The Day I Decided Killing a Helpless Man Was the Right Thing to Do

By Jason Kyle

I’m sure the immediate reaction of most people reading the title of this essay is probably something along the line of “What the f***?!” followed by worries over whether I should be, or have ever been in prison for premeditated murder.  Well, let this be the first, and most important lesson in my code of ethics: context matters! As it happens, the incident I am writing about occurred April 5, 2003 at a place I knew only as Objective Saints- somewhere a bit south of Baghdad, Iraq. I was twenty-two years old, and a soldier in 3rd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division; a part of the Army’s initial invasion force. My company had set up a temporary position in some small town, and cleared the area for threats. One of these identified possible threats included a wounded Iraqi prisoner.

I was selected that morning to relieve another soldier who had already been guarding the prisoner. I was told in my briefing that he had been fatally wounded at some point before we rolled up (presumably in a firefight with American forces who had rolled through ahead of us) but because he was still mobile, he was considered a potential threat, and therefore needed to be guarded for as long as my unit was also in the area- set up a few hundred meters away. The prisoner was being held in a small yard surrounded by a low stone wall, that was adjacent to a small mud-brick house; a typical dwelling for rural areas. Upon arrival I saw the extent of his injury immediately- there was no dressing of any type on it. The prisoner was lying on his back, cradling his left leg, or rather what was left of it. His calf muscle was virtually gone- so much so in fact that the lower part of his leg flopped around limply, connected to the rest of him by little more than skin. There was surprisingly little blood in the vicinity. I presumed he had been brought to this house then, rather than been wounded here, and had possibly received at least some medical attention. Before he left, I asked the guard I was relieving about the prisoner’s condition and was told that the medics had determined that he was too far gone to bother with, especially with our limited resources and opportunities for resupply.

I sat there watching the prisoner as he lay dying all morning. Though he was my enemy, and could very possibly have killed fellow American soldiers within the past few weeks, I pitied him. “What a way to die,” I remember thinking. He had no friends or family to comfort him or be with him when he passed on- only an enemy guard there purely to ensure that he didn’t cause any more trouble before he finally died. He moaned a lot, and rolled around now and then, always cradling his leg. He startled me once when, in a sudden movement, he dragged himself a few yards across the yard and up against the wall of the house, where there was a bit of shade. I may have seen to it that he at least had some water. I like to think I did. But this was almost thirteen years ago now, and I just don’t remember. It’s just as likely that didn’t do anything more than sit there on that stone wall, machine gun across my lap, and watch my prisoner as I’d been instructed to do. The military does a pretty good job of instilling a strong sense of rule-based ethics into service members. They have to, to get people to do the things we are called upon to do.

I was raised in a white, politically conservative, Christian household, under a deontologist system- based largely on Christian Divine Command principle. My father was a senior non-commissioned officer in the Air Force, and my mother was/is a radical Christian, who considers every single word in the Holy Bible to be nothing less than the direct word of God to be followed as practically as possible to the letter. So my cycle of socialization growing up taught me to be kind and merciful to my fellow man, and to forgive them, but that there were still plenty of circumstances where violence and killing were fully justified. When I joined the Army at seventeen, I learned their code of ethics; the Uniform Code of Military Justice. This built onto my cycle of socialization in a rather complimentary fashion, actually. Most of the things I had been taught were wrong or right in my family’s ethics lined up with what the Army taught me. The biggest modification was that I had much less freedom to question authority in the Army’s ethic system. We were taught that killing enemy combatants was not only ethically justified, but it was our duty, and we learned to do it in all kinds of ways. But we were also taught to treat noncombatants- which are basically anybody not armed and representing a clear, direct threat with dignity and respect, even empathy.

The military also has a pretty strong Utilitarian ethic at work; particularly in the sense that the ends frequently justify the means when planning and executing missions. This makes sense when one stops and considers the nature of militaries. Utilitarian and rule-based ethics are the most “black and white” systems, and therefore the easiest methods to apply when weighing in on right versus wrong. I admit that I have embraced a fairly strong Utilitarian ethic system for myself, despite my fairly rebellious nature. Though I am more partial to the aspect of Utilitarianism that factors in the “greater good” concept. That’s actually a concept I would be very reluctant to attribute to our military- or most militaries for that matter; at least on a macro/global level. At best, military leaders consider the greater good specifically as it applied to our/their nation’s interests; which is probably as it should be, all things considered. A military’s primary function is to forcefully impose its nation’s will on another nation, or to protect its nation from the hostility of another nation, when diplomacy fails. The manner in which this is done (through war) is the most destructive thing people can do to each other. It is inevitable that innocent lives are destroyed, infrastructure, and economies are often left in ruin, to say nothing of priceless, historical landmarks. If military leaders based their decisions on what was best from “global community” perspective, and were not predominately concerned with acting in a manner consistent with their nation’s best interest, that nation’s military would effectively be going into a fight with one hand tied behind their backs, and the results would be disastrous for that nation’s military. This has already been happening with the US military. As one of many example, outposts in Afghanistan have literally been overrun, and we have suffered needles casualties in war because soldiers on the ground were not permitted to bring the level of firepower needed to successfully win a fight- because politicians treated the lives of Afghanistan civilians as being more important the lives of a possibly fewer number of American lives.  So in order to be effective, militaries, and actually the governments that they belong to, really have to maintain a nationally-centric point of view, because unfortunately, history has shown time and again that kindness really can become a deliberately exploited weakness.

So with my upbringing and cycle of socialization, even factoring in the Army’s contributions, the situation I found myself in on that day in Iraq struck me as very, very wrong, for a number of reasons. For one, the prisoner was unarmed, and in our custody, which made him a noncombatant, and entitled to humane treatment- to every possible extent at least. That was what the Army taught me. My Christian upbringing prompted me to pity the prisoner as a fellow human being who was now suffering, needlessly I felt. On top of this, I had been raised as a hunter by my father. One of the codes he taught me was that hunters don’t kill animals without justification, and we do not let them suffer any longer than absolutely necessary; even animals deserve a clean death. I felt that if even animals deserve that small mercy, why in Hell shouldn’t a fellow human being- and a noncombatant at that? If our medics were truly low on medicine and bandages, I could accept the fact that our prisoner was being neglected- the potential needs of fellow American soldiers outweigh the needs of fatally wounded enemy prisoners. That made perfect sense to me. But as the morning gave way to afternoon, I became increasingly disgusted with the fact that my chain of command was additionally comfortable with letting this man die a slow, painful death. Almost nobody deserves that! I finally concluded that the human thing to do, given my limited options, was to put the poor man out of his misery quickly, with a bullet to the head- just as I would do for a deer back home.

This presented yet another problem however. There was no way I was comfortable with essentially executing this man on my own authority- I had none. Ironically, allowing this man to die slowly and painfully was perfectly permissible, but killing him, given his status as our prisoner, and being unarmed, could mean a prison sentence for me should my chain of command decide to follow the letter of the law. So I knew I needed to request permission from my chain of command. I felt sorry for him- so much so that I still have a far too vivid memory of the incident, over a decade later, but not so sorry that I was willing to risk going to prison over him. This decision also presented a problem. As a guard, my instructions were to “Guard everything within the limits of my post, and quit my post only when properly relieved.” That is a guard’s first general order. Failure to follow general orders- particularly in a combat zone, can also result in severe punishment. So while it was a fairly easy decision to conclude that killing this man quickly was far more kind and right than sitting there and allowing him to die slowly and painfully, it was another thing altogether having to decide whether to stay where I had been assigned, or leave my post without having been properly relieved in order to request permission to end the man’s suffering.  After watching him for probably close to eight hours and not being relieved, I finally got angry enough to leave my post. As it turned out, when I approached my squad leader, he acted as though he had forgotten I was even still on guard duty (I believe he may have even said as much outright) and promptly told me I was relieved- no guard replaced me. I requested permission to go back and end the man’s suffering but was denied; probably because my squad leader, like me, was uncomfortable with the idea of being responsible for executing a prisoner. Had he given me permission, the responsibility for the man’s death would have been his, not mine, if an investigation was ever done on the incident for whatever reason. He hadn’t had to sit there and stare at the man all morning though!

The next afternoon I volunteered to join a group of soldiers conducting a patrol of our area. We happened to pass by the little house where I had watched my prisoner. I saw his body. He had moved again- from out in the yard to up around the doorway of the house, and he had finally died.

Works Cited

Adams, Maurianne. Readings for Diversity and Social Justice. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print.

“Ethics- By Branch / Doctrine – The Basics of Philosophy.” Ethics – By Branch / Doctrine – The Basics of Philosophy. Web. 14 Feb. 2016. http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_ethics.html