Yesterday I did a few words on the current social media frenzy surrounding the alleged aerial bombardment of a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hospital in Kunduz by US aircraft. I stand by what I said, and for those of you thinking it was an extended riff on, “Well, the Taliban kill more babies, so let’s be mad at them,” I’d recommend reading all the way to the last paragraph. Because that’s not the point I’m trying to make.

Think I covered the fact that bombing hospitals is never OK. That whatever harm might have come to whatever special operations forces (SOF) had to be weighed against the impact of dropping high explosives anywhere near a medical facility. I say again: if you drop those bombs, you get Kunduz. If you don’t? You get Benghazi. Which isn’t going to play well if you end up running for president, yet will probably mean you’re not going to kill hospital patients in their beds.

Note that I’m still saying “alleged” bombardment because at this point all we’ve got to go on are eyewitness accounts by medical personnel and other non-military civilians of what happened in the middle of the night. Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable, as anyone in law enforcement can tell you. I know this based on a whole lot of Law and Order: Criminal Intent watching over the years, which makes me something of a subject matter expert on things like eyewitnesses and police procedures in general.

What’s been described by MSF personnel is consistent with an airstrike in support of forces in trouble: it’s not going to be a single run, but multiple “weapons releases” are going to be the order of the day until the bad guys are beaten back enough to everyone’s satisfaction. Because the last thing that mission commander wants to be is the one who has to explain to their superiors and maybe Congress why some of America’s most elite warriors died fighting guys in flip flops on the streets of Kunduz. That aside, we still don’t know what happened, and we may never know.

This might sound counter to my first post on this, but there are a few things you learn after you raise your hand and take that oath of enlistment. One of them is that most decisions by higher headquarters make no sense. That’s not becaues you’re not smart enough to see the bigger picture, it’s because in the rarefied air of all that Power Point driven ozone, people make really dumb choices. But you’re going to be the one responsible for carrying out those orders, so dumb or not, the war goes on.

And no matter how dumb those orders are, when things go wrong, and they will, since you’re one of the good guys? It’s always going to be your fault. Every time. Because doing bad things to bad men means those bad men will rarely be called to account for the terrible things they have done.

And that’s the way it should be.

No matter how many volleyball players they slaughter, how many medical clinics they blow up, how many kids they kill, this will always be true.

There’s nothing fair about this. No balancing of the karmic scales is going to happen once you light up a hospital in Kunduz. Because it’s not supposed to be fair.

Because we’re the good guys, we get held to a higher standard. We get called up for review by higher and sometimes Congress. Sure, a lot of that “accountability” is a political move calculated to show how much a particular elected official cares about the real heroes, the ones who don’t kill people in hospital beds. And that doesn’t mean we always get it right: far too many times the military’s “investigation” finds that no one wearing a uniform really did anything wrong.

And while people like Ryan Grim are getting it wrong on the Taliban in Kunduz, they have a point: we have a law of war for a reason. Because even though the other guys set fire to the rules a long time ago, we’re supposed to be better than that. We’re supposed to be the ones that make sure Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians, Colombians sleep well at night because the good guys are there making sure the bad guys go away.

We’re supposed to be the stuff of nightmares for the bad guys. We’re supposed to be the ones that make sure they sleep with one eye open because we might be coming for them. We’re not supposed to be the ones that drop bombs on the wounded in a hospital in Kunduz.

Whatever happened at the MSF hospital, a whole lot of things went wrong, many of them years before this lastest push by the Taliban to take a city in Afghanistan. And no matter what any “investigation” finds, someone needs to be held accountable. Because it’s not supposed to be like this. Because at some point someone has to pay. And it should be us. Because we’re the good guys.