<<You get to balance your aversion to the evil of war with the responsibilities of supporting your family and getting on with your career.>>
Well, that is what I did, and I admit some guilt for not having done more.
<<But BSB is not given that same latitude of honoring his commitment to his fellows soldiers even though he had reservations about that particular military action.>>
Maybe we should get a few basic facts here straight. My wife and daughter, as far as I know, were not engaged at the time in invading somebody else's homeland on false pretexts, bombing and napalming villages, torturing and murdering prisoners, or engaging in a killing spree that ultimately claimed some two million Vietnamese lives. My wife was basically engaged in such mundane activities as earning a living, then nurturing a baby, and my baby was primarily engaged in consuming whatever nutriments my wife could rustle up for her, digesting and excreting them and sleeping.
I had no problem making a commitment to love and support my wife and baby. Such a commitment did not entail doing harm to other human beings, let alone harm on the scale committed by BSB and the soldiers to whom he made his "commitment."
So the first observation I'd make in response to your comment is that there is a huge difference between the commitment that I made to my wife and daughter and the "commitment" that BSB allegedly made to his fellow trained killers.
My second point is that at some point BSB observed that the end result of the commitment he made was in some way he never made clear to us, unsavoury or mistaken or in some manner unworthy. Yet he stuck to it. I on the other hand had no reason to reconsider my commitment. If at some future point in time, I had realized that my wife and daughter were or had become junkies, thieves and prostitutes, I might have reconsidered my commitment and taken appropriate steps to back out of it. What we know about BSB is that despite torture, massacre, atrocities and crimes against humanity on a massive scale, he made no attempt to back out of the commitment that he made and remains committed to this day.
Another point I make is that the whole story of BSB's commitment to his fellow soldiers is just a cop-out. Those men were not his household pets or his domestic farm animals. They are and always have been independent, sovereign moral actors. If they felt they had to go to Nam, that was their decision. It had no binding power over BSB and he had no binding obligation to them. Each individual had the choice to make, go or stay behind. Each made his choice and each is responsible for the moral consequences of that choice. BSB unfortunately chose to support the machine - - to abet and enable the mass killing that ultimately took two million Vietnamese lives. BSB as an active participant bears a direct share in the responsibility for each one of those lives taken, a responsibility stemming directly from the choice that he made to go to Nam.
<<So let me make sure i have the numbers correct. Your failure to end the war due to the balancing act you had to perform between idealism and the pragmatism of family responsibilities, resulted in millions of additional deaths. But that's OK you did what you could and certainly you wanted to do more and that counts for something right?
<<Yet BSB with direct control of the trigger was responsible for a whole bunch less lives. Not only did he have the means to take life, but he also had the means to save lives.>>
Wow, you are really fucked up, BT. For one thing, although BSB "had the means to save lives," that's not what he was sent there for. Any lives he saved would have been purely by chance, unless you mean the lives of other invaders like himself, all of whom deserved to die anyway for invading the homeland of a people who had done no harm and meant no harm to the people of the U.S.A. You also seem to have a severely dysfunctional concept of cause and effect and of proportionality. My responsibility for not giving my all to end the war is shared by 30 million Canadians and 300 million Americans. If responsibility were something you could taste in the water, mine would never even be suspected. When BSB goes to Nam and shoots someone, he is 100% responsible for the loss of that life and for the misery of that person's loved ones. If he trains someone else to make the hit, 50% responsible.
