Worst case of suicide we’d ever seen.

They Tomahawked themselves in the back of the head nine times.

That, at least, is the story.

Now look—before the internet brigades warm up their keyboards—I’m going to say something unfashionable:

In war, mistakes happen.

Missiles miss. Coordinates get entered wrong. Intelligence proves faulty. A signal hiccups, a map is outdated, a building is misidentified. Weapons that can thread a needle at a thousand miles sometimes land a few yards off—and a few yards is all it takes to turn the right target into the wrong one.

War is not surgery. It is demolition.

This is precisely why grown-up countries are supposed to think long and hard before starting wars in the first place. When you send people into harm’s way, it ought to be for something resembling a genuine national interest—not a press release, not a cable-news segment, and certainly not because someone in Washington wants to look decisive for a news cycle.

For most of my life, I would have said something else with confidence: that the United States does not intentionally target non-combatants.

I want to believe this incident is either the consequence of bad intel, bad targeting, rogue missile execution, or some combination thereof. At any time prior to Trump, I’d have exceptional confidence in that fault mode.

Today, I’m less certain. After Venezuela—and after Admiral “Shoot the Wounded” Bradley—I can’t say that with the same clarity. The appetite in certain quarters for elastic definitions of “threat” seems to be growing.

But here is also something true, and it gets conveniently ignored in the shouting.

Every officer in the United States military is trained in the laws of armed conflict. The Geneva Conventions. Customary humanitarian law. The rules governing legitimate targets and protected persons. Roughly forty hours of instruction on what you may do in war and what you absolutely may not.

Every officer.

Then come the Rules of Engagement—documents that spell out the mission, the limits, the legal framework, and the specific acts that are forbidden.

So when something like this happens, there are only a few possibilities.

One: it was a mistake. A coordinate entered wrong. A targeting error. A guidance drift.

Two: the intelligence was wrong, and what looked like a legitimate target was not.

Three: someone knowingly violated the rules.

I hope it’s the first. It might be the second.

If it’s the third, the law is supposed to deal with that.

Because innocent people—children included—should never be intentionally targeted by American forces.

But let’s also not indulge in the comforting fantasy that war can be made tidy. It can’t. Shells land in the wrong place. Friendly fire happens. Weapons malfunction. Intelligence fails.

War is ugly. War is chaotic. War is awful.

Which is precisely why you’re not supposed to do it casually.

And when something like this happens—when we screw up—the obligation is simple: own it. Investigate it. Explain it. Make restitution where possible.

Whether the current crop of chest-thumping patriots in Washington has the stomach for that is another question entirely. The prevailing philosophy at the moment seems to be that admitting mistakes is weakness, and that the louder you shout the word “victory,” the less anyone will notice the bodies.

But the rest of the world notices.

Other countries watch how we conduct war. They watch how we explain it. They watch whether we follow the rules we claim to believe in.

And they will apply those same standards—to our soldiers and to our civilians.

That, in the end, is the whole reason the laws of war exist.

Not because war is civilized.

But because if you abandon the rules entirely, you eventually discover the other side has done the same.