If we do not prepare them adequately, their moral failing is ours, though they are the ones left to suffer the consequences.
—Rebecca Johnson, Dean, U.S. Marine Corps War College
In the waning days of World War II, Private First Class John Lee and other American GIs assembled about sixty German soldiers, lined them up against a brick wall, and, as the Germans stood with their hands raised in surrender, shot them down in fusillades of fire.
These were no ordinary Wehrmacht troops; they were fanatical Nazi SS soldiers. The Americans had just broken into the notorious death camp at Dachau, where the SS served as guards. Gaping at boxcars full of corpses, the Americans were beginning to comprehend the ghastly reality that the SS had tortured, beaten, starved, mutilated, and murdered untold numbers of Jews and others. The German SS troopers were grinning and taunting the Americans. It seemed unlikely, in those chaotic last days of the war, that the SS men would ever be brought to real justice for the crimes they had committed. Nevertheless, gunning down surrendering soldiers was itself a war crime.
At least technically a war crime. Punishable by hanging. But was it immoral? Unjust?
John Lee was a frail and astonished seventy-five years old when I knocked on his door after tracking him down in a Cleveland suburb in 2001, fifty-six years after that incident. I was curious how he thought about his actions and whether he ever felt twinges of moral remorse. He invited me in, and after we’d talked for a while, he acknowledged that killing the German prisoners had been wrong. He readily acknowledged the guilt and regret of moral injury and the pain of having held his secret for so long. But for me to judge what he’d done as an exhausted and anguished twenty-year-old, he said, “You had to have been there.”
I continue to be troubled by that reproachful remark, his admonishment that the acute moral dilemmas of war cannot be understood by outsiders; that the moral injuries of wartime should be left for the individual to bear alone. Certainly Dachau was a morally treacherous situation for John Lee, a dilemma with no obvious right answer, one that would be familiar to veterans of other wars and, most recently, to the young Americans who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. I think John Lee was wrong. We must see and identify those wartime actions that clearly violate our own moral and legal standards. But we must also acknowledge the pain of those who struggle at these crossroads and make a fateful choice. Whether or not we ourselves would have made the same decision, whether we would have pulled the trigger at Dachau or stood apart from our combat buddies in that moment, we must accept moral responsibility for the decisions of those we send to war on our behalf.
Otherwise, like John Lee, they do bear their moral injuries alone.
How do you define “morality” in wartime? More precisely, how do those young Americans we send to war sort through the emotional and legal thickets in the crashing immediacy of battle? How can they think clearly about moral issues that remain muddied despite debates by learned theologians, legal scholars, and philosophers down through the ages? Sanctified killing, or murder? When the deadly erupting blast of an IED has just torn off the legs of your best buddy and steel fragments sliced through his brain, and you find cowering in a gully an unarmed teenager holding one end of the detonating wire, should you kill him? Or detain him for questioning that may result in his release? For the rest of your life, to whose version of morality do you answer: Your own? Your dead buddy’s? The version understood by the battalion commander? The one presented to a court-martial jury? The morality of the God who let your buddy die? The moral beliefs of your buddy’s widow? If you refrained from shooting at the SS guards at Dachau and they went free, would that weigh on you the rest of your life?
In any of the confusing but common moral crossroads in war, how should our young troops avoid sustaining a moral wound? In cases where a moral choice can lead to a war crime, who should bear the weight of a legal judgment and the pain of the moral injury?
The U.S. military has spent years and fortunes perfecting the most realistic and thorough combat training in the world. But in preparing young Americans for war, it has failed in one glaring aspect. Those we send to war are never trained to anticipate the moral quandaries of killing that they will face; they are given no opportunity or encouragement to think about or to discuss what makes some killings moral and others a sin or even illegal. We send them into a situation that puts me in mind of jungle-warfare training in Panama, where I once accompanied an army platoon on a daytime patrol. The dense, tangled jungle is notorious for spookily swallowing whole groups of men. Sure enough: fifty meters into the green murk, the vegetation was so thick I lost sight of the soldier directly ahead. Fifty meters more and the path disappeared in the darkening gloom, and we stepped into thigh-deep water. Compass needles swung uselessly. Then the radios went dead.
In a very real sense, men and women go unarmed into the moral swamp of war from which many return bearing lifelong injury.
Often, you can get lost in what seems a simple, binary choice. Kill the guilty Germans, or let them go without penalty while the skeletal death-camp survivors howl from behind the fences. It may be more a complex choice between two evils: Kill to protect yourself and your buddies and to accomplish the mission—and risk a life sentence for murder. Or do nothing and jeopardize the lives of your buddies, those whom you love most and on whom you depend for your life.
That was the choice a young American made in our most recent wars, a choice that haunts him years after he left the war. It was a choice he made deliberately, one that he still feels was morally and ethically correct. Yet it was a choice for which he would be liable to a murder charge and perhaps a life sentence were his actions more widely known by the authorities. The person I’ll call John Doe agreed to allow me to tell his story if I protected his identity. “I want the story told,” he said, “so that people know.”
Terrible things happen in wartime. Terrible things are done by bad people, and by good people making choices that might cause us to shudder. Here at home we have constructed an image of war in which its vileness is airbrushed away. We insist that we act on a higher moral plane than the enemy. We don’t shoot prisoners. Marines who are caught urinating on an enemy corpse are punished. To a large extent the conviction that we hold the moral high ground in war is true, often obtained at high cost.
Jim Gant, the former Special Forces officer, told me of a desperate battle in eastern Afghanistan’s Pech Valley. “One of the most brutal firefights I’ve ever been into. We were taking gunfire on entry into this compound. We were exchanging gunfire from, I mean, like here to there,” he said, gesturing at the ten-foot distance from my dining room table into the kitchen. “Two women were shot. Who shot them? I don’t know. But in this gunfire between these fuckin’ al-Qaeda guys and us, these women and a child ran between us, and [a Special Forces trooper named] Scott Gross, about six-three, two hundred forty pounds, put his weapon system down as gunfire is exchanging, picked up the small child, turned his back to the gunfire, crashed in this door, put the baby on the floor, turned around, and came back out,” and here Gant mimicked raising a weapon, “gun up.” How to explain the impulse to save a baby’s life at the peril of your own? Gant sighed and blinked. “Where do you get a guy like that?”
I knew a helicopter gunship pilot, on a combined air-ground operation, hovering over a medical clinic that had been seized by militants in eastern Afghanistan’s Paktika Province. Ground troops were waiting for him to fire a missile into the building and destroy the Taliban. But the pilot and ground commanders couldn’t be certain there were no civilian hostages inside; in a missile strike they would be killed along with the Taliban. Instead, a decision was made for the American soldiers to storm the building. As the lead trooper rushed into a hallway, he was killed in a fusillade of enemy fire. His buddies pulled the body aside and continued the assault. Eventually the insurgents were killed, and the building secured. There had been no civilians present.
We accept such risks to take the morally higher ground. We do not bomb mosques. Risking the lives of civilians is wrong. We instruct military recruits on the rules and insist that our servicemen and -women act with untarnished moral integrity. From afar, the moral choices we ourselves would make in their situations seem clear and uncomplicated, perhaps even obvious. Shooting surrendering prisoners is wrong.
In reality, of course, those decisions are more complicated, the right choice less obvious: it would be morally repugnant if the SS guards escaped justice. Or perhaps there is no “right” choice. Yet for reasons of military hierarchy, responsibility for making these choices almost always falls on the most-junior soldiers of the working-class military. People like twenty-year-old WWII infantryman John Lee. In those freighted moments when a choice hangs in the balance, higher authority is usually too distant, too busy, or simply disinclined to help. These intimate battlefield decisions about killing do not fall to the ranking officers on the other end of the radio miles away (or, worse, circling high overhead in a command helicopter). Nor are those decisions the burden of the distant generals who guide the course of the war. Politicians in Congress and the White House, who authorize and fund the war and cheer from the sidelines, likewise are excused from that responsibility. And it never falls on those in the military legal system who would judge and perhaps condemn John Lee and others for what would be determined, in retrospect and without context, the wrong choice.
Nor do those of us at home ever have to scramble to find the line that divides “just” killing in wartime from murder. We send young Americans into the moral jungle of war while we absent ourselves from those awful calculations. But like the Roman spectators who passed verdicts on gladiatorial contests from the upper tiers of the amphitheater, we seem quick to judge how our troops have behaved. If they come home silent but uneasy about the choices they’ve made, we avert our attention. Or we simply thank them for their service and move on.
To place someone in that circumstance, in which a momentous moral choice demands to be made, is to expose them to a lasting sense of betrayal by higher authorities who didn’t have to make the decision. To a lifetime of having to keep the secret—or of bitterness at being judged. Guilt, perhaps for having violated the rules. Shame for taking a life in an act that could be murder. In short, a deep moral injury.
This is why the ancients devised complex rituals of cleansing and forgiveness for their returning warriors, recognizing that the moral damage of war was inevitable and allowing for the healing, of both warrior and his society, to take place.
We have abandoned that practice. Instead, we have sought to define and regulate moral practice in war by law. The U.S. military spends an enormous amount of time and effort trying to ensure that it conducts its military operations in strict conformance with international and domestic law. In the army alone, forty-six hundred lawyers are assigned as staff judge advocates. Military lawyers are called JAGs for short, because they are assigned to the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Senior JAGs I have known work at the top levels of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and in places like the headquarters of the Joint Special Operations Command, the highly classified operations center of the U.S. special mission forces. Less senior JAGs work at almost every staff level in the military, including in the tactical operations centers of warfighting units. When the Second Brigade of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division made a mass jump at night not long ago, a slim, thirty-seven-year-old woman in full battle gear, wearing dark-frame glasses and a ponytail tucked under her helmet, jumped with them: Major Megan Wakefield. Paratrooper, lawyer, staff judge advocate. I have many times watched JAGs like Major Wakefield advise battalion staffs on how to shape a planned operation so that it falls within the narrow and specific laws of war. I have seen them advise against a proposed attack because it would unnecessarily expose civilians to harm or because using air strikes to “soften up” the target area would be a use of force disproportionate to the expected military benefit of the operation. Their judgments are sometimes met with groans of frustration and then grudging respect from warfighters. But I have also seen a general overrule his JAG when he felt military necessity trumped the law.
The laws of war are a loose accumulation of treaties, declarations, precedents, and understandings of how war is to be declared, conducted, and concluded. They represent an earnest international effort over more than a century to make war less brutal, more humane, and, in at least one extreme case, downright illegal. The U.S. military historically has issued its own set of rules for war, including George Washington’s Five Rules for Honorable War (“Don’t abuse prisoners”) and President Lincoln’s 1863 General Order 100 (“the unarmed citizen is to be spared”). Today the laws of war include the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, which, among other prohibitions, outlawed the practice of dropping bombs from a balloon and “any other new methods” of air warfare.
A more comprehensive effort came with the Geneva Conventions of 1949. This assemblage of treaties and agreements was amended as recently as 2007 when its overseeing body, the International Committee of the Red Cross, ruled that individuals wearing the Israeli Red Shield, as well as those wearing a Red Cross or Red Crescent, are protected as medical or religious persons involved in humanitarian work. (Anyone engaged in fighting while wearing one of these symbols is guilty, under the Geneva Conventions, of “perfidy.”)
Collectively, the laws of war have prohibited the use of exploding bullets (1868), distinguished between combatants and civilians (1907), and banned chemical (1899) and biological (1925) weapons and land mines (1998). While these agreements are still on the books, others have faded in memory and usefulness. In 1928, diplomats of the United States, France, and Germany solemnly affixed their signatures on an agreement never to go to war. The Kellogg-Briand Pact was ratified soon after by most other nations, even as they rearmed and slid toward World War II. (The pact is technically still in force. Barbados was the most recent signatory, in 1971.)
On the books or not, each of these well-intentioned admonitions about behavior in wartime had been broken by the opening of the twenty-first century, although some internationalists argue they remain important safeguards against the mistreatment of prisoners and noncombatants. The Pentagon, officially and formally, insists that its personnel adhere to the laws of war. But any expectation now that all warring parties will abide by these rules seems dangerously naive. They were, after all, designed for an era when uniformed armies fought pitched battles face-to-face in declared wars over terrain designated as a war zone. None of those conditions was met in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Instead, American troops faced off against insurgents who shunned uniforms and for the most part avoided pitched battles; who nullified the concept of fixed war zones by flowing freely across borders, between Pakistan and Afghanistan, for instance, and from Syria and Iran in and out of Iraq. (The United States, for its part, conducted air strikes with bombers and missile-firing drones on alleged terrorists in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia, stretching the original battle zones and authorizations for the wars.)
Even the term “combatant” used in the Geneva Conventions now gives off an odor of ancient mildew. Is a kid who is hired to dig a hole for a deadly IED a combatant? What about the farmer driving a battered pickup truck piled with bags of ammonium nitrate from Pakistan into eastern Afghanistan, material that could be used for fertilizer or suicide bombs? How about the unarmed civilian idling outside the gate of a U.S. Marine outpost in Iraq’s Anbar Province, who signals to unseen assailants every time an American foot patrol heads out?
The Geneva Conventions’ thoughtfully crafted rules for treating and ultimately releasing prisoners didn’t seem to apply, either. In 2001, the administration of President George W. Bush famously declared that detainees and prisoners in its War on Terror were “unlawful combatants.” It thus avoided having to accord them the legal rights and protections of prisoners dictated by the Geneva Conventions, although the Bush White House promised to treat its prisoners humanely as if they were legitimate POWs. In the old days, that meant that prisoners of war were to be held under humane conditions until the end of hostilities and then released. In the unending War on Terror, however, there is no end of hostilities. In January 2002, I stood outside the then temporary detainee facility at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, chatting about the ultimate fate of the prisoners with the U.S. military police officer in charge. Under the terms set by Bush, I wondered, how could they ever be released in a way that is both safe and humane? His shrug was eloquent, and the question stands unanswered today, as does the detention center, in a new facility at Bagram. Still full of prisoners.
After 2014, when Islamist militants began executing prisoners in Iraq and beheading and burning alive hostages in Syria, it seemed unlikely that future conflicts would see a return to the humane aspirations of generations past. Nevertheless, in 2015, the Defense Department gamely released a 1,176-page Law of War Manual detailing the legally permissible battlefield behavior for U.S. troops and the expected behavior of the enemy. Seeming to ignore the insurgencies of Iraq and Afghanistan that took the lives of more than five thousand Americans, the Pentagon’s official rules demand that “honor forbids resort to means, expedients, or conduct that would constitute a breach of trust with the enemy” and “combatants must take certain measures to distinguish themselves from the civilian population.” And in a section that strains credulity, the manual advises that adherence to these laws by Americans in combat “can encourage an adversary also to comply with those law of war rules.”
But the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan required more explicit rules to enforce moral behavior, and deploying troops were expected to comply with the rules of engagement. The intent was to embrace the evolving strategy of counterinsurgency, in which the main effort was not to destroy the enemy but to protect the civilian population. Thus the ROE sought, for instance, to curtail the accidental killing or wounding of civilians, a faint echo of the hearts-and-minds campaigns of the Vietnam War. But the effect of the ROE, in Vietnam as in Iraq and Afghanistan, often was to push decision-making down to the lowest level, the individual trigger puller.
The rules weren’t easy to apply to real-world situations. For instance, the ROE for American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan insisted that force could be used against a potential or possible enemy only if he or she threatened an imminent use of force. As the 2005 standing ROE put it, “The determination of whether the use of force against U.S. forces is imminent will be based on an assessment of all facts and circumstances known to U.S. forces at the time and may be made at any level. Imminent does not necessarily mean immediate or instantaneous.” Imagine a twenty-year-old army infantry squad leader, pinned down after an ambush in a palm grove outside Baghdad, with enemy fire coming at his guys from three sides, trying to figure this one out. Imminent use of force, check. But there is more. He whips out his copy of the standing ROE and reads: “The use of force in self-defense should be sufficient to respond decisively to hostile acts or demonstrations of hostile intent. Such use of force may exceed the means and intensity of the hostile act or hostile intent, but the nature, duration and scope of force used should not exceed what is required. The concept of proportionality in self-defense should not be confused with attempts to minimize collateral damage during offensive operations.”
Really? You can imagine our squad leader frozen in indecision, knowing with certainty that his interpretation of this language will be different from the interpretation of a senior officer and lawyer, twice his age, in a solemn court-martial proceeding back at Fort Riley, Kansas. And you can imagine his decision as insurgents close in: Screw the rules—kill the fuckers!
These standing ROE were usually supplemented by tactical ROE issued by the combat commander. Grunts carried them on laminated cards, often tucked inside their helmets. These ROE might spell out, for instance, the escalation-of-force steps that must be taken before a soldier could open fire on a vehicle approaching a checkpoint. Such rules undoubtedly saved civilian lives. But the rules sometimes were impossible to follow, because the approaching vehicle would be moving too fast, or the driver might be confused in poor visibility. Or, as in the case of Jake Sexton, a car full of civilians simply didn’t stop for reasons no one could figure out at the time or later on.
By the time Charlie One-Six got to Marjah, Afghanistan, in early 2010, so many different sets of ROE had been issued that marines had a difficult time figuring out which ones applied. Some of the marines were carrying ROE cards from the battle of Falluja, Iraq, five years earlier. Others had different ROE cards from the battalion’s 2008 operations in Garmsir, and others had been issued new ROE cards. All of them were slightly different.
In the collision between the official rules and the reality of war, moral injury was widespread.
After Smitty and Angus were killed by IEDs on January 24, the marines probing into Taliban-held neighborhoods in Marjah were battered by so many IEDs—twelve in one four-hour period—that they were ordered to walk behind tanks equipped with antimine rollers. And they were told that anyone out ahead of them could be considered hostile. Anyone. “That was the word from our commanders sitting back there in bulletproof MRAPs [armored trucks],” Chuck Newton told me. “Then I guess somebody thought that might not look too good, so it was ‘Well, not quite anybody.’”
So there were rules, but it was up to soldiers and marines out in the field to figure out whether or how they applied in reality; whether their actions would win a medal or a court-martial and leave them scarred with a moral injury.
In the lexicon of military lawyers and combat commanders, there are “good kills” and “bad kills.” The deaths of SS prison guards at Dachau eventually were deemed good kills. Or, at least, not bad kills. When I tracked down John Lee in early 2001, he readily admitted the truth. “Nobody’s really proud of doing something like that,” Lee told me. He described how he and his unit, India Company of the 3rd Battalion, 157th Infantry Regiment, had fought almost continuously for more than a year, landing at Anzio in Italy and fighting up through France and on into Germany. Ordered to secure what they were told was a local prison, they scaled masonry walls to find thirty-six boxcars of rotting corpses, inmates who’d been starved. It was overcast and chilly, Lee remembered, as he and the others crept forward beneath tall pines, finding more stacks of bodies and atrocities of which some soldiers could not speak even decades later. By the time they began rounding up the prison guards, as the thirty-two thousand gaunt inmates still living cheered and jeered from behind fences, the men of India Company were “boiling mad, half out of our minds,” one soldier said later. Lee told me, “I looked at the bodies as we went past—their open eyes seemed to say, What took you so long?” As the men walked warily deeper into the camp, somebody muttered, “No prisoners!” Eventually, they rounded up the Germans. As Lee remembered it, there was “a deathly silence. We lined up the SS guards. One of the guys cocked the machine gun. The Germans started moving and somebody shouted ‘Fire!’”
In the army investigation that ensued, several similar incidents were documented. A lieutenant had ordered four German soldiers into an empty boxcar and personally shot them. Another American soldier had clubbed and shot wounded SS prisoners who were still moving. Several GIs turned their backs on two inmates beating a German guard to death with a shovel; one of the inmates had been castrated by the German they were killing. A lengthy army JAG investigation report went to General George Patton, the senior regional commander. No action was ever taken. Among the veterans of the 157th Regiment, it was understood that Patton threw the report in his wastebasket, tossed in a match, and barked at the investigators: “Get the hell out of here.” But a copy survived and eventually made its way to the National Archives, where I discovered it in a cardboard box.
“Nobody’s really proud of doing something like that,” Lee told me before he died. But, he added, “The army trained you to fight. It did not train you for psychological shock.”
The Americans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, similarly untrained for psychological shock, also came up hard against the issue of morally and legally good kills and bad ones. In these wars, the issues often revolved around enemy insurgents who were captured and detained. After the prisoner-abuse scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was disclosed in 2004, U.S. occupation authorities in Iraq and the military command in Afghanistan became more reluctant to hold detainees in prison. The result was that sometimes soldiers suspected or had evidence that an insurgent had attacked American or allied forces; he would be arrested and taken in for interrogation, but a few days later would be free and out on the streets again.
During the Iraq War, high-value enemies—senior officials of Saddam’s government, for instance—were either hunted down and killed (no “imminent use of force” judgment was required) or captured and shipped away to the new U.S. permanent prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, or to secret CIA “rendition” sites. Fifty-two high-ranking former regime officials and Iraqi military officers were listed on U.S.-issued playing cards—Saddam Hussein was the ace of spades—distributed to American troops as a kill-or-capture most-wanted list. With a positive identification, or PID, anyone on the list could be killed, regardless of the evidence or lack of evidence against him.
Dealing with less notable enemies could be difficult. Bing West is a marine who fought in Vietnam, served as a Pentagon official, and found a third career as a battlefield journalist living with infantrymen in Iraq and Afghanistan. He detailed the problem in his 2008 book, The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq. Low-level insurgents who’d been detained, West wrote, “were routinely turned loose to choose whether they would fight again.” By 2006, soldiers arresting suspected insurgents were ordered to collect the kind of evidence required of police for a U.S. court case. Despite minimal training for forensic police work, soldiers found themselves filling out arrest forms, collecting sworn affidavits from witnesses, recording the biometrics (fingerprints, digital facial photos, and iris scans) of detainees, and bagging evidence. “Each arrest package was reviewed at battalion level, then at brigade level, and a third time at Bucca prison in southern Iraq or at Cropper prison in Baghdad,” West wrote. Even so, he found that four out of every five suspects detained by soldiers at the battalion level were released. That was the work of JAGs, who were scrutinizing arrests for any irregularity or weakness that could lead to the charge that an arrest was a human rights violation. Approximately fifty-eight thousand Iraqis were imprisoned between 2003 and the end of 2006; forty-three thousand were released.
Inevitably, soldiers and marines fighting insurgents across deadly city neighborhoods and palm-shaded irrigation canals would encounter the same insurgents they’d detained a few days earlier. Army sergeant Michael Leahy later explained to army investigators: “Seems like, even if you do your job and take these guys to the detainee center, they just come right back. The same [expletive] guys shooting at you,” he said, according to CNN, which obtained videotapes of the investigation. In 2007, Leahy and other soldiers killed four Iraqis who’d been detained and released and then opened fire on Leahy’s unit. Army prosecutors rejected their explanation that the military’s arrest regulations made it nearly impossible to complete their missions with insurgents seemingly rotating in and out of detention. Leahy is imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth, serving a twenty-year sentence for premeditated murder and conspiracy. Sergeant John Hatley, who was in charge of the patrol, received a life sentence, later reduced to forty years’ imprisonment.
In Afghanistan, during the time that Nik Rudolph and Stephen Canty and others of One-Six were fighting in Marjah, in the early winter of 2010, Special Forces captain Mathew L. Golsteyn, a West Point graduate, was awarded the Silver Star for heroism in combat and was later recommended for an upgrade to the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second-highest valor award. After a marine working in Marjah with Golsteyn’s soldiers was nearly hit by a Taliban sniper, Golsteyn had quickly organized and led an operation to find the sniper, returning fire with an antitank weapon, repeatedly braving enemy fire to rescue a wounded Afghan soldier, and coordinating air strikes. The action came days after two marines working with Golsteyn were killed and three wounded in the blast of a booby-trapped door. Marines later found a nearby building with bomb-making materials and detained the alleged bomb maker. Golsteyn was convinced that if he let the bomb maker go he would kill more Americans; according to army investigators, Golsteyn said there had been “countless times” when a detainee was let go and days later was shooting again at Golsteyn’s men. The investigators reported that Golsteyn took the alleged bomb maker off the base, shot him, and burned the corpse in a trash pit. In 2014, acting on the basis of the investigation, Secretary of the Army John McHugh withdrew the Silver Star award and stripped Golsteyn of his prized Special Forces status. Golsteyn did tell investigators, according to an account in the Washington Post, that he felt no remorse over the killing; that he wouldn’t have been able to live with himself if the alleged bomb maker had been let go and built another bomb that killed more American service members. The following year, after a four-year investigation, Golsteyn was cleared of almost all the charges and given a general discharge.
But were his actions so different from those of the hunter-killer teams of commandos led by Stanley McChrystal? McChrystal was the lean Special Forces officer who eventually rose to become a four-star general and Afghanistan War commander before being fired in 2010 by President Obama. In Iraq and Afghanistan, secret teams under McChrystal’s command tracked and killed men accused, sometimes falsely by their rivals, of being dangerous insurgents. McChrystal often went with his teams. As he recounts in his memoir, My Share of the Task, he and his men waged “relentless body blows” against insurgents, and not just against the leaders: they tracked down and killed “leaders, trainers, and mortarmen in order to eliminate their skilled labor” and sought to “disembowel the organization by targeting its midlevel commanders.” The teams worked from a Joint Prioritized Effects List, or JPEL, that by 2009 contained more than two thousand names of suspected insurgents. Of those, roughly one thousand had been hunted down and killed.
Around that time, a group of American infantrymen found themselves encountering out on the street the same men they had detained, now released and back in the fight. These were snipers or guys digging IEDs into the paths the Americans used or laying ambushes. Often they were military-age males—MAMs, in GI parlance—signaling with flags or their cell phones when the grunts would set out on patrol. Soldiers or marines would see a guy scanning them with binoculars and putting a cell phone to his ear—and ten minutes later they’d find mortars or a command-detonated IED exploding in their midst. Very often these spotters wouldn’t be carrying visible weapons, so they couldn’t legally be shot. Sometimes, U.S. troops would be able to capture a spotter and take him into a detention center.
“We’d done it dozens of times, flexi-cuffing guys, collecting evidence, like opening their wallet and finding stuff,” said one of the infantrymen, whom I’m calling John Doe. “We’d take ’em to these intel guys, and they’d do this movie-style good-cop, bad-cop kind of thing. I watched ’em do it once. We were up there [at higher headquarters] to deliver something and ate hot food and crapped in half of a barrel, it was like heaven. We heard some yelling and me and another guy went over and watched this [detainee] in a chair getting yelled at. We were laughing, watching this officer in perfectly clean cammies. We sat there for like a couple of hours, and another guy offered [the detainee] a cigarette, untied him; he was speaking English and the guy doesn’t speak English, and I said, ‘This good-cop, bad-cop routine is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen in my life.’ Then the bad cop comes back and ties him to the chair and starts yelling at him. I’m like this is how it works? Why are these guys getting sent up here just to be flex-cuffed? They should be dead. And then they get released with twenty dollars American, a shower, a meal, basically like the best night of their life, courtesy of taxpayers, after we literally find weapons and radios on these people… it got to the point where all this conversation, like nighttime conversation [in the squad], was like ‘Why don’t we just kill these people?’ You know? It kind of leaves it up to us to be judge and jury and executioner.” Several men in the unit had been killed in the past month in IED explosions and from snipers, the kind of unnerving violence that left their buddies dead or dying and nobody to shoot back at. Inside the unit, tempers frayed at the unfairness of it all. They also were terrified that JAGs would nail them for anything that happened without really trying to understand the situation.
The JAGs were often in difficult situations themselves. They’d be told to go investigate a suspicious death—a body would be found, or an Iraqi villager might complain. The JAGs might look into it and think, I might have done the same thing. If the guys in the unit felt it had been a “good kill,” the investigation might fizzle out with no finding. That, of course, didn’t make it right. But it happened more often than officials have acknowledged.
In one incident where all this came to a boil, the local police had caught a seventeen-year-old with his pockets full of American dollars, not currency ordinary civilians had access to, and two cell phones; one contained contacts known to be insurgent commanders. He’d been overseeing an IED site, waiting until a U.S. or government convoy came by, when he would signal for the device to be detonated. The police, John Doe told me, “wanted to kill him, they wanted our permission to smoke the guy. They were gonna bum rape him and shoot him in the head. But we followed procedure. We had this guy dead to rights.” Doe’s unit had lost men to IED blasts, men they loved. This kid was probably responsible. But they followed the rules. While they were taking him in for interrogation he was smiling. “It was like I got it over you,” Doe said.
Out on patrol a week later, “We were getting shot at. We’d set up, move, get shot at. One of the guys was saying, ‘Our friend is up there on the roof, waving a blanket every time we move.’ We were like That’s the kid we just arrested! When he came down off the roof we grabbed him by the nape of the neck. We told him, ‘You’re gonna clear a path for us’ [through a possible IED site]. We got to the edge of town so we could see our base. I grabbed him, he had this big smile on his face. I took him into this room and I said, ‘You’re done.’ I put him on his knees, he was still smiling, like Fuck you guys. I took my rifle off safe. I said, ‘You met the wrong guys, you’re not gonna get away with getting my friends killed. It’s over.’ His face changed. I pulled the trigger. I went out the door. I caught up with the patrol. Nobody said anything. Nobody did anything.” No investigation was ever completed.
“The point of it is,” he said, “our ROE prevented us from taking care of ourselves and each other. It’s an extremely illegal thing. I should be in [the military prison at Fort] Leavenworth right now. But sometimes you have to make decisions, like I have to take a chance with my life to try to save—when you see your friends die, you’re like I can’t let that happen again. It tears your brain apart. Honestly, I’d rather die than to see my buddies die. Or go to jail the rest of my life than to see that guy I had a chance to kill, kill one of my friends.” Doe sat unseeing. There was a long silence.
“When things go down,” he finally said, “the people in charge aren’t there. The people in charge who are supposed to make the decisions are hiding behind walls and behind bulletproof glass because they have a career. They’re not there to get shot at. They’re not there to risk their lives to help us. They’re there to further their career, get a medal, and move on to the next command. Take credit for our good deeds and disown our bad deeds.”
When I talk with Doe, I can see in his eyes the pain of the decision he made and the moral injury he carries. At the moment he had to choose, both options in his mind held powerful moral consequences: Kill to protect my friends but jeopardize my freedom, or not kill and jeopardize their lives. The face of the man he killed appears in his dreams. And the potential threat of being found guilty hangs over him. The guys in his unit, the sergeants immediately above him, would understand and approve of what he did, he feels. They would see it as a good kill. “But someone [who] didn’t know us, some general who sits here in America hears about it? I would be in jail. But I want this to be in the book. I’m not giving specifics, but I feel it’s important. It’s a subject people don’t want to talk about, don’t want to touch.”
So you think, I said, that what you did carried a higher morality, was more noble, than if you kept turning him in and seeing this catch-and-release cycle, and he kept directing attacks on your guys? Even though killing him was illegal?
“If it hadn’t been done,” he said, “and the next day we’d have gone on patrol and the same thing had happened, and one of my best friends I ever met in my life had been shot in the face, I’d be scarred for life. And probably in a worse way than I am now. Some scars kind of toughen you. Some scars debilitate.”