Alex Horton

We were fighting street to street and house to house with the group that would become the Islamic State movement.

And we were on patrol on a particularly heavy fighting day.

And we set up in a school to sort of look out over some rooftops.

And we watched a two-man machine gun team set up and put their gun in our direction to get ready to fire.

So several of us shot them while they were setting up.

They stopped moving for the most part.

We kept shooting just to make sure that they were dead.

We couldn't go there and check.

And then after a few minutes, we called in an Apache gunship to shoot a hellfire into the building to do two things.

One, to make sure they were dead.

And two, to kill any other militants that we weren't even sure about that we didn't see at the time.

And that's permissible because we had an engagement.

We knew there were armed militants in the area.

We knew civilians were by and large had evacuated.

And, you know, we couldn't be sure that they were killed until we got closer to them.

If we were to have gotten closer to them, this calculus would change.

You know, that we would see they were wounded.

And if they cannot reach a gun or if they don't have explosives on them, then it would become our obligation and responsibility to help them.

There's a very stark line between these two, and it's much less forgiving for this type of environment.

If a U.S.