TWO years ago Natalie Bull was a school leaver whose biggest excitement had been playing soccer with a girls' side in Ramsbury.

Now Natalie,who will be 19 on Monday, is a war veteran who served in the conflict in Iraq.

Although the only women allowed in the front line are officers, Natalie who is a private with the Royal Logistics Corps, came as close to the action as it's possible to get without actually pulling a trigger.

The task of the Corps is to get munitions and other vital supplies up to the troops on the front line.

Natalie was at the wheel of a munitions truck in convoys which came under enemy fire on a number of occasions.

When she became a soldier two years ago and joined the Royal Logistics Corps she fulfilled a dream of a lifetime.

The former Ramsbury and Phoenix Band member said: "It's all I ever wanted to do ever since I was little.

She said: "I don't know what made me want to become a soldier because I was never a tomboy."

She was encouraged with her plans for a career as a soldier by her uncle, Christopher Bull, who has since died. He helped her fill out her application forms to join the Army.

Her younger brother Alex May, 14, is following in her footsteps and is a member of the Army Cadet Force in Marlborough.

Natalie admitted she missed the home comforts and even the lesser comfort of her barracks in Germany while she was Iraq, where a shower under a bottle of warm water was considered a luxury. With daytime temperatures as high as 58 degrees centigrade, dropping to only 34 degrees at night, it was impossible to keep anything cool.

She said: "There was no such thing as a nice long drink of cool water. The only water was so hot when you poured it from the bottles that you could put a teabag in it and have a nice hot cup of tea."

Basic facilities that she had always taken for granted, including a bathroom and a shower, were simply non-existent. The Army's basic rations were supplemented by food parcels sent from home.

Friends in Ramsbury including the locals in the Burdett Arms pub and members of the Royal British Legion Club sent her canned food including baked beans.

Sylvia Judge, the mother of a friend in Ramsbury, sent some of the home-made flapjacks she knew Natalie loves.

Her mother said: "It cost us £56 to send the first parcel out to her until we found out how we could send them free."

Phone calls home for the young soldier were a luxury.

She said: "We could phone home about once a month but when I did phone I did not tell them the full story of what I was doing."

It was not until she returned home last week that she told her family that she had been virtually at the front line with bullets whizzing past her and shells zooming overhead.

At the start of the Iraqi war she was flown to Kuwait from where she drove an eight tonne Bedford lorry loaded with munitions into Iraq.

The convoy she was travelling with, escorted by tanks, covered 220 kilometres virtually non-stop from Basra to Baghdad carrying supplies for the soldiers at the front.

Natalie said the Iraqis were unpredictable. "Some were friendly but others weren't." But she loved meeting the Iraqi children who, like children all over the world, asked for sweets but also for food and water.

She said: "The Iraqis were amazed to see female soldiers."

She is looking forward to returning to her unit to be reunited with boyfriend James who, just before her well earned break started, asked her to marry him.