Beginner's pluck

Patrick, from Co Wicklow, has always enjoyed writing.

And when, as an officer in the British Army, he was deployed to Afghanistan, he was asked to write about his experience for the Irish Times. “The army wanted their profile raised and I knew an editor there,” he says. “Writing about it was good for me. It helped me deal with the things I was seeing. When I had an hour off I’d write and put the experience down. The book came out of that. “I left the army a year and a half ago and I now work for NATO. The quality of life in the army was horrendous, and the situation in Afghanistan was futile.”

The book was recently nominated for the British Army Military Book of the Year.