Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

It's called crack and thump. It's called fear and fascination.

I am in a deep concrete trench, looking up at a sandbank high above my head as there's a whip-crack whistle, followed by a dull bang. It is the noise of a bullet travelling at more than the speed of sound above me: the thump at the end is bizarrely the weapon firing it. The bullets whizzing overhead are real enough, but this is play-acting, not war reporting.

The reason I haven't posted recently is that I've been on a six-day , preparing journalists for what are known officially as "hostile environments".

I really hope I am never this close to live rounds fired in anger, but some of those standing so casually in the trench with me expect, perhaps even hope, to be this close to the sound of fighting.

Why am I here if I don't want to get close to gunfire? Well, I am not and never will be a frontline war correspondent, but it was getting increasingly stupid not knowing this stuff.. Just before the summer I was all ready to go on a trip to see the and was stopped from going because I hadn't done the course. Then there's the little matter of , awaiting EU observers. And even the most timid journalist is someone who runs the wrong way: towards trouble, rather than away from it.

The few courses I've had to do over the years have felt like an imposition, however necessary they may have been. They made me fidget. Not this one. It's great fun, occasionally horrible, and provides food enough to feed scores of thoughts on everything from your own breaking point to group dynamics. I can't tell you about the most traumatic parts, for that would spoil it for those yet to come. Suffice to say, Hostaelia is much rougher than Vontinalys, which was the last imaginary country I reported from.

Much of the course takes place in the grounds of an old mansion. I can almost imagine I am at The Nursery at Sarratt. But this is a conference centre and the illusion is spoilt by posh guests from the silver wedding receptions and supermarket middle manager who mingle incongruously with us mud- and fake blood-splattered hacks. Still you feel tense, constantly on guard. Is that gardener trimming the border hiding an AK 47 in his wheelbarrow? Why is there a moth in the wash basin, two nights running? Does it mean something? Despite this ridiculous over-awareness I still manage to be the first and only member of the course to set off a booby-trap bomb.

One exercise is about how best to take cover when under fire and a group of us play the baddies, stalking the grounds. We are toting pistols (decommissioned, obviously) and targeting colleagues as they run behind Land Rovers or scatter for trees. There is something horribly, evilly, attractive about guns. I despise myself for liking the weight of the automatic in my hand, and the excitement of tracking , who has made the mistake of wearing a bright red anorak If this was for real she would probably be dead. Later in the week it would be understandable: I turn green with envy at the end of the course, watching the series of engaging and lucid reports she's produced under extremely traumatic conditions. Maybe then I would have shot her just out of professional jealousy. I've seen the future and she wears a red anorak.

But at this stage there's no such motive, it's just that the person I'd been laughing and joking with a few minutes earlier has turned into a target in my sights. Behind the role-playing and a lot of joking this is deeply sobering. Anyone who works at the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ knows people whose lives have been ruined or ended while just doing their job. I think a lot this week about someone who I knew very briefly, who was very kind to me, and who is dead.

This is in the end about trying to stay alive. Where should you take cover? In just about every Hollywood movie cops and robbers exchange fire, ducking down behind an open car door. Not a good idea.

At the range one of our instructors fires an AK 47 at a range of objects. It messes up a single brick wall, is stopped by a thickish tree trunk and dents body armour, and shatters some of the ceramic plate. A car door? Paper and scissors, not rock. Most graphically a catering-size tin of tomatoes has a tiny hole where the bullet goes in, but the back is nearly ripped off, the top buckled upwards by shockwaves. Imagine the tin is your leg, and the red lumps, well, you get the picture.

If this didn't bring the reality home to us, a major part of the course is about first aid for traumatic wounds, far from a hospital. No mannequins for us. A gentleman called Ian plays the victim several times a day. We are taken for a walk in the woods and come across him fallen out of a tree with a crushed spine, vomiting on the ground, hanging half out of a Land Rover with gunshot wounds, in the dark surrounded by the sound of gunfire, his strap-on plastic intestines hanging out. Like some modern version of Everyman an immobile and blood-streaked Ian is a recurring punctuation mark - like a figure in a medieval painting, constantly reminding us of our own mortality and fragility.

At least these days there is training. Long before I worked for the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ I worked for IRN. I cowered before charging police horses during the Wapping riots and innocently walked between police and Republican lines in Northern Ireland. When a fridge was pushed from a top floor flat and burst in a shower of metal about 50 feet away it briefly flickered into my head that I had been less than clever and more than lucky. But training? Never crossed my mind.

I have always scoffed at the idea of office workers bonding by building rafts, but I can see now how it could work. Certainly one of the best things about the course was meeting some great people. I have a sealed envelope and am confident that in my armchair-bound dotage I will watch one of them presenting the Ten O'Clock News from a trouble zone, perhaps going on to "two-way" the new Africa editor and someone else in a favourite blue hoodie. I'll feel even happier about it knowing they have training as well as luck on their side.

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