“Put in a good word for us,” he grinned when he recognized me. “You lot could do with a fucking decent sc rum-half.”

Mark passed Selection and joined the squadron just before we left for the Gulf.

“Fucking good to be here, mate,” he said as he came into my room and shook my hand.

I’d forgotten that there was only one adjective in the Kiwi’s vocabulary and that it began with the letter f.

The atmosphere in our hangar was jovial and lively. The Regiment hadn’t been massed like this since the Second World War. It was wonderful that so many of us were there together. So often we work in small groups of a covert nature, but here was the chance to be out in the open in large numbers. We hadn’t been briefed yet, but we knew in our bones that the war was going to provide an excellent chance for everybody to get down to some “green work”-classic, behind-the-lines SAS soldiering. It was what David Stirling had set the Regiment up for in the first place, and now, nearly fifty years later, here we were back where we’d started. As far as I could see, the biggest restrictions in Iraq were likely to be the enemy and the logistics: running out of bullets or water. I felt like a bricklayer who had spent my entire life knocking up bungalows and now somebody had given me the chance to build a skyscraper. I just hoped that the war didn’t finish before I had a chance to lay the first brick.

We didn’t have a clue yet what we’d have to do, so we spent the next few days preparing for anything and everything, from target attacks to setting up observation posts. It’s all very well doing all the exciting things-abseiling, fast roping, jumping through buildings-but what being Special Forces is mostly about is thoroughness and precision. The real motto of the SAS is not “Who Dares Wins” but “Check and Test, Check and Test.”