David is a retired Lieutenant Colonel with a lifetime of service in the Royal Navy and both the Regular and Territorial Armies. He has studied and visited battlefields throughout the world, and his present focus are the battlefields of the Second World War in NW Europe, and the Zulu and Second Anglo-Boer Wars in South Africa. He has led numerous battlefield tours, including a number to South Africa conducting detailed and wide ranging studies of the campaigns.

In 1986 David was the officer responsible for transporting the Welsh Dragon monument from Calais to its site at Mametz Wood on the Somme and placing next to its plinth ready for erection. He was an official guest at its unveiling a year later and the role played by David, and the Army, is an important and often overlooked significant part of the story of the Mametz Dragon. In 2005 he planned and orchestrated the placing of Wales' only full scale replica Trafalgar beacon.

David is the author of several articles on the Great War soldiers of his home town of Llanelli, and has successfully campaigned for a memorial to the town's only VC winner, Sergeant Ivor Rees, South Wales Borderers.

David is the President of both Llanelli Veterans Association and Llanelli Sea Cadets, and in 2009 he was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant for the county of Dyfed.