A brave friend who makes me so proud

My friend Sandip held his leaving party in a small, downstairs piano bar on Kensington High Street called Sopranos two weeks ago.

A lieutenant in 1st The Queen's Dragoon Guards, he was about to be deployed to Helmand Province.

This would be his final big London night before flying out so Sopranos, dark and bunker-like, seemed the right choice for a rousing goodbye.

Good luck card in hand, I arrived to boisterous piano tunes and found Sandip sitting with a beer and his girlfriend, Jules — two things soon to become wistful memories.

"Why are you wearing a baseball cap indoors?" I asked him in a matronly fashion. He took it off to reveal his shiny, long hair pulled back by an Alice band. "But it's all got to come off," he said mournfully, as if a buzz cut was the greatest hardship to come.

He joked about fierce Army hairdressers, told us what to send him (newspapers, beef jerky and Tabasco to jazz up dreary rations) and bemoaned the lack of showers in Helmand (just one a week).

He'll be on patrol in the desert, and we friends have been asked to send him emails to keep his spirits up. Called "blueys", the messages are printed off at the Army base and flown by helicopter to wherever the soldiers happen to be.

Technology might provide a lifeline to friends here, but there's no broadband on tour.

Hearing about his sacrifice made a change from my friends' usual whinging about long hours at work, the Tube, and the weather. I've vowed to stop grumbling about cycling in the rain.

But for all that, I have mixed feelings about his deployment. Many of my peers who joined the Army were rugby-playing types who couldn't quite bear to leave the locker-room bravado of university behind. When my brother once voiced an intention that he might do the same, my grandfather, who fought in the Second World War, was in favour.

But my father, among the first generation to grow up without the spectre of National Service, was horrified.

It didn't seem so mad as we drunkenly sang for Sandip that night. His leaving had personalised the conflict for us, and I felt desperately proud that, aged just 24, a friend of mine was heading for Helmand instead of scrabbling to keep an overpaid desk job in the City — the grim task currently facing some of my friends.

When I last checked, Sandip's Facebook status read "Sandip is sitting and waiting". I suspect there will be quite a bit of that to come. Time to get that beef jerky in the post.