An On the Ground Action Report From Afghanistan

Afghanistan: The Night I Was 'Killed In Action' By A Taliban Ambush -- The Telegraph

In the week that Sir David Richards, the new head of the British Army, called for more troops to be sent to Afghanistan, foreign correspondent Nick Meo came so close to death in a Taliban bomb ambush that the US forces had him written off as a fatality.

The convoy started with a line from a second-rate war film. "I've got a bad feeling about this mission," said Major James Becker, as his unit of National Guardsmen - the US version of the Territorial Army - and Afghan National Police set off through the chaotic traffic of Kandahar city.

The sun was setting in front of us behind the sharp mountains that lie just off Highway One to Helmand province. Easyrider, a company of part-time soldiers who had been in Afghanistan for six months, was on a routine trip from Kandahar to its base in Helmand where it was training police.

It was a route they had taken many times and, although they expected to be attacked, they were confident they could handle whatever the Taliban threw at them.

"We'll get shot at, I guarantee you 100 per cent," Becker, a prison officer back in the United States, had said when I had joined his unit half an hour earlier. He had a dreadful Mohican-style army haircut that made me think of Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver.

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