The Sunday Telegraph has a fascinating first-person account of military operations in Afghanistan by the ‘bomb magnet’ soldier blown up 15 times. The A Company 4 Rifles fought against 500 attacks and had 200 IED incidents at Forward Operating Base Inkerman, Sangin, Helmand Province. One in four of the company were killed or injured by situations such as this one:

On another occasion, the sergeant major spent 26 hours in a Mastiff, which had been blown up by two Russian-made anti-tank mines stacked on top of each other.

Describing the event, he said: “We were moving down Route 611 to recover a vehicle which had been blown up after a 107mm rocket had been fired at it. The vehicle had burned for 36 hours and no one had gone near it but as soon as the fire went out, the area as flooded with kids. We recovered the vehicle and then returned along the same stretch of road two hours later on another job.

“What we didn’t know at the time was that the Taliban had managed to lay three devices in a carefully planned IED ambush in just 20 minutes, in broad daylight in an area being monitored by two bases with cameras.