Some of the army drivers serving in Helmand wear a specially commissioned T-shirt. It says: “If you can read this, I’ve been blown out of my Viking and lost my body armour.”

British soldiers have never lacked for mordant wit, but the drivers of the 11-tonne armoured vehicle make a serious point. Although the Viking has positive attributes, it is known to be vulnerable to roadside bombs, and its drivers carry the greatest risk of all.

Its wide rubber tracks, which make it so agile across rough terrain, also put the most likely explosion point from a roadside bomb directly under the driver’s seat.

This is why, even with recently fitted additional armour, Viking drivers have suffered a particularly horrendous rate of loss.

By contrast, the logistics lorry that I saw blown up this week had the wheels mounted behind where the crew sit; though injured, all three crewmen survived the blast.

The Vikings are also notoriously hot. Attempts to upgrade the air-conditioning in a vehicle originally designed for Arctic combat have proved notoriously unsuccessful.

Inside the troop-carrying compartment, which is towed behind the separate engine unit, it is dark and cramped with a single bullet-proof window in the rear door.

Inside this sweltering steel box, low bucket seats run down either side. It is so small that soldiers tie kit to the outside of the vehicle to maximise interior space. The only contact with the outside world is a radio speaker from the driver’s compartment and an escape hatch in the roof.

A journey over rough ground is a disconcerting and unpredictable succession of buffets and bumps, but the Viking’s rear compartment lacks seatbelts. Many lives have been saved inside American MRAP (mine-resistant, ambush protected) vehicles by a five-point harness that prevents passengers breaking their necks when huge roadside bombs throw them into the air.

The Viking does have the ability to escape high-risk roads and break out into rough country where the Taleban bomb teams cannot anticipate their movements. Among the insurgents, that has earned the vehicle the nickname Camel.

But in the heavily irrigated fields along the Helmand river, room for manoeuvre is more limited, and churning up farmers’ fields with its tracks will not help to win the support of the local populace.

For popularity with the troops, the Vikings are a definite second to the newly introduced Mastiff, a lumbering, wheeled leviathan that offers unrivalled resistance to mines. Though Mastiffs can become bogged down once they are off-road, they are the only vehicles in Afghanistan in which the passengers can feel confident that they are safe from the bombmakers.

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