Recently I signed up for five-day embed with B Company of the second batallion of the Parachute Regiment (2 Para) at their training facility in Thetford, UK, to film the army’s much-talked-about, multimillion-pound “fake Afghanistan village.” On arrival at the camp we felt pretty pleased with ourselves that we’d been given this amazing access to a top-secret military facility and thought we had carte blanche to look around and observe the operations as journalists.