What really strikes you in Afghanistan is the sheer, astonishing ambition of what Nato is attempting here, writes Alex Thomson.
It isn’t the heat or the cold at night. It isn’t the incessant fleas biting you as you try to sleep in a compound. It isn’t the pumping adrenaline and fear when the round from insurgents come cracking in.
What really strikes you is something altogether larger – the sheer, astonishing ambition of what Nato is attempting here.
Take its great hope for getting out of Afghanistan, the Afghan National Army. For starters they were late turning up for the critical pre-dawn helicopter-drop deep into territory scarcely visited at all by Nato forces.
And once arrived they were close to a shambles from the word go. Diffident about wading into irrigation ditches for fear of getting their feet wet. Their commander demanding one of their men piggy-back his precious body over the warm muddy water.
Or at least that was when he was not demanding to be filmed for TV incessantly for three days.
Pinned down in an irrigation ditch buy incoming and accurate AK47 fire, the Coldstream Guards screamed at the ANA that they were not covering one side of the ditch, the side the rounds were coming in from.
The response of their commander? To engage in a five minute shouting match with his men during which time absolutely nobody moved to cover the defenceless east side of our trench.
It got worse. Upon reaching a safe compound the Coldstream commander on the ground, Major Toby Till, rounded on his Afghan counterpart.
The issue – some of the incoming fire on the Coldstream Guards had been the Afghan Army firing on the wrong positions. Or, just as likely, simply blasting away more or less indiscriminately.
Even in the final moment of this three day patrol the Afghans and British managed another set-to. At issue this time – a chicken. Yes, a chicken. The Afghan Army likes to eat fresh. They’d procured a chicken at the final compound before the Chinooks were due to come in.
They saw nothing amiss about bringing a flapping chicken into a night-time fast evacuation involving three Chinook helicopters in a place where it was highly likely they could be under fire.
Major Toby Till and those around him did, however, see a problem. Privately, in their tents, I heard Coldstream Guards routinely refer to their Afghan counterparts in some pretty uncomplimentary language.
So it is that although the brass and the politicians around the world have to praise the great strides which the Afghan Army has made, and to some degree that is true, the reality on the ground is that there is a long, long way to go.