Ollie Ollerton, star of Channel 4's SAS: Who Dares Wins, has claimed he used to party in booze-filled villas in Baghdad that used to belong to Saddam Hussein.
Amongst his wild claims are stories of strippers turning up to the presidential palace disguised in burkas, and he even insisted that he once splashed cash to have a joyride in one of Saddam's cars.
Ollie, 49, was hired as a security contractor in war-torn Iraq following the initial invasion after finishing up a stint in the SAS, before eventually retiring from the battlefield and taking up a job at Channel 4 as an author and TV presenter.
Speaking with podcaster James English about his days in Baghdad, Ollie spilt the beans about what the Iraqi capitol really looked like in the immediate aftermath of Saddam Hussein's removal, claiming that the city was like 'the Wild West'.
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"I'm there years later after doing Special Forces and all of a sudden I'm in Saddam Hussein's villas," he said.
"We had his cars for f**k sake! We used to hire them out.
"So we bought all his cars, we used to hire them out into Baghdad - it was like Hertz car rental but an armoured Mercedes that used to be Saddam's.
"And then going to those parties, which was just mental.
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"You think when you're going to a country like that, 'God it's going to be so strict'.
"But every Thursday night was party night, there were these parties kicking off all over Baghdad."
"That first night I was in that villa? F***ing hell, it blew my mind," he went on to explain.
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"I'd just got into the country, body armour on, weapons and everything.
"They said, 'Take your body armour off and put your weapons down there and chill out. Just look after the clients, we'd got clients there.
"That's when the door opens and all of a sudden women in burkas come in and you can just see their eyes.
"And I'm like, 'F**k, where's my weapons?' And they're like, 'No, no, chill out, chill out.'
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"I was counting them come through the door - 13 came in, into this sunken area, this sort of lounge area, we were round the outside.
"And they took off these burkas and they just had all European porn gear on and it was just alcohol, drugs and everything - it was just absolutely mental.
"I was like, 'What's going on?' I was there as an 18-year-old kid, do you know what I mean, and now I'm there as a contractor.
"It was the Wild West, it was mental. There was money flying everywhere. F*****g million-dollar pallets coming in every day from the Americans.
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"The place was flooded with cash, everyone's fighting for what they can get a hold of, it was just mental days."
But the horrors of war aren't all fun and games and last year, Ollie opened up about finding himself on a "slippery slope" and a "road of destruction" after he returned to the UK from Baghdad and admitted using alcohol and drugs as a way of coping.
Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was an Iraqi politician who served as the fifth president of Iraq from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003. On 30 December 2006, he was executed after being convicted by an Iraqi court of crimes against humanity related to the 1982 killing of 148 Shia Muslim civilians.
Topics: Channel 4