We were supposed to visit the battalion's main casualty stabilisation point. But that morning it was badly damaged by artillery shells. It is here we meet a remarkable young surgeon, Lieutenant Illia.
My first experience of being under direct fire happened while I was lying in an alpine meadow near Batusha, Kosovo, on a glorious spring morning in 1999.
Here I was, with MI6's greatest double agent, in the safe house where he'd lived under the protection of a British state ever since one of espionage's most celebrated escapes.
Unaided, the young soldier walks to the casualty station. What I can't see in this dusk, and what won't be discovered by a medic until later, is that a piece of the soldier's brain is hanging from hi…