Some do join the Military out of a Desire to Kill

[cthulu2016]

6. Excellent reply. Thanks. I don't

know how much I edited the OP after you read it. I made some edits to beef up the point that Bale's actions were fundementally a break-down of discipline, which is in line with your comments about the role of discipline (and deterrence) in the context of war. He was trained to kill and he killed. But he was also trained to maintain discipline and he did not. He went outside his orders.

There are probably of lot of men who, after enough grueling time in the field, might like to go Bale on somebody but they do not because they are not allowed to.

I wrote something a while back about how I think the death penalty has a place in the Uniform Code but not in civil law because acts in war are a different class. I have no desire to see Bale executed out of blood-thirtiness, but because a generation of soldiers have been told, "If you do this you will be executed."

The disagreement was widespread but my argument was that if the military thinks it necessary to their maintainance of order I would tend to defer because the whole moral context of war is so different from civil society so the usual modes of moral anaysis become... well, less sensible.