Between October 2001 and the final evacuation of August 2021, four hundred and fifty-seven men and women of the United Kingdom's Armed Forces did not come home from Afghanistan.

They were soldiers, marines, airmen and women, engineers, medics, and reservists. They came from every part of the United Kingdom, and from every walk of life.

The youngest was eighteen years old. The oldest was fifty-one. Most were in their early twenties - their adult lives barely begun.

They died in the dust of Helmand, in the valleys of the south, in the streets of Kabul, and in the air above a country an ocean from their own.

Behind every one of those four hundred and fifty-seven was a mother, a father, a wife, a husband, a child, a friend - a whole world of people who would carry the weight of that absence for the rest of their lives.