Suicide bomb attacks, serious casualities and mentoring Afghan soldiers were among the realities Captain Doug Beattie faced during his second tour of Afghanistan. He talks about his exploits.

IF Doug Beattie had wanted an indication of the impact his first book would have on readers, he didn’t need to look any further than his son, Luke. The 19- year-old – who was due to join the infantry training school in Catterick, North Yorkshire – decided against it after reading An Ordinary Soldier, his father’s account of his time in Afghanistan during the first British deployment to Helmand, in 2006.

“Luke read the first book, came to me and said, ‘I’m not ready for that. I’m not mature enough, I’m going to leave it until I’m older’,”

he recalls. “I’m really proud of him for that.”

He recalls telling his daughter, Leigh, 21, never to bring a soldier to his front door. “So she brought a man from the RAF instead,” he says, with a laugh. They had a son, Tristan, last year after which Beattie – Captain Doug Beattie MC of the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Regiment – was nicknamed “the fighting grandfather”

when he returned to Afghanistan in March last year.

What happened and what he saw forms the basis of his second book, Task Force Helmand.

“It was never in my mind to write another book,” he says. “I thought the first was pretty much it. I went back to Afghanistan and didn’t think there would be that much to talk about.

I thought it would be more about working with the people and reconstructing the country, but it wasn’t.”

He had been due to retire from the Army in 2007, at the age of 42, after 25 years of soldiering.

Then his commanding officer asked him to train young soldiers and return to Helmand province with them for what has been termed an “unwinnable” war.

Beattie admits being shocked by what he found. “It had gone backwards instead of forwards.

Instead of going to a country where we engaged with the locals, what I found was pretty much all-out war,” he says.

“I did have an inkling because the news really does concentrate on the fighting. But I thought I was watching a snapshot and that for every hour of fighting, there were three hours of reconstruction.”

The reality was very different. He was fighting the Taliban day in, day out. For six months, Beattie led Afghan and British troops into repeated, exhausting battles with the Taliban.

Suicide bomb attacks, serious casualties and mentoring wayward Afghan soldiers who will one day be responsible for their nation’s security were among the realities he was forced to face. “It’s quite shocking when you see this stuff going on,” says Beattie.

HE thinks, having been on the front line, that there has been an “underestimation of the whole situation” in Afghanistan.

Campaign leaders were wrong about the extent of the people they were fighting.

“We are going down the military road rather than how we can engage with these people politically.

Some of these guys we call the Taliban can switch to the government side if people talk to them. We are fighting them on their terms. Instead of waiting for the winter when the Taliban are at their weakest, we fight when they are at their strongest.”

He doesn’t hold back in describing the situation and the grim reality of warfare. He feels it’s his duty to express his opinion about those responsible. Most would say he’s fought – literally – for the right to do that.

Everyone gets political after a while, he says, as he asks who should be blamed – the politicians or the generals for not standing up and telling it how it is? “Politicians are extremely naive and our generals are running a poor campaign.

If they were bankers we would be asking for their heads,” he says.

THERE were a number of contentious issues he decided to include in the book.

They include the death of a seven-yearold Afghan girl, killed by a British mortar shell.

He also relates the murder of a Taliban prisoner by Afghan soldiers while he watched at gunpoint.

“I feel responsible for each of those incidents, although the decisions are made by somebody else, including decisions made by the enemy.

As a commander, you always feel responsible if things don’t work out.”

As for what a book such as Task Force Helmand will achieve, he just hopes those reading it will get an idea of what the men fighting out there are doing. “Not the generals, the politicians or the decision-makers, but the man on the battlefield. They have to carry the can. I served with some truly fantastic men and their story needs to be told. It’s an honest account.”

After retiring from the British Army earlier this year, Beattie remained in North Yorkshire, although he hopes eventually to return to live in Northern Ireland where he was brought up amid the Troubles.

He’s been working on Task Force Helmand since his retirement and is well aware of the competition he faces in the publishing world.

“I’m just trying to get the story out there because I’m battling against very fat celebrities who didn’t eat a biscuit this morning and their dog ran away,” he says.

As president of the local British Legion, he’ll be doing his bit for the Poppy Appeal by giving talks to raise money. The fighting grandfather is clearly determined to continue the battle into civilian life.

■ Task Force Helmand (Simon & Schuster, £17.99). An Ordinary Soldier is available in Pocket Books paperback.