Andy Jackson swops his police officer's uniform for fatigues during his tour as a medic in Helmand Province

Seventy years on from the start of World War Two, Shropshire soldiers are fighting a different kind of battle on the other side of the globe.

They wheeled them in, the wounded and the dying. Some had been hit by gunfire, others ambushed in combat. All needed urgent medical treatment.

Dressed in his blue scrubs and working in a field hospital, medic Andy Jackson, a 40-year-old police sergeant from Shrewsbury, saw first hand the effects of the war in Afghanistan.

Today, life is back to normal and Andy is working at the police custody block in Monkmoor.

Just back from a three-month tour with the Territorial Army’s Copthorne-based 202 Field Hospital, he describes the experience of working in a medical unit in Helmand Province as “just getting on with his job”.

At a time when numbers of troops wounded in Afghanistan is rising steeply, Andy assisted chiefly with anaesthetisation and trauma resuscitation of soldiers needing treatment and surgery. And he admits that seeing endless casualties of war lying before him on theatre tables had a profound effect.

“We had people with battle injuries, IED blasts and gun shot wounds – anything like that,” he says.

“Personally it is very emotional and draining, day after day. It’s been said that in three months you see the same amount of trauma that you would see in an NHS hospital. But you cope because you switch on professionally and get the job done. Professionally it is very rewarding, dealing with these guys and trying to make them well.”

News stories surrounding the Afghanistan conflict make grim reading, with British personnel deaths topping 200 so far and an ever increasing list of allied soldiers wounded in action with no respite in sight.

This year has been the bloodiest in the conflict so far: in the whole of 2008, 254 British patients with Afghanistan injuries had be be flown home for treatment; in the first seven months this year that figure had already been eclipsed.

It is perhaps some indication of the scale of such casualties that while Andy was out there a third operating theatre was opened at the field hospital.

For three months his home was a tent next to the hospital. The conditions, he says, were hot and dusty. “The conditions were not brilliant but there was nothing wrong with them,” he says. “We had three meals a day, a shower and air conditioning. I never complained about it because the guys on the ground were in far worse conditions.”

Andy was armed with a gun, but the only time he had cause to get it out was to give it a clean. And he says that in the confines of the field hospital compound it was relatively safe.

Having joined the army at 16 and worked as a medic with the Royal Army Medical Corps, Andy knew his job.

But ahead of his last tour in Afghanistan he admits to having natural concerns. He was, after all, going into a war zone where injury and worse is a daily fact of life.

“I was apprehensive,” says Andy. “Are you going to be up to the job? Are your skills going be of an advanced standard that you do your best for your patients.”

Andy had been keeping his hand in at the Nuffield Hospital in Shrewsbury, to remain registered as a medic. And all the time working as police officer, where he currently works in the custody block at Shrewsbury station.

Having left the British Army in 1993 and joined the police, Andy joined the Territorial Army 202 Field Hospital in 2000.

“I missed it,” he says. “It was the best of both worlds – I could stay in the Army and be in the police at the same time. As they say, you can take the man out of the Army but you can’t take the Army out of the man. Someone described me the other day as being a proper public servant, 30 years man and boy. But it’s just something you do.”

In March 2003 he was working as a police constable in the response team at Shrewsbury, but his TA role took him to Iraq where he worked as a medic in a field hospital near Basra.

It was rather a more basic set-up from the one in Afghanistan, the hospital being housed in tents with 200 beds under canvas.

Andy describes the scene as “a bit like M*A*S*H”, the American TV comedy drama from the 1970s.

Scud missiles could be heard overhead and when warnings were set off the medical staff would dive into a trench and wait there for the attacks to pass.

Now back working in the day job, Andy says there are no plans to return to Afghanistan.

A family man, he says his girlfriend and 18-year-old daughter have been very supportive of his role but are keen not to wave him off for another tour in a war zone.

Says Andy: “They were worried about me going out there but you try to reassure them that it is safe – and it was relatively safe where I was – and as luck would have it I came back safe and sound.

“And no, I’m not going back – I’m getting too old now.”