I'd like to think that would be the consensus in a serious discussion, but that's not at all what comes through.

The more immediate question is how to interact with current and former troops right now. A lot of leftists are hostile to the idea of a troop becoming a comrade in a way that's totally inconsistent with leftist thinking on people who have committed serious crimes. And that's to say nothing of the whole discussion around the value of bringing around people who were/are in the machine itself.