Tom Shore joined the British army in 1970, a few days after his eighteenth birthday. By 1987 he had completed 17 years' service, most of it with the Airborne and Special Forces. He was now a warrant officer, and like so many of his calling, following years of physical abuse, military parachuting and trudging over mountains carrying far too much weight while wet and cold, resulting in a raft of lower limb injuries, he was headed to the British Army of the Rhine in West Germany. But in July 1989, having been called back to London to attend an early morning meeting in East London's Victoria Park everything changed.