combat ethics Quotes

Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.... Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.

Kill all the Germans you can, but do not put them up against the wall and kill them. Do your killing while they’re still fighting. After a man has surrendered, he should be treated exactly in accordance with the Rules of Land Warfare, and just as you would hope to be treated if you were fool enough to surrender… Americans do not kick people in the teeth after they are down.

To abandon your shield is the basest of crimes; nor may a man thus disgraced be present at the sacred rites, or enter their council; many, indeed, after escaping from battle, have ended their infamy with the halter.

It was just him and me. He fought with honor. If it weren't for his honor, he and the others would have beaten me together. They might have killed me, then. His sense of honor saved my life. I didn't fight with honor . . . I fought to win.

Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.

… war by its nature entails terrible injustice to many individuals and that acceptance of that injustice as the lesser evil is implicit in any decision to send the military into combat.

I have the duty to protect my people, hurt my enemy, do the best I can with as few uninvolved casualties as possible - I can't have zero innocent casualties - and at minimum risk to the lives of our soldiers.

No matter how many people you kill, using a machine gun in battle is not a war crime because it does not cause unnecessary suffering; it simply performs its job horrifyingly well.

The rules of engagement are so lax that soldiers are shooting and killing Iraqis under mere suspicion, and tragedies are everyday. There are road killings, killings on the road when someone is trying to pass a convoy and they get shot. Or if a roadside bomb goes off, the soldiers just start shooting in all directions.

Women, children, monks and other non-combatants are to be spared during war and no longer taken prisoner.

It is every man's right to choose when to Sheathe the Sword." --- Ingtar Shinowa ---

Any weapon is a good weapon as long as ye can use it with honor and skill.

I cannot grasp the difference between killing people with drones or rifles and knives. The objective in war is to kill the enemy before he kills you. I can't fathom the almost religious zeal with which the use of drones is being opposed.

We may attack systems. We must not attack men.

There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire.

It has always been my ideal in war to eliminate all feelings of hatred and to treat my enemy as an enemy only in battle and to honour him as a man according to his courage.

There's a set of unspoken rules we live by when it comes to fighting. We can't help it. It comes from living in a civilized world. Even when you're fighting your hardest, somewhere deep down, you know how far you can go. But today the rules are gone. Today I fight not to win, but to destroy.

Like the fighter, the Warrior is aware of his own immense strength; he never fights with anyone who does not deserve the honor of combat.

If I have to reduce all of the laws of war into a single sentence, it is this. You divide the world into two, combatants and noncombatants. You can attack deliberately combatants, but not deliberately noncombatants. Israel acts that way. It attacks combatants and accidentally kills noncombatants. But in the case of the terrorists, it's the exact opposite. They deliberately attack combatants - noncombatants, civilians, deliberately.

To be the equal of one's opponent-this is the first condition of an honourable duel.

In a hospital, there's not anyone who's generally trying to do you harm. You're generally given a backstory about what happened to them, but not about their life, so you get to work on saving their life. But you know whose lives you're saving overseas, in the Army, to a certain degree. You know whether's it your guy or a bad guy, and it's generally not anybody in between.