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To: Company Commanders
From: A Past Company Commander
The Army performs many of the same functions as civilian organizations, yet there is one absolutely unique and defining characteristic of our profession - we are organized, equipped and trained to kill people. As company-level leaders, we recruit patriotic young Americans to kill; equip them to kill; train them to kill; develop and issue orders for them to kill; issue fire commands for them to kill; and commend them for killing enemies of our country.
We perform our duties well, and the American people sleep safely at night. As a profession, however, we generally do not provide our soldiers with an explanation for why it is morally right for them to kill in combat. Consequently, many of the soldiers entrusted to our care suffer needless guilt after killing in war.
The purpose of this article is to offer you a tool - an explanation for the morality of killing in war - that you can adapt for use in your units. This is a presentation I have given to Army combat units and Marines, as well as at West Point and ROTC programs. This explanation may not be the answer, but it is an answer to this difficult and often-overlooked issue. Perhaps the most important outcome of having this conversation with your unit is a command climate in which your soldiers feel comfortable talking about killing and about the thoughts and feelings that killing provokes.
My Story
I have found it helpful to open the conversation by sharing my personal journey of thinking about the morality of killing. Every soldier thinks about this subject sometime, but relatively few talk openly about it. If we want to open a healthy professional dialogue on a topic that is still somewhat taboo, we ought to set the example. Your story may be more grounded in personal experience and less academic (after all, I have never killed anyone), and that is probably more effective.
My personal interest in the morality of killing in war was sparked one night years ago when 1 was a precommand captain in the 82nd Airborne. Rigged for a combat jump, I was waiting to load into a plane that would unload me and thousands of...