Author guest post from Matt Okuhara.

“I thought about my decision to join the Glosters a little more on that first weekend. Keeping a low profile, I looked around the bar on that first weekend and said to myself, “I want this. I really want this.” It was not a huge ambition. Militarily speaking, it was about as small as ambitions get, but it was still something I wanted to be a part of. I saw the groups of soldiers laughing and talking; I saw the way everyone seemed to get along; I saw the unique badges of the RGBW berets, the history of the local regiment. My local regiment. It was something entirely different from everything I had ever seen, done, or experienced. For me, I decided, it was going to take a lot of hard work. I was a skinny 18-year-old. Just a boy. I was high-strung. Easily upset. And a vegetarian. Not exactly infantry material. But I made my decision there and then. I wanted to be a part of the Glosters.”

Basra and Back – The Memoir of an Unlikely Infantryman in the Iraq war

By the time I found myself in Iraq, in Basra, on the frontline, I was still a boy at heart. I was still in my teens and I was the youngest in the entire company. Eighty five soldiers from South West England had been deployed on Operation Telic IV to provide security for the Coalition Provisional Authority’s base at one of Saddam’s former palaces. But the situation had begun to shift. The CPA had departed and the mission for Salamanca Company was changing from simple force protection to actively dominating the city. As the major had explained, our role now was to prevent crime and deter terrorism, a task far more complex than guarding a compound.

I thought back to my days of basic training. The whole programme had taken around a month. A few weekends. A scattering of Tuesdays. Then a two week combat infantryman’s course that was supposed to sharpen us into soldiers. None of that had truly prepared me for what we were expected to deal with in Iraq. During basic training the focus had been on closing with and engaging the enemy. In Iraq it was never clear who the enemy even was. We were the only side wearing uniforms and identifying ourselves openly as participants in this dangerous game. The other side stayed hidden because they had to. They needed every advantage they could find in order to inflict casualties on the coalition and British forces. And they were proving effective. By the end of the United Kingdom’s involvement in Iraq, 138 personnel had been killed as a direct result of enemy action.

I knew well enough that I was not truly cut out to be an infantryman, but by that point it was too late to reconsider. I was here and I was on operations. Nothing was going to change that. The only thing I could change was myself, so that is what I tried to work on. I was definitely the odd one out in the company. Even within my platoon, or inside my own section, I always felt slightly separate. My sense of humour was different. My interests and even my standards never quite aligned with the others. The platoon commander had recently told me to sew up the holes in my uniform and some sergeant major from somewhere or other had barked at me to get a haircut. In truth, he did not simply ask. He shouted at me in full view of everyone near the mess hall. My so called peacekeeping hairstyle was apparently unacceptable to the senior NCOs.

The base barber was a local Iraqi who spoke a little English and who only had one hairstyle on offer. For two dollars my hair was reduced to a grade one all over. Later we discovered that the barber had been working for the other side, quietly passing information about troop numbers and movements to insurgents so they could adjust their mortar attacks more accurately. Fortunately I never asked him for a close shave as well. I hardly needed one. I was still so young that the soft hair around my face came off with almost no effort.

I had been in Iraq for exactly one month when we were tasked to go out on patrol. We linked up with a squad of Iraqi police officers. There were supposed to be four, but only three turned up. Our section began to make its way into the city. The sun was sinking and the temperature was finally becoming more bearable. Still hot, but now in the mid thirties rather than the brutal high forties of midday. I liked being on patrol. It felt strange and fascinating. The sights in the city. The flames of oil derricks burning off excess gas on the horizon. Fishermen dozing in their boats on the Shatt al Arab river. I had experienced almost nothing in life before this. I had grown up in a semi affluent and comfortable rural Gloucestershire home, far removed from anything like this world.

I had always been interested in the military but had chosen to become a banker, following the money rather than joining the army full time. I joined the reserves as a hobby, something to satisfy any lingering military ambitions from my teenage years. I had never truly expected to be deployed. Yet here I was. I was here and I was on operations, caught between the life I thought I wanted and the reality I had stepped into.

And then the shooting started…

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