Human beings have unfathomed depths. You don't know how you'd react under the same pressures. Like, unless you've been there, you simply don't know. Our behavio

Human beings have unfathomed depths. You don't know how you'd react under the same pressures. Like, unless you've been there, you simply don't know. Our behavior under extreme stress is unpredictable, even to ourselves. That's the hard part about prison or homelessness or war: it shows you parts of yourself that you wish didn't exist. You're writing this guy off as un-human. I think that's a mistake. If we accept the full complexity of normal human potential, including our own destructive capacity, then we can put systems in place to guard against it. That's why the original commenter said it's the command's fault. They should have constructed a system where something like this is impossible. Military systems must be built to absorb the reality that soldiers will act in contradiction to both their training and their self-concept. Only by accepting moral volatility as an expected input can a military system anticipate the full range of its own possible breakdowns.