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AUTHORS NOTE
Who am I to write a book about Iraq?
Well to be perfectly honest, I am nobody, I知 certainly no political expert who can view the balance of a government痴 fragile position and give a strategic military viewpoint.
I am definitely no NATO Potato who can tell you what type of tank it was just by looking at the track prints in the sand through a pair of binoculars from 400 metres.
I知 just a regular bloke with a normal family life and a normal civilian job. A life filled with everything from the boredom and stress at work selling forklift trucks to the mundane Dads job of providing a taxi service to my three kids. I get grief from my wife when I forget to put my dirty washing in the basket and when it comes to the Dads race at the kids school sports day, I知 the first on the track armed only with a pair of trainers that I wear for cutting the grass and the pressure of my children痴 credibility resting firmly on my shoulders. I risk life and limb to cross the country, arriving in the nick of time to sit on a small plastic chair to see my child wearing a grey blanket and a cardboard mask playing the important role of a donkey in the Christmas nativity play. I find myself watching a film at home and mindlessly walking into the kitchen staring into the fridge with a blank gaze, knowing that there is nothing to eat because I did exactly the same thing during the last advert break and there was nothing then either, but here I am yet again, not knowing how I got here and still not finding anything to eat.
In short, I知 just like every other family man in the UK, being in the minority of men who actually laughs with Homer Simpson not at him because we empathise with all that he has to deal with seeing ourselves with the same pressures of life.
So to find myself in the surreal world of leaving my family and going to a war zone for the first time, when I知 in the autumn of my thirty something years and having never spent longer than two weeks away from home before, was an experience that I felt I had to share with others, so they could try to understand how different life can become from the norm. And all of this, because I once saw an advert for the Territorial Army on the television... |
