Remembrance Day this November 11 saw the funeral of Dennis Hutchings, a veteran of the British army’s campaigns in Northern Ireland. With Hutchings’s coffin flanked by official Ministry of Defence pallbearers and the ceremony addressed by former veterans minister Johnny Mercer, it might have looked like he was a national hero. Yet at the time of his death, Hutchings was on trial for the 1974 killing of John Pat Cunningham, an unarmed man with severe learning disabilities, shot five times as he fled, frightened, from a British patrol.

The media sympathy for the elderly Hutchings — it even being claimed that his human rights were being violated — illustrated how the politics of “honoring veterans” can be used to erase the actual victims of British Army crimes.  Yet Joe Glenton insists in his new book, Veteranhood: Rage and Hope in British Ex-Military Life, not all veterans are happy to be used for this propaganda. A well-known military refusenik, jailed in 2010 because he would not return to fight in Afghanistan, Glenton emphasizes that working-class recruits often grow disaffected with army life — and that jingoist veterans’ groups don’t speak for everyone.

Glenton spoke to Jacobin’s David Broder about the rise of nationalist pageantry around veterans, ex-military personnel’s identification with the army as an institution, and soldiers’ historical role in the wider working-class movement.