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their special way of doing things. But 2RGJ was snowed under with commitments; they were all over the Rock, on ceremonial and border duties. Everybody was too busy to give the five of us any attention, and our first couple of weeks were spent just bumming around.
        " went into the main street the morning after I arrived.
        As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but shops full of cheap watches and carpets from Morocco, most of them run by Asian or Arab traders. I bought my mum a peacock carpet for a fiver, with a pair of flip-flops bunged in. I thought, This is wonderful; I've only been here a couple of days and already I'm cutting majorleague deals down the kasbah.
        Full of enthusiasm after my year of training, I was raring to go.
        I thought the posting was brilliant: We were in the Mediterranean; there were beaches; there was sun. It was the first time I'd ever been abroad, apart from my day trips to France, and I was getting paid for it. So the attitude of some of the other blokes came as a bit of a surprise. Some of the old hands seemed so negative; everything was "shit" and "for fuck's sake." Or, very mysteriously, it would be "I'm just going to do some business," and off they'd go. It took me awhile to find out what they were doing.
        The majority of teenagers who joined the army had been exposed to some illegal substances. It was part of the culture, and they took that culture in with them when they joined. I had never been interested in drugs myself, mainly because I hated smoking and had never been exposed to them. I'd heard all the terms but didn't exactly know what was what.
        And now when I did get exposed to the drug business, it scared me; it was something totally alien.
        Drugs, I was told, had always been a bit of a problem.
        Once, when the battalion came back from an overseas exercise, a fleet of coaches had turned up at two-thirty in the morning. It was the local police, come to raid the battalion as a matter of course.
        They didn't find any illegal substances on this occasion, but they did find an officer who was engaged in an activity that was even more naughty in the eyes of military law. He was in bed with a corporal from the mortar platoon.
        We seemed to have the culture of the seventies but the army of the fifties. It felt as if I were living in one of the black-and-white movies I sometimes used to watch on a Saturday afternoon. Each morning we had to drink a mugful of "screech," the old army word for powdered lime juice. The colonel must have been reading a book about Captain Cook and thought it would stop us from getting scurvy. I heard about an officer who joined the Irish Guards. The adjutant pulled him to one side and said, "As a young subaltern, these are the rules. One, never wear a brown suit. Two, always call the underground the underground and not the tube. Three, never travel on a red bus. Four, always wear a hat and have an umbrella, and five, never carry a brown paper parcel."
        Nothing about how to approach the soldiers he was going to have under his command.
        Gibraltar in the summertime was packed with tourists, and because we were doing all the ceremonial stuff, we were God's gift to a pretty girl who liked a uniform.
        That was my theory anyway, and I set off one afternoon for the main street, wearing civvies and in my own mind very much our man in Gibraltar. I found a place called the Capri bar, with plastic palm trees inside and semicircular booths with tables. All very dark and sophisticated, I thought. To be as suave as the surroundings demanded, I ordered a Southern Comfort and lemonade, a very international drink at the time.
        As I sat there listening to songs by the Stylistics and the Chi-Lites, I could see now and again blokes that I recognized from the battalion walking past, looking at me through the window.
        The fellow who owned the bar was a Brit. He came