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It's not just: you get off the plane, you're back home, everything's fine. Maybe the physical danger ends, but soldiers are still deeply at risk of being injured in a different way.

I know what soldiers or their families go through.

Before they deploy, they train for the specific operations, but there is a danger that the Army is not retaining the core of its full capabilities.

The front-line soldier wants it to be got over by the physical process of his destroying enough Germans to end it. He is truly at war. The rest of us, no matter how hard we work, are not.

Everybody in the military has a reputation, and usually it doesn't come out to the public.

When an army unit returns from service in Iraq or Afghanistan, it barely gets a breather before it begins training for its next deployment.

It's very strange getting out of the military, when you've lived in Iraq, and people you know are going overseas again and again. Some of them are getting injured.

Every soldier should learn survival on land, sea, and in the air.

What's always got me is the fact that when people talked on the telly about Iraq, before Afghanistan kicked off, you'd get only these public-school-type army officers talking about what was going on out there. I kept thinking, 'Why don't we get the true voice of the squaddie? Why don't we hear from the lads on the battlefield?'

Most people know nobody in the military.