James Meek joins British troops in Afghanistan and shares a few stories:
In the same firefight, another private, 20-year-old Phil Briggs, was saved by his chest plate, a piece of armour slightly larger than a slice of bread. He fell over backwards into another para, shouting out, “I’ve been shot! I’ve been shot!” Later, when he opened up his flak jacket, he found the squashed bullet inside. I mentioned this to another group of paras who’d been at Sangin, and they told me about a soldier to whom the opposite had happened. “He was sure the bullet had hit his armour and he was all right. But it had hit him. It was just the adrenaline.”