You knew that this was going to happen one day. And now you’re going to die in the cold wet mud of a ditch in Afghanistan because you chose to join a bunch of American marines as they were dropped like kittens into the middle of a perfect ambush.

You deserve to die for just floating along again. Not thinking, not making a decision, just stumbling slowly forwards until you couldn’t turn back.

It was so bad I imagined a tiny black-eyed dormouse, frozen with terror in the corner of a glass tank half-filled with a huge, languid, grey and black snake, its tongue and eyes gradually moving closer; so slow and arrogant it was repellent.

I had other strange visions: nothing peaceful, no floating towards a white light, just a quick flash of me and the Marines, curled into foetal positions, pressing ourselves as far as we could into the cold, dark mud. Above, a huge cartoon Taliban face, hundreds of feet tall, turbaned, dirty, brown and sweaty with a wiry beard and a wart, grinning maniacally down at us, growling with joy.

Even the fucking ditch was America’s fault. They had built it over fifty years ago to make the desert bloom, win hearts and minds and counter Russian influence. But being American, they had to build it in a perfectly straight line, in a land where nothing is straight. So as I dived into the ditch and slid towards the putrid water at the bottom, I was still an easy target for the Taliban fighters who did the same.

I wanted to wrap my arms around something but there was only freezing mud and a few dehydrated reeds. I went limp, resigned to the fact that metal was about to enter my body. Cus D’Amato’s old saying about how no boxer ever got knocked out who didn’t want to get knocked out suddenly made sense. OK, I lose, there’s no way out, just put me to sleep so that this ordeal can end.

A rocket whooshed over my shoulder and exploded against the wall behind me.

‘AW FUCK, I’M HIT, I’M HIT’, screamed the marine next to me. As he rolled on to his side I could see his right leg was covered in bright red blood that gushed from beneath his knee.

‘WHAT THA FUCK’, he moaned.

‘I’m hit too’, screamed the marine on my other side, holding the back of his left leg. ‘Am I bleeding?’ he asked, moving his hand away briefly.

‘No, you’re good’, I told him, sounding calm for a second. I rolled on to my back, expecting to feel pain, or a warm wet patch, somewhere. Please don’t let it be between my legs. Please let me keep my legs. But there was nothing, except knuckles bloodied from the scramble into the ditch. The bullets clattered above us in murderous clouds and the screams and the faces around me all said the same thing: we don’t know where it’s coming from and we’re all going to die.