Taking the lives of seven men with one act of violence in common, this article explores how the history of a whole life might reframe our sense of the ‘soldiers’ tale’. If violence stops being the only experience we seek, if, rather than isolated and sought out, it gets left in the muddle of getting older, of getting by, do we come closer to the marks that violence made, or begin to see them in the context of all the other things that shape a life? Do we find something of the perspective that those who lived with killing tried to put it in? Rather than see their lives through the prism of one episode of conflict, which is the position so many histories of killing begin from, this article proposes instead a history of seven individuals, who just happened to have been party to the killing of two men.

本文以七名男子的共同经历和一次暴力行为为例，探讨了整个生活的历史如何重塑我们对“士兵故事”的理解。如果暴力不再是我们寻求的唯一经历，如果它不再是孤立的和寻求的，而是被留在变老和过日子的混乱中，我们是否会更接近暴力留下的痕迹，或者开始在其中看到它们塑造生活的所有其他事物的背景？我们是否发现了那些生活在杀戮中的人试图表达的观点？本文不是通过一次冲突的棱镜来看待他们的生活，这是许多杀戮历史的起点，而是提出了七个人的历史，他们恰好参与了两名男子的杀戮。