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Sherlock, then 21, should have been among the men heading out that morning but had been struck down by severe heatstroke the previous day and ordered by medics to remain in the base.
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Instead he chatted with the men getting ready, one of whom, 20-year-old Rifleman Danny Simpson, was Sherlock’s best friend in C Company, 2nd Battalion, the Rifles. He had lost his helmet and Sherlock agreed to lend him his even though it contravened regulations and sat awkwardly on Simpson’s far smaller head.
When America, along with its allies, launched ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, few could have guessed it would be stepping into its longest war.
Yet if the legacy of this two-decade conflict will be long disputed, bleeding as it did both literally and metaphorically into the invasion of Iraq two years later, and a broader War on Terror, it would be wrong to forget the unity of that pre-invasion month in 2001.
For 9/11 shocked the world and left no room for equivocation.
Rescue workers sift through the wreckage of the World Trade Center, two days after the terrorist attack