'You were lying in your bed, and the whole ground was shaking with AS-90 guns. It was like being in a movie.' 🎙️ mollyblackall interviews Captain Julie Thain-Smith
, the Scottish captain, who has now retired from the forces, described her deployment as like “being in a movie”.
“I was in the navy, so I had no army kit. We got issued with winter combat gear, but where were we going? To Iraq, where it’s hot. [We had] hardly any, and it was all a dark green colour. They kept saying, you’ll get [the kit] in theatre. Don’t worry that you’ve only got big black boots that are absolutely no use in the desert, you’ll get it in theatre. But that was a complete lie.
Captain Thain-Smith began her deployment in neighbouring Kuwait, spending two weeks close to the Iraqi border as the invasion was prepared. With fears that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction”, which triggered the invasion and, the navy captain remembers spending hours in bunkers wearing stuffy chemical protection kit as chemical alarms rang out.
“It was all going on around you. When we arrived, we were sleeping in a massive tent, a couple of hundred of us, and there were rockets going off and patriot missiles. You were lying in your bed, and the whole ground was shaking with AS-90 guns. It was like being in a movie. I said to one of the army people, what do I do? He said, put your helmet on,” she said. “I was expecting to go into a shelter or a trench, but no – just put your helmet on.
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