What are you going to tell that Iraqi kid?”Īmid all the playacting of OCS-screaming “Kill!” with every movement during training exercises, singing cadences about how tough we are, about how much we relish violence-this felt like a valuable corrective. Say you think there’s an insurgent in a house and you call in air support, but then when you walk through the rubble there’s no insurgents, just this dead Iraqi civilian with his brains spilling out of his head, his legs still twitching and a little Iraqi kid at his side asking you why his father won’t get up. When he got to me, down at the end, he unloaded one of his more involved hypotheticals. No, “Who’s the Old Man of the Marine Corps?” or “What’s your first general order?” The first time he paced down the squad bay, all of us at attention in front of our racks, he grilled the would-be infantry guys with, “Would it bother you, ordering men into an assault where you know some will die?” and the would-be pilots with, “Do you think you could drop a bomb on an enemy target, knowing you might also kill women and kids?” Either way, during inspections at Officer Candidates School, the Marine Corps version of boot camp for officers, he was the Sergeant Instructor who asked the hardest, the craziest questions.
Or maybe bashed his head in with a radio. The rumor was he’d killed an Iraqi soldier with his bare hands. The Citizen-Soldier : Moral Risk and the Modern Military By Phil Klay May 24, 2016
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