The house was stripped bare of all its treasures. Gone was the furniture, the family silver, the paintings and the antique china. And if that was a shock for Charles Todd, painter of horses, how much more harrowing was the trauma for his cousin Donald, whose house it was and whose young wife lay on the sitting room floor, bloody and dead... A coincidental meeting with a middle-aged widow sends Charles off to Australia...
In 2006 a British peace-keeping force was sent to Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. Within weeks they were cut off and besieged by the Taliban. Here, in their own words and for the first time, are the young veterans of Herrick 4- alongside the words of the Taliban themselves. Fergusson examines the war in Helmand and asks this most troubling question: could Britain have avoided the violence altogether?
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