here in the russian capital you're watching. the headlines now for the first lap of egypt's parliamentary poll sees the highest turnout ever i want to haze of uncertainty still hold those over the election. slowed. again as the u.n. human rights council passes a motion condemning violence in syria russia saying the report does not give the full picture and is. no way out germany's.

europe's debt crisis is here to stay as leaders on yet another minute deal. and a legal loophole in the u.k. thousands of foreign criminals to stay in the country convicted. paedophiles use it to escape punishment. next to a nazi it is our special report on the tough decisions a soldier sometimes has to make the life and death the moral dilemma of shooting to kill that's coming up and soldiers of conscience. thought. oh the upper good reason why i joined the army. i mean easy for my recruiter i say i want to shoot

a machine going to jump out of a plane right here. i was raised on american pie i was a cradle conservative i was voted most likely to succeed most conservative when nickname among a lot of my friends was g.i. josh and i wanted to defend my country and i tried to listen to marines or that a high school that hurt playing football so join the national guard and then end up going to west point and being a commissioned officer. put it bluntly i'm a patriotic son of a gun i love this country it's done some great things for me about some great opportunities both my grandfathers fought in world war one my father fought a war to head off of the far korea because it was the fall in vietnam or so there's been a family member in the military since there's been a country. at

some point every soldier has to face the question well i be able to kill another human being conduct. this film is about killing in war and about some u.s. soldiers who have chosen not to. the evidence is that far more soldiers refused to kill than we might expect. in world war two research by the official u.s. army historian brigadier general s.l.a. marshall revealed that among the u.s. soldiers in combat less than twenty five percent actually fired their weapons

at the enemy. even with their own lives at risk seventy five percent did not try to kill the enemy marshall wrote the average individual still has such an inner resistance toward killing a fellow man that he will not take a life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility. at the vital point he becomes a conscientious objector. what

is your duty as a soldier as a human being or do you want to live with. you have to ask yourself and was situations would kill and be right. it's just not something you can put behind it stays with the you carry it in your heart. people are shots by how upsetting it is to kill another human being. it's not that soldiers are somehow different where it's not hard to kill. soldiers to kill. only because they've been trained to do that her. father and her father was here for your father.

and after her words are you sure. sure you was abu bakr r. i was . going to write right white right here. part. no wonder bullets start flying about about god a country like that it's about the man right next to you left in your right and that's about it. was. you know what it's what they know some people do they cope with it differently than i do. it all that they don't talk about what they did over there with a wife and probably the only time we get drunk.

i told my wife what i did oh yeah. cause i got your but it just happened sometimes you just have to let it out. again here thank you. thank you. for you today do you know i know more than money. well i was older than. me i thought i had to go to a ten year old boy over there. grenades in my squad if you do that grenada would have been maybe five or six maybe tire

squad would have been killed or wounded or just one kid and that's something that's something that you know that i made that decision because i was the person in charge at that time and i got no regrets about it but look at back at it though it's like the demons come back. that's. the. i'm not saying we're all we are doing the right thing over there. is just people just don't understand what it's like to be you. know we recruit people to serve their country and to kill we train them how to kill

we as officers develop the orders for them to kill. given awards or pats on the back a lot of times or you know credit them for being effective fighters and killers but we never explain to them why it's ok so that when they do what they've been trained so well to do they can be at peace with their consciences for the rest of their lives. as anyone heard of s.l.a. marshall man against far as only a marshal was the army's first real the story he was the head of the history department for world war two one thing he noticed is that in most units only one in four people tried to kill the enemy. most people at the point of looking down in time to pull the trigger became conscientious objectors and there was a lot of once we reported that it was a lot of people coming out saying yeah you know that was my experience i just

couldn't kill. so the army decided well that's not good so the army said ok how do we help them overcome this. and they said let's condition people so the idea is reflexive fire training. or some other torn apart. and just conditioning conditioning conditioning charge to come out of each. cave shooting sure to. do. what they want people to do if they're so trained they just. dead right where is the next target and that's good it becomes muscle memory you don't think about it you just do it. and you raise an issue as fast as you can. so. firing rates went up like fifty to sixty percent during the korean war as they introduce is not a training eighty five to ninety percent in the vietnam war and i haven't seen any

numbers on the current war but i've talked to a whole lot of somebody who has two leaders and people say. people are more lethal than they ever imagined. i own. the problem with reflexive fire training is does bypass their moral decision making process so as in previous wars before we had this kind of training a soldier would look at a target and think through you know thinking through should i shoot this person ok now i'm going to shoot all that takes time that's dangerous. when you train a reflexive lee they learn to make those decisions much more quickly but the price of that is they're not thinking through the great moral decision of killing another human being.

we sleep comfortably in our beds at night because a violent men do violence on our behalf when i first read that i thought to myself i'm the person who allows people to sleep comfortably in their beds at night but i haven't actually gone to do the violence yet. i grew up in an evangelical household an evangelical christian household i grew up hearing stories about the nobility of service. and war is not fought by or for ideas it is fought by individual persons who possess human will.

liberty and democracy were not necessarily in the forefront of my mind i was first told to lock and load my m. sixteen. i was the only person to raise my hands when the convoy commander asked who's never done this before. looked me in the eyes and he said. when you hear selector lever from say the semi you're shooting to kill. i stuck my m. sixteen of the bed a two ton truck. i was thinking about what's my field of fire. who's on the side of the road. who's that moving on top of a building. i was acting on instinct which is usually the mode that soldiers go into when they enter a combat zone. and

for a kid who grew up in evangelical christianity as much as we might be patriotic there's something doesn't quite sit right. i was thinking about the stories in sunday school of the gentle jesus in the gospels that says if a man strikes you on the left cheek turn him also your right. had started to ask questions about redemption. what would it look like if that same determination that's used to defeat the enemy is used to redeem the enemy.

the nine eleven happened. i had to act. i focused on duty. i focused on the job at hand. and. the following summer i started training in the art of interrogation. and i was pretty good at. hand. is never killed anyone but i've talked with

a lot of people who have in the profession where that's a regular part of business right now and i decided i really want to understand this better. but one of the things i did then to try to just get new ideas was i put aquarian to army magazine and i wrote and said if you've killed anyone in war in combat i would be very interested to hear how you justify it oh responses they got half or more amen someone these are we talking about this this is great that nasir is talking about it and the other half or what the hellcat don't have anything more to do how dare you question the morality of what we're doing and we don't talk about it it's a taboo topic soldiers that sort of their inner pain very often that they live with this person who wrote is a vietnam veteran who talked about he said the three fears that were in our twenty year old minds back then in the jungle one will i be able to stand up to combat

when the bullets fly too will i survive but he mentions a third one and he described this fear as now that i've been to the heart of darkness and done things that i supreme leader regret well i ever again be the person that i used to like. and he said this turns out to be the hardest question and it may go on and on answered for the rest of our lives. we share this story says thirty five years after a life changing experience. still looking for a way i think to to make sense of the experience of killing on behalf of all of us on behalf of this country so. we're not going to go back. what.

do you know. when you're out there in the middle of combat sometimes. kill or be q. some people when you get into the first. and you actually. all kill someone it's mess with the head and they start having mixed feelings about being in the situation and that causes them the stress to start building up and then it's just like shaking up a pop bottle which is just keep keep building and keep building. just. when i talk to my family about yes hey have you ever took in one life before and you say yes i take it one life one and it would escape the subject. like yeah that's a tragedy but they really don't want to hear. no one really wants to take

anyone's life sometimes it can be prevented. sometimes you go look it's either me or that person. duty honor country. and stand up there and you supported defend the constitution to me that's exactly what i mean you're going to protect the ideals that founded your country

freedom. i was in or in a persian gulf war but i wasn't a ploy to the war. so i kind of felt like i had and fulfill my obligation so a realist and in june of two thousand. in march two thousand and three i was deployed to iraq. this is a dozen different places where i was while i was over there some of them were in kuwait before we crossed in iraq and some of them were after we were there. my father who fall in world war two he tried to tell me or is not as glamorous as they make it out to be. but i was too stubborn and bullheaded to

listen. and i really found out i saw it more than i ever wanted to see. it when i was. i don't know that i can describe you know. it's hard it's hard to put it in words. oh don't. come off on your time we got to know our process. so i get grilled how i'm going to get a letter. just just have

a secret. to mine is like you know except. people are not going to tell. me. you're coming back in history. books with mine down straight they will come back that's what i'm going to decide i'll most likely get back to. you seeing how war affects the civilians that are in the area. you know every house you look as god. you know writers and are full of holes in it. and just in general how it affects people. how it makes them put all their humanity aside or to be able to survive in a war zone. and then you see

the did the injured. you stand at that mass graves and you smell the decomposing bodies that are there. you see the young girl that stands along the side of the road where there are third degree burns and you want to help her but you can't do it because you're in the middle of a war and you see all that stuff and you see how it affects you and you see how it affects everyone around you and you just say you know what why are we even doing that anymore. we'll have a conscience we'll have you know a sense between but tell us is between right and wrong. when i joined the military i was nineteen and i'll say ok so if when that going to war it's going to be for

good cos you know if we end up going to war is going to be to bring freedom to other lands. and we started gearing up to put iraq. it was a war that i opposed politically but not very personally. i went to iraq thinking that i could push my principles aside and then get the world or with put it behind me move on. but. nothing ever burst your for the reality of war. broke up. with go back to. that give it up push. love to. get a good. job with. let's go with what is one of the goal of a long list of. nothing arab affairs you for

going to iraq and seen the destruction of an entire nation nothing ever prepares you for. you know the unmeasured killing of civilians. nothing ever prepares you for what the dustiest a human being you know to kill an innocent person. nothing's going to really prepare you for the level of destruction that you bring upon a nation and that you bring on yourself from being a part of it. and yet i have i have a conscience you know which goes way beyond any law it goes way beyond any order that i can receive.

but. i don't care how old you get if you're in this environment firing these weapons it's fun it's to be honest with you. to fifty caliber machine gun it's a very very very effective weapon it's got a range of eight hundred meters. it'll blow holes through walls. personnel wise you don't have a chance of if you're hit by a bullet from this weapon there's it's devastating it's pretty gruesome actually. you saw it. yesterday. so. there's no civilian job that compares to a fisherman but you're training not to kill people. i have absolutely no hesitation about it it's just what i'm with what i do it's my job how do i feel afterwards it's. you know hey. i look at it like this the people on the underside are soldiers

too and soldiers do what soldiers do and they're trying to kill us we're trying to kill them and that's just the ugly face to war. as russians pick for parliament who are the main contenders in the race for duma seats party leader vladimir putin he swapped seats with dmitri medvedev in two thousand and eight and may do so again in twenty twelve after midday to propose putin for the presidency current campaign slogan future is dos priorities modernization tackling inequality fighting corruption maximizing russia's impact in international affairs criticized as a monolith that's too slow to react to social change the world for being home to the tons of law to be a putin and dmitri medvedev wanted russia election two thousand and eleven on

party.