Throughout our recent and not-so-recent history, the understated, fearless and hearty Gurkhas have served the British loyally and without complaint. For more than a hundred years, this bloodthirsty regiment has followed the British Army around the globe - from Gallipoli to the jungles of Burma in World War II, from Palestine to the Falklands and the Gulf War. This text tells the story of this regiment. It tells of the Gurkha blood running through the veins of British military conquests for more than two centuries, from the founding of the brigade by the terrifying, extraordinary Johnny Gurkha through to the amazing feats that put Gurkhas in the same distinguished company as the British Paras, the Commandos, the Guards and the Black Watch.

Gurkha Warriors is a brilliantly researched and fantastically readable history of this most fascinating of regiments. It tells the story of the amazing feats that put the Gurkhas in the same distinguished company as the British Paras, the Commandos, the Guards and the Black Watch. This fascinating relationship between the British and the Gurkhas - born out of ferocious violence and bloodshed, deadly serious bravery and extraordinary heroics - is one of the most psychologically intriguing and totally astonishing stories known to military history. It is of obvious interest not only to soldiers and historians, but also to members of the general public on whose behalf brave Gurkha soldiers are still sent to spill their own and other people's blood in the four corners of our deeply troubled world today.

In this Sunday Times Top Ten bestselling memoir that 'reads like a thriller', (Joanna Lumley) Colour-Sargent Kailash Limbu shares a riveting account of his life as a Gurkha soldier-marking the first time in its two-hundred-year history that a soldier of the Brigade of Gurkhas has been given permission to tell his story in his own words. In the summer of 2006, Colour-Sargeant Kailash Limbu's platoon was sent to relieve and occupy a police compound in the town of Now Zad in Helmand. He was told to prepare for a forty-eight hour operation. In the end, he and his men were under siege for thirty-one days - one of the longest such sieges in the whole of the Afghan campaign. Kailash Limbu recalls the terrifying and exciting details of those thirty-one days - in which they killed an estimated one hundred Taliban fighters - and intersperses them with the story of his own life as a villager from the Himalayas. He grew up in a place without roads or electricity and didn't see a car until he was fifteen. Kailash's descriptions of Gurkha training and rituals - including how to use the lethal Kukri knife - are eye-opening and fascinating. They combine with the story of his time in Helmand to create a unique account of one man's life as a Gurkha. 'I was completely bowled over by Kailash's book and read it with a beating heart and dry mouth. I felt as though I was at his side, hearing the shells and bullets, enjoying the jokes and listening in the scary dead of night. The skill with which he has included his childhood and training is immense, always discovered with ease in the narrative: it actually felt as though I was watching, was IN a film with him. It brought me nearer than I have ever been not only to the mind of the universal soldier but to a hill boy of Nepal and a hugely impressive Gurkha. I raced through it and couldn't put it down: it reads like a thriller. If you want to know anything about the Gurkhas, read this book, and be prepared for a thrilling and dangerous trip' Joanna Lumley

The author has travelled in Nepal and met many Gurkhas to investigate the background to their traditional service to Britain and the threat that this is now under. He recounts famous battles when they collected VC's and earned admiration.

The history of the Gurkha serviceman is one that goes beyond soldiering and bravery-it is in equal measure a story of the resilient human spirit, and of a tiny community that carved for itself a niche in world history.

A pictorial history of The Royal Gurkha Rifles. An introduction to this remarkable regiment, its operational deployments abroad and at home supported by a wealth of photographs chronicling its quarter century of service to the Crown. This unique insight into one of the world's elite fighting units includes descriptions of operational deployments in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Sierra Leone and East Timor, as well as special interest sections covering recruiting, sport, adventure training, snipers, tracking and, of course, the kukri fighting knife. The Roll of Honour, its Battle Honours (including those of its antecedent regiments), honours and awards received by members of the Regiment and a brief history of Britain's Gurkhas are amongst the detail amassed in this special edition.

America was still neutral when, in the fall of 1941, a tall, solid thirty-year-old advertising executive from Connecticut volunteered to serve as an American Field Service ambulance driver in the British Army. It was the start of an adventure that took Scott Gilmore to Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, India, and, finally, to the jungles of Burma. After an exciting and dangerous year in North Africa, where he witnessed the fall of Tobruk and the battle of El Alamein, Gilmore was accepted for training as an officer in the elite Indian Army. This was the old Indian Army of the British Raj, a fighting force of unflappable English officers, hardy Indians, and the legendary Gurkhas of Nepal. It was an army at the apogee of its skills and about to inflict on the Japanese their greatest defeat on land. With dry, offbeat humor, Gilmore describes his challenging months at the Officers Training School and with his new unit, the 8th Gurkha Rifles. As he endures the assault courses and marches, confronts the arcane rituals of the officers' mess, and learns the language and customs of his diminutive fellow soldiers, Gilmore's adaptability and good nature is notable, and his American viewpoint on the mix of cultures refreshing. Moreover, like generations of Britons, he learns to love and respect the kukri knife-wielding Gurkha warriors. When Gilmore's 4th Battalion is finally deemed ready to be put to the test as part of General Bill Slim's Fourteenth Army, it plunges into battle in the jungle-covered mountains of the Indo-Burmese border. He and his comrades fight their way across the dry plains of central Burma, execute a dangerous crossing of the mile-wide Irrawaddy River, and press on to Rangoon, enduring ahostile climate and tenacious Japanese opposition. As Gilmore moves up in responsibility to company commander and engages in night reconnaissance patrols and set-piece attacks, his experiences give a forceful picture of the fighting in one of the most difficult and remote theaters of World War II.