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Hello, I'm Matthew Price.

This is Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4.

Today we're dropping a whole six-part series deadliest day.

When I started out as a journalist I always had this idea fixed in my mind that I wanted to go to

war zones and I wanted to report from them and when I broke it down in my own mind it was about really

experiencing life and death. It was only years later after going to lots of these places that I realized

how much you carry around with you after seeing the things that you see. And I suppose Claire that's as good a starting point for this

series as any. Yeah we as journalists carry around what we see, but we only go for five days, two weeks.

The soldiers who are there, they stay there for several months, and they carry the stuff while they're still there.

And then they bring it all back.

The soldiers that I've met while making the series

are everything you expect from an infantryman but everything you don't expect.

They're funny, they're charming, they're passionate, they care so deeply about each other.

But the stories they tell are brutal. They're full of gruesome

details. And these guys are still so young in their late 20s, early 30s.

Claire Reed's a defense producer with the BBC and she is the person who has worked on this

series for the last half year. Why did you want to make it?

It actually all started with a list of names that I was given by a charity because I was trying to find

out if there's a problem with suicide among British military veterans and the government doesn't keep that data so a charity had started making the list.

And on that list was a name, Kevin Holt, and that name stood out to me because of the platoon that he'd served with, which was

nine platoon of two rifles.

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