Olga Craig in the Telegraph - Who the **** are you, asked the man from special forces:
As a greeting, it was neither conventional nor civilised - but then neither were the circumstances. I was in retreat, he was advancing.
It was 4pm one afternoon last week on the bridge into Basra, and Saddam Hussein's elite militia were sending a rain of mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades from the city.
In the smoke and the confusion and the deafening noise, I ran straight into him, my left arm colliding with his assault rifle. "Who the f*** are you?" he asked incredulously, surprised to see a British woman. "Who are you?" was my instinctive response.
Dressed in civvies - cargo trousers and a T-shirt - he didn't look like a soldier. On the other hand, he was obviously British, and he did have an impressive telescopic sight atop his rifle. "You don't need to know," he said ominously. Realisation dawned: he was a member of the special forces.
...
His message communicated, he stopped talking. His departure was as unconventional as his greeting. He simply stalked off.
A few days later, back temporarily in Kuwait City, I watched the bombing of the bridge continue on a television in the lobby of the hotel where I was staying.
Suddenly, without my being aware of his approach, a man appeared at my shoulder. "The last time we met was on that bridge," he said, pointing up at the TV screen. I took my eyes off him for a moment and he did it again. He just disappeared.
