Sniper One by Dan Mills, 3 Para by Patrick Bishop

OUR MOST SENIOR soldier, General Sir Richard Dannatt, claims that there is a widening gulf and broken covenant between Britain's civilian society and soldiery. Yet if support for the troops is failing, there is certainly no lack of appetite to buy their war stories.

Three accounts by servicemen, Sniper One, 3 Para and Soldier, the autobiography of General Sir Mike Jackson, have all punched straight into the nonfiction top ten and continue to hold position. Why, then, if the average reader shares so little empathy with the efforts of the Army fighting unpopular wars in farflung Iraq and Afghanistan, does he buy the soldiers' books with such zeal?

Sniper One provides some of the answers. The account of a serving sniper platoon commander, Sergeant Dan Mills, the book is a gritty, speedball run on the defence of an outpost in Al Amarah, southern Iraq, in 2004.

Ghostwritten by the defence editor of The Sun, Tom Newton Dunn, its style — an assimilation of Commando magazine, Warlord and the ladsmag Loaded — might have Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves twisting beneath the sod but if nothing else it plugs the reader straight into the blood and guts of the action. No wonder that The Sun snapped up Sniper One's serialisation and Nutz magazine is running a two-part feature on this contemporary successor to Andy McNab's genre-setting Bravo Two Zero. Whatever its shortfalls in prose, it delivers an intensity attractive to male readers whose own lives may lack similar excitement.

“There's an extremity of experience that appeals to people who may be deskbound: the James Bond element, wish-fulfilment, male fantasy,” Rowland White, Penguin's nonfiction publishing director, said.

Sniper One has other attributes. Mills's experience, as he and his comrades fight it out under a suffocating siege that resulted in the first Victoria Cross to be awarded to a living recipient in 36 years, is strong, cohesive and complete. It is also a credible unofficial account of war: the MoD had limited editorial control because Mills had applied to produce the book before rules governing the publishing rights of service personnel were recently tightened.

An inherent black humour and irony — qualities so apparent in Sniper One — have made the British soldier an engaging storyteller through history.

The Recollections of Rifleman Harris was an early example of the genre. Published in 1848, it is a vivid account of the experiences of the author, an enlisted man, in the Peninsular War, complete with drunkenness, ill-discipline, firing squad and close-quarter combat. These graphic qualities were more recently epitomised in the profane, moving, and unofficial bestselling nonfiction account of the Falklands conflict by Robert McGowan and Jeremy Hands, Don't Cry For Me, Sergeant Major, first published in 1983.

Though written by journalists, its no-holds-barred descriptions of conflict set the precedent for soldier-authors such as McNab and Mills to exploit.

“Christ, I've lost my leg!,” it records a young para crying out after being scythed down by shrapnel on Mount Longden.

“No you haven't, mate,” his comrade offers, helpfully. “It's over there!” The men of the Parachute Regiment make their return in Patrick Bishop's 3 Para. In terms of style, construction and evolution, this is streets ahead of Sniper One, and in a different league to Jackson's ponderous and often unconvincing autobiography.

Bishop gives a gripping insight into the deployment in Afghanistan last year of 3 Para, and the unravelling of their mission into a series of bloody defensive battles. However, though written with the fluent, rich and engaging fashion typical of the author's work as a journalist, 3 Para is also very much the official line, a conventional authorised biography of the 3rd Battalion The Parachute Regiment in Helmand province.

The idea for the book was that of the MoD, together with 3 Para's commanding officer, Stuart Tootal. HarperCollins came in as publisher through its family connections with the paras, and Bishop was head-hunted to write it. (3 Para and the MoD say that it was written because the battalion's experience in Afghanistan was neglected by the media. The accusation is true, in so far as that the MoD quickly restricted access to journalists in Helmand province after an early and illuminating dispatch by Christina Lamb, a foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times.)

This background carries some obvious implications for the book's credibility. And while Bishop has done his best to balance the tale there remains the off-putting sense of too many officers' hands at work. Bishop is not given enough leeway to utilise his own expertise. Not that this will worry most of the readers of 3 Para. And even the most cynical of critics cannot dispute the soldiers' courage or the scale of the obstacles that they faced and fought through in Afghanistan.

Recent restrictions by the MoD on aspiring soldier-authors suggest that the future of fighting writing lies in Whitehall and in books such as this. After the storm caused by newspaper payments to navy personnel from the frigate HMS Cornwall who were imprisoned in Iran, it is now illegal for members of the Forces to sell their war stories for personal profit while serving. They must either wait until they leave the services, or go through the official route via the MoD in the manner of 3 Para.

Rules have been applied by the MoD before. In response to McNab's Bravo Two Zero, the ministry made it illegal for special forces troops to publish their experiences. “But then we went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Rowland White noted, “and the regular army saw as much action as the special forces. So now we've got 80,000 people potentially with stories to tell!”

Sadly, who controls the way that they tell those stories may be a point lost on most readers, who require only that their square-jawed British heroes give Joe Jihadi and his Green Legions a damn good thrashing, whatever the odds.

Sniper One by Dan Mills

Michael Joseph, £16.99, 384pp

3 Para by Patrick Bishop

HarperPress, £18.99, 320pp

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