A Million Bullets is a timely account of the British Army’s deployment to Helmand Province, Afghanistan, from March to October 2006 (known as Operation Herrick 4). In his postscript, Fergusson makes a rather belated justification for his somewhat sensationalist title. He feels ‘bound to point out that, actually, only half that number of bullets had been fired during the Herrick 4 period [he] was writing about.’

Fergusson’s publisher – with an eye for a catchy title and the lucrative end of the market – assured him that A Million Bullets would not be misleading because by the time the book went to print the other 500,000 would almost certainly have been fired. Fergusson goes on to