The Accidental Soldier by Owain Mulligan: How a pink crop top, bottles of Chianti and a trusted band of brothers got me through the Iraq War

It is not unusual to hear the livelier kind of school classroom described as a ‘war zone’ – generally by people with no experience of war zones.

But for history teacher Owain Mulligan, spending weekends with the Territorial Army (TA) on Salisbury Plain was a welcome relief from trying to convince a class of 12-year-olds that Henry VIII was more interesting than nailing your neighbour’s hand to his desk with a compass.

The moment of decision came on a December day in 2005. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, several members of Owain’s TA regiment had recently returned from Iraq with impressive suntans and a repertoire of exotic anecdotes.

Meanwhile, in the classroom, a small boy had just smashed his violin over his classmate’s head. That afternoon, Owain volunteered for Iraq.

By early January 2006, he was set to join the Queen’s Royal Hussars at Sennelager in Germany. Probably, he thought, they would find him a role in keeping with his limited military experience. It was a shock to learn that he was to lead Third Troop – 12 professional soldiers – on an operational tour to Basra.

In these circumstances an experienced troop sergeant can make or break a young officer, and Owain struck lucky with Sergeant Mason, ‘Six foot one with the torso of Goliath’s harder brother, hair shaved to the skull, and a voice like aggregate being crushed.’

Pre-deployment training took place in ‘Tin City’ – a snow-covered facility set up to resemble a 1970s Northern Irish border town. Owain briefly wondered how useful this would prove on a summer tour of Iraq. He had yet to realise that it was an ideal introduction to the glorious (and often inglorious) illogicality of Army life.

Training completed and the troop bonded (they now called him ‘Boss’ rather than ‘Sir’ – a good sign), it was off to Shaibah Logistics Base, a few miles south-west of Basra.

Here the facilities included a Pizza Hut and a Subway, but the accommodation was in tents – something that concentrated their minds quite sharply when they were mortared. None of the rounds was on target, but it was a reminder that there were people out there who meant them serious harm.

Before long the mortars began landing closer, and for Owain it felt personal. Some of his men had endured childhoods so grim that they were used to the idea of someone wanting to hurt them. But ‘I have spent 20 years being told what a special little flower I am… It doesn’t feel like this is supposed to happen to someone like me.’ (He is, in fact, the brother of the actress Carey Mulligan, whom he sweetly describes as ‘a much better sister than I deserve’.)

Third Troop’s duties ranged from refurbishing schools (they were stoned with chunks of breeze block) to patrolling the Iran-Iraq border (the Iranians jammed their radio with Chris de Burgh’s The Lady In Red on a loop).

Escorting a convoy, they handed over to some Italian troops. It was a congenial encounter – the Italians’ rations included a very acceptable Chianti, and their mesmerisingly glamorous medic looked like a young Sophia Loren, with fingernails varnished cherry red.

Half an hour later they heard over the radio that the Italians had been hit by an IED, with one dead and multiple casualties.

Thinking of those cherry-red fingernails scrabbling for a field dressing in the dark, Owain was close to tears.

Soldiers are good at finding the comedy in chaos and horror, and Basra provided outstanding opportunities for black humour, from the explosive incident with the honeysucker (a small tanker that emptied the portable loos), to Third Troop’s irrepressible talent for winding up the regimental sergeant major – who nearly blew a ventricle when one solider turned up in a hot pink cropped top with the word PIMP picked out in gold sequins.

As the end of the tour approached, a couple of incidents made Owain question what the British forces were doing in Iraq. He was on patrol when a woman hopped into the back of his Land Rover.

Her name was Leila, and she explained in fluent English that she wanted the Army to kill a local militia commander who was trying to recruit her son. ‘Life under Saddam was difficult, but at least we had a life,’ she said bitterly.

Two days before Third Troop were due to fly home, they were sent on a last operation.

An official report recorded what happened: one soldier wounded, one Iraqi male dead and an Iraqi female wounded, later declared dead.

What wasn’t described, Owain writes, was what really happened: the Iraqi male, a bomb maker, wielding an AK-47, killed before he hit the ground; the ‘female’, his mother, accidentally shot by her dying son; the Army medic who tried to treat her looking up and shaking his head. ‘With that, the tour was over.’

Owain said goodbye to Third Troop and never saw them again – though a photograph of them was on the wall of his study as he wrote this book. Its vivid humour and deep humanity (not to mention its virtuoso use of the F-word) will secure it a place among the classics of military memoir.

Now 40, a management consultant with a wife and small children, living in a quiet suburb at the end of the Northern Line, he looks back in anger at the ‘ineptitude, and the let-downs, and the sheer waste’ of what happened in Iraq.

But his overwhelming feeling, he writes, is still of ‘gratitude, for having been in that place, at that time’. For having seen the canopy of stars on the Iran-Iraq border; for watching the reed warblers wake as the sun rose over the Central Marshes.

And most of all, for his troop. He was very young – just 23 – when he volunteered to serve in Iraq, and they were even younger. ‘But they were the best men I would ever know.’