Operation Herrick is what the British Army labeled their deployments to Afghanistan in support of the US and other NATO nations.

This 64 page soft cover book takes a look at the deployments to the Helmand Province which is the largest of the 34 provinces that make up Afghanistan. It is also one of the more dangerous areas with a lot of action taking place in the Green Zone, an agricultural area along the Helmand River.

The book follows along chronologically through the years indicating which units were deployed for each Operation Herrick, their equipment and some of the battles that were waged. The photographs illustrate the uniforms and vehicles but are small and hard to make out details. Luckily there are three pages of illustrations that describe the uniforms in more detail. These are backed up with three more pages of illustrations of the ground vehicles in use though the details in these drawings seem a little vague. Lastly we have an action painting of the Pathfinder Platoon in action in May of 2006 and a representative image of troops in contact in the Green Zone.

The book does a good job covering the material in the number of pages available. With nine years of action covered the information is obviously limited but it did give me a good history of action I had not heard of before.

One other thing in the book that I found interesting was the fact that many of the troops only used one knee pad on their uniform. Something I had never noticed before and a very useful tip if you are doing figures.

Thanks to Osprey and IPMS/USA for the review sample. www.ospreypublishing.com