The Dream

Yup been there myself man. Everyone handles it differently. I didn't and still don't feel the least bit bad about it. These guys would have killed me and my brothers and all our families if they would have had the chance.

The only one I felt even a little bit bad about was the young one. I never found out his real age but he couldn't have been more than 18, which was only a year younger than I was at the time. I say only a little bit bad because he had most definitely chosen to be there, and was ready to fight had we/I not put him down, he would have killed someone. When I saw his face after it was over, and how young he was, it bothered me a little bit.

I don't know if you ever had to take anti-Malaria pills when you were deployed but we did. For some reason they make you have really vivid dreams. I had a dream 2 nights after I shot that kid that I had the ability to time travel and I went back in time to visit that kid when he was 12 years old. I explained everything to him (even though I didn't speak his language, he understood me), how his path would eventually lead him to me, and warned him how his life was going to end if he didn't correct it. I told him I didn't want to have to kill him, but that I would if I found him in that same point under the same circumstances. He said he understood. In my dream I sincerely tried to help him and prevent him from dying so young because I really didn't want to kill him. Then the next part of the dream was replaying the moment we made contact with him and his group, and he was there again, even despite my warning. I shot him again in my dream exactly the same way but in the dream we made eye contact, and it was like he communicated to me that even knowing the truth, he still chose this. He was a true believer.

Honestly the dream affected me more than the actual act of killing him did in the weeks after that. I wondered what it meant that in my dream, which was amazingly vivid, I had tried to help him avoid me. Now, several years later I feel like having that dream helped me rationalize it. What happened to him was the end of a long series of bad decisions on his part. Those decisions led him here, and that's where he died. I was simply the last sentence in the book of his life.

Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1ohrap/serious_redditors_who_have_killed_someone_by/