From hero to zero

From hero to zero

What turns a brave soldier abroad into a violent criminal at home?

Michael Clohessy returned from Iraq with a distinguished war record — and ended up in prison. Our jails are swollen with former soldiers. Why can’t they stay out of trouble?





When the sniper opened fire, Michael Clohessy reacted first and fastest. It was the summer of 2004, and the 26-year-old private from Walton in Liverpool was serving with the 1st Battalion the 22nd (Cheshire) Regiment in Basra. In the clipped assessment of one officer, he was “a cracking soldier, super-fit, bags of potential, and very mature”.

Indeed, during the battalion’s deployment at Basra’s Old State Building, when the British Army were engaged regularly by insurgents, Clohessy had more than proved his worth.

So, when a sniper started taking pot shots at a joint British Army and Iraqi police patrol on a patch of wasteland, Clohessy knew what to do. He shouldered an injured Iraqi policeman and took him to safety behind a nearby wall, before pushing two of his colleagues, who had momentarily frozen as bullets thudded around them, out of harm’s way. He then moved into the open ground and returned fire on the enemy with his machine gun. “I don’t know whether I hit him or not, but I pretty much took down the building with him in it,” he remembers. Either way, the sniper was silenced.

Nine months later, Clohessy stood before a judge at Liverpool crown court, on trial for grievous bodily harm with intent and affray. He had just begun his second tour of Iraq when he was pulled home to appear in the dock. The court heard that Clohessy had committed a violent assault outside the Barlow Arms pub in Walton, in Liverpool, on December 31, 2003, at a New Year’s Eve party that had gone haywire. His victim, William Littlemore, suffered a fractured skull and permanently impaired vision as a result of the attack.