Author and Marine veteran Philip Klay on Thursday expressed concern about the role that Trump Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth played in lobbying him to pardon war criminals during his first term in office.
Writing in the New York Times, Klay highlights Hegseth's efforts on behalf of 1st Lt. Clint Lorance, a convicted war criminal whom Trump pardoned in 2019.
Klay begins by giving a grisly account of Lorance's past misdeeds while serving in Afghanistan.
"One day [Lorance] threatened to kill a farmer and his son, a 3- or 4-year-old boy, and a day later ordered his men to shoot within inches of unarmed villagers, including near children," he writes. “'It’s funny watching' the villagers 'dance,' he said. Mr. Lorance’s men, combat veterans, eventually balked at his orders, and refused his instructions to make a false report about taking fire from the village. The next day he ordered fire on unarmed Afghans over a hundred yards away from the platoon, killing them, and radioed a false report claiming the bodies couldn’t be searched."
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He then went on to describe the reaction of Lorance's fellow servicemembers to his pardon, which he described as "a final betrayal for the troops who served in that platoon."
"One of them said that he attempted to kill himself when Mr. Lorance became a cause célèbre in right-wing media," he explains. "Even beforehand, the killings had haunted them. 'It tainted our entire service,' another explained."
Klay concludes by warning about the effects that this sort of mentality could have on the American military as a whole, as he argues that "a military with neither moral purpose nor a commitment to moral conduct is a military that fights without honor."