A clock ticks down the final hours of Operation Banner on the wall behind Col Wayne Harber at British army headquarters near Lisburn.
In a corner of his office there is a lump of metal saved from the look-out post in Crossmaglen - a keepsake of sorts from the army's long and costly years in south Armagh. Certainly no-one envisaged Operation Banner, as the name given to the army's deployment in Northern Ireland in 1969, would last this long.
But for Col Harber this is not a time to rue the past or to engage in "what ifs". His talk instead is of great achievement, of putting to good use elsewhere in the world the lessons and skills learned and, crucially, what the past 38 years were about.
"For us this has not been a war. Absolutely this is not a war." Having an enemy, apparently, is not enough. "War for us means different things. This has been a conflict, we have not thrown at this all of our resources to make it a war. It has been of limited duration within the law and a limited capability deployed. What we see as war is what we did at the start in Iraq - that's a war. This is something else and it isn't a war, it's a conflict.
"It's a campaign to resolve certain things but this is not war. There can't be winners and losers. The only winner out of this is the political process that is now back in place after 38 years."
He explains the reasons for the end of Operation Banner - the longest British army deployment ever, yet the one, curiously, whose title was barely known by the population it was said to protect. "What is termed the peace process has come to fruition politically in order to make sure we can move. That in itself means that the military is absolutely supportive of that process. The military does not have a political view . . . But there is a maturity in the military that says having been here for 38 years on operations we have learned a number of things: to defeat an enemy, to stay one jump ahead of his thinking, to avoid doing certain things, to prevent certain things and more importantly to take the initiative.
"We've applied those lessons tactically around the globe. We are still learning and that process of learning 'in theatre' has taken a long time."
Before he became a Royal Irish officer, Col Harber was deployed with the second battalion of the Queen's Regiment into the Falls area in August 1969 "specifically to protect the Catholic community from attack".
Since then, he believes, the conflict has changed and the "enemy" has changed, while some other requirements have remained constant.
"I think I've got some understanding of why some people don't like me, I think I've got some understanding of why people do like me. I think I've now got a better understanding of the Republic and where it's coming from but I would say nothing more than just 'some understanding'. It has taken that long."
There is a very strong sense that having opposed the IRA and Sinn Féin since the 1970s, the British officers are now as keen to quit south Armagh and elsewhere as republicans are to see them go.
He voices what comes across as a grudging regard for the paramilitaries' ability to change and adapt throughout the long conflict. "They learned that taking us on face-to-face was always going to be very difficult and they would normally come off second best on every occasion. We have a very good intelligence network.
"We are very good at infiltration in terms of a variety of tactics . . . which inform the way we do our business. We are a trained army and they could never be equal to that in tactics. They needed to be more clever in applying what they were doing and you got some very clever tactics.
"Finding out our weaknesses and our vulnerable points is part of the enemy's way. If you are working within the law then you have to do things certain ways and the enemy works outside the law. There's no moral high ground in that sense if you work outside the law. The use of technology comes into play a great deal and radio-controlled improvised explosive devices was one step ahead.
"The technology of making their own armaments was quite significant and really rather good in terms of mortars, culvert bombs - but we devised certain tactics against them - very sophisticated stuff. All of that changed, they changed and we have had to adapt. Over a long period of time that meant a sophisticated enemy but a just as sophisticated army."
For the colonel the use of the army to confront problems such as those in Northern Ireland has always been akin to employment of a "blunt instrument". The solution was always going to be found through what he calls "political means and normal community policing". The imperative has, as a soldier, to do what he had been ordered to do and as quickly as possible, get out.
But it ended up taking 38 years - why? "The politics of Northern Ireland are so difficult and the enemy has been so clever that there has been no resolution. The environment was just not ever in 38 years going to be conducive to the military to withdraw.
"The police could not have coped on their own because the community was so divided and there were still sufficient terrorists on both sides willing to take the police on, upset the democratic process and fight for their cause.
"A political solution is the only solution. We are an aberration. We should not be here. There can never be a military solution. We are enabling a solution, we are not the solution, that's all we were ever here for.
"What we will take away from all of this is 38 years of learning - how to operate at [ a level] which is below war to help us around the globe. Would we have chosen to do it? No we wouldn't - but we had to do it. The most important thing that we take away from this is the fact that it has now been resolved to a level that is acceptable to everyone and the support for the peace process is absolute on both sides.
"What a shame that 38 years have been wasted. It is not just the North of Ireland that is changing it is the whole of Ireland that is moving on. That can't be anything other than good."