James Watson

Life After Death - A Guardsman's Tale James Watson

As a young boy, I was engulfed by the romanticism associated with warfare and was destined for a career within the Infantry, but I was never prepared for what comes after and the hidden wounds of warfare that always seem to remain. In the 1990s, the British Army was world-renowned as being 'The Best', yet, when it came to the welfare of its soldiers, this was far from the case. Our behavioural conditioning had been perfected, and we were trained to dehumanise and kill the enemy without question or hesitation, but what are the long-term psychological effects of such methods? This is an honest account of my generation of war-fighters, a group of soldiers who progressed from operations in Northern Ireland and the Balkans to the high-intensity attrition battles in Iraq and Afghanistan. We witnessed genocide first-hand in Kosovo, went to war in Iraq, then stood toe-to-toe with the Taliban - this is a Guardsman's Tale.