Temptation

The Bible does not actually state that Eve tempted Adam with an apple. The Book of Genesis simply refers to the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge and the apple was just the interpretation of early renaissance artists.

            For me, final temptation was offered in a can of strawberry Fanta. It sat on my desk in Basrah Air Station, glistening with cool perspiration, ironically not far from Al-Qurna where the Tigris and Euphrates meet; the supposed site of the Garden of Eden.

            “Kiss me,” it said. So I did and then got into real trouble because she was a corporal and I was a major. Then we got married and I haven’t looked smart since.

            Being seduced with a can of Fanta in the desert surprised me. I’d gone there hoping to get away from trouble with girls. As it says in the Book of Proverbs, it is better to live in the wilderness than with an angry woman and I was walking away from a failed marriage. I was a late thirties, gnarly old soldier. She was in her twenties, blonde and pretty, and could have chosen any of the hundreds of lonely men wandering around the HQ.

            So I wasn't expecting the cutest girl in Iraq to be interested in me and, to be fair, I was not really expecting any trouble with girls. We were trying to find Saddam whilst simultaneously trying to stem a nascent insurgency and my attention was focussed elswehere. In truth, however, my greatest contribution to the war in Iraq was forming the Coffee Club. All that my first wife left  me with was a bruised ego and a coffee machine. So I took them both to Iraq.