If you shell a military base and happen to kill civilians, you have not committed a war crime; if you deliberately target cities and towns, you have.

War is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.

I came to think of it as a kind of zen practice: the Zen of not fucking up.

One could reasonably argue that the Turkish pogrom against the Armenians during World War I qualifies as a crime against humanity, as does the United States' ethnic cleansing of Native Americans.

No matter how many people you kill, using a machine gun in battle is not a war crime because it does not cause unnecessary suffering; it simply performs its job horrifyingly well.

The problem is that it's hard to aim a rifle when your heart is pounding, which points to an irony of modern combat: it does extraordinarily violent things to the human body but requires almost dead calm to execute well.