Without looking up from his rifle, Woody asked me the question we were all pondering. “Should we shoot him?”

Sergeant First Class Brooks gazed through the spotter’s scope and motioned for silence as I reached the top of the stairs. After a few moments passed I asked what was up. His sniper, Staff Sergeant Woods, pointed needlessly down his barrel to the other side of the highway. “No shit” I whispered. “But what’s going on?”

“There’s some guy up to no good over there.” Brooks explained quietly. “He’s hiding in that clump of reeds. I think he’s digging a hole for a bomb.”

I studied the terrain. There was a shallow, reed-filled irrigation ditch running perpendicular to the road and draining into a culvert under the highway. A tree-lined path ran along the ditch and serviced a small shack, maybe a pump house, about 20 feet from the roadway. The path offered such easy access to the road that kicking around in those reeds would have been strange behavior indeed. Sure enough, every time there was a break in the traffic, a young man emerged cautiously from the vegetation, shovel in hand. He would quickly make a few scrapes on the side of the road before scurrying back into hiding on the approach of another car. Shovel Guy seemed not to know or care about the guard tower we were standing in just 200 meters away. 

Without looking up from his rifle, Woody asked me the question we were all pondering. “Should we shoot him?”

Tampa

It was early 2006 and things were heating up north of Baghdad. Al Qaeda had blown up the Al Askari Mosque in Samarra, an important landmark in the history of Shia Islam. They intended the attack to start a sectarian war and though it did not immediately succeed, we knew it was coming. In the meantime, we began to see a rise in disruptive attacks against the Shia-led Iraqi government. Many of those attacks focused on the highway in front of us, a road the Iraqis called Route 1 and that we called Main Supply Route Tampa; the MSR.

MSR Tampa was the main road connecting Baghdad with Iraq’s northern capital, Mosul. In parts it was a modern, limited-access highway indistinguishable in the quality of its design from the Interstate system or Europe’s Autoroute. Adjacent to our base at Camp Taji however, the MSR was just a four-lane divided road; a cratered patchwork of hasty repair work and makeshift vendor kiosks that cluttered its shoulder and snarled traffic.

Taji itself was a major logistics hub for both the Iraqi and American armies. It was a garden of half pilfered warehouses and old tank barns and was home to what was left of Saddam’s armored forces. An eerie boneyard on base featured the mangled hulks of tanks and trucks and boats and artillery pieces dragged to their final resting place by the victorious 4th U.S. Infantry Division. Many featured vulgar graffiti and scars made by anti-tank weapons. By 2006 we had turned Taji into a walled fortress with concrete bastions and guard towers lining the MSR for miles. Though the 4th Infantry Division had overall responsibility for the defense of Camp Taji, my Special Forces battalion was responsible for an important part of that defense. We occupied Firebase Bennett, a fortress within a fortress in Taji’s northwest corner and with it, Tower #4. Situated in the extreme corner of the massive military complex, Tower #4 was the first line of defense against any threats coming down the MSR from Mosul and Tikrit. 

The men assigned to defend FB Bennett were a mix of Green Berets from part of an A Team assigned to the task, support soldiers from the battalion headquarters, and an Infantry squad or two attached from another unit. The GBs in particular used to love hanging out in the tower in hopes of getting something to shoot at. As callous as that may sound, I sympathized with them. Our Asia-Pacific focused battalion had missed the fighting in the Middle East up to that point and our operators felt they had been left out of the war. They were Green Berets stuck on base while their buddies went outside the wire every night. For them, combat was a right they were being denied.

Ethical Dilemma

That day I was also bored and found my way into Tower 4 just as Brooks and Woody were pondering whether to drop the hammer on the guy with the shovel. We knew each other well. Brooks had been the senior Engineer Sergeant on my Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA, otherwise called an A Team) for two years. In his mid-30s with a stable marriage and a couple kids, he had joined Special Forces in search of something more interesting and fun than he was getting in the regular Army. He was a pretty typical Green Beret. Woody less so. Young and single, I considered Woody a little immature and a bit of a hothead but that is a relative concept in Special Forces. Both wanted to test themselves against the best of men and the worst of circumstances. We all did. That day in the tower we faced our first chance for action yet we found ourselves in a surprisingly complex ethical discussion that illustrated the principal challenge of the imperial wars we have been fighting since 9-11.

Brooks and I agreed on what Shovel Guy was doing right in front of us in broad daylight. He was almost certainly digging a hole for someone to come along later and quickly place a bomb in. But he was not some hardened jihadi fighter. If he was that dedicated to the cause he would have been a soldier and not a hole-digger. More likely, he was a member of what we would call the Auxiliary; a farmer by day and facilitator by night. As Brooks put it: “…this is just some asshole trying to feed his family or earn enough money for a motorcycle so he can visit his girlfriend.” In other words, someone that may have been paid a ridiculously paltry sum to risk his life to dig a hole without asking questions. He may have been too stupid or too innocent to realize that what he was doing could earn him 7.62mm of lead to the face.

Woody saw it differently. “Look dude,” he said with his California swagger. “someone’s going to put a bomb in that hole and it could kill one of ours. I say we shoot him.”

Brooks wasn’t convinced. “And then what? Someone else will come along and finish the hole when we aren’t here to see it. Which means we just killed a dude for nothing.”

“I get that, but fuck this asshole. He’s the enemy. What’s your plan? To just let him do it? Report to higher? Hope no one gets hurt? We can stop this right now before we waste everyone’s time.”

Brooks pondered that for a minute and I trusted him enough to stay silent. “Maybe he’s not the enemy. Maybe he doesn’t know what the hole is for.” Woody spat at that unlikely possibility but Brooks continued. “Or maybe he’s being coerced.”

Coercion was an effective tool of the enemy and we had to consider the possibility. If Shovel Guy or his family were under duress, killing him would play right into the hands of the enemy. We’d made too many mistakes along those lines and every one of them fueled the cycle of vengeance that sustained the insurgency. Brooks considered options. “The best thing to do is just roll his ass up. He might be able to tell us something that leads to something bigger.”

Woody rolled his eyes. “Yeah right. It takes 20 minutes just to get out the gate. By the time we plan, get kitted up, and roll he’ll be long gone and we’ll be staring at an empty hole. And that doesn’t even account for the fucking CONOP approval.”

He was referring to the process for approving operational concepts we called CONOPs. Even a CONOP as simple as rolling out to chat with an unarmed chogey like Shovel Guy had to run a gauntlet of staff scrutiny before the commander ever saw it. Every time one of those things came up the chain, every bored staff officer would ask a question or offer a good idea that required attention. It could take days.

Brooks scratched his head. Woody wasn’t wrong. The CONOP process was a necessary control measure but it had its problems. This was one of them. “Ok say we shoot this guy. How are we going to explain shooting an unarmed guy? Where does ‘digging a hole’ fall on the rules of engagement?”

“Fuck the ROE!” Woody snapped. “And fuck this guy. We all know what he’s doing.”

At this point I interjected. “We might be able to make an argument but it will be a tough sell.”

“So fucking sell it sir! That’s your job isn’t it?”

Brooks responded before I could. “Shut the fuck up Woody. The Captain’s right. You haven’t even convinced me yet.”

Woody grimaced but I understood his frustration. The ROE was designed to keep the United States on the right side of the laws of war by providing guidelines for when its soldiers could use force. It wasn’t designed as a limitation but in practice it was exactly that. For that reason, it was an occasional scapegoat for those that thought the war wasn’t being fought aggressively enough. For the soldiers on the ground however, it was life and death. Woody had a point. We could make an argument in favor of killing Shovel Guy so why not? But Brooks was right too. Killing Shovel Guy could result in more violence, more hate, and would deprive us of an opportunity to influence the situation to our benefit. Though I was no longer their commander I suddenly felt a lot of complex pressures.

Shrinking the Perimeter

Brooks and Woody represented two sides of an ethical dilemma. On one side was the practical argument that Shovel Guy represented a threat to us and our mission. On the other was the moral reality that his motivations mattered and understanding them offered us an opportunity to improve our own situation. We were frustrated by what we recognized as a microcosm of the entire war. In past conflicts we may have had more options, but in Iraq rules and ethics and military boundaries constrained us. They shaped our idea of right and wrong and we risked American soldiers every day for that idea. The enemy just did not care. Our military ethics were both a strength and a weakness and we were learning there was no good way to wage a war for hearts and minds. Though Brooks and I believed we were right, it still irritated us because among other things, a short distance away in Ramadi, our SEAL brothers had far less restrictive rules.

In Taji, we placed a relative premium on the use of force, whereas killing was cheap in Ramadi. I had the opportunity to ponder those differences several years later as the controversy surrounding the war crimes tribunal of SEAL Chief Eddie Gallagher accelerated across the news. I imagined what the conversation in Tower 4 would have been like if I had been talking to Gallagher and not Brooks. What differentiated SFC Brooks, or SSG Woods for that matter, from Chief Gallagher? Why did one seem to descend into bloodlust and bravado and the others rose to ponder the moral hazard of killing in war? Was it that they hadn’t killed enough or that he had done so too frequently? Was Ramadi the problem or something else? 

Perhaps Gallagher was damaged; predisposed to violence and primed to explode brutally in the right conditions. Or maybe he wasn’t the problem at all. The Special Forces Regiment screens its soldiers for violent tendencies and I assume the SEALs do too so it is possible his leadership was at fault. They certainly received a lot of criticism for failing to address Gallagher’s lunacy but there’s more to the story. Prior to 2006 the SEALs had not commanded a Special Operations Task Force in combat. As an organization they just did not have the experience operating at that level and had been relegated to direct action or smaller scale missions. Their first time in command of such a headquarters was in Ramadi where decisions on the use of force were very straightforward. I don’t know if Eddie Gallagher served in Ramadi around that time but he would have come into his own in an environment where any military aged man with something in his hands was a lawful target and discussions about killing got people hurt.

Eddie Gallagher is a manifestation of our weakness not our strength. We failed him just as we failed Ramadi; by indulging too much violence. Our inability to control the situation there required great moral and physical risk to get the job done. What is more troubling however is the ethical shortcuts didn’t stop when we pulled out of Ramadi. Powerful people in America have unwittingly crystalized that failure by normalizing Gallagher’s casual violence. They argued, for the basest of political reasons, that Gallagher is a leader to be emulated; a victim of a dishonest system; and the scapegoat of military leaders losing wars because they’re afraid to take risks. In a way however, this is the exact opposite of the truth but are the same cynical arguments used to cheapen the decision to deploy the military in the first place. These arguments serve only the lazy whims of those that turn their noses up at the other tools of national power and spurn allies as dead weight or worse. 

Americans take pride in our fighting prowess but empires do not survive not based on their ability to fight, they survive on their ability to avoid battle. The United States must understand there is a direct relationship between how much force we apply to our foreign entanglements and how much moral and physical risk we must assume to achieve our goals. As Americans we want more victory but if we keep taking shortcuts we will deploy more troops, more often, to face more enemies than ever before. Worse, those troops will bring more wrongheaded ideas to the battlefield about the use of force versus the military value of thinking twice when war provides the opportunity to do so. We will also become more isolated. Our dominant position in the world depends on the strength of our ideas and our ability to inspire others to trust us with military power. We must find more clever ways to maintain order but with a low threshold on the use of violence we will become a dying empire clinging to a shrinking perimeter, lashing out in every direction with decreasing effectiveness until it is too late.

Head Shot

That day in Tower 4 we ran out of time. Chasing Shovel Guy was not a viable option but neither was shooting him. After deliberating, I ordered Woody to deliver a head shot…to the shovel; an extremely difficult shot to take. Woody and Brooks looked at me like I was crazy. “What?!” I asked, suddenly questioning my experience employing snipers. “If it isn’t possible, it’s at least a warning shot. If nothing else, it’ll buy us time to put together an operation for whomever comes next.” Woody turned back around and grumbled something foul then got to work. After a couple seconds of cross talk with Brooks, SSG Woods dropped the hammer.

His bullet passed so smoothly through the thin metal of the tool that Shovel Guy almost didn’t notice. When he finally realized what happened he nearly killed himself diving into the culvert. But this story is not a happy one. Within a day or two a convoy commander reported a possible IED in that location. The response blocked traffic on the MSR for hours, disrupting our operations and those of the Iraqis while thousands of motorists waited impatiently for a disposal team to arrive. When the bomb squad finally got to work, someone detonated the device, taking one of our expensive robots with it.

The incident illustrated the costs of my decision. This time the casualty was just a robot, but it could have been one of us, or a family of innocents. By not killing Shovel Guy I had put all of the above at risk. Instead, I favored Brooks’ moral argument that without a compelling reason, killing is not acceptable, even in war where the bar defining a “compelling reason” can be very low indeed. We gained no intelligence from Shovel Guy; no insight. Though we missed an opportunity, we didn’t worsen the situation unnecessarily and we can all live with that.

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Lino Miani is a retired US Army Special Forces officer, author of The Sulu Arms Market, CEO of Navisio Global LLC. He believes in the cooperative uses of American power and shuns both isolationism and unilateralism.