Gurkha: Better to Die Than Live a Coward: My Life in the Gurkhas

By Alexander Norman and Kailash Limbu

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1408705354
• ISBN13: 9781408705353
• Release Date: September 2015
• Publisher: Little Brown and Co. (UK)
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.9" x 9.3"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary