I grew up in a military family, lived on bases and in quarters (and no, not officers' quarters either). I saw enough of what the military life did to people domestically to realise that it was pretty messed up even before I knew what the army was supposed to do. My dad was in the forces for 40 years and in almost everything he was involved in for the first few years he was on the wrong side (and I mean both morally and in a retrospective historical view) - in Aden and Malaya, for example. My mother grew up in Kenya in an army family, where it turns out that the British Army was involved in the most horrific abuses, torture and so on. This was not a case of a 'few bad apples.' We have this idea that it is somehow honorable to serve. There are circumstances where it can be - I don't think I would have refused to fight in WW2, for example whereas I would in WW1, and one can certainly make a strong case for the intervention in the former Yugoslavia - but for a large part of the last 50 years the British Army has been fighting the remnants of colonial wars or fighting on behalf of other states' imperial ambitions (e.g. Iraq - which my dad and many of his retired military colleagues seem to have opposed). I don't see any honour in this at all. I do see the exploitation of poor working class communities and the perversion of patriotism. And I suspect it was ever thus
) were highly encouraging and made their pay up for the period of call-out. 
