60 miles west of Jalalabad, Afghanistan 17 June 1986

Last light I didn't know the name of the village, though we'd been through there many times. It was just a collection of mud huts on a plateau, three-quarters of the way down a mountain, in a snow-capped range halfway between Kabul and the Khyber Pass. We had to be out again by first light, when the Hinds would be back to hand out the early-morning news. If they spotted us, the gunships would annihilate the place, and anyone inside. That was how they did things.

We were in-country because the Ivans were in-country, and the West didn't want them to be. It wasn't the invasion they objected to. It was Soviet troops massed so close to the oil-rich Gulf. The sheiks were flapping, so the bad boys had to be persuaded to fuck off back to the land of vodka.

The mujahideen – soldiers of Allah – had only put up weak resistance to start with. Fragmented, and armed with no more than rifles and pistols, all they had going for them was their lifelong knowledge of the terrain and an unshakeable faith in their God.

That was when dickheads like me were told to get the maps out and see where the fuck Afghanistan was, then get our arses over from Hereford and help. We came, we saw, we dropped bridges, attacked police stations, built IEDs, and blew up armoured convoys. I wasn't wild about living in a cave, but other than that, I'd been having the time of my life.

'See that?'

'What, Nick?'

'Over there, in the alleyway. Looks like a body.'

'It will just be a girl,' Ahmad grunted. He wore the kind of expression you use when someone's just pointed out the shit on your shoe. 'We go on, Nick. We need food.'

My new best mujahideen mate cut away and gestured to the others to sort themselves out before the long tab back to our holes in the rock above the snowline.