I think it was because the younger ones felt their life was still in front of them. They took us to a big prison camp in Iraq, in Tikrit, the home town of Saddam Hussein Our first years there were very hard They killed some of us, tortured others. He told me his story as he sat in the back of a Tehran taxi, locked into one of the capital's fume-clogged, traffic-jammed streets "I was captured about 20 miles outside Abadan We were surrounded at night We had no chance. So many were slaughtered defending Khorramshahr that the Iranians renamed the city "Khuninshahr" - City of Blood - before they recaptured it two years later.Among the soldiers trying to fight off the Iraqi invaders was Mujtaba Safavi. In addition to our Iranian war dead, we lost 70,000 dead in the Islamic revolution [which overthrew the Shah] the year before the war began."Many of the war casualties died in the first months of the war when the Iraqi army stormed into the Iranian city of Khorramshahr on the Shatt al-Arab river and attacked oil terminals outside Abadan. Mohsen Rafiqdoost, who now runs a multi-million dollar foundation for the war-wounded and the families of dead soldiers, claimed to me that 220,000 Iranians were killed and 400,000 wounded "We think the Iraqis lost 500,000 dead We don't know how many of their men were wounded.

It was their Islamic faith that mattered."Exactly how many men died in the war may never be known - the Iraqis have never given figures - but the man who was in charge of the Revolutionary Guards during the 1980-88 conflict insisted to me that the Iranians lost well under 500,000 men. You think the number of deaths and casualties are important - you work these statistics out on your computers - but my impression is that here people died regardless of the material worth of their lives. You have to understand the importance of morality in our war - morality was better than food. Three of us just stood there in amazement - we couldn't do anything - this man was almost gone, he was in the seconds before his death, and he had taken out his Koran and was looking at it.

It was a scene I will never forget all my life, the power of his commitment."There was a long silence, and then one of the women, at the end of the room, dressed in a black chador, spoke "In general, we were very proud of what we did in the war Our nation of Iran proved its sovereignty We know how people have returned home after other big wars I've read about it in Hemingway But this did not happen in Iran during the war. We were in the Mehran area and I was sitting with several other soldiers on top of a small hill There was a man sitting with us, about 30 or 35 years old. And suddenly we all noticed that his head had fallen forward, just a little We didn't know what had happened. Then we saw blood running from his arm and then from his head A bullet had hit him in the head. And at this moment, he turned slightly, knowing he was hit, and he put his hand in his pocket and took out a Koran and started looking at it, and the blood was all the while flowing down his arm. "There was one day at the beginning of our 'Val Fajr 5' operation in 1984.

I ask myself 'Was it real or not?' There were extraordinary scenes that touched me."And here Ahmmadvande looked at the floor, speaking to the ground rather than to me. "My involvement in the war was a reflection of the nature of our Islamic revolution. It was based on a new interpretation of religion - getting involved in the war was a sacred duty. We were led by a prophet-like statesman [Khomeini] so this is how we perceived the war This was the reason for our overwhelming commitment The war could not be separated from our religion I saw many incidents that cannot be described.