From banter to dark reflection

PATRICK HENNESSEY read English at Oxford before joining the Grenadier Guards at the age of 22, going to Sandhurst, seeing spells guarding Buckingham Palace and in Bosnia before serving in Iraq and seeing some of the fiercest fighting in decades in Afghanistan.

Born in 1982, he belongs to a generation of uniformed men and women who would, as he puts it, “do more and see more in five years than our fathers and uncles had packed into 22 on manoeuvres in Germany and rioting in Ulster”.

Brought up on a diet of video games and adventure sports, today’s young recruits – to the British army at least – seem to view war as a slightly more extreme version of paintballing, whose only purpose is to provide them with an adrenalin high.