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Kuttner on TAP

Shooting the wounded

Is the order to kill survivors the exception to U.S. conduct, or the norm?

Americans have been appalled that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth would order a second strike to finish off alleged drug smugglers clinging to the wreckage of a small boat destroyed by a first airstrike. As numerous Democrats who have seen the video have pointed out, this is a clear violation of the laws of war and of domestic military law.

It should be stressed that the first strike appears to be illegal, not just the second. We are not in a declared war with fishing boats in the Caribbean Sea. No evidence has been provided confirming that these boats are populated with drug traffickers. Yet the administration has conducted summary executions without due process. Nothing close to the laws of war is being applied here.

But for the sake of argument, let’s ask the question: Just how atypical is a second strike or a “kill them all” order on a declared military combatant in U.S. military history?

In the several wars to exterminate Native American tribes, prisoners were sometimes taken, but it was also common to kill the wounded. At the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, in what was then Colorado Territory, Col. John Chivington’s Colorado volunteers attacked a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment. Numerous eyewitnesses—including soldiers who opposed Chivington—testified that women, children, and the elderly were killed; wounded survivors were executed; and Indians who tried to surrender were shot. And in the notorious Wounded Knee Massacre of December 1890, official U.S. Army testimony as well as accounts by survivors and forensic evidence established that wounded Lakota seeking to surrender were gunned down.

In the Vietnam War, panicked GIs, repeatedly ambushed by the Viet Cong, would sometimes go into small villages, fire indiscriminately, and kill civilians mistakenly presumed to be the enemy. Morally, what’s the difference between killing noncombatants, whether with small arms fire or with napalm, and deliberately shooting the wounded?

You may have heard the expression “give no quarter.” It literally means to refuse to quarter captured enemy troops—in other words, to kill them on the battlefield.

The greatest of American generals, George Washington, broke with that policy. Historian David Hackett Fischer, in his classic, Pulitzer Prize-winning work Washington’s Crossing, recounts how humane treatment of prisoners was literally invented by Gen. Washington on the battlefield in late 1776.

As Fischer tells the story, Washington wept, watching through a spyglass, as his troops, taken prisoner at the disastrous Battle of New York that November, were then put to the sword. After the first Battle of Trenton, on December 26 and 27, where Washington’s men captured several hundred Hessian mercenaries, Washington ordered his troops to ferry Hessian prisoners back across the Delaware, to give them quarter. Many astonished Hessians, fully expecting to die, became loyal to the Americans.

It wasn’t until the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 that shooting the wounded became a war crime. The 1907 version explicitly declared that it is forbidden “to kill or wound an enemy who, having laid down his arms, or having no longer means of defense, has surrendered.”

The Hague Conventions, incidentally, also prohibited killing civilians. That lasted only a few years, until World War I, when more civilians died than soldiers. And of course, in World War II, both sides incinerated noncombatants by the hundreds of thousands, the U.S. at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and in the firebombing of Hamburg.

As human lives, each of these people in mass annihilations was killed one at a time. Somehow, it is easier to become incensed at the vivid image of the deliberate killing of two people clinging to the wreckage of a boat, because it is at a scale we can fathom.

Hegseth has resorted to double-talk, to describe alleged “narco-terrorists” as a national-security threat, but also to deny that the attacks on boats are a military operation subject to the laws of war; and to deny that killing survivors of a U.S. military attack was the result of his orders (blaming the “fog of war”), but also justifying the action.

If George Washington, peering out through the fog on the banks of the Delaware in 1776, could decide to spare the wounded, so could Hegseth.

I wish I could report that the military misadventures of President Trump and his minions are a sorry exception to the history of our country. But when Hegseth resolves to shoot the wounded, he is only repeating the Indian Wars and Vietnam.

Trump has been known to shoot his wounded when they become sufficiently embarrassing. Hegseth is suffering from repeated self-inflicted wounds. Let’s hope they turn out to be politically fatal.

–ROBERT KUTTNER

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