Powerful writing by Fred Reed at LRC on how to make a killer:

“One day the platoon approached a town and a sniper fired at them. “Light’em up” said the lieutenant, who hated the locals. Ten minutes later thirty-seven villagers were dead and the reporter who had been there got pictures of it all. They appeared around the world. The platoon didn’t know why they were being picked on. If villagers didn’t want to get shot, they shouldn’t let heavily armed insurgents come into their village. At a thousand legion halls, members said war is war, people get hurt. You gotta expect it. The press are wimps, comsymps, unrealistic idealists. We need to unleash the troops, let them win.

Officers, knowing that reporters were the most dangerous of their enemies, said that it hadn’t happened, that the enemy had really done it, that it was an isolated incident, and that there would be an investigation. The commanding general in what interestingly was called “the theater” had presidential aspirations, and so sacrificed the lieutenant, who eventually received three months house arrest.

The soldier from the county almost made it. He was approaching PCOD, Pussy Cut-off Date, determined by the germination time of gonorrhea, when his truck hit the mine. Nothing new here. Men in agony, exposed bone, crushed lungs, and the dying crying out for the trinity of the badly wounded, mother wife, and water. This time the soldier from the county was half gutted.

It was a grand adventure, though.

On the ward where they removed a length of his intestines, he saw many things. He saw the soldier with his jaw shot away who fed through a tube in his nose. He watched a high-school girl of seventeen from Tennessee as she saw her betrothed, stone blind, his face a hideous porridge that would gag a maggot.

Johnny…Johnny…oh Johnny.

He left the hospital with a colostomy bag and instructions never to eat anything he liked. Women do not like colostomy bags, so he had time on his hands. He read. He thought. He came to hate, to hate with a shuddering intensity that unnerved his friends, who learned not to talk about the war. Like soldiers since before time existed, he learned that the war was not about the noble things it was supposed to be about, God and country and democracy, but about money, power, contracts, and the egos of the men who, on the principle that shit floats, always rise to the top. For the rest of his life, he would really, truly, want to kill.

He had come a long way from the county. It had been a grand adventure.”