On a freezing January morning two years ago, I joined a US army assault in an al-Qa’eda-controlled village in northern Iraq. We were dropped by helicopter half a mile from the village not long after midnight and shivered till dawn, when the soldiers launched their assault. They met with no resistance and by late afternoon had completed their searches and were mostly asleep.
I sat in the garden of the makeshift company HQ — the largest house in the village, commandeered from a reluctant sheikh. Above me a US soldier was on sentry duty, while at the bottom of the garden women were cleaning clothes in a stream. There was just enough warmth from the winter sun, so I took out my book, Sir Walter Scott’s Chronicles of the Canongate.
Like much of Scott’s work, it deals with the struggle between the clans of the Scottish Highlands and the savage British redcoats.
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