Anecdotal photos of joy at the end of fighting only represent a few moments and are not the real-life consequences that pervade the lives of fighters and society during and after war.

Obviously - did you seriously think I was using them to argue the absurd view that if they were smiling then they would be OK after the war ? (see the quotation in my comment above). My point was - pretty clearly I think - that smiling after combat was a quite understandable immediate reaction and not a sign of abnormality. The photo of Brit troops laughing at the funeral of a comrade doesn't indicate that they have been dehumanised, but that shared laughter can be a way of coping with grim circumstances, cf. Irish wakes, at which it is also the custom to share memories of the dead person, some of them humourous. Whether the Brit troops will be psychologically damaged when they return by their general experience in Afghanistan is another matter (see the quotation above again).

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.