I am reviewing the autobiography Battleworn by Chantelle Taylor which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. This is the story of a combat field medic in Afghanistan in Kandahar province who was a sergaent. She had joined the army at 22 and is 26 at the time of most of this story. When the insurgent war started in Afghanistan which had been going on when the Russians invaded but they had long left the British initially sent 4,000. A realistic amount to do the job would have been 30,000. Even 2 years later the British only had 8,000 and it was left for the Americans to prop them up. A lot of the problem was that Britain had a left wing government that was preoccupied with making cuts to the armed forces. By contrast they had sent 40,000 troops to Iraq to invade that country. The book is loaded with lots of fascinating facts as with a lot of these wartime memoirs like someone is caught in a IUD explosion on average they have injuries and not all of them may be visible. At least the injuries you can see you can try and treat. More often than not when someone dies it is as a result of these invisible wounds. Chantelle was based in an area where the Taliban controlled a small town and they were trying to wrestle it back with a nearby base where they were stationed. It was a very dangerous area where they always had to make sure no military hardware ever fell into enemy hands. If something like a vehicle broke down and they couldn’t repair it, it had to be blown up with explosives or failing that they had call in an airstrike. Chantelle went on to become an instructor and also served in Baghdad looking after a dignitary. I very much enjoyed reading this book which is around 200 pages and I do recommend it.
