Medic tells of moment she gunned down Taliban fighter

Chantelle Taylor, who is one of the first female British soldiers known to have killed an enemy fighter in combat, said she was “overwhelmed by fear” during the battle and chose to kill the enemy gunman rather than being shot herself.

The former servicewoman was serving as a sergeant in the Royal Army Medical Corps when her patrol was ambushed by around 20 heavily armed insurgents in Helmand province in July 2008.

In her new book Bad Company A Woman Face To Face With The Taliban, the 32-year-old revealed it was the first time she had fired her standard issue SA80 assault rifle at another person.

Describing the attack, which came as her unit patrolled the Taliban stronghold of Marjah, Ms Taylor said her convoy turned into a “Taliban shooting gallery”, with her Land Rover being peppered with bullets.

“I immediately get eyes on a Taliban fighter – a little more than 50ft away, in a field to our left,” she adds in her account.

“Suddenly, overwhelmed by a fear that I am about to be shot in the face, I experience a massive rush of blood to the head. Instinctively and purposefully I engage him, firing seven shots, which would later become quite the joke within my regiment. Apparently I was wasting ammunition.”

After the fighter falls to the ground dead, she adds: “It would never be right to claim a kill as a medic but, at the end of the day, he no longer had the ability to engage us and that’s all that I am concerned about.

“Faced with the choice of him or me, I chose me.”