Dario Nustrini entered the army for many of the usual reasons young people do. The way he left it was anything but usual. After six years in the service, on deployment alongside Nato forces in Iraq, the communications specialist had an epiphany: “The money and the resources and the manpower going into this weren’t really helping. And in a lot of ways, there was a good argument that we were the bad guys. Not as bad as Isis, but there was definitely a large amount of self-interest [shown by] the countries there that wasn’t really that altruistic.”
So the lance corporal quit, did a creative writing course and, as of this interview, the now-32-year-old has been a firefighter for two weeks.
Until Iraq, he hadn’t given the geopolitical implications of his chosen career much thought, although he’d been in uniform for a long time. As outlined in his new memoir, Nothing Significant to Report, he joined the Army Cadets at 13.
“I joined because my best friend at the time was in it and his older brother had gone through and done all this really cool stuff. We’d go shooting and hiking and learn bush craft
