"At times it seems like every junior officer in the British army has written his or her Afghan War memoirs. Where Leo Docherty (Desert of Death) and Patrick Hennessy (The Junior Officer's Reading Club) set the benchmarks and gained critical acclaim, many mediocre offerings followed with an often-clichéd, paint-by-numbers narrative; "I was at Sandhurst and it was really hard, I only caught the end of Iraq/I missed Iraq and it was rubbish, I went to Afghanistan" … ad nauseum. Thus, it is with some trepidation and skepticism that I began reading Capt. Davis Wiseman's Helmand to Himalayas, which, as it happens, opens with a chapter about Sandhurst, just catching the end of an Iraq tour and then deploying to Afghanistan.
Truth be told, I didn't get on well with the book at the beginning. The "memoirs" seemed fairly mundane and I wasn't warming to the author much either. Remarks such as "I like to think of myself as a soldier's Officer" and "I can adopt my command and leadership style depending on the situation" had this former Officer false retching. What came next at about 100 pages in, however, changed my view of the book entirely.
The middle chapters floored me. Wiseman finally drops his infanteer's guard and begins to pour out his soul to the reader as he dares to recall the details of two extremely traumatic events in Helmand Province. The first is the shocking atrocity that occurred on Nov. 3, 2009, when three Grenadier Guards and two Royal Military Police were shot dead by two rogue Afghan National Police officers that they had been mentoring at Shin Kalay police station. It was an event so appalling that it forever cast a haunting shadow over the working relationship between Afghan and U.K. forces thereafter. On that tragic day, Wiseman was the first man on the scene and in his book he guides us back to the bloody aftermath and his unit's attempts to cope with the carnage before them. It is a raw, heart-breaking and very emotive read…"
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Amicalement
Armand
explains step-by-step how he painted 
