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Gurkha: Better to Die than Live a Coward: My Life in the Gurkhas by Colour-Sergeant Kailash Limbu

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In the summer of 2006, Colour-Sargeant Kailash Limbu's platoon was sent to relieve and occupy a police compound in the town of Now Zad in Helmand. He was told to prepare for a forty-eight hour operation. In the end, he and his men were under siege for thirty-one days - one of the longest such sieges in the whole of the Afghan campaign.

Kailash Limbu recalls the terrifying and exciting details of those thirty-one days - in which they killed an estimated one hundred Taliban fighters - and intersperses them with the story of his own life as a villager from the Himalayas. He grew up in a place without roads or electricity and didn't see a car until he was fifteen.

Kailash's descriptions of Gurkha training and rituals - including how to use the lethal Kukri knife - are eye-opening and fascinating. They combine with the story of his time in Helmand to create a unique account of one man's life as a Gurkha.

  • Publisher:‎ Abacus; 0 edition (5 May 2016)
  • Language: English
  • Paperback
  • 352 pages
  • ISBN-10: 0349140103
  • ISBN-13: ‎978-0349140100
  • Dimensions: ‎12.7cm x 2.54cm x 19.69cm

About the author;

Colour Sergeant Kailash Limbu was born in 1981 in Khebang village, one of the most remote in the whole of Nepal. He joined the 2nd Batallion Royal Gurkha Rifles in 1999 and undertook four tours of active service in Afghanistan. He has also been on operations in Bosnia and Sierra Leone. Married with two children, he is currently serving in the UK.
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