He was permanently deafened by a gun being deliberately fired within inches of his ear.

In order to make the training more effective, he was deliberately led to believe that his torturers had gone "rogue" and were really interested in causing him real harm, not just simulating threatening him with it. The shooting was an attempt to convince him his captors were covering up the excesses of his brutalization by faking an accident that would eliminate the only witness. The idea is to familiarize the trainee with the feeling of helplessness and panic which demoralizes the POW.

His opinion is different. Speaking of his captors, he believes that kind of work tends to attract psychopathic personalities, and tends to reinforce psychopathy in those prone to it. He also is convinced that healthy personalities will quickly find another line of work to get into.

I make no moralistic judgement here. War forces all involved to do horrible things, including the killing of what are probably perfectly decent individuals who you have never met and who have no quarrel with you, simply because they wear a different uniform, or because they are merely in suspected physical proximity to those who do.

There is no real difference between running a teenager through with a bayonet face-to-face and loading an artillery piece which kills him from twenty miles away. For that matter, there is no difference between the gunner and the civilian machinist who helped build his cannon.

I am not a pacifist, but I try to never forget that. Rightly or wrongly, I have convinced myself it helps preserve my humanity. I believe people like Dick Cheney never even made the effort. I can tell by the sneers on their faces.