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Target practice: the author, coming off the ranges after firing his Challenger tank in 1988

OUR breath came in short, staccato starts. The turret’s atmosphere turned viscous, from air to treacle. Fear, certainly anticipated fear, blunts the brain. It forces a thinking slowdown. Thank God for drills, automated – automaton – processes. The perfect antidote to a crew gone quiet, retreating from one another into his own personal terror. Fright compartmentalised. We had the right. Out there, headed straight this way, rumbled the Red Army.

It had begun an hour after heads hit pillows. NCOs banging on bedroom doors, far away cries. “Not a drill. Not a drill.” The mind never quite recovers from having just one hour’s sleep when it was anticipating seven. We moved like drones to silent silos whose acquaintance we made rarely, usually only on guard. Suddenly, they became the camp’s focus. Great iron doors were thrown open and from within poured an exotica of weaponry: latest-generation tank rounds, .50 cal machine guns, grenade launchers, ammunition. Lots and lots and lots of ammunition.

And then we were flying through the camp gates. No explanation had been given. None was needed. That could come later. We had to get somewhere first, to the best place we could put up a fight. A Challenger mark 1 main battle tank weighs 70 tonnes when fully bombed up, and many of its crews would have been forgiven the brief thrill of leaving behind all those peace time rules, the speed limits, the barrels to the rear. A short-lived thrill.

Now we were sat in woods but a stone’s throw from the East German border. The distant hum of silent running, green glare from gunsights, the occasional whirr of a traversing turret, moving this way and that in search of T72s. Otherwise, nothing but darkness and silence. No one spoke. Most of us desperately wanted to smoke.

The job was simple. We were a suicide regiment. We were to stand in the way of any forthcoming Soviet division and slow it as best we could. Optimistic planners believed we could take out four of theirs before our time came. Even if we were so fortuitous, we were just 48 tanks against 10,000. Given the Warsaw Pact’s preference for skirting round hotspots in a fast push, to return later to mop up encirclements (they had the numbers, after all), and given that their generals almost certainly knew that the British sector would provide less resistance than the Americans to the south, it seemed the tactics of the Somme. It felt that grim.

Among those quiet pines, fear conspired to turn all our circumstances against us. Latest generation thermal imaging gave us the jump on the Russkies, but it only served to remind us gunners of the limited arc of our main armament in woodland. The quiet certainly beat the clank of approach tank tracks, but what if Spetznaz commandos were using the night as a shield to place landmines under our motionless vehicles?

Squaddies, to a man, prefer to be thrown into the thick of it rather than have to endure a wait, left alone with imaginations exaggerating outcomes. But, as the minutes turned to hours, shoulders began to relax. Our ears become less keen to every noise, the gun sweeps less frequent. Down below the turret, our drive Baldrick went back to sleep, his Pavlovian response to halting while closed down.

Of course the call came. If it had gone differently, this piece would have been written in a radically-changed world, and probably not by this writer. We made our way back slowly to camp, pushing gingerly through the emerging dawn, another cloying, spidery-cold German autumn morning. We even stopped for a fag, making sure we were at some distance to the charge bins before lighters were brandished. There was no hurry. Returning everything would be a chaotic nightmare, interrupted frequently by unctuous, storeroom fascists who thought it was their god-given right to overreact to every unexpected turn of events. Hardly the way to recover from such a stress.

The Soviets, we later learned, had wheeled first south and then away from the border, coming perhaps within 20 miles of the fence they had put up. AWACS wasn’t able to tell if they’d come tooled up, so squaddie stories began. This was to be expected among young men. The least fantastic, and most credible, was that they were testing our response, perhaps attempting to count our guns. But such events were more commonplace than many might expect. Old sweats later reminisced about previous crash-outs, happy to tell the sprogs – the newbies – how it all used to be so much tougher.

Several months later, we had completed an invasion of our own. The troop had set up camp in an East Berlin restaurant and we were setting about getting our best number twos filthy with beer. We had to wear the uniforms, it was a stipulation of crossing behind the Iron Curtain. It allowed the Stasi to follow us far more easily.

The dishes and drinks kept coming and we settled into a familiar pattern, hunting round the table in a gang, settling on an individual and mercilessly ripping the Michael before moving on to the next poor sod. We all of us had it. Both barrels. But time soon came to go. We had to make it back past Checkpoint Charlie before midnight or run the risk of diplomatic incident. This wasn’t far fetched. A year earlier, one of the boys from another squadron arrived too late and too drunk. The East Germans insisted upon holding him until an extremely irate colonel arrived to deposit him in a cell back west.

The alcohol made us generous, but an unfuzzy mind wouldn’t have seen the cultural mis-step coming. Our sergeant growled at us to get our hands in our pockets for the waitress. We all reasoned 10 East German marks a piece from us squaddies, and a little more from the non-coms. In all, the pot came to 270 marks. At the time, there were nine East German to one West German Mark, and three WGMs to the pound. A tenner. It didn’t seem much, but when she saw the notes, our girl erupted into tears, and insisted upon going around the table to give each one of us a damp kiss. “Now I can buy my children Christmas presents,” she told us.

There are times when it doesn’t matter how far gone you are, some things will sobers you on the spot. This was such a moment. We fell silent, and shuffled out with our heads low, ashamed of our profligacy, of our pissed braying, our – well – capitalist ostentatiousness. On the way back, we suddenly saw East Germany. The ghostship shops, no end to the grey concrete, empty faces. That bloody, bloody Wall. Some of us had lived in central Europe for over a decade and many of us spoke German. This was a different galaxy.

Many of us were glad it was our last night. The following morning, we would return west by train, at that time still one of only a handful of routes into and out of Berlin. We would pass a Soviet tank park that stretched away from the line and over the horizon. For long, squaddies had believed it had been built there to mess with our minds.

Perhaps another year had passed before our troop leader appeared beetroot-faced at the cage door. Having a Rupert – especially our Rupert – pay a visit to the tank park was indeed an occasion, but he waved it away with more important news. “I’ve got us tickets to go to Berlin – this weekend.” A room of blank expressions shot back. “You know. They say it’s the end of communism.”

They might have done, but we hadn’t believed it. Sure, a trickle of Ossies had already made their way through, but the reception was perhaps less than they’d been hoping for. West Germans treated them with an indifference that bordered on disdain and embarrassment, rather like a smart metropolitan family disturbed at dinner by long-unseen country cousins. Forty years had become an eternity.

Whatever was going to happen, it sounded like action, and we all immediately bought into the lieutenant’s plan. All week, we gabbed in anticipation, minds and mouths speculating feverishly, making sure that other troops in the squadron knew we were going, that we had been selected, that we were the special ones.

Friday finishes at midday in the army, and we had to be ready to go straight afterwards. We flew back to the block, pushed past people to make it to the showers first and were outside, ready, waiting, laughing, joking and smoking, for the four tonner to take us off to ringside seats at a moment in history. But the four tonner never came.

At the 11th hour, senior officers had become concerned as to what might happen to us if a revolution got under way. The East German guards had a reputation where machine guns were concerned. We all cynically thought that it was just top brass face saving, that Field Marshal Haig mentality of nobs before troopers. Instead, we spent the weekend running the payback gauntlet of those we had previously taunted.

It became especially painful for this future journalist (and remains so to this day) to watch TV, to see the sledgehammers taken to the Wall. We could have been there, too, closer than David Hasselhoff. There was to be no blood-drenched revolution, just as there had been no Soviet invasion. The Cold War had become a phony conflict, and the most remarkable experience we have from that time was that we saw our first Trabant a few days afterwards, before even U2.

Francis Fukuyama would later call this the end of history. But just months afterwards, life had pretty much returned to the way it had been. The revolution had gone as surely as cordite in the wind. The West Germans had to get used to the fact that those distant cousins had not only come for food, but had moved into the spare bedroom. But by that time, our unit had been posted back to the UK. During those two years at home, we had Desert Storm, the start of something else. And many of us left the forces.

This apparent return to normality vexed some. Early nineties Indie darlings Jesus Jones had visited Romania after it had experienced the far bloodier Ceau?escu coup, returning fizzing with anger at stories of pregnant women pleading for their unborn’s lives before being bayoneted in the belly. The band would later express their frustration at such swift complacency in Right Here, Right Now. A line from that track gives this piece its title.

Those of us who served together during 1989 remain in touch, all us comrades in arms from those halcyon days. It wasn’t a bond of friendship, undiminished down two decades, that kept us together. Rather, it was rather a more modern phenomenon: Facebook. We meet perhaps four times a year and draw immense comfort from such encounters. We do, or don’t, talk about the depression, the anger management problems, the emerging arthritis and the aches that come as the weather turns, hangovers from when we were bulletproof, issues that have surfaced in the interim years that we can trace in a straight line back to our time in the forces. We remain the lucky ones. Squaddies are good at dying like flies. Some will never come to a reunion, because they drove a car carelessly, drunk too much one night, started a nightclub fight with the odds clearly against them, just got unlucky. Others found their way into crime. Fate doesn’t appear to smile kindly upon those that elect to put themselves in harm’s way.

But when we meet, we never talk about the greatest battle we never fought, that day in history we missed by a hair’s width. How can we, when there is Wootton Bassett? We see the hearses and we experience the guilt of desertion, of leaving our little brothers to wars far worse than our own. And we are haunted by the notion that, had we been there, they might well have lived.

Dedicated to the memory of Trooper Joshua Hammond, of 2nd Royal Tank Regiment, killed on Wednesday July 1 this year in Afghanistan, a week before his 19th birthday. Help for Heroes.