In his memoir, One Bullet Away, Captain Nathaniel Fick (ret.), former platoon leader in the elite Marines Recon Battalion that went into Iraq in 2003, wrote a statement that I thought captures the ethical responsibilities of military leadership as well as the ethical strength that is so salient in the U.S. military. “I couldn’t control the justice of the declaration of war, but I could control the justice of its conduct within my tiny sphere of influence” (p.182). It’s leaders like Fick that make the U.S. military an ethical army.
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