From left: Paul Jacobs (left), who was blinded in Sangin, and boxing coach Luke Nevin at Hard Hitters, Liverpool; Caroline Bull, the combat medic who attended the attack in which Jacobs was injured – and who also suffered from PTSDThere is a kind of love that only those at war have known. It is the kind of love that makes soldiers brave when they are together but smashes some apart when they are alone. I encountered its thrall again and again as I began to journey through the reflections of the riflemen who had fought in Helmand: a voyage so intimate in the footsteps of a lost war that, were it not for the recall of the horror, I might have been walking through the glowing embers of an impassioned affair. Some said it directly. Sponsored“I had a love for that man,” a 2 Rifles veteran told me last November as he recalled recognising the body of a bomb-torn rifleman, killed in Sangin that

Source: The Times January 15, 2022 18:11 UTC