resources: veterans' experience

Veterans for Peace UK is an international chapter of the U.S.network. 

They run workshops in schools and colleges giving an honest view of military life, as well as publish and campaign around military and peace issues. 

The Militarisation in Everyday Life in the UK conference was held in London in 2013 and was organised by ForcesWatch. It brought together academics, writers, activists and campaigners concerned about the implications of the militarisation of everyday life in the UK.

12 presentations were filmed. For more details and background reading, see here.

Diana Francis, Looking at everyday militarisation. See more presentations.

This report from ForcesWatch, shows that young soldiers recruited from disadvantaged backgrounds are substantially more likely than other troops to return from war experiencing problems with their mental health. It calls for the policy of recruiting from age 16 to be reviewed so that the greatest burden of risk is not left to the youngest, most vulnerable recruits to shoulder.

Download the full report (PDF 1294kb)

Download the Executive Summary (PDF 268kb)

Watch on YouTube

A 4 part investigation into 'the soldier myth' - talking to front-line soldiers about recruitment, training, fighting and coming home

Kevin McSorley

in War and the Body: Militarisation, Practice and Experience, Kevin McSorley (ed), 2012

This book places the body at the centre of critical thinking about war,giving embodiment and bodily issues an analytic recognition they have often been denied in the annals and ontology of conventional war scholarship. The reality of war is not  just politics by any other means but politics incarnate, politics written on and experienced through the thinking, feeling bodies of men and women. From steeled combatants to abject victims, from the grieving relative to the exhausted aid worker, war occupies innumerable bodies in a multitude of ways, profoundly shaping lives and ways of being human.

A 14 minute film made by the American Friends Service Committee and Veterans for Peace, updated in 2011. An informative deconstruction of a US army recruitment video and moving reflection on the effects of going to war. With testimony from a number of young and older veterans.

The Skinback Fusiliers, "a fast, funny and deeply disturbing novel about life in the British army today seen through the eyes of three young men." This is a novel based on the real experiences of 3 young men. Serialised on Open Democracy in 2011. Read it and add your comments to the well of feedback this book has generated.

These BBC radio programmes explore the effect of killing on people in the military, how many are unable to kill and others live with the effects of having killed for the rest of their lives.