How to Escape a Taliban Ambush

The Lives Less Ordinary series brings you the most exciting, adventurous and entertaining true-life writing that is out there, for men who are time-poor but want the best. Lives Less Ordinary drops you into extreme first-hand accounts of human experience, whether that's the adrenaline-pumping heights of professional sport, the brutality of the modern battlefield, the casual violence of the criminal world, the mind-blowing frontiers of science, or the excesses of rock 'n' roll, high finance and Hollywood. Lives Less Ordinary also brings you some of the finest comic voices around, on every subject from toilet etiquette to Paul Gascoigne.

'The CO had given me the word: whatever it took, I had to get our injured lads out. I'd ordered the F15s on an attack run right over our heads. If I'd got it wrong we were dead...'Paul 'Bommer' Grahame is one of the British Army's most deadlyJTACs - the man who, with high-tech precision, calls in the airborne attacks from on the ground in the heart of the battle. This is his brutal, explosive account of walking into a close combat Taliban attack in Helmand and his attempts to get his fellow squaddies out alive.

This digital bite has been extracted from Paul Grahame and Damien Lewis's adrenaline-fuelled book Fire Strike 7/9.