What is it like being in a warzone?
Being in a warzone, it's very surreal actually but you actually adapt to it incredibly quickly. You can go from being in a normal town or city in the UK where you worry about what you're going to have for dinner tonight, or what you've got to do, clearing your e-mail in-box, that sort of stuff, your day-to-day sort of humdrum life activity. And you sort of go out for a drive in the car or something, you're going from A to B and someone cuts you up and you get really sort of irate about it; the normal sort of everyday things that happen in life. And then suddenly you get moved out of there and you go to a Third World country that's the absolute pits, where they don't have running water, they don't have electricity, or the sewage is piled up on the side of the roads, or the buildings are sort bombed out, people are begging on the streets, or they've reverted to crime to try to survive. And it's just absolute one extreme to the other. You go from a completely developed society to a completely undeveloped society. So you've got the physical landscape itself that's highly alien to what you're used to back home. But you actually adapt to that very, very quickly within a matter of hours or days, quite sort of quick. And then you've got the fact that every time you go out of the gates, even when you're in the compound, you've always got the threat of mortars and rockets. But certainly, when you physically leave those gates, you're switching from full off to full on and your senses are totally alert. And everywhere you drive, you're looking around you for threats, you're looking for people who might be throwing stones or hand grenades at you, people who might be shooting you, you're looking for areas of disturbed earth or the absence of the normal and the presence of the abnormal. Anything at all that looks really, really surreal, or out of place, or just not quite right, where they might be a roadside bomb, or a car that's randomly parked, basically displaying signs of being a car bomb or something; it's weighted down its axles, that sort of thing. And the whole time you're out there you're just constantly immersed in the possible threats that are facing you and the team before you even get to what it is you're going to do, whether you're going to go and get a resupply of equipment or whether you're going to go and deal with a bomb. So it's kind of a really strange experience, really, very, very high pressure. But on the flip side, the banter and the camaraderie is very extreme as well. So lots and lots of piss taking and nobody actually gets to take themselves seriously because as soon as they try doing it they get a relentless torrent of abuse from everybody else. And eventually, you either fight it, which is a futile effort or you just got with it and let it break you and then burst into laughter, which is what happens. So there's this kind of black humor, and this extreme sort of camaraderie and banter that goes on that compensates for the extremes of pressure and fear, in some cases, as well.
