Don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas . . . really. I love waking up on Christmas morning next to my gorgeous wife and presenting her with a gift I have tried – although admittedly not always successfully – to think carefully about buying. I love the Christmas morning shag and a hearty English breakfast – although not always in that order. And I do love vegging out in front of the TV after an excessive Christmas dinner, trying to keep my eyes open but never quite managing it. I just hate all the crap that goes with Christmas and the obscene commerciality of it all. It drives me mad, and every Christmas since leaving the Foreign Legion I have vowed to escape to somewhere better, sunnier and infinitely more exciting.

But I didn’t really expect to be going to bloody Iraq again!

After my first stint in the hellhole of the universe, I was told many times, by many people, that one tour would never be enough. Like a virus, the bug of war wiggles its wretched way into the soul of a true soldier and embeds itself for all eternity – or at least until the nagging wife really does pack her bags and leave. Even then, I have met many soldiers who have endured failed marriages and relationships just to get back to the front line, listening to the sweet sound of bullets whizzing by their heads and the thud and mayhem of the mortar shell. After my first spell in the ‘sandpit’, I half-heartedly said I wouldn’t be going back – that one tour was enough – but I think deep inside I knew I would. Just one more trip, and it would help with the bills and go towards a nice car. It might even pay off a bit of the mortgage.

I am a former French Foreign Legion soldier, or a Legionnaire as we are usually more affectionately called. For some reason, I didn’t fancy joining the British Army and joined the Legion in 1992 when I was just 18 years old – I was young, incredibly foolish and most definitely off my tiny trolley. One evening, while getting high on grass and drunk on cheap Tesco lager, I had watched a fascinating documentary on the National Geographic Channel about the French Foreign Legion and decided there and then that a Legionnaire’s life was definitely the life for me. Surprisingly, I thought the same the very next day when I had a blinding hangover and had to clear up my vomit-stained carpet. And the day after, I still wanted to join. As days turned into weeks and weeks into months, I made my plans to escape the mindless teenage world of grass, cheap beer and puke and do something constructive with my life. And one day, I just woke up, packed my bags and headed to Marseilles.

After the initial basic instruction and tests, I trained to be a medic, as that almost guaranteed a posting to some god-forsaken hellhole where the action really was. It was just kicking off in Somalia at that time, and I knew they wanted as many medics as they could muster, so I was first in the queue. If you finish high in the rankings, you get to choose which regiment you go to, and if you finish low, you go wherever you are sent! I finished 12th out of 65, which I was surprised at. I chose to go to the 13th DBLE (Demi-Brigade de Légion Étrangère) based in Djibouti on the Somalia border. It was a fucking crazy hellhole. I was in Djibouti for just three weeks before I was sent into Somalia, and I ended up doing two tours there altogether – out of my two years in Djibouti, I spent nearly eighteen months in Somalia. There were bad bits, of course, and war had a huge impact on me mentally, as I witnessed a lot of really bad things when I was still very young. Africa was, and still is, fucked – life there is worth shit. Also, having to learn a foreign language and being away from family and friends at that age was also sometimes very hard, and losing friends in accidents or incidents had a profound effect on me.

As well as the action, there were other reasons I chose Djibouti: the sunshine and the higher wages!

I had some great moments in the Legion. One time, during basic training, there were really severe floods in Avignon, very similar to those in the UK in 2007, and the Legion was sent to help out. We spent days rescuing people, saving lives and belongings, and cleaning up. Afterwards, when the floods had receded and the city was almost back to normal, we were asked to parade through the town centre, and we all received commendations for the work we had done to help the local community. It was a proud moment.

Then, while on leave in Marseilles, I managed to be in the right place at the right time and prevented two girls from being robbed at knife-point. I was 21 years old at the time and on leave after returning from Djibouti. It had been a tough two years, and I was settling back into life in France. I had met a French girl while on leave previously; she had fallen pregnant and had just given birth to a baby girl. We had a little apartment in the town and had just moved in together. I went out to the local hypermarket to buy milk, a few fluffy toys and a couple of cans of lager for my own private celebratory drink, as I didn’t know anyone locally whom I could get pissed with. I was standing at the bus stop waiting to return home to the weird smell of nappies and to my girlfriend’s pretty puffed up face, brought on by a lack of sleep. I was in my own little world, enjoying a precious few minutes of ‘peace and quiet’, listening to Metallica on my Walkman. Metallica deafens me and helps to take my mind off things. There must have been at least 40 to 50 people standing at the bus stop: little old biddies with their trolleys on wheels, pumped-up guys returning from the gym, and the token single mother with three kids and a pushchair with at least a dozen carrier bags of crisps and sweets hanging from every corner.

There was also a couple of girls sitting on a little wall just a few feet away from the bus stop chatting happily to each other. From the corner of my eye, I noticed a group of about nine young Algerian lads walking towards them. They were a typical bunch of street lads, aged around 20 to 23ish, kicking Coke cans, spitting on the floor, larking about and pushing each other into the road. I assumed that the two girls knew them, because they started talking to each other. Metallica was bursting my eardrums, so I couldn’t make out what was being said, but then one of the lads grabbed one of the girls’ handbags. Because no one else said or did anything, I didn’t realise anything was wrong for a few seconds, but then the girl lunged to get her bag back, and once she did that the other lads started to severely punch and kick the pair of them and grab at the second girl’s handbag. Even though there were several guys who were a lot bigger than me standing at the bus stop nearer to the group, no one reacted or did anything. It was obvious to me that these Algerian cunts were prepared to do whatever it took to get these poor young girls’ handbags, and it seemed that no one at all was prepared to stop them. Big mistake! I quickly took off my Walkman, shoved it into my carrier bag and hurriedly gave it to an old woman standing next to me to hold while I went to work.

I went straight for the biggest and nutted him hard. He fell. As soon as I did that, the rest turned and were stunned for a second. This gave me a few seconds to unleash a torrent of punches and kicks, and I had managed to down five of them before they knew what was going on. I noticed a couple of them were already gone; they were halfway up the road. The two who remained gave me a couple of quick digs. I kicked one of them in the chest, and he collapsed like a bag of shit. His mate quickly followed the others up the road. As I was standing over the scumbags on the floor, looking down at them deciding whether to kick them in the ribs or the stomach, a screeching of tyres broke my concentration.

Next, I felt the hot metal of a police car bonnet as my face was slammed into it. I was handcuffed and put into the back of the car. Over the pounding of my heart, I could hear one of the officers calling on his radio for an ambulance. As I stared out of the window, I noticed several people at the bus stop rushing over to the policemen, obviously explaining to them what had actually happened. Thankfully, one of the officers immediately came over to the car, took me out and removed my handcuffs. He was babbling away to me in French, but even though I spoke the language fluently and had a French girlfriend whom I only spoke French to, I was bizarrely oblivious to what he was saying. I could see his lips jabbering away, but my mind was elsewhere, and I couldn’t understand a word he was saying. For a few seconds, it was as though I didn’t speak a word of French. Rage? Anger? Mental breakdown? Stress? I don’t know.

I was taken to the police station to make a statement, and once I had identified myself as a Legionnaire I was immediately treated in a more respectful and courteous manner. Once I had made my statement and had calmed down a bit, a high-ranking police officer walked in and introduced himself. I guess he would have been the equivalent of a British superintendent. He told me that one of the girls attacked at the bus stop was actually his daughter. He shook my hand so hard it seemed as though he was going to cut off my circulation. He said he owed me and would do everything he could to make sure that what I had done would not go unrecognised.

So there I was in my parade uniform, in a long line of guys who were all reporting to the base commander to be punished. My shoes were shining in the roasting summer sun, sweat was streaming down my neck and back, and my trusty white képi was keeping the sun off my worried head and out of my eyes. One by one, the colonel and his assistant worked their way down the line of soldiers, dishing out various punishments for stupid things like drunkenness, crashing a jeep, coming back from leave a day late. They all got prison time. Harsh? Yes, but (in theory) they would think twice before making the same mistakes again. Then they reached me. Fuck. The colonel stared at me for what felt like ages, and then in a harsh tone said, ‘You know what happens to people who get arrested outside of the regiment, don’t you?’ Of course I fucking did. ‘This is really unfair,’ I thought to myself, but what was I supposed to do? Let those girls get mugged and beaten?

As I stared at the colonel, I wondered what he would have done? Probably fuck all. He was half my size, in his late 50s and French. I stared straight at him and unkindly thought to myself, ‘Not the bravest chap in the world, are you? Weren’t so fucking brave in both the world wars, were you? Isn’t that why you have Legionnaires? You need a foreign army because the fucking French Army are a bunch of cowards.’

Fuck it. In a similar situation, I would have done the same again. ‘Fuck all those pussies at the bus stop who didn’t help, and fuck you,’ I almost shouted at the colonel.

‘While you prats were crashing jeeps and getting pissed,’ he said, turning to rant at the other guys who were being punished, ‘this crazy bastard fought off a gang of nine Algerians who were mugging two girls with no regard for his own safety.’ I wasn’t going to be punished after all. ‘Damn right I’m not,’ I happily thought to myself. The colonel didn’t seem so bad after all. ‘This is why I want to see Legionnaires standing here in front of me,’ he shouted. He then pulled out a sheet of paper and told me he was presenting me with a citation. He read out loud, embarrassing me, ‘It is with great pleasure . . .’ Blah blah blah. My citation looks great framed, but I didn’t really want it and didn’t really need it – it is something I think I would have done any time, anywhere, and it certainly didn’t merit a fuss.

I served five years in the Legion altogether, and ten years later I am still immensely proud of what I achieved personally and what the Legion achieved as a unit. We did some good work in Somalia: we delivered tons of food, managed a massive vaccination campaign, and escorted a large number of medical convoys throughout the region and into some of the worst places in the world.

I certainly missed the Legion when I left. Five years were enough, but for a few years after I left I pined to see some action again and was chomping at the bit for an adrenalin rush and to smell the smell of war. It is an experience unlike any other: gruesome yet compulsive; exhausting yet exhilarating; exciting yet fucking scary.

I first decided I wanted to go to Iraq when the war ended and reconstruction of the country began. I knew then that private security would be big business, as many of the major security providers were already in discussions with both the British and American governments with regard to tendering for security contracts. Most of the large private security companies are run by high-ranking ex-military officers, who have all the contacts to be able to secure the ripest contracts, and discreet nods were already being given to the likes of Olive Group, CRG, ArmorGroup, etc. I had just started close protection training and had attended a three-day course run by Robin Barratt in Norwich. Robin had just returned from Moscow and was eager to start instructing again, both in the UK and abroad. He ran a three-day course entitled ‘Introduction to Close Protection’ for those of us who were keen to enter the industry but wanted to know more before committing a lot more money and time. After that, I went on to join Robin in Iceland for three weeks of intensive training and then went back to Iceland once more on a course for instructors.

It was while I was on the initial three-day course that I decided to qualify and go to Iraq. I was given a list of contractors, and a friend of mine called Craig Hales, who was also on the course, heard that a company called Hart Security had just secured a major contract. They were a lot smaller than the other major players setting up in Iraq and probably a lot better to work for as a result. Hart was a fairly new company, originally founded in 1999 by Richard Westbury, who had previously been the chief executive of Defence Systems, so they seemed to have a good commercial manager. I sent off my application and was called down to London a week later for an interview. I thought the interview went well, and the fact I was a Legionnaire seemed to help – 95 per cent of their staff, they said, were ex-military or ex-Special Forces.

I was expecting to hear back from them pretty quickly, but days turned into a couple of weeks, then a month, then six weeks. Then early one morning, and almost exactly six weeks after my initial interview, the telephone suddenly rang. It was just past 9 a.m. I had had a late night and was still half asleep, so I initially thought about letting it ring, but curiosity took hold, and I sleepily picked up the receiver. Did I still want a job? ‘Fuck, yes,’ I almost shouted. I was told to be at Heathrow airport in 48 hours. The first contract was for ten weeks.

After returning home, I decided to go out one more time. Hart had called to say that they had one of the most important and dangerous contracts in post-war Iraq and to ask whether I would be interested. Again, it was a case of, ‘Fuck, yes!’ And again, I was given 48 hours’ notice and told to pick up my tickets to Kuwait from the Emirates desk at the airport. I have to say that my wife was not pleased. It was Christmas, after all, and a time for family and friends and log fires and ‘Jingle Bells’, not for scrambling frantically through the sand, being chased by a deranged fanatical Iraqi who believes his God would welcome him with open arms if he blew the arms and legs off a British non-believer. Of course, Iraq is not really like that – we never once scrambled through the sand.

After collecting my tickets, checking in and making my way through Customs, I met up with a few other guys who were also on their way out into the field – it was good to not have to sit alone, thinking of the missus waiting for me back at home and the heat and dust and shit to come. Like me, most of the guys had been out before, so we had a lot to talk about.

Just before we boarded, I called my wife, but she didn’t answer. Maybe she was on the toilet, or doing her hair, or maybe she just didn’t want to answer, but I left a short, cheerful message, telling her that I loved her, that I would be back soon and not to worry, because everything would be fine – as if that would make a difference. For me, this was much better than actually speaking to her, as I was never any good at saying goodbyes.

After what seemed a fairly quick six-hour flight, we arrived and were met by a Hart representative holding up a big placard. Once we had all gathered together and were checked off his list, we were ushered to a waiting minibus. Leaving the airport terminal and chilly England and entering the searing, oppressive heat of the Middle East is a complete shock. It is hard to imagine a wall of heat, but that is exactly what it is like – like being slammed up against an invisible brick. Immediately, you start to sweat. I was used to the feeling, as I had already been out to Iraq and had lived and worked in hot climes with the Legion, but for the newcomers it was a shock. Thankfully, the minibus was air-conditioned.

We drove through the centre of Kuwait City to a rented safe house, where we were to spend the night before going into Iraq the following morning. Most of us hadn’t yet signed a contract for the trip, as recruitment had been rushed due to the large number of personnel needed for the job. Therefore, we didn’t know anything about the job – we just knew it was going to be fucking dangerous. I signed a nine-week contract, visas and permits were sorted, insurance and waiver forms were signed, and the rest of the administration associated with sending Westerners into a war zone was hastily completed.

While this was all being sorted out by the guy who had picked us up from the airport and a couple of his administrative assistants, we were allowed to go into town for an evening stroll and a bit of shopping. I spent most of the money I had, just in case something happened to me and I ended up coming home in a body bag.

That night, I was restless. It was hard to sleep, as memories of my previous tour kept creeping into my mind: the few contact situations I had experienced; a round slamming into the side of our vehicle; the adrenalin rush I felt as we reversed our vehicle out of a contact zone and sprayed the building that we thought the hostile fire had come from. Was I really going back? Damn right I was!

The next day, we were taken in a convoy to the Iraqi border, where we passed quickly through a Kuwaiti checkpoint then on to an American checkpoint. The Americans seemed to take for ever to check our documents and papers. The lads manning the checkpoint were a great bunch but paranoid as fuck, even though no Iraqis have yet blown themselves up on the Iraq–Kuwait border. I bet they were as happy as could be when they were told they would be on that post as opposed to working on streets in the centre of Baghdad.

After passing through both checkpoints, we were in Iraq, where we were met by two more Hart close protection teams. We were each handed an AK-47 and two magazines, which we all hastily checked. The nerves of the previous evening had all but disappeared, and with the AK in my hand I felt back at home. My wife always said that I had a stupid grin on my face whenever I had my weapon in my hand, and I knew what she meant – it felt good. Weapons are compulsive and addictive, and absolutely necessary in a place like Iraq – you simply would not survive as a Westerner without a weapon.

Once we had checked and signed for our weapons, we were driven to the Hart compound inside Basra Airport complex, where the British Forces were based. Basra Airport is the second-largest airport in Iraq and located south of the city. On my first tour, Hart had based themselves in and operated from a large villa in the city itself, but due to the elevated risk, coupled with the number of times they were mortared, they wisely decided that it was a lot more logical, and infinitely safer, to move into the airport complex and nearer to the British Army.

We had a few minutes to arrange ourselves and settle into our dorms, then we were all mustered to the courtyard. There were over 90 personnel altogether; there were 20 or so in the team that had just come in from Kuwait with me, and the rest had arrived over the previous 48 hours. We were the last of the batch, which was why we were mustered so quickly after we arrived. Apparently, everyone had been eagerly awaiting the last batch of fresh meat from the UK.

Because of the extremely important, high-risk contract Hart had just won, they’d embarked on a massive recruitment drive, signing up almost anyone with a security-related background, including lots of doormen from the UK. I have worked the clubs and pubs myself on and off for many years, so I know the job well, and I can usually spot a doorman a mile away. Standing outside in the searing 40°C heat, it was easy to spot the nightclub bouncers amongst the many ex-soldiers. I fondly remembered the story Robin had told me during the initial three-day course I’d attended. He’d worked in Bosnia during the conflict and had secured a contract to pick up mercenaries from Zagreb Airport and take them to the Hrvatska Vojska (Croatian Army) camp near the front line, where they would be put through their paces before being sent into action. They were not really mercenaries, as they didn’t get paid – the Croatian Army always fervently maintained that they never employed mercenaries during that particular conflict. Instead, they were unpaid volunteers, and many of them were from the UK. Robin told me that those who were full of bravado, boasting and bragging and doing their best to look hard, would shit themselves at the first sound of a mortar shell or the first live round whizzing past their ears. They would literally crap their pants, and it seemed to me that a few of the guys who looked very much like nightclub doormen standing amongst the rest of us might have been doing the same thing.

Sam, the project manager, stood on a small podium in front of us all and told us that some of the team would be working in Basra, while the rest would be sent to central Baghdad on an extremely high-risk operation. Before we had even been allocated our assignments, and to my utter amazement, about six of the guys who looked as though their pants were a lot stickier than they had been a few minutes previously put up their hands and said that they had changed their minds and felt they didn’t have what it took to go to Baghdad, and could they please stay in Basra. What a bunch of utter cunts. The rest of the team almost collapsed with laughter. Sam screamed at them, telling them to fuck off, and within the hour they were back on the bus towards the border, where they were left to make their own way home. There was no room for people who didn’t have the bottle for the job, and for the life of me I could not understand how some cunts could come so far and then lose their bottle at the last minute – surely they knew what they were there for? It is ‘virtual’ bravado. Being a big man in a small pond somehow makes some people believe that they could be a big man in a fucking huge pond somewhere else, but the reality is very different. These people are only brave in the small, insignificant world of their own nightclub door – anywhere else, they are cowards and cunts. The sad fact is that I have heard that some of those wankers who were sent home actually went on to tell other people that they’d served in Iraq in private security!

Sam explained to the rest of us who weren’t packing our bags and changing our trousers back in the dorm that the job in Baghdad was far more dangerous than any other job the company had taken on, and only those who were completely right for the assignment would be asked to go. As he said this, I smiled to myself, because I realised that the cunts who didn’t want to go to Baghdad probably wouldn’t have been chosen anyway.

Sam asked for volunteers, and I was probably the first to put my hand up. I couldn’t wait. I hadn’t come all the way to Iraq not to see some real action and not to get involved in something risky and dangerous. There was only a handful of us who had been with Hart before, and as Sam counted the hands he recognised me from my last tour. ‘This is your second time out with Hart, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘Yes, sir,’ I replied casually in army mode. He told me that because it was my second time with the company, I didn’t have to go on that particular mission – there were other less dangerous jobs he could assign me to. ‘But I want this job, sir,’ was my swift reply. He nodded his acceptance, and the job was mine.

The next day, we were split into two groups, consisting of four or five teams each. Because I was bilingual, I was put into a half-English, half-French team; astonishingly, it even included a couple of guys whom I’d served with in the Legion. The first group were driving up to Baghdad in convoy with all our equipment, baggage, etc., while the rest of us were being sent to the capital by helicopter. I really didn’t fancy going all that way in convoy; it was a long, arduous and uncomfortable journey, and I was therefore really pleased when my name was called in the group travelling by helicopter.

We regrouped at Baghdad Airport that same evening and were given the exact details of the task. I must be honest that it did come as a bit of a shock when I realised just how high profile the job was.

Each team consisted of eight ‘internationals’ – the foreign contingent – and sixteen ‘nationals’ – Iraqi guards who were employed by Hart. The vehicles for the assignment were to be totally standard local cars with local plates – no armour or markings or anything out of the ordinary. At first, I was horrified, but it proved to be a stroke of good thinking, as throughout the assignment we could travel freely around town and on the motorways without anyone giving us so much as a second glance – unlike American security companies, such as Blackwater, who used huge white Ford pickups that stood out a mile and made wonderfully massive targets. ‘Typical Americans,’ I thought whenever I heard of another white pickup coming under fire, whereas we never once had someone even look our way, let alone fire a gun at us.

Each team was to be holed up in a warehouse in the centre of the city. Our job was to drive from the warehouse to the airport two to three times a day. Once there, we would form up a new convoy with six to seven forty-feet trailers, containing portable voting stations, ballot boxes and all the necessary equipment and materials for setting up polling stations for the upcoming elections to select a new Iraqi government. We were then to escort the convoys back to the warehouses so that the electoral equipment could be securely stored until the elections were ready to be held. With the political mayhem and social turmoil in Iraq, these convoys made much bigger and more important targets than the American soldiers patrolling the streets.

We were taken in convoy to the warehouse. To our complete horror, we discovered that not only was the warehouse in the middle of Baghdad, but it was in constant daily use by local traders and businessmen – it was used for storing wheat, sugar, oil and other foodstuffs, and trucks and lorries would come and go, delivering and collecting, all day, every day. We were told in any one day that there could be anything up to 200 trucks and possibly up to 1,000 workers coming and going. And we only had control of about a third of the warehouse. It was a complete and utter fucking nightmare.

As we settled in and surveyed our temporary new home, the Americans turned up with two or three heavy trailers, containing concrete blocks and giant sandbags, which we used to try and form some kind of last line of defence should we come under heavy and sustained attack.

The plan was for half of the international close protection team to go backwards and forwards to the airport with all of the Iraqi nationals, leaving just four of us to guard the warehouse and equipment until the team returned. It took about a week to escort the convoys with all of the ballot boxes and polling stations from the airport. Once all the materials and equipment had been collected, we spent a further week looking after them before the Iraqi national guard turned up with the election committee officials to organise, separate and despatch the stuff out so that polling stations could be constructed around the country.

After the election, all the votes were brought back to the warehouse for us to guard until they were ready to be taken to the airport for counting. Things heated up for us once we had the votes in our dirty, grubby little hands. We all felt like we were protecting Fort Knox and then some. We had the future of the country under our noses, and it seemed as though everyone in Iraq knew it – especially the fanatics and extremists. As we patrolled the dim exterior of the warehouse, there was an almost constant sound of gunfire in the air – the city sounded like bonfire night on steroids. Nights were worse – the bastard Iraqis just would not let us get a minute’s sleep, and the heavens were filled with the thuds and tremors of an almost constant barrage of mortar shells, which felt as though they were being aimed directly at our tired little heads.

Life in the warehouse was completely shit. It was a big unit divided into three sections; my team had the third section, furthest from the main gate. Because the warehouse was in daily use, we had to quickly build a makeshift defence barrier between us and the rest of the yard. The lorries that were coming and going and the hundreds of fucking workers walking around were supposed to be controlled and guarded by the local Iraqi guards based at the main gate – but these Iraqi guards were about as useful as a chocolate coffee mug. We also had to man the corridor area leading to our part of the warehouse and make sure that no one wandered, accidentally or otherwise, into our area. We were instructed to shoot anyone who even remotely looked like a threat – the consequences of destroying even a small part of the material we were guarding was immensely grave, both politically and socially. To lose votes from the first so-called Iraqi democratic free election could bring the civil unrest in Iraq to even greater heights.

Our part of the warehouse was about 200 feet by 75 feet and had previously been used to store sugar. There was sugar all over the floor, and during the night, in the pitch black between the volleys of mortars and the near constant sound of gunfire, the only noise you could hear – apart from the occasional snores of our team leader – was the steady scurrying of rats below our beds. We needed the warehouse to be in blackout during the night, as we didn’t want to highlight our position within the unit.

On our first evening in the warehouse, we made makeshift beds by laying a couple of wooden pallets together on the floor with our sleeping bags on top. However, after trying to kip for one night on an uncomfortable wooden pallet with the sound of gunfire and mortars keeping us awake and fat rats scuttling all around, we were supplied with some slightly more comfortable US camp beds. Our kitchen area was in the same room and consisted of a simple gas stove balanced on a pile of pallets. Our dining table was a piece of wood on . . . guess what? Yep, a fucking pile of pallets. I am sure that I even tried to shag a pallet in a dream one night.

The only thing we couldn’t do with pallets was eat them, so at the start of our assignment we were given a few boxes of US Army rations, which kept us going. Now and then, the US Army popped in with an occasional warm lunch when they were passing on patrol. But this didn’t happen that often, as it wasn’t very safe for the US Army to patrol in our area.

We passed our time by sitting on the roof of the warehouse, counting the clouds of smoke from explosions around the city or by trying to identify where the shooting was coming from. We also tried to sleep a lot and played many games of chess. Other than me, there were a couple of strong characters in the team, including a couple of Bosnians who spoke very little English, which was fun, especially as I thrashed them time and time again at chess. There were also a couple of French ex-soldiers, which was good, as we could have one or two decent conversations.

After many sleepless, nervous nights, the instruction came for us to escort all the votes back to the relative safety of the airport, where they would be guarded by military personnel and counted. The trucks for the votes were escorted to us at the warehouse by another close protection team, and we guarded them with our weapons at the ready, as they were being loaded with the containers of votes we had protected with our lives. The Iraqi forklift operators were completely useless and kept bashing into the boxes we had carefully guarded. I lost my patience, kicked one of them off and loaded many of the crates myself. I felt like shooting the bloke in question, but that might have been a little extreme.

Before we left, my team sat down with the drivers and explained how we were going to set up the convoy back to the airport, with the votes tightly protected by our vehicles and weapons. This meant that when we hit the motorway, I was in the rear car. My main task was to make sure that no one overtook us or got in between the vehicles in the convoy. I constantly swept the area from side to side all the way to the airport, making sure that no one got too close. A few times, vehicles did get too close, not really knowing who or what we were, or perhaps they were just trying their luck, and I leaned precariously out of the window, aiming my AK at them, showing them that we were armed and dangerous and that they’d better back off. I waved my hand in an up-and-down motion to show them to slow down. If they were stupid enough to ignore me, I fired a couple of rounds into the ground in front of them to indicate that we meant business. Thankfully, everyone in Baghdad is now used to a high-profile military and private security presence, and when someone points a weapon at them or their vehicles, they know precisely what to do . . . they back off!

At the end of that particular job, most of the guys were sent home, but a few, including me, were kept back to help out on another job – to guard the new court house, which was under construction for the trial of Saddam Hussein. Our job was to control the entrance, patrol the perimeter, and check vehicles and personnel coming in and going out, making sure that no one took any photos or ‘souvenirs’ or blew themselves up! But that is a story for another day.

I started to get into trouble with the police around the time I left school – petty little things, such as smashing windows, joyriding, drunk and disorderly behaviour and plenty of fighting. I ended up on a supervision order for three years, which is like a junior version of a probation order. One day, I woke up and decided enough was enough – I had to straighten myself out. I knew that if I carried on in the same vein, I was going to end up going down – and that scared the shit out of me.

I was just an 18-year-old kid when I took my sorry ass down to the army careers office. To my amazement, as soon as they found out about the supervision order, they told me to fuck off and come back in three years’ time. There was me trying to straighten myself out and the army shoved me back into the life I was trying to get away from. So I gathered some money together and went off to France to join the Legion. It was much easier than I expected. I arrived in France on 13 July. I secured a bed in a youth hostel in Lille for the night and got pissed with a couple of young Aussie birds who were also staying there – luckily for me, they were both gagging for it, which was nice!

In the morning, I went into the town centre looking for a McDonald’s, as I was starving. To my amazement, there was a huge military parade through the town centre. I hadn’t realised that it was 14 July – Bastille Day! There were soldiers and tanks everywhere, and at the end of the parade I approached a soldier who seemed to be in charge of a unit and asked him if he knew anything about joining the Legion. Surprisingly, he spoke very good English, and after initially looking at me as if I wasn’t right in the head (I wasn’t), he gave me a sympathetic smile and told me to go down the road to La Citadelle, a large military base with a Legion recruitment office.

After answering a few questions and passing a basic medical, I said goodbye to all my personal belongings and was put in a minibus with a few other recruits and sent to Marseilles. It was as simple as that, and for the following five years I was a Legionnaire.