Ed Calderon

There's something like a video game aspect where people are almost having fun.

There's a humor.

And I think underneath that, the prerequisite is to see the enemy in the same way you see the enemy when you play Call of Duty.

You don't really think.

You think of them as NPCs, the bad guys.

The Russians are called orcs in Ukraine.

I mean, there's all kinds of other names.

For us, it was mugrosos.

You know, there's always something.

Over time, those are just words, but over time it gathers a kind of, like a meaning to it that's more than just the words, orcs.

They're less than human.

They're dirty.

They're too dumb to understand the evil they're doing or whatever.

It's useful.

It's useful.

It's part of the program.

I've talked to soldiers and some of them do have stories of momentarily remembering that there's a human on the other side.

I've talked to one woman

who's this really badass soldier, and she saw this really brave soldier on the other side do something that was almost stupid how brave it was.

And then she was trying to shoot him and she missed.