Richard Slaiter

From the pine woods of a Dorset hillside to the jungles of Borneo and the desert wadis of Oman, this is the unflinching memoir of a British soldier who lived the Cold War at its sharpest edges.

As a boy he ran away from home and found unexpected shelter with an old tramp living rough on St Catherine's Hill. Years later, that same restless spirit carried him into the ranks of 94 Locating Regiment. In freezing German winters he manned the new Green Archer radars. In 1965 he flew into the Borneo confrontation, shared trenches with Gurkhas, watched a helicopter vanish over the border under anti-aircraft fire, and marched through rainforest that would one day be erased by palm oil. In 1971 he stood on a sandbagged hedgehog in Dhofar, calling in rocket strikes while mortar rounds walked towards him across the Wadi Jarsis.

Between the firefights there were moments of strange beauty: sailing the Baltic, a week of stolen freedom in Cyprus, the quiet dignity of Gurkha comrades, and the fierce loyalty of a friend named Alvin. There was also the long, difficult marriage that began with a night in a Vauxhall and lasted eighteen years.

When the uniform finally came off, the road did not end. Squats in London, grape harvests in the Languedoc, cold nights in the French Alps, and the familiar vineyards of the Moselle became the next chapters of a life that never quite settled.

Told with candour, dry humour, and a soldier's clear eye, this is a story of duty, friendship, danger, and the long search for a place to belong, written by a man who survived the Cold War and then kept walking.