Before you get too angry, consider that this experience is common of soldiers in war, not many of whom would after combat use terms like warrior. I doubt he chose the headline himself or was even asked about it, and it is contradicted by the tone of the article. There are far more important questions here than which labels are used to describe the people who carry out the killings.
This one guy (part of the largest group ever inducted as drone pilots) killed 1,626 people, and that figure won't include the civilians near the targets, who were often at home or travelling with their families. The real figure is probably 2-3 times that.
“We’re gonna shoot and collapse the building. They’ve gotten intel that the guy is inside.”...Bryant stared at the screen, frozen. “There’s this giant flash, and all of a sudden there’s no person there.” He looked over at the pilot and asked, “Did that look like a child to you?” They typed a chat message to their screener, an intelligence observer who was watching the shot from “somewhere in the world”—maybe Bagram, maybe the Pentagon, Bryant had no idea—asking if a child had just run directly into the path of their shot. “And he says, ‘Per the review, it’s a dog.’ ”Bryant and the pilot replayed the shot, recorded on eight-millimeter tape. They watched it over and over, the figure darting around the corner. Bryant was certain it wasn’t a dog.
What I find most troubling about this is that:
This program has been expanded to Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan already, and the same legal justification given for killing in Pakistan with no trial or even proper investigation could be given for a drone killing in Idaho. There is no limit to this war in time or space.
Even if you are on a battlefield, killing of non-uniformed and unarmed combatants is illegal under the Geneva conventions - you're supposed to avoid civilian casualties - clearly targeting houses and markets etc doesn't do that.
People who have not been positively identified as combattants and are away from any battlefield are killed without trial, without counsel, without charges and without official remorse if there was a mistake or they were innocent.
The distance created by the drone and the lack of risk to US personnel gives a very real risk that substantial abuse of this method of killing will occur. What if the US withdraws from Afghanistan/Pakistan/Iraq, but continues to kill from a distance? What if they expand the war to other countries and don't tell anyone (JSOC is in 100 countries)? All this has been done without even declaring war.
This drone pilot deserves to be recognised for at least having the courage to speak up about what he was asked to do, about the mistakes made.
The book Dirty Wars is definitely worth reading if you are interested in finding out more about US drone programs.
http://dirtywars.org/