Memories of Karmah came back to me three weeks ago, when President Donald Trump granted a pardon to Michael Behenna, a former Army lieutenant convicted of the murder of an Iraqi prisoner in 2008.

“We know we have a president who is very sympathetic to the very difficult situation that soldiers, sailors, and marines were put in during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars,” John Richter, the lawyer who defended Behenna in court, told The Washington Post. Since then, The New York Times and others have reported that, around Memorial Day, the president intends to pardon other servicemen accused or convicted of war crimes. Among the names that have been floated are Naval Special Warfare Operator Chief Eddie Gallagher and Green Beret Major Mathew Golsteyn, both of whom have been charged with murder and are pending trial. Golsteyn stands accused of murdering a detainee, while Gallagher faces allegations that he shot civilians and stabbed a prisoner to death. The president’s comments came against a backdrop of sympathetic media coverage of both men, and amid appeals by politicians on their behalf.

Behenna, Golsteyn, and Gallagher held leadership positions within elite units and were all described in the media as being highly decorated heroes. The public seems uneasy to see such Americans in the dock.

They are men of proven character, runs the subtext. If they did lose their way, it was because of what they went through, because of what they did for their country. And when you’re fighting a vicious enemy, sometimes the rules just don’t make sense. It’s a superficially beguiling message, but one that undermines rather than supports the sacrifice of those who serve. As a combat veteran myself, I watch these developments with deep unease.

If the men in question had been junior soldiers, I might feel differently. But when the military gives you responsibility, it comes with the understanding that you can’t abandon it by blaming the stressors of combat. Because it’s in combat when your subordinates depend on you the most—when fear, fatigue, and anger threaten to take them off path, and when, lacking firm guidance, they are likely to blunder down a dangerous path. Among the squad leaders whom I sent into Karmah that day were a number who had earlier served with me as junior marines in the Battle of Fallujah, during a four-month period in which the same battalion had seen 45 marines killed, with another 250 wounded. None of them used that fact as an excuse to abuse prisoners or the local population—then or afterward. That doing so was forbidden was just understood.

Andrew Exum: How to really honor the troops

Just over 40 years before I addressed my marines in Karmah, another Charlie Company reacted very differently to the impact of fear and loss. On March 16, 1968, in the Vietnamese village of My Lai, U.S. soldiers killed between 347 and 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians and raped approximately 20 women and girls, some as young as 10 years old. In an article published in The New York Times on the 50th anniversary of the incident, Christopher J. Levesque illustrated that until that point, there was nothing remarkable about Company C, 1st Battalion 20th Infantry. Demographically, the soldiers who composed the company were an average representation of the U.S. Army, even slightly better educated than the norm in terms of high-school-graduation rates. They came from homes across America, cities and small towns and remote rural areas.