Thank you for downloading this podcast from the BBC. Stephen Evans and I

present the first in a two-part series, The Kill Factor.

I was like a time bomb ticking, waiting to go off.

I was in Iraq, I didn't know what, what was going on really.

I just split second thing, I put around through the window screen, it's head.

That's it, that's it, that's it, that's it.

The hardest time is doing it the first time. When I pulled that trigger for the

very first time in Basra when I was 19 years old, it got a lot easier after that.

Look out, contact!

You had an AK-47 and he was going to kill me, you know?

I was cool, calm, and collective the whole time. I knew I had a job to do, I knew I was going to do it,

and I did. I was a soldier, that was my job, and that was war.

Soldiers kill, it's what we ask them to do as we sit at home.

People don't talk about killing other people. In general, if you're a soldier and you've

killed in war, you lie and say no. It is the great taboo, the ultimate sin,

the great unmentionable. What people say is everyone looks at you differently

if they know you've killed someone. It tends to be the secret that we have

that we're not proud of. We want to fight bravely, but it's hard to be proud

of killing another person. It's opening a can of worms that hasn't been opened

in hundreds of years in the profession of arms.

In this BBC World Service program, soldiers talk about killing, about how it

changes them, or doesn't, and about how they are changed so they can kill.

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