sirs, doing a headcount. Any casualties?”
Mr Kite lives in the tent next door. You’d have thought that if there were indeed casualties in our tent, his first clue might have been an earth-shattering explosion about fifteen yards away. Perhaps our ruined limbs raining down onto his roof.
“Erm, no, sarn’t major,” says Godders.
He looks at us reproachfully. “You should be lying down, sirs — set an example to the boys, like.” We slide down the side of the tent until we are prone again. Technically we have now been under contact. But as first bloodings go, it’s a pretty benign one.
Saturday, April 29, Shaibah
Today is the day of our first patrol. It’s what the army calls a “familiarisation patrol”; the experienced outgoing unit takes the box-fresh incoming unit out on the ground.
I head down to the operations room with the other troop leaders to get a briefing. We are taking over from the Fusiliers and they have sent over their intelligence officer, Jeremy. We sit at a map table, which Jeremy has marked up with coloured stickers for every incident that has happened to them over the past six months. There are a lot of bloody stickers. Reds are improvised explosive devices, Jeremy says, blue is for small arms, purple is indirect fire and green is public order.
“What about yellow?” asks Mike abruptly. “Yellow?” “Yes, yellow. Down there, by Shaibah. You’ve just rubbed it off with your elbow.” “Oh yes, that,” Jeremy says. He sticks it back on the map, next to Shaibah’s front gate. “Suicide bombings.”
“Suicide bombings?” repeat at least 75 per cent of Jeremy’s audience incredulously. Yes, says Jeremy, suicide bombings. Two weeks ago a patrol was leaving Shaibah when a Toyota Corolla drew up next to them and exploded. No one had been killed, but it had made a mess of a Snatch Land Rover and four soldiers had been badly hurt.
We walk over to the tank park and a pair of waiting Warriors. Godders and I get in the nearest one. A couple of Fusilier privates are sitting in the back finishing their fags. The Warrior lurches off and the patrol commander briefs us in Geordie over our personal role radios. We are going to skirt the edges of Basra but stay clear of the city itself. There is intelligence about an ambush and he is understandably not excited about “getting fookin’ whacked wi’ two deeys left on the tour showing fookin’ Ruperts the area”. Before I’ve even processed it all, we are outside the wire.
Psychologists call it “hypervigilance”; an elevated state in which your senses are on a constant nerve-jangling 360-degree scan for threats. I am scared rigid. It doesn’t seem possible that I won’t shortly be wiping Godders’s brains off my upper lip while the Warrior goes up in flames around me. From the way Godders is gesticulating madly at a boy on a bicycle, whom he clearly believes is seconds away from exploding, I sense that he’s going through something similar.
At the edge of the city I see the squat, flat-roofed buildings of al-Hayyaniyah. It’s also known as the Shia Flats and is the poorest — and diciest — part of the city, riddled with militia. Any patrol that does go in there is guaranteed to get “fookin’ smashed to fook”, the patrol commander tells us. Grinning, he shows us his map. A month ago some unseen marksman in the Shia Flats had shot it clean out of his hands. I am fairly sure that if someone had put a 7.62mm hole in a piece of paper that I was holding nine inches away from my face, they’d still be waving the smelling salts under my nose and trying to coax me out of my helmet. But he seems to find the whole thing hilarious.
Afterwards, the patrol commander drops us off at Tiger Lines and tells us not to worry, sirs; Basra’s a walk in the park, really. Aye, fookin’ Jurassic Park. Classic.
Saturday, May 6, Shaibah
The first sign that something has gone wrong is when we see Jonty running past our tent just after lunch. “They’ve shot down a Lynx helicopter in the city. Get your boys ready. We’re on 30 minutes’ notice to move.”
I clatter into Third Troop’s tent and give them the news with all the measured gravitas of a Year 9 telling everyone there’s a massive fight in the corridor. Within seconds their tent is a whirlwind — Griffiths, Buxton and Schofield sprinting off to start the Snatches, everyone else chucking ammunition into daysacks and fixing slings to rifles. My troop sergeant, Mason, who is of course already packed, is doing probably the most important job of all — standing quietly by the tent flap, 16st of pure Zen, looking like this kind of thing happens every day.
Except it doesn’t. You can tell by the grim look on people’s faces as they stalk past, and by the sound of 35 Warriors roaring into life. This is as bad as it gets.
I find Jonty in the cookhouse, map spread over one of the tables, surrounded by the other troop leaders. “About half an hour ago, a Lynx out of the Air Station crashed smack in the middle of the city,” he says. “It’s about 500 metres from the OSB [Old State Building]. Based on what the guys on guard there are saying, it was shot down, likely by a Manpad.” He pauses. Manpads — man-portable air defence systems — are probably a new one on him as well. The militia aren’t supposed to have Manpads.
“Apparently it’s come down partly on a roof, partly in an alleyway, and it’s still on fire. No confirmation on casualties yet, but there were five on board. There’s already a platoon at the crash site — they reckon there’s zero chance anyone’s alive. They’re trying to get a cordon in place but half the city has turned up, so it can’t be long before it all goes Black Hawk Down.”
I swallow, and look around at the other troop leaders. We’ve all seen the film. Both the battlegroups in the city are inbound to the crash site now, and there is a high chance we’ll be going too. Even if the cordon doesn’t get breached it’s going to take them hours to extract everyone from the wreckage.
I run over to the tank park to give the boys the latest. They don’t have any questions, they simply go back to prepping their kit. I feel a sudden burst of violent affection. They know as well as I do that the helicopter crew are probably all dead and there will be a crowd of thousands gathering at the crash site, while the militia gunmen slip quietly into position around the cordon. Yet if we were told to go, they’d climb into their battered Snatches without a word and drive straight there. Not bad for 16 grand a year.
Eventually we are stood down, not least because it gets dark and most of the locals pack it in. Getting the bodies out ends up taking all night, but they will be going home.
Sunday, May 21, Camp Abu Naji
It starts like it always does: a distant whump. We’re at Camp Abu Naji (CAN) in al-Amarah. Al-Amarah is the capital of Maysan province and has quite the spicy reputation. My watch says a quarter past four in the morning; I can’t see much, but I hear the tearing of Velcro tabs as body armour is shrugged on. The person next to me rolls over and mutters, “For f***’s sake.”
The explosion, when it comes, is less a sound and more a whole body experience. We find out later that the mortar round hit the corner of the neighbouring building, turning it into a shattered mess.
Another round slams in nearby, rocking the building. From the corner of the room, where some of the female Royal Logistic Corp drivers have put up their cot beds, I hear someone start to cry. I’m not far from tears myself. This is utterly horrific.
The detonations — half a dozen deafening crashes — aren’t even the worst of it. It’s the hideous silence between each one. I am close to panic. Then, thank you God, the barrage starts moving on.
Someone turns the lights on; they’ve been off this whole time, which is just as well given I’ve spent the past ten minutes looking like Munch’s The Scream.
Half the cot beds are on their sides. A few of the boys look pale. Presently, Mr Kite intimates that we should all shut the f*** up and listen in. There are casualties in the female accommodation, two buildings over. They need medics and they need them now.
We don’t yet know the barrage is over, but our medics, Buxton and Womack, don’t hesitate. Dumb with pride, I watch as they simply nod, heft their medical packs and run out into the night.
Monday, May 22, Camp Abu Naji
Jonty gives us the latest on yesterday’s attack. Clearly something this big means the local militias had help. According to the CAN intelligence cell there is no shortage of candidates, and their theories abound. There are rumours of mysterious convoys of cars from Najaf, out to the west, as well as up from Basra. Alternatively, given the Iranians are themselves supplying the rockets, it’s not inconceivable that they’ve sent a few lads to help fire them too.
Astonishingly no one has actually been killed, but a Royal Engineer has lost his leg. The females in the building near ours have some bad cuts from shrapnel, but haven’t been seriously hurt. Mentally, they’re still in battle shock; according to Buxton, trying to get a field dressing on them had been like bathing a stray cat. He and Womack don’t seem any the worse for the experience, but I tell them I’m here to talk if they want. Fat lot of good it’d do them — I feel a bit like breaking out a feelings wheel myself, and I didn’t even see any blood.
But it’s the first time anyone has made a very concerted effort to kill me. And while I know that whoever was firing those mortars doesn’t have the first clue about me — I’m just a small cog in an idolatrous horde that shouldn’t be here — for some weird reason it feels intensely personal. And even more weirdly, somehow as if they’ve made a mistake. It’s probably to do with upbringing. I’ve spent 20 years being told what a special little flower I am; winning prizes at school and sitting in candlelit halls at Oxford while white-haired men chunter on about how much I’m going to achieve. So the idea that someone would want to erase all that in an eyeblink just doesn’t make sense.
Saturday, August 6, Kumayt
We’ve been sent to inspect 3/4/10 — the 3rd Battalion, 4th Brigade, 10th Division of the Iraqi army. I’ve been allocated the armoury, where there are rumours of 20 rifles having gone missing. “Welcome!” cries the quartermaster, pumping my fist. “Hello-how-are-you? I-Major-Hassan. I-am-pleased-to-meet-you. Luvvly-jubbly!”
Via our interpreter, Suleiman, we establish that I am here to do an inspection. Major Hassan looks suddenly hurt. This is clearly not very luvvly-jubbly information.
“This battalion,” Suleiman translates, “is a good battalion. An honest battalion.” Major Hassan picks up a pistachio nut from a bowl on the table and holds it in front of me. “In this battalion, not so much as a pistachio has ever gone missing ” At this point Suleiman coughs politely and mutters something in Arabic.
“…Apart from 20 rifles,” continues Major Hassan without missing a beat. “And they are not really lost. We’ll find them soon.”
Then he eats the pistachio, presumably for emphasis. I have to hand it to him; he has the oratory down pat. And he needs to — within 20 minutes it’s clear he’s presiding over a web of embezzlement and fraud that would have made Imelda Marcos look like a Carmelite nun.
Sunday, August 7, Kumayt
I’m not the only one discovering that not all is as it seems in 3/4/10. According to Mike, they’re being sent wages for about 150 soldiers whom he’s almost certain do not exist. And Godders has spent the best part of 12 hours in a heated debate with the 3/4/10 ops officer about exactly what the battalion does all day. At one point he’d queried the lack of any patrol reports. Returning after lunch he’d been heartened, and even a little remorseful — perhaps he’d been a bit too quick to judge — to find two lever-arch files full of them. He’d been a bit less remorseful when he opened the first file to find 50 identical reports, each written in the same pen, all of which when translated turned out to say, “We went on patrol. It was good. Everyone really liked us.”
Saturday, August 12, Kumayt
It’s our last night in Kumayt; we’ll be leaving at the crack of dawn tomorrow. Most of B Squadron is asleep. I sit with Griffiths and Buxton, chatting about their plans for when we get home. Buxton is going to be a paramedic. Taking care of the wounded the night it all went sideways in CAN gave him more satisfaction than three years of soldiering. Griffiths will be staying in. There’s nothing for him where he comes from; most of his mates are either in nick, addicted to something or both. They ask what I’m going to do. I say something about teaching again. Will I hell — I’d rather end my days working as a harem maid to 3/4/10 than go back to Enfield. In truth, I don’t yet know.
In fact, I spent the next three years in the civil service before rejoining the army in 2010 for 18 months’ language training and two tours of Afghanistan attached to UK special forces. I completed an MBA in 2014 and have spent the past ten years as a management consultant. I live in London with my wife, and two children who make Iraq and Afghanistan seem like an afternoon at the bowls.
© Owain Mulligan 2025. Extracted from The Accidental Soldier: Dispatches from Quite Near the Front Line, published on April 10 (Hodder & Stoughton £22). Order a copy at timesbookshop.co.uk. Discount for Times+ members. All the author’s royalty earnings from sales of this book will be donated to the charity War Child (warchild.org.uk)
