Rules of Engagement

What war actually requires — and what our own hands are doing in Gaza.

The people who decide what war requires have mostly never been in one.

I have. Two tours — Iraq and Afghanistan, helicopter crew chief. Air Medal with Valor. And I need to tell you something the men who've never stood on a battlefield keep getting wrong on purpose, because the lie they tell depends on you not knowing it.

Our rules of engagement were simple. You could fire when you were fired upon. Positive identification of a hostile act — not a suspicion, not a neighborhood, not a feeling. Before a lethal round you escalated: you warned, you showed, you gave the person in front of you every chance not to die. The burden was on you to be certain, and you carried more risk to yourself so that a civilian didn't pay for your fear. That is not softness. That is the whole moral architecture of a lawful war, and we held it under fire.

Not just me. My whole battalion. And not just us — a generation. Hundreds of thousands of Americans cycled through two decades of war against enemies who wore no uniform, who hid in the exact crowds that the apologists now point to as the reason mass civilian death is "unavoidable." And the overwhelming mass of us did not kill civilians. Not because we were saints. Because the standard held.

That is the fact that ends the argument. If hundreds of thousands of soldiers can hold the line for twenty years under the hardest conditions on earth, then holding the line is the baseline — the ordinary condition of a disciplined force. Which means its absence is not the fog of war. It is a choice. Somebody removed the standard.

In Gaza, somebody removed the standard.

A United Nations Commission of Inquiry found at least 20,179 children killed between October 2023 and October 2025. Other counts put confirmed child deaths above 21,000, with more still under the rubble. That is not what my war produced against the same kind of enemy. The difference is not the terrain, and it is not the tactics. It is the orders — coming down from men who were never at the fence.

They told us they don't target civilians. Then the same UN Commission concluded the targeting was deliberate: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes. A lie is falsifiable in a way an intention never is. Put the denial on the left and the finding on the right, and let it sit there.

They told us it was forced on them. But their own prime minister reached for Amalek — the old command to blot out a people, man, woman, and infant — and South Africa entered that invocation into the genocide case at the International Court of Justice as evidence of intent. A choice speaks in the voice of the one who makes it.

I am not going to pretend I can prove what was in anyone's heart. I don't have to. The documented version is already damning, and it is the version no one can wave away.

Here is the part that is ours, and the part I most need my neighbors to hear.

None of it runs without us.

The weapons are largely ours. The vetoes at the United Nations that killed ceasefire after ceasefire are ours. The money is ours — billions a year, plus wartime supplements, sent while people in this state cannot make rent. We are not bystanders to this war. We are the arsenal. If the killing was a choice, then the nation that armed the choice, funded it, and shielded it from consequence is a participant in it. Not in some hidden way. Openly. On the invoice.

And it comes closer to home than the federal budget. The retirement savings of New Mexico's teachers and public employees are invested, right now, in Israeli government bonds and in the arms manufacturers supplying this war. That is not a theory. It is a line item, and it is a line item we can read and we can change. North Carolina divested its Israel bonds. So did Minnesota. So did Louisiana. Their pension funds are no worse for it, and their hands are cleaner.

I did not come home from two wars to have my own state spend its workers' savings on the killing of children.

So this is not another essay asking you to feel something. Feeling something changes nothing, and I am done writing the kind of thing everyone writes while nothing gets done. This is an ask with an address on it.

Find out what our public funds hold. File the request — anyone can; it is public record. Show up at the investment board meeting and make them say it out loud. Ask your representatives, on the record and again and again, why American weapons are still flowing to a war a UN commission has called a genocide. Pin the people who fund this to the principles they claim — the pro-life congregation, the rules-based-order senator, the general who swears we don't target civilians — and make them defend the distance between what they say and what they pay for.

And hold the line where it is aimed at the government that did this and the machine that arms it — not at a people. The Israelis in the streets against Netanyahu are proof of the difference. The Jewish New Yorkers who just elected a mayor pledging to honor the arrest warrant are proof of the difference. The moment this becomes about a people instead of a state's crimes, the killers win, because then they never have to answer the evidence. Keep the blade narrow. Narrow is what cuts.

I flew two wars and never killed a civilian. Neither did the men beside me. That is how I know, with everything I am, that what is being done in Gaza was never what war required. It is what someone chose — and then lied to call inevitable.

We paid for the lie. We can stop paying for it.

David Kirkland is a U.S. Army veteran (Iraq, Afghanistan) and writes The Living Ditch.