War makes us killers. We must confront this horror directly if we’re to be honest about the true cost of war… I’m no longer the “good” person I once thought I was.
—Timothy Kudo, U.S. Marine Corps, Iraq 2009, Afghanistan 2010–2011
Like many other American kids, Chuck Newton went to war to kill. It was after 9/11, and he was burning for revenge. I want to go fight, he told his parents when he was seventeen. Understandably, they said no. But after he was old enough to enlist without their permission, off he went to marine boot camp at Parris Island and then to two combat tours in Afghanistan with Charlie One-Six. By the time he got home, he had killed many times, with different weapons and in many different circumstances, and in my conversations with him he seemed awash in conflicting emotions of pride, remorse, bitterness, and defiance. In combat there are things you know you shouldn’t do, but everybody does them, he said one day. It’s a dichotomy.
“I wanted to kill people—badly. In the same way you wanted the people responsible for the [9/11] massacres to get killed. And I went and did it, and thinking back on it, you know… that’s too heavy for one person to take on. I don’t know that there’s anybody who’s not psychopathic who isn’t hurt by it.”
Killing seems like such a natural part of war, so central to the existence of the Defense Department and so implicit in the duties of everyone in military service, that it’s easy to assume that if the act of killing carries any moral consequences, they are marginal. That soldiers and marines can kill without being disturbed by it later on; that the crews of bombers and strike fighters and the pilots of armed drones, those who launch rockets and mortars and who fire high-explosive artillery rounds, all emerge with their consciences unmarked by what they have done.
They do not. Even the most hardened of our military killers, as I found out, are haunted in the end by the taking of life, justifiable though it may be. Our newest generation of veterans may have experienced grief and loss, remorse and regret, even anger at having felt betrayed. But it is killing that lies at the heart of their moral injury.
I once walked the gentle green hills of Fort Benning, Georgia, with a retired Army Ranger who early in his career had served several combat tours in Vietnam. He couldn’t help pointing out good fields of fire, ideal spots for machine-gun emplacements and channelized kill zones. As we walked, he enthused about the properties of various weapons without mentioning their effect; in all, he seemed a tough, hard man, inured to close-up killing. Yet his demeanor changed when he described a trip he’d recently made back to old battlefields in Vietnam. At one point, he said, he had climbed over a ridgeline to find a vast cemetery spread out before him with hundreds of white crosses marking the graves of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. “All those people,” he said as tears wet his eyes. “We shouldn’t have killed all those people. We should not have killed all those people.”
It’s a profound and unpleasant truth, and each one of us knows it, deep down. Under any circumstance, killing another human exacts a moral cost. We send men and women into war knowing that they will collide with a moral choice no one can resolve: in order to be good soldiers they must kill; and killing violates one of our oldest taboos.
But rather than confronting the morality of killing, we’ve just surrounded it with a conspiracy of silence. We smother the truth of killing with video games and television dramas in which the act is done casually, usually without evident pain, gore, or consequence. Except in escapist fantasy or frenzied political posturing, the word “kill” itself is impolite. The father of a new military enlistee doesn’t say with pride “My daughter has signed up to kill.” Military recruiters avoid the word. Many of the young recruits I’ve talked with say they never really thought about killing. The Rifleman’s Creed memorized by every young marine demands not that the rifleman kill but only that he must fire his weapon “true” and adds, “We will hit.” Asking a combat veteran if he ever killed someone is considered rude and, for the veteran, cause for excruciating discomfort: most likely, the answer lies tightly wrapped in layers of pride and guilt and confusion, an experience that’s been hard-earned and not lightly shared. In his blog, Thoughts of a Soldier-Ethicist, Army Lieutenant Colonel Pete Kilner, who teaches philosophy and military science at West Point, acknowledged some moral squeamishness when he wrote: “We don’t tell our family members and civilian friends that we killed in war. If they ask, we answer matter of factly and move on. When acquaintances and strangers ask if we killed anyone in war, we lie or ignore them; they have no right to know. Those who haven’t experienced combat couldn’t possibly understand what it means to kill another human being, and we want to be looked at for the purpose we achieved (protecting them) not for the means we used (killing others).”
That justification for silence—outsiders have no right to know about the moral cost of killing—rises to the institutional level as well. Killing is rarely discussed or even mentioned in the public statements and documents and training manuals of the Department of Defense (which was the Department of War until 1947, when the name began to seem too belligerent). There was a major fuss, for instance, when then major general James Mattis told his First Marine Division on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, and within earshot of journalists, “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.” The Defense Department publicly distanced itself from that advice, as if killing were not the central purpose of the war.
Theologians and philosophers and religious and secular leaders have wrestled with the morality of killing in war for centuries, but rather than looking away in silence they have acknowledged the moral damage of killing and searched for ways to sanitize warriors after battle. The understanding that killing contaminates the killer has persisted stubbornly down through the ages. It’s a constant theme in Greek tragedies. Samurai warriors used Zen meditation to assuage their fear and guilt over killing. Ancient Hebrew texts and modern-day moralists have sought to distinguish between killing in combat and murder, disagreeing sharply about whether the sixth commandment dictates that one should not kill or that one should not murder. The fourth-century bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, put his finger on the moral dichotomy Nik Rudolph experienced when he killed an Afghan boy in a firefight: “It is not right to kill,” Athanasius wrote sometime before A.D. 354, “yet in war it is lawful and praiseworthy to destroy the enemy… so that the same act is at one time and under some circumstances unlawful, while under others, and at the right time, it is lawful and permissible.”
That’s a lovely philosophical point for theoreticians to ponder. But religious and secular authorities in centuries past also recognized that killing even under legally and morally justifiable conditions demanded that the killers afterward cleanse themselves by making amends. So medieval foot soldiers and archers and battle-ax wielders and mounted lancers found themselves thrown into battle and, if they survived, were sentenced to acts of penance, some of them severe. In the seventh century, warriors who killed in battle underwent a period of forty days of penance and banishment from the church by the order of the archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore of Tarsus, whose revulsion at killing came from his childhood during a period of devastating wars.
By the tenth century the church had gone so far as to sanction even those who fought in self-defense: it required three years’ penance “for anyone who kills an enemy while trying to repulse an invasion of his own country.” The fine print added that if the war was waged by a king, only one year of penance was required. Penance was heavy-duty stuff: it might include abstinence from sleep and from sex; public confessions; wearing sackcloth and ashes; and kneeling before the congregation and groaning and crying out for their intercession with God. How many soldiers actually performed these acts of penance is not recorded.
After the Battle of Hastings in 1066, a gathering of bishops ruled that “anyone who knows he killed a man in the great battle must do penance for one year for each man he killed.” Those who couldn’t recall how many they’d killed were required to do one day of penance each week for the rest of their lives. Or they could get off by financing a new church.
All that seems rather quaint and even backward. But I’m struck by the sharp difference with our own treatment of returning warriors. On the battlefield, in the heat of life-and-death struggle, an individual simply cannot make fine distinctions between killing and murder that wise men have argued over for centuries; the warrior must trust that if he acts in accordance with his conscience, whatever his decision he will be forgiven, cleansed, welcomed home. A thousand years ago, societies acknowledged that killing in wartime imposed a moral cost on warriors, and however odd their methods might seem, they did recognize and honor that moral pain and offered healing. Today we send the young into war, and when they return we call them heroes and ignore whatever moral struggles they bring home. Any moral or spiritual cleaning up we leave to the individual or, if the wounds of killing are disabling enough, we label them as mental illness and send the injured off to the VA to be cured with therapy and drugs. Unlike societies of old, we have decided: not our job. That’s a tragic loss for veterans, and for us.
Yet in the aftermath of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is an awakening recognition that killing does wound the killer, specifically with moral injury. “Taking a human life, in the point of view of most Americans, is immoral,” the Reverend Robert G. Certain told me. Certain was a B-52 navigator who was shot down during a bombing run over Hanoi in late 1972 and held as a POW; on his release he became an Episcopal priest and air force chaplain. Now retired, Certain is not a pacifist by any means. But he sees wartime killing clearly as “a violation of the commandment not to do murder.”
The moral injury of killing, of participating in the death and destruction of our longest wars, seems evident as combat veterans pour back into civilian life, often seeming angry or depressed, unwilling to talk about the war. Wanting to go off by themselves or hang out at the bar with other veterans. New research is providing glimmers of understanding of these effects of wartime killing. Brett Litz, the Boston trauma researcher, conducted a series of focus groups in 2014 with combat veterans from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He found deep trauma:
For example, group members articulated that they distanced themselves from loved ones because of their experiences with killing, due to fear of what others might think if they knew the truth about their actions. Many members felt that they did not deserve to have intimates due to killing, and identified several self-handicapping behaviors that they engaged in due to killing in war (e.g., abusing alcohol prior to an exam or job interview due to the belief that happiness and advancement is undeserved). Another significant theme that arose during the focus groups was the topic of spirituality. Group members expressed loss of spirituality as well as beliefs that they could not be forgiven due to killing actions in war; struggles with self-forgiveness were central, as were the ways in which this impacted sense of self. We have also examined the relationship between killing in war and a number of mental health and functional outcomes, including PTSD symptoms, depression symptoms, alcohol problems, dissociation, relationship problems, anger, violent behaviors, and functional impairment. After controlling for a number of demographic variables and combat exposure, killing was a significant predictor of multiple mental health and functional outcomes.
For several days in the summer of 2014, Jim Gant sat at my dining room table and talked about killing. Of all the men and women I have met in war and all the veterans I have known or interviewed even briefly, Gant is the apotheosis of the ancient and modern warrior, the pure killer. Listening to him over many hours, it occurred to me that if you decide to go to war and want to win, if your goal is to kill as many of the enemy as necessary, then Gant is your guy.
He grew up in southern New Mexico and enlisted in the army out of high school. Bright and ambitious, he served in the army’s elite Special Forces, then went to college and returned to Special Forces as an officer and a commander. He served a fourteen-month tour in Iraq and three tours in Afghanistan, including twenty-two months of continuous combat there from 2010 to 2011. He has been awarded, among other commendations, a Silver Star for combat valor for his actions after an extended firefight in which he deliberately drove over three IEDs, detonating two against his vehicle, to protect his troops following him. Beyond the killing, he was an extraordinarily effective soldier. In Afghanistan he developed a way to organize local tribes to defend themselves against the Taliban. He lived a spartan life with the tribes, shunning the cumbersome U.S. military machinery. General David Petraeus called him “the perfect counterinsurgent.” Osama bin Laden demanded his head.
It felt easy having Gant in my home. He is a likable companion, softening his high-strung temperament with a courtly, self-deprecating manner. He tells good stories. He is above all an intensely proud man for whom honor is the highest moral value. He is lean and wiry and wore a navy baseball cap even indoors, a thin beard, and a plain T-shirt. His face was weathered by stress and sun. On his sinewy arms: elaborate tattoos of Achilles, the Greek hero of the Trojan War, and Hecate, a goddess associated with victory and glory in war. When we talked, he kneaded his fingers together, as if squeezing out difficult or painful ideas. He was forty-seven, and his career had ended abruptly with an official reprimand, the revocation of his Special Forces status, and a denial of promotion, an ugly and humiliating debacle detailed in the book American Spartan by the journalist Ann Scott Tyson, his wife. As Petraeus told me, Gant’s downfall was his “willingness to push the envelope” of the military’s rigid bureaucracy.
Gant saw war as the most challenging and honorable endeavor of life. “War is a gift from God,” he declared one day. “The opportunity to prove yourself on the battlefield. In Iraq we were killing people every day. There’s a lot of satisfaction in the hunt, getting a target, going after a specific person, which I did many, many times, and, like I said, I enjoyed it a lot.” There are some people, Gant said, who will not fire their weapon. Most people in combat will fire when they feel threatened. “It takes a completely different person to hunt another human being down and shoot him in the face. For me, it was a lot of enjoyment and satisfaction.” In Iraq, he said, “we’d go through a village, three or four IEDs’d go off, they [the insurgents] would open up, and we’d take a casualty. Now, most units would evacuate. That’s not what we would do. We would right there hunt those motherfuckers down, chase ’em through the village, hunt them down and fucking kill them.”
In Iraq, Gant commanded an Iraqi police commando unit that conducted hunter-killer missions and acted as a quick-reaction force that would respond when American or Iraqi troops were in trouble. Once, he told me, “an American patrol hit a couple of IEDs and got hung up there real bad, and by the time we got there, there was an up-armored Humvee on its side, pretty much blown in half. And as we got there the Americans were pulling out with their casualties, trying to get the hell out of there, and there were still gunshots and about twenty-five Iraqis with guns were jumping around and the [U.S.] vehicles were on fire and they [the insurgents] were doing, you know, their killing dance.”
I was dying to know what happened next, figuring Gant waded in and killed all the bad guys. But Gant would not be hurried. By the second or third year into the war, he explained by way of background, the rules of engagement were getting more and more restrictive, in an effort to reduce unintended civilian casualties. Whenever an American fired a shot, it had to be reported and investigated. Gant snorted. “There was a time in Iraq when, if you fired even a warning shot, you had to report it, you know? Fuck that! Warning shot hell! There’s no such thing as a warning shot! I’m just saying that over time it became more and more dangerous for the individual soldier to fire his weapon system, not because of the combat but because of what he would have to answer for. Fuck that!”
Now, with jihadis dancing in jubilation atop burning American vehicles, Gant never hesitated. “We opened fire on those fuckers. That’s hostile fucking intent—you are dancing on a fucking vehicle that fifteen minutes before there was a couple of guys killed on it? I opened fire on that and reported it and there was a fifteen-six [military investigation] or whatever the fuck, and I said, ‘Hey! Hostile intent! Couldn’t be more hostile intent!’” The investigation was dropped.
Gant thought killing was just and honorable and also effective. “Once you get a taste for it and once you, you know, get good at that, there is absolutely nothing like it and you seek out engagements and you seek out those moments in time when your life and the lives of your men are right there. I do not believe killing another human being, for most people, is a natural thing to do. I and others like me did really, really enjoy it.”
After his years in Afghanistan and then Iraq, Gant rotated home to work at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. There he had time to think, and what he wondered was, What is all this killing actually accomplishing? Because a lot of killing was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, and things were not getting better. “See, if all you’re doing is killing, and you’re not gaining security with that, something is wrong, okay? And there are a lot of times in a lot of places tactically and otherwise where you gotta do a whole bunch of killing in order to even give security a chance. But at some point, when you’re killing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands of these fuckin’ guys and there is no increase in security—well, you have to relook at what it is that you’re doing.”
With all that killing, Gant said to me, “did it do what we needed it to do? Clearly the answer is no. Clearly. I mean clearly, clearly. At some point, you gotta do something different.”
Gant’s epiphany led him to develop a strikingly new counterinsurgency doctrine based on helping local tribes develop their own security. Rather than trying to kill all the Taliban, enable the locals to stand up to them so that some kind of deal, even reconciliation, can take place. The key was working locally. The idea caught the attention of senior commanders and worked well, until Gant ran afoul of Big Army, the institutional military, and he was ordered home in disgrace.
When I asked Gant if there was a moral cost, a personal cost, for all that killing, he didn’t hesitate. To get me to understand it, he described his own moral principles as being a series of walls that demarcate right from wrong. An internal honor code that dictates, for instance, that killing an innocent civilian is wrong; helping an injured noncombatant is right. The innermost wall, as he described it, is the moral prohibition against killing, one he ignored repeatedly for much of his career.
“Over the course of time, what happened to me is that pretty much all the moral walls I had, in regards to anything and everything, were pretty much obliterated. That’s not just in combat; it was my personal life. It was everything. I was gonna die tomorrow so I didn’t give a fuck. So those moral walls broke down. And this last little one that you have around yourself, the one you’re asking about, has to do with killing—what you’ve done to other people, and what they’ve tried to do to you. It’s the last thing you have, and you keep it right here”—he thumped his chest hard—“because you know you’re gonna go again. And our lives centered around combat and so we kept this last place, the killing and the dying part, what we did to others and what they did to us, we kept it…”
Gant bowed his head. After a long silence, he was able to go on. When he was forced out of the army, when he no longer had to gird himself for combat, “then that last little wall [against killing] was taken away. And now I am having to deal with… what I did to others. At the very basic level, was all of that worth it?”
On another day I asked Gant to help me understand the emotional storms that have swept through his life, the effect of repeated moral injuries. “I have a lot of very violent dreams, sometimes extremely violent. Disturbing. I struggle with these things every day. It’s been absolutely… horrible. I almost committed suicide a couple of times. Pretty much tried to drink myself to death. See, because I already decided I would die. When I get on that fuckin’ plane [to deploy] I’m already dead. I said that for ten years, say good-bye to my family, I am dead. I don’t have any intention of coming home. I have made that decision a thousand fuckin’ times. When the time and place comes, that decision is already made, and I’ve proved it dozens and dozens of times. Well, that does something to you.”
Several years after this conversation Gant wrote me a long letter to explain the perspective he felt he’d gained since he left Afghanistan and the army. He seemed, on the surface, better. He is happily married, engaged in outdoor sports, and deeply religious. “I am getting a second chance as a father and a parent,” he wrote. “It is a wonderful life and I am a blessed, fortunate, and lucky man.”
But Gant also wrote that the war and the killing have not left him alone. “Just about six months ago my commander from Iraq killed himself. What the fuck? He called three days before he killed himself and I didn’t answer the phone. I don’t remember what I was doing but it wasn’t important. Here was a guy I trusted unequivocally in battle and had become a true friend.” Gant spoke at his memorial and placed his own Silver Star Medal at the foot of his casket at Arlington National Cemetery.
“There are dark, very dark, echoes and shadows in my head,” Gant wrote to me. “I hate laying my head on my pillow at night. It is at night that the demons gather. Tonight when I close my eyes I will dream of killing or dying, whichever is necessary.”
Gant and the men who fought alongside him are outliers, it seemed to me. Forever separated from the rest of society by the killing they’ve seen and done. He reminded me of an army sergeant I’d met on a warm, moonless night in northern Afghanistan. He was on lone sentry duty. I’d been unable to sleep and wandered out to talk. For an hour we spoke softly. I never saw his face. But I did jot down in my notebook one thing he said after talking about his combat experiences and how he felt killing forever separated him from civilian America. “We can’t ever really go home,” he said. “We’re the ones society no longer needs.”
Now Gant was voicing a similar conclusion. “My closest friends are not okay,” he once told me. “It’s never going to be okay for us.”
Shira Maguen, the clinical and research psychologist at the San Francisco VA Medical Center, has done landmark work on the impact of killing. In 2010 she published the results of a study of 2,797 soldiers returning from Iraq, of whom 40 percent reported killing or being responsible for killing during the deployment. “Even after controlling for combat exposure,” she found, “killing was a significant predictor of posttraumatic disorder (PTSD) symptoms, alcohol abuse, anger, and relationship problems. Military personnel returning from modern deployments are at risk of adverse mental health conditions and related psychosocial functioning related to killing in war.” A year later, Maguen reported that veterans with higher killing experiences had thoughts of suicide at a rate twice that of veterans with fewer or no combat killing experiences.
In her clinical work, Maguen asks combat veterans to fill out a measure called the Killing Cognitions Scale, capturing the ways in which killing has impacted the person. “We look for guilt and shame, contamination, feeling like you are functionally impaired in certain ways,” she explained to me. “We found a lot of people who felt that because of the killing they’ve done, they can’t go back to their spiritual community, some who felt that because they killed, they don’t deserve to be happy, to have a family, to have kids, a successful relationship.”
Chuck Newton is not functionally impaired, although he has done his share of killing in two combat deployments with Charlie One-Six in Afghanistan. A faint Brooklyn accent betrays his origins in New York, where he’s working as a welder in his new post-Afghanistan, civilian life. He’s a gifted guitar player, like his father. He’s read the Bible from cover to cover. He has thought deeply about issues of morality and holds firm positions on his own moral culpabilities.
In boot camp, he said, killing is only mentioned after they shut the barracks doors and not as a part of the formal training. “Middle of the night they woke everybody up, closed all the doors, had us stand on line with our weapon. We said the Rifleman’s Creed. The drill instructor looked like a human GI Joe, giant arms and a kung-fu grip, he’s walking around with his M16 and telling us, ‘This is a weapon of death, this is a weapon of destruction, you are now a weapon of death, you will be killing.’ He’s telling guys who will be cooks and accountants that they are here to kill. And I was extremely high on that for days, and then I find out this guy is a refrigerator repairman! This guy hadn’t killed. But they make a point of telling you you’re going to kill people. And they get people who are either crying about it or, like me, excited about it.”
I said, “But this is not part of the official indoctrination or training.”
“It can’t be!” Chuck said.
“You’re right! Yes—but it’s part of the underground brotherhood.”
In 1999, then Major Kilner, an enlisted soldier who had risen to command in the Eighty-Second Airborne Division, published an essay in the army’s influential journal Military Review. Kilner, who wrote the Thoughts of a Soldier-Ethicist blog, intended to cut through much of the official obfuscation about the subject of military killing. He had come to see that killing was a problem for the army—not because it was immoral, he thought, but because soldiers were not being trained how to think about the morality of killing. After the killing was done, he knew, many soldiers felt they had committed an immoral act. And no one, he wrote—not military chaplains or lawyers, not the army, not the Defense Department, or academia, “not even my own religion—provided a satisfactory justification for looking down my sights and placing two rounds into the head of an insurgent.” Consequently, he wrote, “many of the soldiers entrusted to our care suffer needless guilt after killing in war.” He dismissed the idea of just war as valid only for nations engaged in international conflict but of little use in explaining to individual troops why killing in war can be “a morally right choice.” Killing, Kilner wrote, “is central to our profession, and it is a huge moral issue. We already train our soldiers to kill effectively. Let’s train them to live effectively after they kill.”
Kilner’s urgent plea, that the army begin talking about killing and morality, came at a time when the military was getting much better at the business of killing. At least since the Civil War, it had been known that in combat some soldiers would not fire their weapons at the enemy, even at the risk of being overrun. But the army was astonished to be told definitively, at the close of World War II, that most of its soldiers would not fire or would not fire persistently even in close-quarter fighting. This was the conclusion of a disheveled former sportswriter turned military historian, one of dozens of analysts hired by the army to get out on the battlefield and document how well existing tactics and operations were working and to recommend changes. S. L. A. Marshall, inevitably known as Slam, showed up just before Thanksgiving 1943 at a South Pacific atoll called Makin Island, and after witnessing three days of heavy fighting against a Japanese force “crazed with sake,” Marshall reported that the island was captured. He spent the next few days interviewing individual soldiers about their roles in the fighting, a technique he would continue in both the Pacific and European campaigns of World War II. He later reported to astonished War Department brass that “on average not more than 15 percent of the men had actually fired at the enemy positions or personnel with rifles, carbines, grenades, bazookas, BARs [Browning automatic rifles] or machine guns during the course of an entire engagement.” He later wrote, in his classic 1947 account, Men Against Fire, that, overall, 75 percent of American troops would not fire or persist in firing at the enemy. “These men may face the danger,” he wrote, “but they will not fight.”
Although he never backed up his conclusions with actual data, Marshall had a profound effect on American combat training and infantry weapons. “The teaching and the ideals of that civilization [from which American soldiers come] are against killing,” he explained. “The fear of killing, rather than the fear of being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure in the individual.” His solution: “We need to free the rifleman’s mind with respect to the nature of targets.” Soon the army had its eye on a new rapid-fire weapon that could be sprayed at the enemy rather than requiring a soldier to wait for a target and take careful aim before firing—a pause believed to encourage second thoughts about killing. The M16 rifle, introduced in 1963, could be fired on semiautomatic or full automatic. And new combat training emphasized quick-reaction drills. I’ve watched soldiers and marines training to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan in these react-to-fire drills: as they walk along a road with their weapons at the ready, targets pop up, and the infantryman swivels and shoots. No time to consider; reaction becomes automatic. The theory is—no time to think about it.
Until afterward.
When the killing is done, as Kilner recognized, soldiers and marines often begin to question what they’ve done. Kilner believed that killing in war could be justified as a moral right, akin to amputating a diseased limb: painful, requiring courage, but the morally right choice among bad alternatives. To help them think through the morality of killing, Kilner came up with what he refers to as the “bubble theory.” He described it to me in its most simple form. Think of every human being, he told me, walking around inside a protective bubble, which represents the right to life, the right not to be killed. Puncturing that bubble to hurt the person inside is immoral, a violation of one’s right to live. But an aggressor can forfeit that right to live—for example, by attacking an innocent person. A soldier is then morally permitted to kill the aggressor because he has forfeited his bubble of protection. It’s an almost-cartoonish idea, but one that sparks animated discussions among the West Point cadets in his ethics class. Since Kilner introduced the idea in 2006, he’s briefed it to groups at the army’s Command and General Staff College and to the entire West Point class of 2015. But overall, he said, “the army is very uncomfortable with it. People can talk about killing, about their feelings about killing, but when you actually want to say, ‘This is when killing is justified and this is when it is not,’ the army as an institution objects because in the end they want the freedom just to have soldiers obey their orders.”
Even in the academic environment of West Point, Kilner’s ideas about morality and killing are treated with ambivalence by senior leaders, he said. In 2014 he was allowed to give a presentation to the entire junior class; the following year the command changed the format to one in which combat veterans talked to the juniors about the psychology—but not the morality—of killing in war. Two years earlier Kilner had been invited to help design a series of online training programs as part of the army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program intended to toughen soldiers physically and mentally for combat. When I asked about preparing soldiers for killing, Sharyn Saunders, the director of the program, at first told me that Kilner’s bubble theory “is not codified” in the training. Several minutes later she corrected herself, saying that four training modules designed by Kilner are in the army’s online resiliency training program. In fact, Kilner’s ideas about teaching soldiers to see the morality of killing in wartime were cut out of the army’s training program. In an e-mail to me, Kilner wrote that the army’s “bureaucrats deleted a robust, very helpful way to understand the moral justification for killing (i.e., the bubble theory).” Despite repeated requests, the army refused to allow me to see the training programs it asserts will protect soldiers against PTSD and moral injury.
When Chuck Newton talks about killing in combat, his stories are leavened with humor, as if a straight, sober recounting would be too much to say or hear. “Most kills are like sport, you may as well be hunting a duck or a deer, you know. I’m not a hunter, but I know enough hunters,” he told me one evening. “You got twelve guys unloading at somebody running a hundred meters away, and the guy drops, and twelve guys are cheering and claiming they killed him, you know? Now you got twelve so-called confirmed kills, and only one guy was killed. Ya know what I mean? It’s like high fives, you know?” We were both laughing at this image. When the laughter died down, I told Chuck about a soldier in Iraq who had looked an insurgent in the eye just before he killed him, and even though he had killed many times before, this particular killing felt awful, evil, immoral, and the soldier was deeply injured by this experience.
Chuck nodded in recognition. Firing at the enemy in a tree line is one thing, he found; up-close killing is different. At a distance, killing the enemy is an easy and justifiable him-or-me calculation. Not so when you look your enemy in the eye. “When it’s one-on-one and you see, you take your time even, like I unfortunately did. I thought I was bringing closure. Instead it was just a nightmare.” Go on, I said. What do you mean by “closure”? “Let ’em know, like, ‘You were trying to kill me, I am trying to kill you, I won.’ Ya know? It’s over. You continue on.” But that didn’t happen? “No, because you see a Taliban, a Talib, whatever they call themselves, you see a Talib, and then for a split second you see just a human, a son, a father; it’s like—aaagghh! You don’t have time to think about it. I can talk about it. I understand the whole one-on-one, close-proximity thing and thinking about, you know, as opposed to the sport shooting, which is what most of it is.
“I had one incident with three guys [Taliban] where, you know, they call ’em spotters; they had a radio and binoculars, whatever, and they ran into a little—they were ducking fire, unloading on us—and they ducked into a little building the size of a garage, and I popped up with a rocket and put it right in the open door, and it was the same thing [from the other marines]. Cheers, yaaaay! I won’t brag, but it was a good one.”
It’s true that in combat some guys hold back. Their training, their weapons, are designed to make it easier to pull the trigger on another human being. Even then, as Jim Gant explained, some don’t. “We know guys who did that,” Newton said when I asked him once about marines who would shoot into the trees rather than at another human. “Lots of guys.” We were lounging around with a couple of beers with Stephen Canty and Xavier Zell and others who’d been marines with Charlie One-Six, and they were listening intently. “Those guys didn’t actually wanna try to kill,” Newton was saying. “So they just kind of popped off to the side and shot at a tree. We saw it happen all the time. But the thing is, they’d go home and tell their families they’re heroes when in fact they put us in danger by showing up, you know, talking the talk but not walking the walk. And we needed everyone focused, we needed guys looking, watching our backs and focusing on the enemy, and these guys are off there having their own personal dilemmas and shooting at a tree and pretending like they’re doing something and that’s…
“I’m sure their brains are worse off than mine because the great thing is that I killed people, I killed people up close and personal, but everybody here, honestly, it’s like mutual love. I know these guys will always be there for me,” he said, waving a beer bottle at his buddies, “because I proved that I was there for them, when you had other guys wandering around over there and crying on the radio that we’re being overrun while I was actually hunting people down and killing them. And guys thanked me for it. And that makes me feel great.”
But like other combat veterans I’ve talked with, Newton felt morally damaged by killing only to the extent that he established a fleeting personal connection with the person he killed. “There’s a split second, it’s just him and me and… two guys with parents and brothers and sisters and… you know, families that care about them, walking around on the earth under the same sun, nothing to do with the war and… You know, I’m not a psychopath, because I understand there are people who just relish that, and I am not one of them.”
In the video that Canty has made, interviewing the marines of Charlie One-Six about their experiences at war and afterward, Chuck Newton talks again about the time he killed someone after looking him right in the eye. “I drew up on him and I shot him in the face and I watched the bullet go in between his eyes and I watched it come out behind his ear, I watched the life go out of his face and he fell on the ground, and that’s an image I can’t get out of my head, you know. And I know why executioners wear a mask and why the condemned always faces away from the executioner. Because the image of someone dying as you look him in the eyes is nightmarish. It’s something no one should ever do. And I would tell someone, ‘If you’re in that situation, don’t look ’em in the eye, you will not go one day without thinking about it, you will not go to sleep without thinking about it.’
“I’ve decided to move on with my life,” Newton says in the video. “But the fact that this still haunts me shows that beyond the military, on a human level, there’s…” Searching for words, he trails off. “Other than the nightmares about how I killed people and stuff, other than that, there’s really no adverse effect.”
Canty, behind the camera, interrupts. “Wouldn’t you say that’s a pretty big adverse effect?”
“Yeah,” says Newton. “As a member of the animal kingdom, you probably shouldn’t be killing your own species.”
But guilt, remorse, sorrow, and grief can descend on anyone, even those who are not trigger pullers. Stacy Pearsall taught me that.