BROTHER IN ARMS

Owain Mulligan talks about becoming an accidental soldier and how his movie star sister Carey is like one of his best friends. By HANNAH STEPHENSON

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THE irony of his sister Carey Mulligan’s glamorous film career compared with his own army experience dodging bombs and bullets in war-torn countries isn’t lost on Owain Mulligan, genial and witty sibling of the famous movie star.

"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”.

Owain, 42, who read history at Oxford, quit his job as a teacher, which he hated, in search of military adventure. For years he'd “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.