Dec 05, 2025
War by its very nature is an act of barbarity, regardless of how righteous the purpose. Whether you are a grunt in the trenches or stalking through jungle foliage desperate to kill the enemy before he kills you, or whether you’re an intelligence officer frantic to anticipate the next attack and pre-empt it, war breeds an inevitable impulse toward excess, an anything-goes ethos. That is precisely why we have a Constitution, a Uniform Code of Military Justice, a tradition of controlled restraint, and a civilized abhorrence of the “shaded” standards that unleash barbarism in wartime.
There can be no ambiguity about the fine red lines.
That is why Senator Tom Cotton’s remarks after viewing the satellite video of the slaughter of two shipwrecked sailors by U.S. forces in the Caribbean on September 2 were so loathsome — and so terrifying to me. He claimed to have seen evidence that the two survivors of the initial blast had tried to flip their shattered boat over “and continue the fight.” He thus declared the second strike to kill them “righteous.”
He was not alone. According to reporting on the closed-door testimony on Thursday, the head of the Joint Chiefs and the commander of Special Operations offered a similarly malleable justification, insisting the two survivors might have continued their drug-smuggling mission and thus still presented a threat. By that logic, you could rationalize the killing of any supposed enemy trying to save himself after being disabled. If the testimony was accurately reported, Cotton’s sick defense of it would amount to an open invitation to repeat the offense.
As I reviewed the news coverage of that discreet testimony, I was reminded of something else — what Donald Trump’s lawyer had said in court when pressed about presidential criminal immunity. In a January 2024 hearing before the D.C. Circuit, Judge Florence Pan asked Trump’s attorney, D. John Sauer, whether his theory of “official-acts immunity” meant a president could order SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival and still escape criminal prosecution. Sauer replied — astonishingly but unambiguously — that yes, under his reading of the Constitution, the president could not be prosecuted for such an act unless he had first been impeached and convicted. Assassination, so long as it was nominally part of the president’s “official duties,” would fall under the protective umbrella of presidential immunity.
Shipwreck survivors are not political adversaries, at least not in any verifiable sense. But their vulnerability to a double-tap strike in the fog and ambiguity of Trump’s self-declared campaign to “interdict” drug trafficking invites an unsettling conclusion: the same inflated interpretation of presidential immunity that Sauer advanced for hypothetical political killings could easily be invoked to shield otherwise barbaric acts committed under color of an improvised wartime authority.
This is especially troubling since the president in this instance is acting at the very edge of his commander-in-chief powers, if not in outright violation of them. And the precedent Trump is setting is ominous, given his penchant for labeling any critic or perceived opponent as an enemy worthy of destruction. Witness his response to Senator Mark Kelly’s appeal urging military officers to refuse illegal orders: Trump took to social media to suggest death for Kelly and others who agreed with him.
As a contemporary of William Calley in Vietnam — I arrived in-country just as the My Lai massacre of March 1968 was beginning to seep into the press — I often tried to place myself in Calley’s head to understand how he could have presided over the cold-blooded murder of more than 340 innocent villagers. His stock lawyered answer was that he was simply following orders. But there had to be more. Was it because he and his men were still traumatized by the Tet attacks that had so recently swept through the country? Was he so steeped in fear and revenge after the killing of Americans and the near seizure of the U.S. Embassy that the moral and legal constraints governing his company simply dissolved? Time and again I convinced myself that this was the explanation — that the bloodlust unleashed by Tet had pushed him past the edge.
But the more those conclusions compelled themselves, the clearer it became why the existing constraints matter, and matter most, in the very moments when the most human instincts veer toward savagery. That is precisely when the UCMJ and constitutional invocations are at their greatest relevance — because bloodlust comes so naturally.
Trump’s campaign against drug trafficking bears no resemblance to the blood-drenched trauma of Tet, and yet Trump, his defense secretary, and apparently key members of Southern Command would have us believe that double-tapping shipwreck survivors is essential to our national survival and therefore a justification for any excess.
That mindset had no place in Tet-ravaged Vietnam, and it certainly has no place in the current political environment. Worse, because it is so inexplicable as guiding doctrine for the military here and now, it becomes an even greater threat to the very idea of who we are as a nation and a people.
The Vietnam War was never declared. It was little more than a jury-rigged pretext for excessive presidential initiative, wrapped in claims of national emergency. Trump’s initiatives against drug trafficking are so poorly rooted in legality they make even Vietnam look like a fully justified exercise of constitutional prerogative. That is how far we have slid down the rabbit hole.
Even amateur historians like myself can trace the trajectory of presidential war-making powers as they veered outside constitutional boundaries — Kosovo, Libya, and other excursions undertaken without proper declarations, each loosening the constraints against executive excess. Is it any wonder we have arrived at this nadir of law and morality, a point at which the strutting excuse for manhood embodied by Trump and his secretary of war can try to convince us that killing shipwreck survivors is justified by an imaginary war untethered from any recognized constitutional norm?
Shame on Trump. Shame on the military officers and enablers who salute this logic rather than Senator Mark Kelly’s discernment and courage. And shame on politicians like Tom Cotton, who look upon a video of a double-tap on stranded, defenseless survivors and proclaim, stoutly, blindly, that it was a righteous kill.