Have you watched SAS: Rogue Heroes? It’s a recent BBC release, and I spent much of the last week watching it. Perhaps they went with SAS because it didn’t require the budget to film a bunch of men in the desert as it would have to do the Battle of Britain again (the BBC at 100 years is in some ways still very much a post-war broadcaster). In any case, once you have put a bunch of young, violent men in the desert (with an officer class that’s conveniently classically educated), the references to The Iliad pretty much make themselves. A psychopathic rendering of Paddy Mayne sits in his tent, having lost his former tent-mate and clandestine lover to a foolishly overconfident first mission, and is accused of acting Achilles.

The young men who make up the SAS are shown selecting it for themselves, ‘raging’ for battle, counting kills, and lacking much of a self-preservation instinct. While the Generals that gave them the go-ahead might have benefited, they didn’t have to push them: in fact Stirling has to break into GHQ to get an audience with them in the first place. A portrayal that matches with the historical reports of the real SAS, at least, when it comes to David Stirling and Mayne. Thus far, all in in line with your proposal that ‘Picking glory over longevity is what young men do. And it’s the thing that old men make use of.’

But if we compare this fiction with fact, there’s actually a lot of dialogue in SAS:RH that mirrors the gratuitous violence and the ‘when shit is fucked up’ aesthetic that interview you linked. This kind of thing:

‘if you can’t handle a knee to the guts, a kick to the ribs, what good are you in the trenches, what good are you when shit goes wrong, in life, y’know?’

The engagement of the team with the ‘outside’ is, as you say, ‘mere environment’. Enemies armed or unarmed disposed of in night raids (recall Odysseus and Diomedes with the Thracians - is it significant that that whole book is thought to be a later edition?). The ‘desert heroes’ spend a lot of time talking about how to challenge authority when mistakes are being made, and the importance of each soldier knowing the why so they can recover when things don’t go to plan. Nevertheless, they’re almost caught and killed because they were too lazy to shave their beards before an undercover mission. This they also share with Achilles: getting themselves into unnecessarily terrible situations out of shortsightedness, glory-seeking, and recklessness.

I write all this because it seems unusual for it all to be televised in the course of a show that is also, possibly fundamentally, about watching shirtless, sweaty young men do violence for ‘good’. Perhaps war crimes just aren’t that emotionally challenging when the enemy is literally Nazis. Or perhaps SAS:RH is trying to do something else, or at least accidentally accomplishing it. Unless the argument is that The Iliad itself was propaganda for heroic glory - which its willingness in portraying the consequences of the death of the enemy (unmatched until Austin Powers came along) and its portrayal of Agamemnon as the failing state do something to undermine - there’s a space for texts that thread a needle between increasing the public’s comprehension of extreme violence and increasing their acceptance of it. Then again, maybe getting that message out isn’t easy in practice.