On 12 May 2009 Margaret Evison's son Lieutenant Mark Evison of 1st Battalion Welsh Guards, died of wounds sustained whilst leading a patrol in Helmand Province. Hailed a hero, Mark's death was a national sacrifice, his grave to be one of many in the identical, ordered rows in a military cemetery. But to his mother Margaret it was the most intimate of griefs. In Death of a Soldier, she attempts to reconcile her own unanswerable sense of loss with the idea that her son died for a good cause.