In certain special forces operations, like a commando raid, a small team moves ahead of everyone else. Two, sometimes three soldiers. Their mission is called sentry neutralisation — the clinical term for what is, in practice, the most intimate act of violence in modern warfare. These soldiers must creep through darkness to within arm’s reach of an enemy sentry, gag his mouth with one hand, overpower his body with the other, and with either a garrotte or a dagger between the ribs, take his life. Silently. Restraining a human body while it is withering spasmodically in its final death throes.

There is no distance in this act. No screen, no trigger, no intermediary. Just two human beings — one killing the other. The soldiers trained for this are not monsters. That is precisely the point.

On Christmas Eve, 1914, during World War I, something happened on the Western Front, that high command on both sides tried desperately to suppress. German soldiers began placing candles along their trench parapets. British soldiers watching from 50 yards away heard singing. Within hours, men who had spent months trying to kill each other were standing in No Man’s Land — sharing cigarettes, exchanging food, and by multiple accounts, playing football. High command scrambled to prevent its recurrence.

What this proved was something military planners had always understood and never wanted to acknowledge: Soldiers do not hate each other. The enmity of soldiers is not personal. It is institutional — manufactured by States, sustained by political rhetoric, and insulated by deliberate dehumanisation........

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