Hunkered down in Polish forest amid massive live-fire Nato exercise, threats posed by Russia's war in Ukraine feel very real – Mike Edwards

That I had been on the television news every night for a quarter of a century would fan the flames of a wind-up already a raging inferno, given I am a 50-something major with 30 years in. “You’ll never guess who I had in my store yesterday, lads,” would go the lantern-swinging overture, as his buddies in the Naafi gleefully pulled up a sandbag.

Instead, rather than the Götterdammerung I feared, his bidding was much more prosaic. “I need to measure your sternum, sir.” As I groped self-consciously inside uniform shirt pockets for my areolae, he whipped off the tape measure he’d hung around his neck ‘Are You Being Served’ style and went to work on my chest. Next came measurement of my head with a kind of caliper thing and bingo, I was done.

I returned to the quartermaster’s store at Redford Barracks in Edinburgh a week later to sign for my new kit. The headgear was like nothing I’d ever been issued before, with a brow-fitting for night-vision goggles and spaces above the ears for my radio headset. The body armour was a futuristic Kevlar tabard with shoulder pads, a far cry from the set I’d been issued when mobilised for active service in Iraq and Afghanistan a lifetime before.

Psychologically life-changing enemy fire

Then it was a gilet-type affair with pouches for ceramic plates to protect the heart, front and back. But in those black-boots-in-the-desert days of supply issues, I shared my two plates with a mate who had none. Every Basra morning, we held each other’s eye as we decided silently where that day to position our single plate, in a garment designed for two. I usually chose the rear pouch because I felt that if I found myself facing the enemy, then things had gone very badly wrong.

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Why I joined what was then called the Territorial Army is a soliloquy for another Sunday but the life of an army reservist is seldom routine. Down my three decades in green, I have been sent to some amazing places, others not so much. Despite coming under psychologically life-changing enemy fire, including Iraqi Scud ballistic missiles that we thought were carrying weapons of mass destruction, the stresses and scars of an epiphany I still bear, Iraq and Afghanistan were fascinating places and one day I would like to return, although I think that is more and more unlikely now, given events.

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Instead, I am making the most of Poland where I am a miniscule cog in a colossal machine as Nato puts itself through its paces in a series of exercises across its eastern flank. I write this with a pencil stub on scraps of paper, bookies’ slips, the backs of fag packets and the like, because personal laptops and mobile phones are prohibited. A rather embarrassing incident occurred earlier this year in which the mobile phone call of a senior German military officer in Singapore was surveilled by Russian agents, highlighting the dangers of the instrument of all trades in the back pocket.

Deafening cacophony of tanks

No, for once I am phoneless. And I am living where I like to live best – outside, where you can be very comfortable with the right kit and, more importantly, the right mindset. The fact that the outside in question shares a border with Ukraine which is Nato’s front line, makes the experience all the more vivid. The operations I went on were huge military campaigns but this is an exercise and Nato’s biggest for 40 years, spanning Europe from the Mediterranean to the Arctic. I am hunkered down in a forest, sporting my new body armour and helmet – because live ammunition is as deadly on exercise as it is on operations – while an armoured brigade races across the real estate around me.

The cacophony of the Perkins diesel engines – each with a whopping 26-litre capacity and belonging to a dozen Challenger 2 tanks – is deafening but hugely assuring as they hammer forward; their US Army compatriots in Abrams tanks and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles are on an adjoining grid square and the Polish army is nearby too.

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I can smell fumes and smoke but the biggest sensation I feel is the pulsing of the earth as the tanks race onwards to their objectives. This is not something I have experienced since the Iraqi desert. The goosebumps are up. This is corporeal. This is visceral. This is surely what makes people want to be soldiers. If ever there was a recruiting tool, it is surely the Challenger tank.

And Britain has just pledged to increase defence spending by a totemic 2.5 per cent of GDP to £87 billion annually by 2030, so expect their new big brothers, the Challenger 3, on the ground very soon – and many more exercises like these.

Today the enemy is an exercise scenario detail. The Nato message is that this exercise is not about Russia and Ukraine, rather about strength and unity and a commitment to defending the alliance’s shared values. But you don’t have to be a Wellington to know what the desired effect of all this is, given the propinquity of events across the border, where the enemy is far from fictional and the narrative is all too real.

Mike Edwards OBE is a serving army reservist with 30 years of service and Deputy Lord Lieutenant of Dunbartonshire.