Lest we forget, most ex-soldiers don’t go bad in civvies | Nick Cohen

The average ex-serviceman is less likely to end up behind bars than the average civilian

Despite the parades and the professions of gratitude, soldiers are more belittled today than at any time since the 19th century. Menacing, working-class men haunt middle-class nightmares. They appear all the more frightening when the services have trained them in the techniques of violence and sent them to Afghanistan and Iraq to hone their skills.

In contemporary cliche, the ex-serviceman is like a cornered animal. He suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder that leaves him angry enough to lash out without reason. His road home takes him from Helmand province to Wormwood Scrubs via a spell living rough. A society that in the mid-20th century treated the squaddie as a working-class hero now depicts him as a thug.

Whether his thuggery is his fault is a question that divides people you can broadly define as pacifists from militarists or, if that is too strong, those who believe that we should support the armed forces as a point of principle.

All sides pretend, however, that military service invariably changes men for the worse. In my experience, when all sides agree, you should open your eyes and look for the falsehoods they are failing to confront.

The pacifist doctrine that war is always wrong is easy to state but almost impossible to follow. True pacifists should condemn all who take up arms equally. But the pressure of holding to a pacifist position when your country is at war is often too much to bear. Nearly every opponent of the Afghan war I know has begun by justifying their opposition by imagining moral equivalence between Britain and the Taliban jihadis. They then stop mentioning radical Islam and talk as if there are no killers on the other side. The horrors of war become the sole responsibility of the west, which appears to be fighting out of sheer malice.

I, and I guess most people watching the ceremony at the Cenotaph on 10 November, will applaud the troops, while reserving the right to condemn the politicians and generals who have led Britain to effective defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pacifists, by contrast, have to condemn the lions along with the donkeys. Writing for the religious website Ekklesia, Jill Segger explained why good people must not show solidarity with ex-servicemen and women. British troops had tortured and murdered Iraqis and Afghans, she said. The case of “Marine A”, who killed a captive in cold blood, then told his patrol: “Obviously this doesn’t go anywhere fellas. I just broke the Geneva Convention”, supports her argument. But even Segger has to admit most soldiers do not torture and murder. War had tainted them nevertheless. “The brutalising experiences of combat lead many to harm themselves and others when they return to civilian life.”

The popular press screams at those who “hate Britain” and “insult our boys”. But it is as keen to present pictures of brutalised men. In a typical piece, the Sunday Mirror “revealed” that ex-service personnel …read more