Ground Truth: 3 Para Return to Afghanistan

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Patrick Bishop. Ground Truth: 3 Para Return to Afghanistan

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Maps

Introduction: A Big Ask

1 Going Back

2 Through the Looking Glass

3 KAF

4 Hearts and Minds

5 Hunting the Hobbit

6 Green Zone

7 IED

8 The Stadium

9 Facing the Dragon

10 Sangin Revisited

11 The White Cliffs of Helmand

12 Convoy

13 The Enemy

14 Close Quarters

15 Fields Of Fire

16 ‘Something our Parents will Understand’

17 Homecoming

Acronyms, Abbreviations and Military Terms

Acknowledgments

Index

Copyright

About the Publisher

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GROUND TRUTH

3 Para: Return to Afghanistan

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If he made no mention of war, it was because in his mind the army was not engaged in one. ‘What I wanted to avoid was this sense of 2006,’ he said later. The intensity of the fighting in Helmand, he felt, had caused people to lose sight of the nature of the campaign they were there to prosecute. There was an inevitable tendency among the soldiers to reason that ‘if it looked and smelt and sounded like war fighting, then for God’s sake, we must be fighting a war’. In his view, however, ‘we’re not fighting a war. We’re supporting a democratically elected government to prosecute a counter-insurgency campaign, the nature [of which] is much more political than it is military.’

From this perspective, the ‘core of the matter was not the Taliban’. It was ‘the Afghan people and what they thought was happening’. The prize was ‘the human security of the people. The Taliban were to be marginalised and isolated, not made the absolute focus of the operation.’

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