We arrived in Basra brimming with training and enthusiasm and devoid of any serious experience. We had seen the graphs, the scatter diagrams, the incident reports. Every available statistic pointed to a rise in attacks. But most of us came only with a hazy idea of what to expect.

The next seven months quickly fell into a pattern. A crescendo of nerves and frustration - with equipment, with each other, with our tasks - followed by the release with a cigarette and a brew.

Looking back, my memories were of the excitement, the energy, the extraordinary sense of purpose that surrounded our activity.

I still remember a patrol that was hit by an IED (roadside bomb). A long afternoon on the roof of someone's house followed, as we secured the area and gathered evidence. Dominating high points is vital to securing any patch of ground. In cities that means getting onto roofs - a move that never makes you popular with the locals. The soldier who had walked ahead to clear the route on that patrol had taken the force of the blast. It had ripped open his side and removed chunks from his leg. He survived. His friends went out to face their enemy again that afternoon.

I recall too, the incessant mortar attacks. They would catch you any time: on a portaloo, soaped up in a shower, or in the open. By the time we left, Basra Palace was a warren of sandbag tunnels, the grand opulence of Saddam's buildings hidden behind grey concrete blast walls. Visitors unfamiliar with the camp were most at risk. The first challenge was to persuade them to lie down when they heard a mortar rather than run. Most of the blast goes upward from the point of impact. You can survive a remarkably close hit if you are flat on the ground. Sometimes, though, the first you knew of them was when they exploded.

One got a sergeant working in the Quartermaster's store.

“At least I'm getting out of this bloody dump,” he said, as he waited to be evacuated on a stretcher. Shrapnel from a 120mm mortar had opened his stomach. Casualties such as this were a regular fact of life. They appeared at the medical aid post and disappeared in a helicopter. Some had been shot, some hit by shrapnel, some by roadside bombs. One returned from fighting only to be hit on the head by falling masonry. None of us had experience of casualties on that scale, but they were never depressing, just a source of pride and sadness. We were too busy to think much about them. Perhaps only on returning to the UK did we realise the hole that they had left. When we returned home last year we had experienced the bloodiest tour to date -- 13 dead, 100 injured, out of a force of less than 700 soldiers.

Most of all I remember the buzz, the sheer electricity that followed a successful operation. We might have launched an arrest. We might have killed an enemy commander, or lured them into an ambush. In any case our spirits were buoyed, the soldiers swaggered and the planning teams breathed more freely. We are taught at Sandhurst that morale is decisive in battle. It is, and nothing boosts it like offensive operations.

Yet for all the glamour, excitement and bravado, it was clear by the time we arrived that the British had run out of ideas in Iraq. We had no strategy and one aim: to get out of Basra city before it looked like we had been driven out. When we arrived in 2003 we made great show of telling the Americans how to fight a counter-insurgency war. Just as they grasped the nettle, our failure to do the same became evident. They revised their approach, extended their tours and poured more troops into the 'surge'. We abandoned our doctrine, closed our bases and retreated into our armoured vehicles. Meaningful contact with the locals was all but impossible.Whether for lack of resources, lack of will, or out of despair we devoted our efforts to presenting the Iraqis as ready and the job as done. The press machine spun tortuous lines about 'handover' not 'withdrawal', 'creating conditions' for Iraqi control and putting the future of Basra into Iraqi hands. (We were, but which Iraqis and what sort of future?) I doubt if many of the journalists who visited believed us. In any case troops were needed elsewhere.

The last generation that fought a war of this duration and intensity is dying out. Our generation is struggling to come to terms with this one. It seems to me that we need to. Without an understanding of the prosecution of a war, we have little chance of winning it. After all, war is much too serious a thing to be left to the military.

Christopher Salmon served as captain in Basra for seven months in 2007.

Times Recommends

• Fish and chip shops ‘selling cobbler as cod’
• T in the Park festival at Kinross
• How to get Madonna’s Thighs