The previous evening Corporal Chris Mount had been regaling us with the pros and cons of his more intimate tattoos. Now he was wide-eyed, pale and clearly frightened. “It's not funny anymore,” he told a patrol of rangers. “I hate my job.”

With an oath, Corporal Mount left the shade of the pomegranate orchard and went back to the spot on the narrow path where, moments earlier, he had been lying down, grubbing around in the dust with his fingers and a paintbrush. As he scraped away he uncovered a large bomb - an artillery shell wired up to a radio receiver. Somewhere a watching insurgent - he needed to be close by - would be trying to detonate it. The bomb had been put there at some point between the hours of night when the patrol had used the track and the light of early morning as they now returned.

There was no disturbed earth to give away the position of the bomb, or Improvised Explosive Device (IED). The Taleban urinate on the ground above buried devices so that the summer heat quickly bakes the turned soil into a uniform shade and texture. Instead, the double-tone alarm of a ranger's metal detector sounded and Corporal Mount, a Para engineer, had been sent to check it out.

He had to hope that the electronic counter-measure (ECM) devices carried by the rest of the patrol were jamming the signals sent out by the watching bomber's transmitter. The alternative was the end of Corporal Mount. The rangers, from the 1st Battalion the Royal Irish Regiment, seemed unfazed either way, right up to the point when an American team arrived and destroyed the device.

“You'd think that you were in Wales, wouldn't you,” Sergeant Paul Harrison mused. “A little stream, woods, a cafe at the top of a hill. Then you find an IED and it brings you right back down again.”

Ten days earlier they had set up a small patrol base in an abandoned Taleban safe house, named it “Armagh” and got on with their chess games with the insurgents. The rangers tried to hamper the Taleban's movements on the east side of the Helmand River. In turn the Taleban tried to block the rangers in by planting bombs along the few paths leading through the orchards and walled farm compounds to their patrol base.

This was the second device the soldiers had found in less than 24 hours. As the insurgency in Helmand changes, IEDs have become the Taleban's weapon of choice. Their use has more than doubled compared with the summer of last year. An average of three a day were found in Helmand last month alone.

Captain Paul Martin is one of several Royal Irish veterans of the bitter 2006 fighting in Helmand who has returned to Sangin. During that first tour he was involved in 51 firefights in ten weeks before being badly wounded by a mortar. This time his men have had only six engagements in about three months but have found more than 30 IEDs.

Some veterans of 2006 preferred the old style of war. Another Irishman in the patrol base, Sergeant Trevor Coult, said: “It was more intense but you never worried about radiocontrolled IEDs, suicide attack. Now we are running around after guys who carry one rifle and maybe a couple of magazines in the heat. Carrying 90lb with all our kit and ECM, hoping to catch them - it'll not happen, will it?”

The Royal Irish have noticed more positive changes. Sergeant Coult remembers Sangin in 2006 as a place of mayhem: rubble, dust, airstrikes, rocket and mortar fire. Now its bazaar is crowded. “I couldn't get used to walking around the DC without my rifle,” he said. “I couldn't believe it - soldiers swimming, the bazaar thriving.”

Captain Martin still has shrapnel near his heart, courtesy of his last tour in Helmand. “I spend 75 per cent of my time trying to set the security conditions to reconstruct something I spent 75 per cent of my time trying to destroy last time around,” he said, with a flicker of a smile.

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