Help me Mrs Medlicott
I don’t know what to do
I’ve only got three bullets
And there’s four of Mötley Crüe

In the film Point Blank Lee Marvin’s character Walker slaughters his way through the minions of “The Organization” so that he can get his $93 000 back. He felt it was due to him since he’d stolen it fair and square before his partner had nicked it from him.

By contrast to the average British soldier on active service Walker seems to a moral philosopher of the highest calibre. (.38 in his case). He had a reason that was close to his heart and when the film was made $93 000 was serious money. If the cast of the BBC documentary Fighting Passions are a fair cross section of British infantry a dysfunctional personality seems to be all that’s required to graduate to the job of professional killer.

There was the officer type who joined the army after getting chucked out of boarding school. He felt that by enlisting his father would not be so ashamed. A desire to please father seems to be a common thread. The son of an Ulster Defence Regiment officer who shot his mate in the head with daddy’s gun joined up so that he could make his father proud.

A wicked stepfather and persistent bullying from other kids made a future SAS man join the second Paras. The only exception was the former City trader who ended up as a sniper because he really enjoyed it.

Setting aside the family backgrounds the one thing they all really got a kick from was killing people. Now while Half Man Half Biscuit’s example quoted above is entirely justifiable the British soldier just is not that fussy. The Para was the most pitiful. While in the north of Ireland he just wanted to kill someone so that the other men in his squad would look up to him. If he had thrown in a bit of racism he would have been slightly less contemptible. He wanted to kill someone because he had low self esteem and ended up in the British army’s elite regiment.

The sniper estimated that he had killed about thirty Iraqis who were resisting the imperialist occupation of their country. Years of careful reflection on his craft drew him to the conclusion that sniping is like Marmite. You love it or you hate it.

Public schoolboy lost 40% of his brain in the Malvinas but was rapturous describing the Argentineans he’d killed. The UDR man’s son had to wait twenty years before getting his chance to stick a bayonet into someone and was chuffed that he’d done it so well. His target was an Afghan resisting the imperialist occupation of his country. There’s a theme emerging.

One of the officers put the case that it is up to the politicians to decide where the army is sent. After that the soldier’s reasoning is the Nuremberg defence. Relieved of the necessity of making a political judgement the soldier is free to think only of the mechanics of killing, a process that is reduced to a drill as several of the interviewees make clear.

As the anti-war movement has waned Brown’s government has gone to some trouble to rehabilitate the image of the British army. This finds an echo in those voices who use terms like “let’s get our (sic) troops home”. The British army does a very effective job at creating the myth of the apolitical professional soldier but, as all the example above demonstrate, few jobs are more explicitly political.

In normal life these people would either be in prison, secure accommodation or receiving therapeutic support. New Labour and the imperial ideology  make them poster boys of a reactionary notion of duty. It’s an idea worth confronting but one that is seldom challenged.