On the second of September, 2025, an American strike hit a small boat in the Caribbean. There were eleven men aboard. Nine of them died in the first blast. Two did not.
Those two held on to what was left of the boat. They were in the water about forty minutes. Then a second strike came and killed them, and two more strikes sent the boat to the bottom.
The Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, had authorized the operation. He said he watched the first strike live. Then he left the room for another meeting. He told reporters he didn’t stick around. Later he said that if he had stayed, he would have made the same call.
I want to say something about that.
I served in the Army in the Vietnam years. Every soldier is taught that a leader does not ask his men to do what he will not do himself. The lieutenant goes out on the patrol. The sergeant digs his own hole. That rule isn’t written in any manual. It is older than manuals. Men follow the one who goes first.
So here is my thought. If the Secretary wanted those two men in the water dead, he should have been the one to kill them. Not the admiral. Not some young man at a screen who was told what to do. Him. The Washington Post reported that he ordered everyone aboard killed. He denies it. But if he wanted it, he should have gone out there, put his own hand on the controls, looked at those two men holding on to the wreck, and fired. Then the killing would be his, and his alone. No man under him would have to carry it.
That is what leading by example means. You don’t hand the worst job to the men below you and go to a meeting.
It is easy to kill from a long way off. A man in an office in Washington can watch a fire on a screen and go on with his day. The men under him can’t do that. They carry it home, and they carry it the rest of their lives. When the order is a bad one, they carry something worse. They carry a crime that was never theirs to begin with.
The Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual has a section on orders a soldier is bound to refuse. It gives one example. “Orders to fire upon the shipwrecked,” it says, “would be clearly illegal.” Out of everything they could have chosen, they chose this one, because it is the plainest. Every man in uniform is supposed to know it.
The admiral who ordered the second strike says nobody told him to kill everybody. He says the two men were still in the fight, trying to right the boat. Lawmakers who have seen the video don’t agree with each other about what it shows. The public has not been allowed to see it.
But a leader does not get to watch the first strike and walk out before the second. He does not get to set a thing in motion and then say he wasn’t in the room. If he wanted those men dead, it should have been his finger on the trigger. If he didn’t want it, he should have said so, loud and early, so that no one under him could mistake his meaning.
Either way, the men in the water are dead. And the man at the top went on to his next meeting.