Your "Walk a mile" rationalisation is spurious. It's a pragmatic justification for having 'our boys' act like their boys 'cos we're the good guys.
We'll just have to agree to disagree then, remember 1 patrol in your whole life isn't quite the same as one every day for 6 months..I
Don't condone what happened but I can understand why. Which is the point I was trying to make.
As an aside thousands and thousands more Iraqi innnocents have had to scrape up and bury their own than in the NI parallel you propose.
Yes they have, again the point being made was the up close and personal violence suffered by the guys.
I am aware of many crewmen who went out of BBK and XMG on patrol- it was reasonably common. I didn't.
I was n't and never saw any, either on the ground or later in aviation