To the Editor:

I ’m a Marine who was on active duty from 1966 to 1968. To me the worst thing President Trump has done, worse than his constant lying, lawbreaking and advocacy of cruelty and exclusion, is intervening on behalf of a Navy SEAL convicted of exulting over a dead prisoner whom he may have killed. Our military, like most in the West, has committed war crimes, but hitherto it has tried to own up to it, to try servicemen and women accused of war crimes and punish those convicted, as it did those who waterboarded Filipinos during the Philippine-American War early in the 20th century and those who massacred civilians in Vietnam.

Now the man in overall command of the forces helps a convicted war criminal, saves his rank and has the secretary of the Navy fired for defending our Uniform Code of Military Justice. To me that’s inexcusable.

William R. Everdell

Brooklyn

To the Editor:

Re “The Moral Injury of Pardoning War Crimes” (editorial, Nov. 24):

The obvious way to avoid war-induced moral injury is not to engage in immoral wars in the first place, nor to glorify militarism run amok. But go to war we do, and President Trump is not the first to excuse inexcusable killing. The moral injury that results, however, is not so much a bruise on the soul, as a scar on the soul, which doesn’t go away. Nor should it.

Painful as it is, soldiers need to come to terms with their actions, as do the nations that send them to war, and more than treatment, what’s required is atonement.

In researching soldiers who came to oppose war, I’ve talked with scores of veterans of wars from Vietnam to the present, most of whom have some form of a moral injury. They atone by working to end wars.