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Afterwards John and his unit would laugh about it, later John would keep a very ill Sherlock entertained with a detailed account and lots of hand waiving, later still John and Reece would use the memory of all the drunken wavering about to confuses and evade a group of muggers who thought the two drunk men they were following would be an easy target, and even later than that John would recount it at the Yards Christmas party and effectively silence the boasting of the young green officers and earn himself the undisputed title of "Crazy ass lunatic you don't ever want to piss off."
In Mike's defence walking around the desert in the dark is not easy, even if you have night vision goggles and GPS to help you, a muffled curse and a man doing a faceplant into the sand isn't that uncommon on night patrol. Embarrassing sure but not uncommon, what was uncommon was the dull metallic clang of boot meeting metal that accompanied the fall. Everyone gathered round trying to work out what the object was from touch and the gritty green view of their goggles, what ever it was was cylindrical and badly dented and after a few minuets determined digging the business end of a tank's gun was uncovered. After a few "where did you say you'd parked the tank?" jokes they tagged it for reference and moved on.
A few weeks later they were back in the same area but no one was joking about buried tanks, the patrol had run into large well armed group of insurgents and where under very heavy fire when John went boot over helmet having caught his foot in the half open hatch of another buried tank. cursing and spitting sand he scrambled back up to resume giving covering fire for the last of his squad when there was a roaring noise followed by the ground rattling impact of an rpg exploding close by.
The air hadn't had time to stop vibrating when to John's horror Alex toppled backwards of the rock pile he'd been using as cover hit the ground in a spectacular pratfall and kept on going. a few interminable seconds passed in a whine of bullets and the harsh breathing of men before David crawled over to the hole in the desert took a look into the darkness and started to laugh.
"Cap... captain Watson." He hitched out "Better come take a look."
John scrambled through the hail of lead to drop to his knees by David, peering into the gloom he saw that Alex had fallen trough a set of doors and rolled down a ramp to fetch up beside an old but fairly intact Russian tank.
"What the hell?" John muttered "ALEX! Sit rep!"
A groggy moan told him that at least the boy was still alive and the buried structure did at least offer more protection from fire than the loose rock piles they where currently sheltering behind. Yelling and gesturing to his men to get their backsides over to him and down into the building John spent a though on why was there apparently a building full of old Russian hardware buried in the desert before deciding that the much more pertinent questions where do they run? do the guns still fire? and how hard can it be to drive a tank?
The answers it turned out, after a lot of fumbling about in the dark and cursing, were yes, no and very hard actually. The resulting armoured advance succeeded in scattering the enemy but wasn't so much a modern cavalry charge as a prolonged and rather slow demolition derby. John rapidly gave up on trying to keep the line in order and concentrated on keeping a wavering course for base and hoping that no one ripped a track off or rammed the next one with the gun barrel. One of John's fondest memories is the various double takes of the watch and the commander when his ramshackle cavalry brigade shuddered to a halt outside the base.