A teenage soldier, who committed a violent burglary while psychologically scarred by harrowing memories of the Gulf War, has had his sentence slashed by Appeal Court judges.

Dean Goucher, now aged 20, from Bromsgrove, was detained for four years at Northampton Crown Court last April after admitting the aggravated burglary, carried out on January 28 last year.

Mr Justice Openshaw, who this week substituted a sentence of two and a half years, said the Irish Guardsman was in the grip of acute post traumatic stress syndrome when he burgled the shop, in Kettering, Northants, in the small hours, battering Jaswinder Singh Mann with an iron bar.

But Goucher's crime, although serious, had to be viewed alongside compelling mitigation in the shape of his involvement in the first, gruelling phase of the 2003 Iraq campaign.

He had gone to Iraq the day after his 18th birthday, said the judge, just after finishing his basic training."

The judge added: "He must have been one of the youngest soldiers in that theatre.

"He saw many distressing sights, including his best friend being killed next to him," the judge continued, "and was unable to cope with the stress of combat."

Goucher was in the first wave of soldiers into the port of Basra in an armoured vehicle under constant fire, and himself shot dead two enemy soldiers.

Maxine Krone, for Goucher, said the young veteran had "one of the most extreme forms" of combat trauma.

He had gone on the run after his regiment returned to Germany when the burden of his trauma became too intense.

The guardsman's victim, Mr Mann, was keeping an all-night vigil in his shop as it had been raided on two previous occasions.

He woke in the early hours to see a man's leg coming in through the window, but when he courageously tried to seize hold of the limb the intruder lashed out with the iron bar.

Mr Justice Openshaw - sitting with Lord Justice Mantell - said Goucher had probably taken the bar as a tool for gaining entry, not as a weapon.

He cut Goucher's sentence in view of his combat trauma and his relative youth.

"These circumstances do not excuse the conduct, but they are relevant to sentence," said the judge.

"They amount to very considerable personal mitigation," he concluded.