A BLIZZARD of mud, blown up from the marshbanks that cover most of this apocalyptically bleak part of central Iraq, had stopped us dead in our tracks by mid-afternoon. Some of the US Marines were fuming. They had argued against leaving their positions in such unpredictable weather, but the commanders — being commanders — had ignored them.

So as night came we sat in our Humvees — armoured troop carriers — unable to move along Saddam’s partly built Highway 1, waiting for the Iraqis to come. No doubt they were as at home in the mud and the dark as Americans in a suburban mega-mall.

Marines were ordered not to get out of their vehicles, in case they got lost in the ink soup outside. From where I sat, it felt as though the invasion was going badly awry.

Until that point the war had been tedious, physically uncomfortable and terrifying, often all at the same time.

I remembered how military chiefs in northern Kuwait had boasted that the Marines were an “all-weather fighting force”, unstoppable by anything that Iraq’s annual spring storm season could hurl at them.

In fact, the wind and the mud kept bringing to mind the poetic dispatches of Wilfred Owen from the stalemate of the First World War. I imagined what my face must have looked like, caked, like everything in this part of Iraq, with orange-brown mud.

Just to make matters worse — quite a feat in the circumstances — a thunderstorm had arrived from the north, making us flinch with every rumble. It was so dark I could not even see my gloved hand in front of my face. “If I was an Iraqi, this would be my ideal time to launch an attack,” muttered one Marine.

Seconds later his prediction came true.

Usually at about 7pm the Marines try to eat rations in the dark, which is harder than it sounds, given that the main course has to be prepared using a bag of chemicals that heat up when activated by water. Then they take it in turns to sleep. The pressure-hose of adrenalin that keeps Marines alert during the day makes it easy to pass out, in spite of the pestering winds, which blow right through the standard-issue chemical suits, and the discomfort of the Humvees.

It is only on waking that the contortion necessary to sleep in a Humvee becomes apparent: it can take several minutes for circulation to return to the arms and legs. The spine feels as though it has been splintered like a cocktail stick.

But on this evening, at about 8pm, there was a blast of radio static and some catastrophic news.

“We have contact,” crackled a distant bass monotone.

Contact, in the language of the Marines where all emotion is surgically removed to avoid collateral damage to troop morale, means being attacked by the enemy. When fire is returned, it becomes engagement. A nuclear exchange is presumably a white wedding.

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