The Tartan Terriers

THIS week the centenary of the Territorial Army was marked by guns – a simultaneous four-round feu de joie – fired at Edinburgh Castle, the Tower of London and also in Cardiff and Belfast.

The centenary will be marked by further celebrations at Edinburgh Castle on 11 April, in the presence of General Sir Richard Dannatt and Des Browne, Secretary of State for defence. It comes at a time when the force – once saddled with an image of amateur "weekend warriors" – plays an increasingly integral role in the British Army's commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and not without cost. Eight TA members have been killed in action during the past five years, including two from Scotland's 52 Lowland Regiment, Fusilier Russell Beeston, shot on a patrol in Iraq, and Private Jason Smith, who died from heat exhaustion in Iraq.

The "Terriers" also greet their 100th birthday with the prospect of a major strategic review, currently the subject of much speculation, which will examine its place in today's armed forces.

Local militias and yeomanry were common during the 19th century: by 1900, Edinburgh alone could boast five volunteer infantry battalions, two volunteer artillery regiments and a volunteer engineers' regiment, over and above local militias. It was a Scotsman, Richard Burdon Haldane, Liberal (and later Labour) politician, who as secretary of state for war presided over legislation passed in 1907 to consolidate the various volunteer forces into a single Territorial Force. The first units were "stood up" on 1 April 1908, and just six years later were fighting alongside a relatively small standing army in the First World War (during which more than 122,000 TA members died). During the Second World War, 17 TA personnel won Victoria and George Crosses.

Some notable TA members have ranged from Billy Connolly to Dad's Army actor Arthur Lowe, and from former prime minister Ted Heath to the Duke of Westminster, who joined the reserve as a trooper in 1970 and ended up as a major general and Assistant Chief of Defence Staff (Reserves and Cadets). Today, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan see the one-time "reserve of last resort" operating as an integral part of the Army, with members – often specialists such as medics or engineers – subject to compulsory call-up for the first time since the end of National Service in 1963.

With some 17,000 of the TA's part-timers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003, the impending strategic review comes as the force is seen in some quarters as being used to plug gaps in the regular army's overstretched ranks, while losing members who are leaving rather than risk deployment to the conflict zones. An Army spokesman approached by The Scotsman said he couldn't comment on the review, as it hadn't yet started, but stated that in Scotland, which boasts more than 2,500 Territorials, recruitment and retention remains buoyant, bucking the trend elsewhere in the UK.

We speak to three Scottish TA soldiers who have seen duty at the sharp end.

"I was excited at the time. I didn't realise what proper war was"

CAPTAIN MARTINE McNEE, Royal Engineers (Volunteers, part of Media Operations Group), and head of Media Operations for Army HQ 2 Division.

MARTINE McNEE formerly worked with BBC Scotland's Gaelic department. Back in 1994 she had just graduated in French and Gaelic and was livingnear a squadron of an engineering regiment. "I had just left university, was skint and bored and thought, why not?"

Today, at 36, she is a TA captain in a specialist volunteer unit, the Media Operations Group, and her full-time job is as a civil servant in the media office at 2nd Division HQ at Craigiehall, outside Edinburgh. Wearing her TA beret, she has seen deployment in Bosnia, Kosovo and, most recently, Iraq. "When I joined up, it was still post-Cold War, and we were still a reserve of last resort – you'd only be called up if the Army ran out of troops (and] we'd stop the Russians invading, that sort of mentality. Nowadays, you're pretty much going to be expected to deploy.

"I was mobilised for Iraq at the beginning of February 2003. I was terribly excited at the time and probably didn't realise what war proper was.

"I was in a forward press information centre, and our job basically was to take embedded journalists as far towards the front line as we could, and get them back safely … so we had to be good on our convoy and ambush drills." (She was carrying an SA80 carbine and a pistol.)

"What really brought it all home to us was when we had our first gas attack warning. At that time we thought there were weapons of mass destruction, so we had to assume that any bombardment was going to be chemical or biological.

"I was on duty overnight and got a call on the field phone – "Gas, gas, gas!". I just slammed it down, and started 'Gas-gas-gassing' all over the place, setting off the alarms.

"It's bizarre, at the time you're not concentrating on the fact that you might die; you just get on with your job."

When Basra Technical College was occupied by the Scottish Dragoon Guards, who had taken it from the Iraqi army, she was dispatched to deal with female college staff who had come to recover belongings, one of whom gave her invaluable intelligence about an arms cache. She had to help another find her son, a caretaker at the college. When they did find him, he'd been shot dead.

"We found him under a piece of corrugated iron, and the woman was inconsolable. I've never felt so helpless, but all I could do was sit with her. Her daughter came back later and said (her mother] wanted to say thank you for looking after her and finding her son and she could now bury him … I thought, 'My God, I should be the last person she's thinking of.'"

When deployed, she sometimes finds herself thinking about what her friends are doing at home. "I remember in Bosnia, thinking, 'God, normally on a Tuesday I'd be doing such and such,' or 'Friday we'd be bringing cakes into the office,' and here I am in a helicopter going up to Sarajevo."

Asked about the widespread disagreement with the invasion of Iraq at home, she says: "Whatever you may think, you put it to one side and do what you're told to the best of your ability.

"I've had people at dinner parties, etc, giving me grief as if the Iraq war was my doing. I have opinions on it, but I like to keep them to myself."

"I think the difficult part is for the families who are left behind"

LIEUTENANT DOUGLAS FISHER, commander of Bremen Platoon, 6 Battalion the Royal Regiment of Scotland (TA) and Dundee policeman

WHEN I got my call-up papers, yes, it was a bit of a surprise but I knew something was in the pipeline," says Dougie Fisher, 35, who in civilian life is a constable with Tayside Police. Recently presented with his Afghanistan Operational Service Medal, Fisher returned in January from his first operational tour with the TA, a six-month stint as commander of Bremen Platoon in Afghanistan, where their efficiency earned them a commendation from General Dan K McNeill, the American commanding officer of the International Security Assistance Force there.

"I was realistic about it," says Fisher, who is married with an 18-month-old son. I think the difficult part is for the families, wives, parents and girlfriends who are left behind, because they see the media reports so naturally are worried."

In Kabul, the Bremen platoon made an impression by sporting their regimental Tam O'Shanters rather than helmets. "That was my decision as platoon commander. It was less aggressive and threatening, and was a risk balance between having a visible presence on the streets and the likely threat level, which in Kabul was significant. But we'd got to know the area and the locals quite well, and the feedback was that they were glad to see us there. We always had the helmets with us, so if there was any trouble they could go on straight away."

Bremen platoon was there in a peacekeeping role, rather than in the kind of fighting operation going on further south in the country. "We weren't under fire, as such, but Kabul is a very large city and when you're on patrol, it can be difficult to identify potential threats. There were a couple of instances when vehicles drove too close to our vehicles, erratically or aggressively, and my soldiers had to fire warning shots.

"You might think it sounds funny," he adds, "but over there, there are no punch-ups in the street, no drunks on a Saturday night."

Fisher who joined the TA in 2001, regards his spell of duty in Afghanistan as "a life-changing experience. From my perspective, to take (the platoon] out on tour and have that responsibility – that privilege if you like – and bring them all home again with no casualties … you can't ask for anything more."

The TA website may offer adventure, challenges and skills development, but how do you deal with the possibility that you may be killed, or have to kill? "As a police officer, I've been involved in a few scary incidents. That probably made it easier for me, but each person has to rationalise it in his own way."

"There was a shock and I remember thinking, is this ever going to end?"

LANCE CORPORAL DARREN DICKSON, Scottish Transport Regiment Royal Logistic Corps (Volunteers), student and bus driver

SHOCK is the only way to describe it," is how 25-year-old Darren Dickson recalls his reaction at being awarded the Military Cross for his bravery in May 2004 when his convoy came under attack from insurgents on "the Chicken Run", as the road from Shaibah to Basra Palace was known, owing to the high risk of ambush.

Dickson, who joined the TA when he was still at Edinburgh's Stewart's Melville school and contemplating an army career, was just 22 when posted to Basra as a volunteer with the Royal Logistic Corps.

He had been studying law at university, but had left and taken up temporary work as a bus driver in Edinburgh, in the knowledge that he was about to be called up.

Just a week after he arrived in Iraq, he was part of an escort for six water tankers heading for Basra Palace: "We were ambushed on several occasions that day and at every ambush, the intensity seemed to get greater." An improvised mine exploded nearby then, during a third ambush, he was shot, the bullet entering through his left shoulder, passing down through his rib cage and lodging in his back. The shot knocked him over, but he continued to return fire, one-handed, until he'd emptied his magazine. "There was a shock," he recalls, with some understatement, "and I remember thinking, 'I wonder if this is ever going to end, and how can we make it end?' I didn't really concentrate on the injury part of it. You don't have time to think about it."

Dickson was helicoptered back to a field hospital, where he spent a week before being flown back to Britain. The deltoid muscle on his left shoulder had been torn away, leaving scarring and some loss of movement, but he was back on duty in Iraq the following September. "I was very keen to return," he says.

Having now been demobilised and unlikely to be mobilised again for three years, he is considering returning to university. Asked whether he has any regrets at joining the TA, in view of his experience, he replies "Absolutely none at all."