A SOLDIER'S DIARY:SMILES, LAUGHS and inquisitive glances greet my return to this village in the green zone. The locals flock around and invite me to sit with them.
A fat mullah appears, and after I have finished inspecting the last International Security Assistance Force-funded irrigation project, we sit and discuss the proposed painting and carpeting of his mosque. This tranquil scene is abruptly shattered by a large explosion.
We run for cover. "Contact: IED [improvised explosive device]; Wait out." Oddly, somewhere within me I feel everyone is alright. And they are. My platoon sergeant and a section that had been on watch just outside the village have had a lucky escape.
A command-wire daisy chain IED has been set off in their midst, and these devices are specially designed to kill or maim up to eight soldiers. [A daisy chain is two or more explosive devices wired together so that a single signal will detonate all at the same time.]
In a life-saving twist of fate, only the middle part of the deadly trap has gone off, while both ends, where our medic and sergeant had actually been sitting on the buried shells, have not.
Sometimes you wonder . . . We unearth the buried wire in the fading light and see it runs toward a compound. Locals.
Someone in this village dug and then initiated this. I return to the mullah, who barely reacted when the explosion rocked his mosque. I am angry. They nearly killed my men, and these people had to know it was there - it was in their field.
"We know nothing."
Usual response.
I continue to discuss the mosque improvements and eventually in the darkness of the prayer room, away from prying eyes, settle a fee by candlelight.
Bitter, I leave.
The next day we move out to cordon the device with the IED disposal team. As my lead section moves cautiously down the path sweeping for devices with metal detectors, a young boy brushes past. He mutters something in Pashtu and is gone.
"Sir," says our interpreter, "there is an IED just up there."
"Davy, Naf, STOP! STOP! Move back now!"
We move away and the specialists come forward. It is a slow process, all the more painful in the 45-degree heat. We sit in an orchard while local kids annoy us.
The boy who warned us off now tries to steal my patrol camera.
Eventually there is a boom that signifies the device has been cleared: another daisy chain that my lead scout was five metres from. It would have been carnage.
The IED team moves on.
Another device is found, like the first, right where we were blown up yesterday. It, too, is cleared.
And so it goes for 10 hours. We know it is dangerous to stay on the ground for this length of time but we'd all rather face Taliban bullets and rocket-propelled grenades than leave the IEDs intact.
We find five IEDs, the final one packed into a booby-trapped motorbike close to a mosque.
Slimy with sweat, we start to move back. And then the ambush is sprung.
As Lieut Gavin, from Mayo, is leading a section back up the canal track, an RPG detonates behind them, followed seconds later by one to their front. The section is smack in the middle of a well-prepared Taliban ambush.
Bullets zip at their feet, over their heads, into the wall behind them. Amazingly, none find their target. Stuck between a canal and a compound, the section has no option but to manoeuvre through and out of the killing area, which they do.
By now mortars, rockets and grenade launchers are smashing the Taliban positions.
My platoon is ordered to storm across the canal and clear the enemy from the bank. We race across the rickety bridge and fan out stealthily in the corn fields.
By now all is quiet. We find blood-spattered firing points. The light fails. A US jet swoops low and loud down the length of the canal whilst the air controller tries to mark our position. We turn for base, content that we have destroyed many IEDs and that we have killed our enemy.
• Lieut Paddy Bury has completed his tour of duty in Afghanistan and is now back at his base in England. Tomorrow, in his final dispatch, he will reflect on his experience and answer his Irish Timesletters page critics