AS my taxi crawled at a snail's pace through the rush-hour to the Mandarin hotel I recalled the Special Air Service's punishment meted out for lateness which is described in General Sir Peter de la Billiere's autobiography, Looking For Trouble.
Then a major, Sir Peter had lost the key to his garage and failed to make 0800 muster parade. For this he was fined GBP50, a considerable sum in the mid-60s, which went to pay for the next squadron party. The daunting prospect of supporting Jardine Fleming's Christmas party loomed in my mind.
In the event, Sir Peter, who as a main board director of JF's parent company investment house Robert Fleming, is visiting the territory, was forgiving: the reputation of Hong Kong's traffic has spread far and he apologised for being able to see me only at breakfast.
Sir Peter's name has become synonymous with Britain's role in Operation Desert Storm, the successful Allied operation to shove the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait which he had invaded in August 1990. After more than 40 years in the army, the three-star general retired in 1992, able to bask in a glorious light for having led the British forces in punishing a tyrant's aggression and with unexpectedly few casualties on the Allied side.
That story Sir Peter told in Storm Command, his personal account of the Gulf War, a bestseller which has notched up more than 200,000 sales. Now Sir Peter, who regularly returns to the Middle East to promote Robert Fleming, has written an often dramatic, occasionally touching and, most of all, endearingly honest account of his life in the service of his country and its allies.
Sir Peter, who is 60, lost his father in World War II and grew up a loner, cocking snooks at authority. At the top public school Harrow he purloined a rifle for some enterprising target practice within the school precincts (though he was wise enough to stop when he realised the enormity of his actions) and committed minor acts of vandalism such as daubing the motto of rival college Eton on the walls which would not have endeared him to the Singapore school of values.
He subjugated his solitary manner - but not his sense of adventure - in the comradeship of the British army, joining not as an officer but in the ranks and saw action in the embers of the Korean conflict. But it was his time in the Special Air Service, then regarded within the army as a maverick institution, fighting insurgents in Malaya, the Gulf and Borneo that shaped him.
