“I remember on one of my tours I flew to Afghanistan on a trooping flight with 150 other soldiers, and all they give you is a bottle of water on board, but apart from that they sit you in your helmet and body armour for 10 hours. “So, I was on that flight at the exact same time that Carey was crossing the Atlantic on Leonardo DiCaprio’s private jet, which always struck me as a particularly galling juxtaposition.” The self-deprecating former Territorial Army soldier-turned-management consultant is for once taking the spotlight with his memoir The Accidental Soldier, a dark and very funny account of his seven-month tour of Iraq with, in his words, ‘my very limited military skills’. Mulligan, 42, who read history at Oxford, quit his job as a teacher, which he hated, in search of military adventure. For years he had ‘played soldiers’ with the TA at weekends, and when he volunteered to go to Iraq he had a month of TA officer training at Sandhurst and further training in Germany before being deployed with his regiment. He thought he would be given relatively minor duties, maybe some sort of liaison job, but ended up 3rd Troop leader of B Squadron, a fighting troop stationed in Basra in 2006. “My learning curve was vertical,” he says today, only half joking. “I’m constantly surprised that they let me go on operations as a troop leader with as little training and competence as I had at the time. “The army was scraping the bottom of the barrel and I was almost certainly at the bottom of that barrel.” Yet he’s never been what he calls a professional soldier, he clarifies. “I’ve done three operational tours and been to Iraq and Afghanistan, but it’s never been my full-time job. So, I mean, it’s kind of like a hobby that just got wildly out of control and ended up getting me deployed all over the place.” In the book, Mulligan describes his chaotic deployment, the challenges of being under-prepared, trying to deal with warring militias and keep areas secure, and the emotional toll of losing comrades. His recollections are aided by the diaries he kept in Iraq and the email correspondence while out there, while two paternity leaves after the birth of his children gave him time to write the book. The terrifying escapades included his troop having to reverse out of a minefield they had accidentally driven into, and of him desperately pulling on his body armour while in a camp under siege from mortars, which struck the corimec (shelter) next door. “Getting very closely mortared in camp – 50 or 60 mortar rounds landed in the space of eight to 10 minutes – was the one where I thought, ‘This could well be it’. “You’re lying on the floor of a kind of Portakabin with your head in your helmet and your body armour on, but if a mortar or rocket comes through that roof it’s game over for everyone in there.” Yet this darkly comic memoir, which been endorsed by Richard Curtis and Richard E Grant, also charts much of the army banter and ribbing he received from other soldiers under his command. “They need the wit of a first-rate stand-up comedian, because it is just relentless,” he says. “In terms of the darkness of the humour, a great deal of that is to do with, if you didn’t laugh you’d cry at some of the things that happen. It’s a real coping mechanism.” “I was like the weird, repressed, slightly posh uncle who no-one could work out,” he continues. “They’ll happily tell you that you are some sort of Downton Abbey chinless wonder.” Did his troop look up to him, though? “They did a very good job of tolerating me. Tolerating a 23-year-old with no real kind of military experience whatsoever having to make what could genuinely be life or death decisions on their behalf. “I’m not sure I’d have the patience or willingness to put up with that. It was always a constant surprise to me that at no point did someone turn around and go, ‘F*** off’.” Some also knew of his actress sister. “They’d say the most outrageous things like, ‘Sir, how can you be out here living your life when your sister is just so much more successful?’” He joshes about sibling rivalry. “Over the years there’s been a lot of jealously and bitterness, but as I say to Carey, ‘I’m sorry, you just can’t be a management consultant no matter how much you like it, it’s not doable for you’.” He recalls that when he attended Carey’s wedding to Mumford & Sons frontman Marcus Mumford in 2012, he’d only met him about four times because he’d been away with the army so much. “I went to the wedding the day after I got back from Afghanistan, with a haircut that had been done by an Afghan barber in Camp Bastion, for which I will never forgive him.” He rarely attends red carpet events with his sister, he says, although he almost appeared as an extra in her film Suffragette. “But I ended up on the cutting room floor because they thought it was weird that some random policeman sitting in a cinema looked a bit too much like the lead actress.” Joking aside, they are extremely close, he stresses, describing Carey as ‘like one of my best friends’ and have together raised funds for War Child, which supports children in war-torn countries. He’s donating the royalties from the book to the charity. When Mulligan returned to the UK after Iraq he joined the Civil Service, but then rejoined the army in 2010, spent 18 months learning Afghan languages and completed two tours of Afghanistan as an interpreter and cultural adviser attached to UK Special Forces. Today, he lives in north London with his wife Marianne and two children, aged eight and two. He fell into management consultancy in the knowledge he needed to get a proper job. “I was about 30, I thought, this is ridiculous. You need to stop letting this TA hobby get out of hand.” His experience in Iraq didn’t give him a newfound perspective, he reflects. “I think a lot of people hope that, right? You stare some fairly difficult situations in the face. You learn what really matters and that you’re not supposed to sweat the small stuff. “Unfortunately, within about two weeks of getting home, I was getting very upset about the broadband not working or the fact that my cup of tea had too much milk in it. “What has changed is, it’s made me appreciate just how lucky I am to have been born in the UK into the kind of society we have. I’d not seen suffering – both to do with war and with basic life circumstances – like that, until I’d been to rural Iraq, where people, and particularly the children, just don’t have anything.” Life has changed immeasurably since dodging bombs and bullets, he agrees. “Sometimes, though, the intensity on a Saturday morning when we’re trying to get everyone out of the house for rugby or other activities can be a little bit reminiscent of Basra, but there’s much less chance of anyone actually getting hurt.” The Accidental Soldier by Owain Mulligan is published by Hodder & Stoughton, priced £22.