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The subtitle of Colonel Tim Collins’s autobiography accurately describes both his extensive experience of military operations in Northern Ireland, the SAS and Iraq, and the premature demise of his career following trumped-up accusations of war crimes. Collins was accused of dousing with petrol, igniting and then shooting a Ba’ath party official; the men of his battalion, the 1st Royal Irish regiment, were also accused of massacring nine prisoners in cold blood.

From the very start of the Iraq invasion, Collins had been a marked man, after the words of a last-minute briefing to his battalion were broadcast to the world by an embedded journalist. Collins’s intelligent, humanitarian credo provided George W Bush with an articulate justification for his invasion (the president even displayed the speech on the wall of the Oval Office). But the upper echelons of the Ministry of Defence are more comfortable with less egotistical, more reticent leaders. The speech made Collins few friends in the MoD, so much so that, two months later, despite the fact that neither Collins nor his men had visited Basra where the atrocities were alleged to have occurred, the MoD’s army spokesman Brigadier Matthew Sykes told Collins he wasn’t going to do anything about refuting the story. He advised him instead to be “more thick-skinned”.

As well as concentrating on Iraq, this well-written, evocative book also focuses on the author’s deeply personal relationship with his regiment and men, whose lives were always close to his heart. As their commanding officer, Collins took the 1st Royal Irish to Northern Ireland, where they quelled riots in streets in which many of them had played as children (and where they mixed with paramilitaries when on leave). Like Collins, a lot of his men have long family traditions of service in the regiment. He describes the unique atmosphere this creates, how it is the envy of other armies around the world, and why he and many other military men despair of the present government’s destruction of that tradition (a destruction that today’s senior army officers appear unwilling to do anything about).

Collins gives us a few unsettling examples of his sometimes inappropriate sense of humour, and he can be disarmingly honest. As SAS operations’ officer, for instance, he helped organise the dramatic Special Forces mission in Sierra Leone that rescued a group of Royal Irish soldiers captured by the West Side Boys terrorist gang. In an anecdotal footnote, he says that 1 Para recovered a former British Army SLR rifle from the gang. The serial number revealed that it had been used by 1 Para on Bloody Sunday in Londonderry 1972. The footnote adds that the rifle had been declared destroyed when the Saville inquiry into the shootings asked for it.

Collins was effective as commanding officer (though he clearly ruffled a few feathers). A DIY recruiting campaign restored his half-strength battalion to fighting size. He rooted out a gang of drug dealers, dealt with a homosexual rape, then a suicide in Northern Ireland and the death of a soldier on a training exercise. He also took his men on three operations: Northern Ireland, fire-fighting in Nottingham, and the invasion of Iraq.

His style, however, inevitably created enemies. He describes the American who accused him of war crimes as a “sad, confused” school-careers-guidance counsellor and part-time police patrolman, who was humiliated after attempting to ignore Collins. One complaint, though, was quickly followed by others. His former unit chaplain Nick Evans alleged that he’d been “bullied and struck” by Collins, and a Royal Military Police corporal claimed that, when ordered by Collins to stand on protection duty outside his office in the sports stadium at Al Armarah, he was being “abused”.

After a year of investigation, Collins was cleared of all accusations, promoted and given an OBE. But enough was enough, and he resigned, feeling that the army had left him high and dry. He now works with Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Spicer, another unashamed egoist, who has proved himself remarkably effective outside the constrictions of peacetime military life. It may be that private military companies such as Spicer’s Aegis Defence Services are the way that future conflicts will be resolved — but hopefully not because good operators such as Collins have left the army, wearied by wading through the treacle of bureaucracy and peacetime politics.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £16 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585

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