Don't know about Borneo, Teribus, but I've met several people who served in Malaya. Three were psychiatric patients, two of them in-patients detained under the (UK) mental health act, and all of them traumatised by British atrocities they'd witnessed or been forced to participate in.

I notice you didn't mention Kenya, where British soldiers were offered financial inducements/incentives to kill blacks - quite often blacks who had opposed the Mau Mau. But then as British officers blandly explained: mistakes were understandable, as all blacks looked the same. Several thousand people were killed by the Brits in Kenya - a measured response, I suppose you'd say, to the 30 or so Mau Mau murders.

In Northern Ireland the behaviour of the British Army on the ground has been counter-productive beyond belief. I have witnessed behavour by the Greenjackets and the paras that led me to conclude that any group of men, given some modicum of power, is capable of almost any depravity. (Squaddies, almost by definition, are not usually the sharpest knives in the box to start with.)

How much the behaviour is down to individuals and their officers, and how much it is institutional can be argued. But the damage it causes is a fact. Which points to another fact: an army - any army - is a hopelessly blunt instrument to use in any kind of peace-keeping role.