When Matthew Conyers signed up for a non-combat job in the Army he thought it would be a great way to pay off his student debts and gain life experience. Eight months later, he was dodging bullets in Baghdad. He talked to Sam Strangeways about the "living hell" that is Iraq.

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Matthew Conyers clearly remembers the noise he heard soon after the military C-130 plane he was travelling in touched down in Baghdad in October 2006.

"I was very, very nervous and when I got out of the plane I heard mortars land in the airport and I thought: 'Conyers, what have you got yourself into'," he says. "I was scared stiff. If you are not scared when you get there for the first time, there is something wrong with you."

The 25-year-old, who was born in Bermuda and has dual citizenship with the States, grins as he recounts the story — but his 16 months in Iraq as a Specialist with the US Army's 1st Cavalry Division's Field Artillery were far from funny.

Signing up for the military seemed to him a common sense way of paying off his student debts quickly and giving his life some direction after he dropped out of college. "I got a job cooking but it really didn't pay great," he says. "I wasn't going anywhere in my life. I had tons of bills, lots of debt hanging over my head. It was a great way to quickly resolve the situation and actually be able to make a good bit of money."

The Army would pay for him to finish college and go to graduate school if he completed a minimum two-and-a-half years service — so he signed on the dotted line for a non-combat job doing surveying for the field artillery.

But with America showing no signs of withdrawing from Iraq, it was a risky strategy and a year later he was on a plane bound for the Middle East war zone with his Hellraiser II platoon — as a rear tank gunner.

Matthew had found out about the posting six months before and was told a mere month-and-a-half before setting off that he would be in a combat role.

"When I got the orders to go they changed my job to be a gunner on a Humvee," he explains. He had no desire to see action in Iraq and was not the kind of little boy who spent his childhood playing with toy tanks and dreaming of being a soldier.

But the comradeship with his military "buddies" was strong. "If they told me I had to go to the frontline with my guys, I'd do it in a heartbeat," he says.

The former Saltus Cavendish student completed tough desert training in the Mojave Desert in California and combat training, including how to deal with the M4 rifle he'd be handling in Iraq, at the Fort Hood military base at Killeen, Texas.

He, like half of his platoon, became a qualified emergency medical technician, was taught anti-terrorism techniques and had to get seriously fit. "It was a little bit rough at first," he says of the physical training. "I'd been in college, partying, and going to school and not doing anything physical. But you get used to it. You are sore for the first few months and then you get real fit."

However fit and mentally-ready he was, nothing could have prepared Matthew for the conditions he'd face in Iraq, where the "unbearable, uncomfortable" temperature regularly hit 135 degrees Fahrenheit and where danger was ever-present.

"You know there are people in this country that want to take your life," he says. "There is no grey area. You either come home or you don't."

The sound of mortars became a daily fixture — but that was preferable to silence. "As long as you can hear them you are safe," he says. "Unlike in the movies, you don't hear them when they're coming towards you. If you don't hear them, they probably blew you up."

Stationed in the Green Zone at a half-finished palace originally intended by Saddam Hussein for his Ba'ath Party headquarters, Matthew says the fear he felt on first arriving never left him but became his routine.

"There's a lot of adrenaline and you just thrive off it. You have to come to grips with the reality that you are not going anywhere for a long time. You might as well suck it up and do the job."

For the first few months, his job was to escort embassy officials around the Iraqi capital and surrounding area.

On his third day at work, his sergeant was shot. "He got out of the vehicle to direct traffic and took a bullet through his thigh. I was ten feet away.

"We got him in the Humvee and the medic was in the back working with him. We called up the hospital and started driving like a bat out of hell."

The sergeant recovered and was back with his men after two months. Matthew says the experience was "a little brutal" but worse was to follow. He became an escort to the Explosive Ordnance Disposal team — aka Baghdad Bomb Squad — and was on call 24 hours a day taking them to find and detonate suspected bombs.

Missions were, as he acknowledges with devastating understatement, "quite hairy".

They could also be long and physically gruelling; one time he was on the road for 38 hours straight. A non-smoker, he found himself having to have a cigarette at the end of a mission because his adrenaline was pumping so hard.

The young soldier witnessed gory scenes when the squad arrived too late and saw people — though none of his comrades — get killed. "I had bullets flying by my face," he says. "We got ambushed during a fake bomb call.

"It was about 3 a.m. and some guys had made a huge fire so that all our night vision goggles couldn't get vision. They stood behind this massive fire and shot at us, bullets coming within inches of my head."

He couldn't see who was firing so couldn't make the positive identification required to shoot back and was pulled into the safety of their vehicle by his sergeant. He doesn't know if any of the few shots he did fire in Iraq hit their target. "There was returning fire and I don't know what happened," he explains.

His 400-strong unit battalion lost two people and had innumerable close calls. "Hundreds of people die every day over there," he says.

Matthew was initially told he'd serve a year in Iraq but his stay got extended by six months.

The first phone call he'd made back in Texas to his parents — his father in Paget and mother in New Hampshire — to tell them he was going to war was tough, but this one was harder.

His dad Hugh says his first thought was how many more missions could his son complete before his luck ran out.

"Your percentages run out after a while," says Hugh. "You can only do that for a time and then blam!"

Matthew felt the same. When he finally got his leaving date, he found his last missions the hardest because each one safely completed represented a step nearer to the end. He eventually completed more than 400 missions before his time in Iraq was up, spending two Christmases at war. The worst thing about the experience, he says, was the senseless acts of civil war — innocent people killing one another in the name of religion.

"For the most part, the people don't want anything to do with the war," he says. "It's just the really radical few that ruin it for everybody. It's amazing how evil human beings can be. The absolute disregard for human life. It's very appalling.

"Going over there really humbles you and makes you really appreciate being from this side of the world."

The plus side was the bond formed with the other soldiers. "I didn't have a lot in common with a lot of them but it doesn't really matter for the job at hand.

"Race, ethnicity, religion, background — that gets thrown out of the window. You are brothers in arms and you have to take care of each other."

Matthew says the occupying troops try to assist local people by providing food and water and helping improve the devastated infrastructure. But when he describes seeing a tiny girl, picking up trash alone in the middle of nowhere, and the futility of her task in a country filled with garbage, you sense he's not just talking about her.

"It's so weird going out there because none of the troops want to be out there," he says. "You go out to make sure that your buddies come back.

"Being a soldier is our job. We knew we were at war but none of us signed up for war. There's not really much support in the troops for this man, for Bush."

He adds: "At least when I was on the bomb squad, it's one of the most dangerous missions there is for a soldier, but you are saving lives. That's rewarding. Every one you find, it's a few less lives that can be taken."

He got through the war by telling himself during the gruelling 80-hour weeks, when his body constantly ached, that he was coming home.

"I thought: 'there's people that want to kill me but they are not going to stop me coming home. If it's me or them, it's me'. If you are a Westerner and you are out there and a terrorist sees you, he's going to try to kill you.

"As long as you come from this side of the world, you represent democracy and they are going to take you out. The way I justified that was: I'm going to beat them to the punch because I'm coming home to my family."

In January of this year he finally did that, arriving back at Fort Hood in the early hours of the morning to be greeted by his dad, stepmom Susan and brother Andrew, 22.

He was exhausted after the arduous journey home via Kuwait, Germany and Maine.

Hugh says seeing the buses which brought the soldiers back to the base pull away to reveal them standing in formation, flanked by four horses, was immensely moving.

"I didn't just feel proud of my son but for the whole bunch. They all touched my heart. These are very brave people."

The relief Hugh felt when he was reunited with his son moments later is still visible on his face when he talks about it. "He gave me a big hug. I shed a little tear," he says.

Matthew was demobilised after another two months in Texas and is now in Bermuda until the autumn. Being back on the sleepy, sun-drenched Island where he spent all his childhood summers after the chaos of Baghdad is "surreal".

"You have your plan that you can hopefully do," he says. "You go over it a million times.

"It seems like you'll never get there because you are at war, you are in a living hell. Now it's like I can't believe it's over."

He plans to return to Champlain College in Vermont and finish his final year before a likely stint at grad school and his eventual return here to look for a job in business.

The experience of war will never leave him, he says, but he believes the majority of veterans from Iraq are unlikely to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder since it's not a conscripted war.

He has no plans to return to the military — and no desire to ever set foot in Iraq again. "The only positive thing I can think of is taking everybody out of there. We make it worse by being over there."

But he has no regrets. "I wouldn't change it but I wouldn't do it twice. I'm very proud to be a part of history."

A number of Bermudians have served in Iraq apart from Matthew Conyers, including several in the US Marines. Brother and sister David Perinchief and Lauren Baskins were both drafted to the war-torn country with the Marines, as well as Dathan Byrd and Alistair Reynolds.

The late Allan Miguel LuVince Mello, who received 11 medals from the US Army, died of cancer after taking part in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. Others to have served there include Army sergeants Jason DiGiacomo, who was injured when his Humvee was forced off the road, and Daniel (Parker) Thomas.