David Knowles is an accomplished and thoughtful writer. He is also a decorated pilot who has left the RAF after 26 years in the cockpit and is set to become Britain’s first war poet of the Iraq era. He lives in a croft on the south edge of Loch Broom near Ullapool, with hens, ducks, fluffy black Hebridean sheep and his writer wife, Sharon.

These days Knowles resembles Action Man’s eccentric country uncle: slight, self-deprecating, wearing wellies. He still can’t believe it was him up there, owning the sky above Baghdad, flying £20m-worth of state-of-the-art aircraft.

“I saw a video once of a jet taxiing in,” he recalls. “The lid came up, the pilot came out, and I thought, aah, this is great, love that stuff. And then I realised: it’s me. That’s a trivial way of looking at it but the tasks you execute become so automatic, it’s happening around you and you step back from it.”

His book, Meeting the Jet Man, reflects this dissociation. “The title poem comes from one particular night when a moon shadow of me fell across a big slab of concrete,” he explains. Many of Knowles’s missions, in the first phase of the invasion of Iraq, were carried out at night. “There were, briefly, two of us.”

Knowles has been writing poetry since his days as a foppish punk at boarding school in Wales. It was, he says, the kind of place where porn was “dull” and everyone read Nietzsche instead. “I was handed an under-the-counter copy of Beyond Good and Evil when I was 14.” By the time he was at Oxford, reading philosophy and physics, Knowles had blue hair, earrings and his eye on a career as a philosopher.

He had also, since he was eight years old, dreamt of flying: “walking off a cliff and swooping. I was amazed when I first did fly an aeroplane, a glider, that the sensation of just achieving enough airspeed to have lift and fly away was spookily close to what I’d dreamt of.”

Flying was, he says, “something I just desperately wanted”. The university air squadron turned their noses up at the outré hairstyle but the glider club let him in. Then, when careers advisers made noises about merchant banks and stockbroking, Knowles applied for officer training with the RAF. A lick of brown hair dye later, he was in.

It turned out that the existentialist punk was officer material after all. “It felt like I was in search of the holy grail, I swallowed the whole thing lock, stock and barrel. They didn’t need to reprogramme me at officer training; the tradition, the uniform, the marching, the bands, I absolutely adored it all.”

By the 1990s he was in the cockpit, patrolling the southern no-fly zones around Kuwait. Then, in 2001, everything changed. “We were out briefing for a training session when 9/11 happened. We walked back in through the crew room, saw it on television; our jaws dropped like the rest of the world. We knew instantly and saw instantly — this isn’t just hindsight — that this is a change in history. This is a watershed that will affect all of us one way or another. We all stiffened a bit.”

In the run up to the invasion of Iraq, the tension became unbearable. “The metaphors we used to ourselves were big match, and big match temperament. It sounds dreadfully cynical but I’m not going to disguise it — that’s the way it actually was. We were straining at the leash for weeks beforehand.”

Then, from March 20 to May 1 2003, it all happened. “I was living for nine weeks, 24 hours a day, knowing that this was as good as it ever gets.”

Based in Kuwait, for the first few missions he was launching Stormshadow, a cruise missile that was rushed into service for the conflict. “Then I joined what was basically the taxi rank of aircraft hauling bombs up to the front, working with ground control to identify our targets. We almost never knew, before we took off, what the target would be. The front was moving so fast, in the cycle of finishing debriefing and getting airborne, two or three hours, it could have leapfrogged 50 miles.

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