I KNEW the Christmas of 2007 would be a memorable one because one week beforehand I was going to cover possibly the most dangerous assignment of my journalistic career.

That morning I had boarded a military flight from RAF Brize Norton and hours later I touched down in Kandahar airbase in war-torn Afghanistan.

As I was preparing to head out TV bulletins were filled with news of a successful Afghan-led joint operation to liberate from the Taliban the town of Musa Qala, in Helmand province, and I thought it would be interesting to meet some of those involved.

At the time I was working for a local paper in Scarborough and had been despatched to interview troops sending their Christmas wishes back home to friends and family across the rest of Yorkshire and the North East.

I spent the first week on a British base attached to Camp Bastion where I spoke to local troops from 2nd Battalion The Yorkshire Regiment (Green Howards), as well as the Afghan general in charge of the whole of Helmand, and followed a supply convoy to one of the more remote patrol bases.

When I returned I saw a map of the route full of red dots and was told each one represented previous roadside bombs.

But by Christmas morning I was in the heart of Musa Qala and that afternoon I was with a foot patrol around the town and surrounding countryside.

By that stage of the campaign British troops were mainly responsible formentoring their Afghan counterparts — training them so they would be able to keep control when foreign troops eventually left Afghanistan.

The route was meticulously planned beforehand and took in a number of compounds outside the town. The soldiers took time to speak to locals to give them the opportunity to raise concerns or provide information.

I was concerned at one point when they found a suspect device by the roadside and the Afghans decided to see if it was a bomb by kicking it.

We made it back in one piece and the soldiers spent their down time opening shoe boxes, which were filled with festive gifts from home, before tucking into their Christmas dinner of ration packs.

Home for the night was the British command centre, which had been set up in a hotel which used to be owned by the local drug dealers, and my bed for the night was a hard concrete floor.

On Boxing Day I joined an armed convoy back into the centre of Musa Qala and it was good to see a bustling market with a variety of goods being traded — apparently it had not taken long for the locals to return to the town once news of the victory spread.

Communication was via a shared satellite phone and I managed to ring home that afternoon, much to the relief of my parents and future wife Karen.

I was in Helmand at the same time as Prince Harry’s first tour of duty and I was sworn to secrecy about his presence — that was until an Australian website leaked the news and he got an early trip back to the UK.

On the whole it was quiet during my two weeks in Afghanistan, but gunfire crackled in the distance, a few rockets flew overhead before falling wide of the mark and the area was rocked by a massive explosion as an improvised explosive device was detonated.

One of the soldiers on the Christmas patrol was from Whitby, and we nodded our hellos when he realised I was from his local paper.

But I never caught his name — I was to learn this less than two months later when news broke that Corporal Damian Lawrence had been killed in an explosion during a similar patrol and I recognised his face instantly.

Incidents like that brought things into perspective for me and is perhaps one of the reasons why my wife and I do not embrace the commercialism that is the modern Christmas.

From The Cumberland and Westmorland Herald on Saturday, November 21, 2015.