Excerpt of the prologue to Bloody Hell by Simon Weston

Sometimes I think I never went to war—war came to me. It hit, burned, changed, and tempered me. And taught me many things.

Bad people, I learned, don't go to war. It's the young who go to war, the nice lads. And it's the civilians who become the real innocent casualties of war. But the people who actually wage war are so far behind the lines that they don't even get a smell of cordite, let alone hear the shells explode.

That's part of the reality of conflict. The other part is that, when you go to war, it becomes your job to kill people just as nice as you. more...