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The war vets I knew did not brag about their “lethality,� or their “warrior ethos.� Most of them refused to talk about it at all, apparently regarding their service as at best a necessary evil, not something to celebrate. That was the difference between America’s great citizen soldiers and Nazi Germany’s warrior culture that elevated war to be the highest achievement.

In America, we watched movies where the evil Nazi U-boat captain would surface his sub after sinking an allied ship, and then grin while he ordered his crew to open fire on the survivors desperately clinging to wreckage in the roiling, often burning ocean. This was the stark difference between America’s heroic citizen soldiers and the murderous Nazi legions. America fought to liberate all humans from evil, Nazi legions lived to kill — even unarmed, unthreatening, defeated opponents. That was why America fought, to rid the world of such cruel, heartless, ignominious, berserker warriors without honor.

The fathers returned from the war preferred to shake the dirt of the necessary evil from their boots and return to the noble, humble work of building a better world for their kids, as plumbers, electricians, carpenters — any profession other than killer. The horrors of war were not to be celebrated. If anything, they had fought, as so many noble soldiers before them, to end war. I was told by one vet that on his return from war he had jettisoned all his medals and awards from battle because, “I never want anything to do with that again.�

After World War II, America led the allies to enshrine in the law of nations a rule of law governing the difference between civilized warfare and barbarians, such as Nazi U-boat captains or the cowards in the SS who machine gunned unarmed civilians into mass graves. The resulting Nuremberg Principles emerged as a towering achievement of civilized nations. In the future even war itself would be subject to law. No future Hitler’s illegitimate orders to murder would be followed by honorable soldiers. Those who followed illegal orders would be tried as war criminals. America hung such spineless criminals after Nuremberg Trials.

Such humble heroes, so different from the grinning Nazi U-boat captain enjoying murdering helpless sailors swimming in the sea after the sinking of their warship, seemed to bring the light of a new sun into the world. A world where war, if tolerated at all, was to be subject to law. A just war, fought for human liberation or not at all, was to be fought justly, by honorable soldiers who would do the job and then, like Cincinnatus, return to their farms and plows to feed their fellow humans.

Such humble heroes were all around us as we grew up sheltered by their courage, their strength, their morals and their decency. This allowed us to dream, to build, to go to the moon, inhabit space, while on earth, science cured many diseases, comforted the sick and the only war was the war to end poverty.

Murder most foul, the double-tap murder of helpless survivors of boat sinkings, had been abolished from the earth. A new birth of decency, of hope, of a world that could be united under law, for the uplifting of all people, repudiating the barbaric Nazi “berserker warrior� rose over the earth like a new sun.

Imperfect? Certainly. Much hard work remained for true leaders to guide the great mass of humanity upward remained. But the greatest generation, now mostly passed from the earth, established a pinnacle of accomplishment and achievement.

Murder most foul cannot be allowed to tarnish their admirable heroism. Double tap murders, whether on the high seas or in marketplaces to which first responders rush, peopled with women and children injured by a terrorist bomb, only to be unscrupulously targeted for a “double tap� are beneath contempt. Those who order such crimes are either repudiated by decent human beings, or the world descends into utter madness. Allowing double tap murder sinks American greatness and restores Nazi U-boat barbarism most foul.

Kary Love, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Michigan attorney who has defended nuclear resisters and many others in court for decades.