Cant say i would want to risk losing limbs for any type of money…Your health is the more important than money.

But this kind of blanket statement is totally unhelpful. It says "I wouldn't take ANY risk for ANY money" – but it's absurd because every day you trade off risk against reward. If you buy a 4* rated new car instead of a 5* rated one (because it's cheaper, or more fuel efficient, or looks better) – or if you live in Britain instead of Norway (less crime in Norway) – or if you live in a terraced house instead of a bungalow (stairs! very dangerous!), you're trading off risk against a basket of other things.

You're in Afghanistan. Even with three weeks leave, it's going to take you a long time to get anywhere worthwhile

I love the way that people on here are so snotty about Dubai when most of them live in Basingstoke or Otley or East Kilbride. It's 3 hours flight to Dubai and then you can be practically anywhere in Europe, Asia or Africa within another 12 hours – so, a day's travelling. There's people that spend that long commuting between some dump in Benelux and some dump in Yorkshire ffs.

And it's 1, 2, 3, what are we contracting for? 😆
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBdeCxJmcAo

I do apologise for being nasty about Dubai.

Fly-blown technology park / shoddy building site in the middle of nowhere populated by money / image-obsessed chavs on the make and chippy ex-military personnel all held together by a poorly treated migrant workforce. What's not to like? …You're right, it is just like Basingstoke.

Depending on your qualifications there are lots of jobs out there that pay good money on rotation not in a war zone.

You might have to work up the ladder for two or three years and work out in the desert but it's doable.

Years back I applied for a job in Iraq working at one of the universities in the green zone, didn't get it, never noticed that it said Americans only on the application form., steal the oil and take all the choice jobs.

If you can get into the oil industry a couple of years back there were big money jobs in Nigeria paying silly day rates for working there with decent rotations as well.

Fly-blown technology park / shoddy building site in the middle of nowhere populated by money / image-obsessed chavs on the make and chippy ex-military personnel all held together by a poorly treated migrant workforce.

If that's what you've seen of Dubai, you just haven't been hanging out with the right people (with the exception of the last bit, which is unquestionably true at the bottom end of the market).

Sorry – it just gets on my moobs that whenever the subject of Dubai pops up the self-appointed experts that live in Ramsgate and watch Trisha start sneering at Dubai for its lack of culture as if they're Brian Bleeding Bloody Bleeding Sewell or something.

</hair trigger rant>

If you do go, make sure you see some of the country while you're there, rather than just getting to know army camps:

http://www.mountainunity.org/TheWakhanCorridor.html