26th February

Well I’m sat in a departure lounge waiting for the flight back to the UK, this will be the last entry in here. The end of my first tour, Op Herrick 13, full of laughter, courage, anger, fear and sadness. Afghanistan is not the place I thought it would be, it’s a 100% worse. This country is in clip, the Taliban have a hold over this country and that grip will never loosen, a grip on the locals who are ruled through fear, a grip in the forces ANA and ANP who in my eyes are easily corrupt and I’ve no doubt that they have an impression on the government of this country and will do forever.

I have lost two good friends on this tour, friends that I will never forget for as long as I live, two of the bravest men I have ever known and will never be forgotten by me, or by any of us who served at CP Qudrat.

I will never forget the lads at that CP, fuck me CP Qudrat, everyone thought was going to be a dicking, turned out to be the most contacted CP in 3 Para’s AO, and I served 5 months there, 5 months of stepping out that big blue gate, when we knew there was a sharpshooter around, but we went out every day, with our head held high, and a big ‘fuck you’ smile on our face’s.

None of us see ourselves as ‘Hero’s’, that just is not what we do this shit for, it’s for the lads to the left and to the right, for the lads in contact who need support, when you have a shit day to make that day better. To cook a Christmas dinner in a fucking mortar tin, to tab 2k north with 6 blokes over pure open ground to confirm a dead enemy (that shit was crazy). This is just the times of our lives and we fucking love it.

This account of my tour is going to be dedicated to the lads who lost their lives on the 9th February 2011, and to indeed all the Para’s who gave their tomorrow for our today, see you in Valhalla lads.

For anybody who read’s this, yes I was scared, at times fucking petrified, but we went out to face the enemy every single day. To go out without a shred of emotion and take the fight to them, to get the job done, and we did that to the best of our ability, every man at CP Qudrat, The Lost Tribe, gave himself 100% to that place and some men more.

This place is in my blood now, forever in my heart and soul, and to whoever may be reading this if you try to understand, what we did, what we’ve all been through, if you can fathom that for 10 seconds, then you truly can only understand 1% of what it was really like!