Mission Afghanistan is based on stories told in images and words. They describe missions you cannot actually get used to, what actually being in a hostile environment might be like, what it actually means to trust – or not to trust – someone when it really matters, and how the signs may differ. Here we get to see fragments of a larger course of events in a mission. In this book, the mission emerges from within, formed by thousands of individual events that constantly take place. These are eyewitness accounts, but given in retrospect. Because in real time they were not stories; everything was at stake, as it always is in real time. In his preface, Peter Tillberg writes that by using soldiers’ narratives of when their military professionalism had been tested we can ‘develop our understanding, imagination and ability to conceive’. Military training aims, among other things, to develop preparedness to face the unknown. Much of this must be rooted in the body, a team spirit, an ethical instinct. But can we also reduce the unknown by becoming better familiar with it and learning how to perceive it? The actual real-time situation will never appear before us and say how it should be perceived or what is lurking beneath the surface. We are ultimately reduced here to relying on our own judgement and ability to actually see things. Training our judgement has to be done through real experiences: the question is how much can we learn from others? Naturally, an obvious prerequisite is that those with something to tell – the skilled and the experienced – actually do. Less obvious, perhaps, is that the not so experienced must be able to connect with some of this. The stories in this book are told by very experienced soldiers. When read appropriately, they can be a gold mine of working examples.