Rupert Streatfeild’s job was to sense danger. As a “tactical psy-ops commander” patrolling the streets of Basra, he was trained to judge atmospherics, to watch for the tiny signs of an impending attack. But only a clairvoyant could have anticipated the sniper. A car in the street ahead of his “Bulldog” armoured personnel carrier began hooting and reversing. Captain Streatfeild, momentarily distracted, turned his head towards the noise. Then the sniper squeezed the trigger.

The bullet passed through the top of his arm, shattering his humerus and burying itself in the wall of his chest. “When a bullet hits flesh, it stops spinning and starts tumbling,” he says, sitting in his sunny flat in Fulham, London, a world away from Basra.

A year after the attack and back in Britain, fully recovered but with the bullet still embedded in his chest, Captain Streatfeild, 27, is judging a rather different sort of psychology: the attitude of the British public towards soldiers injured in an unpopular war.

According to the latest figures, 175 British soldiers have died in Iraq since 2003 and more than 300 have been seriously wounded. Despite that sacrifice, there have been some ugly incidents of social hostility towards returning soldiers, complaints about medical treatment and housing, and anger in some quarters that the Iraq veterans, particularly those with serious injuries, have not been accorded the homecoming reception they deserve.

Captain Streatfeild picks his words with the same care that he once navigated Basra’s streets. “I think the hostility is blown out of proportion,” he says. “But the apathy is rife. Or is indifference a better word? Is there enough nationally expressed support for the troops? I don’t think there is.”

But he is also careful to avoid complaining: “Everyone was involved in the Second World War, but today we are such a small part of society.”

Among the top brass, anger at the perceived lack of sympathy for returning troops has occasionally boiled over. Last September the Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Richard Dannatt, complained of public apathy, saying that the returning soldier wants “people in his local pub to know and understand what he had been doing”.

Few local councils have arranged homecoming parades for returning troops, and the Royal British Legion has accused the Government of undermining the “military covenant” under which soldiers who have fought for the country should be well treated and respected on their return. There was an outcry last November, when 15 soldiers undergoing treatment at the Defence Services Medical Rehabilitation Centre at Headley Court, near Epsom – many with missing limbs and severely burnt – were forced to leave a swimming pool at a council leisure centre after members of the public complained.

For some returning soldiers, the battle in Iraq, and the struggle towards recovery, has been followed by another battle against misunderstanding and prejudice in Britain. Lance-Sergeant Carl Shadrake, 23, was severely injured last July when a suicide bomber detonated a bomb alongside his vehicle, sending a piece of shrapnel into his neck and killing the driver. Some 47 staples were needed to close the wound, followed by treatment at Headley Court to combat temporary memory loss. Sergeant Shadrake had been studying for a degree in French, but found much of the vocabulary had been erased. “I lost so much blood, my brain was starved of oxygen,” he says.

A few months ago he and two other war casualties, each of whom had lost a leg, were turned away at the door of a nightclub. “They wouldn’t let us in because we were soldiers. They said they didn’t want any trouble: two of us on crutches, and me with my neck out.” Sergeant Shadrake compares that reception with his experience in America last Christmas. “When I showed my military ID card at the door for a nightclub, we got in free and had the first drink on the house. Americans love their soldiers.”

Like most wounded soldiers, Sergeant Shadrake treats his own wound with crisp insouciance. He had been planning to get the long scar on his neck tattooed, to make it look like a zip. His girlfriend stopped him.

America has 32 times as many troops in Iraq as Britain, but a population only five times the size, so awareness of the military sacrifice is proportionally greater, yet the contrast between the yellow ribbons and flowers awaiting American soldiers and the subdued reception for British veterans is still striking.

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