My son knew all the risks. He told us, whatever happens, I'll make you proud

Bill Pritchard, who spent nearly 30 years in the Army, said: “Gordon knew the risks and wanted to talk about it openly. He made plans and told us, ‘Whatever happens I will make you proud of me’.”

He implored his wife and three children to leave their family home at a military barracks in Germany and move in with Julie-Anne’s mother in Radstock, Somerset.

His father, who during his career had to break the news of a death to army families, said: “He didn’t want her and the kids alone in a near-empty base getting the early morning knock on the door.”

The young couple had laughed and cried over what he was about to do in Iraq but his reasons for planning his own funeral were to spare his widow the agonies of arguing with the military over the arrangements. Only close family will be there, with a handful of his best friends from his regiment, The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, to carry his coffin to the funeral service in Radstock where Gordon Pritchard was a popular figure.

He wants his remains cremated and his ashes scattered over a favourite picnic spot that he and his wife visited near Salisbury Plain, which he thought “a magic place”.

“He has made us very proud. We were always proud of Gordon,” his father said.

“He has achieved his fame. His face is on the front of every paper, but what a bloody stupid way to do it,” Mr Pritchard said last night at his Edinburgh home, sifting through the last batch of photographs his son sent home from the Gulf. They show him laughing with colleagues he thought of as family.

Gordon Pritchard was born to be a soldier. Army life was all he knew growing up on military bases as he, two brothers and his mother, Jeanette, followed his father to various postings here and abroad.

Bill Pritchard was serving in Germany with the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards when Gordon was born in October 1974 at the military hospital in Münster. Relatives joked it was all they could do to stop Bill from dressing the new arrival in camouflage fatigues instead of baby clothes.

Last night as he waited for his son’s body to be flown back to Britain, Mr Pritchard, 56, said: “Gordon and his brother, Peter, spent their time kicking around military camps with other army brats and they loved the life.

“Nobody forced them to join the Army. But truly it is the only thing they wanted to do.”

Both boys went to Queen Victoria School in Dunblane and then signed up as cadets on a junior leaders’ course in Bovington, Dorset, before joining their father’s regiment, which looked upon the pair as “their own”.

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