Trail West Dispatch #7 October 18, 2025

 

“Be reflective if you must be armed.  If you carry a weapon in public service, may God bless you and keep you.  But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things.  Be ready to say no.”                                             --Timothy Snyder

When our boys were growing up, I remember telling them that it is important to draw bright lines early and honor them throughout life in matters related to taking up weapons against other people.  I emphasized that every small early compromise would decrease the likelihood of their being able to do the right thing in a moment of extraordinary testing.  “Do the right thing at the very beginning” are the words I remember saying.  Using Snyder’s words might have sounded like “Be ready to say no” from the start.

I cannot help wondering about the messages that Doug Schroeder, the Mennonite law enforcement officer from Hesston, KS got in his childhood, long before he shot and killed the shooter at Excel Industries after he opened fire on employees in February, 2016.  Three people died and 14 were injured, some critically. 

While Chief of Police Schroeder seems to have operated in line with professional ethics for officers with his responsibilities, I cannot imagine that a Mennonite mother would have seen his career choice as being ideal—for the very reason that eventually materialized:  violent acts are part of a policeman’s job under certain conditions.  I can imagine that his mother might have felt as I did—that doing the right thing from the beginning would mean that you never take a job in which you must be armed, when doing the job carries the expectation that you will use a gun against people if necessary.  This is simple enough, right?

What Snyder warns against is slightly different, however, from Schroeder’s situation.  For anyone besides a nonresistant or pacifist person, Schroeder’s actions were “regular,” in line with typical measures taken by police officers in similar situations.  If policemen were to protect a perpetrator or attacker instead of protecting the victims, or if they harmed innocent people, they would be “doing irregular things.” 

Things get a bit more complicated in the military but the distinction between “regular” and “irregular” acts remains.  There, any lawful order must be obeyed, and any unlawful order may not be obeyed.  This principle was applied during the International Military Tribunal proceedings at Nuremburg--trials after WWII.  Then, people mounted the “I was just following orders” defense, but they were convicted of crimes anyway--for mass executions and other atrocities that were part of Hitler’s purges.  Some of those convicted were hanged and others served lengthy prison sentences.  In the US, any member of the military who commits crimes (“doing irregular things” in other words) can be tried for those crimes, even when they are obeying orders from a military superior.  In the Viet Nam war era, Lieutenant Calley, was a US military figure convicted and sentenced because of the My Lai massacre in which hundreds of unarmed villagers were killed in South Viet Nam by American soldiers.  He had committed “irregular” actions and was originally sentenced to life in prison because of it. 

Figuring out what constitutes an unlawful order gets messy, and trying to describe it is difficult.  Basically, every military enlistee takes an oath to defend the Constitution, not any specific individual or political authority.  Recent events have caused upheaval in American military circles.  The unrest is centered on what many perceive as a conflict between defending the Constitution and carrying out the wishes of the highest military officials in the country.  This plays out every time the military is employed domestically against the population within US borders, something that most military enlistees never expected to be asked to do.  The moral dilemma is real and some of them wonder if they should say no.                                                                         –Miriam Iwashige