There's morality and then there's morality. When I was in OCS in '77 we had a lecture on the Law of Land Warfare in the auditorium of Infantry Hall at Fort Benning. The instructor described a hypothetical situation -- an NVA machine gunner opens fire on an infantry platoon in Vietnam and blows half of them away. When a G.I. sees his buddies get killed he rushes the MG and when he's 10 feet away the NVA gunner throws up his arms in surrender. The G.I. kills him anyway. The school solution -- a war crime has just been committed. I asked a fellow OCS candidate, an 11B 101st Vietnam veteran, what he thought about that. He said that you should give the guy a medal. Terry's first officer assignment was with the Old Guard at Fort Myer because he was a second lieutenant with a CIB.
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