We've all been there. Everyone remembers that mission. You and your partner are climbing up the mountains in the snow, striving to pull some slick clandestine operation about getting some intel on a bad guy, or something similar (because let's face it, all these MW games are a blur). You make your way silently through some buildings and you find yourself out on the flight line in the middle of a blizzard. There are MiG 29s all over the strip, and standing around them are the bad guys. Here's the part where you mindlessly move in for the kill. The quiet hiccups of your pistol and the wet smack of your blade are the only thing you hear as bad guy after bad guy is injected with a dose of freedom.

Now I want you to turn that around. See, in my time spent in the military, I found myself in a familiar position. I had all the guns, a lot of the gear, a lot of the training, and I was always ready to do what needed to be done to accomplish the mission, blizzard or not (I was in North Dakota, after all). Now you must think I'm claiming to be the same as some special forces badass, but again, I want you to turn it around. I am the poor guy standing by the airplane.

Nuclear security is a hell of a thing. Obviously, you need more than just sensors on the fences and cameras facing in every direction. There are no substitutes for boots on the ground. When its -70 degrees in the middle of a blizzard and your camera can't see beyond its sun shield, who do you send out to cover that area? That's right, you send standard bad guy number one. The poor guy walking blindly through the snow that stumbles into GI Joe and gets shot, stabbed, or broken, is me.

Now let's picture, say, Sniper Elite 3. You play as yet another American badass behind enemy lines pulling some slick clandestine operation about getting some intel on a bad guy/superweapon. Here you are, stalking forward through the bushes towards your vantage point. You bring up your rifle, range your target, make your sight corrections, and squeeze the trigger.

Again, let's look at this from another perspective. I am the guy sitting or standing in a guard tower. Again, Nuke Security is a hell of a thing. Obviously, you'll need guard towers. I've been posted up there for the last 13 hours, and I have a half an hour left on shift. The troop transport that was carrying the dayshift guys ran over a land mine on the way in, so now I have to stay up there longer. The dog pooped on the floor last night and I didn't have time to clean it up, so my wife will be mad when I get home, we don't have anything for dinner, my feet hurt, my back hurts, my eyes are tired, I hate this job, this gun sucks, I'm not even wearing my body armor, why do I need to be here? Nobody is attacking us. How could today get any worse?

Here you are, player one. Pulling the trigger and sending that round into that poor man's skull, as if it's a personal vendetta. The same scenario on the flight line, when you go out of your way to murder everyone because they're all the bad guys. Are they all bad guys, though? Likely not. In the same way that I hated sitting in a tower for 16 hours a day, or standing in front of a B52 all day long with sixty pounds of equipment on, these guys are there doing the same job. I'm not thinking about some spec-ops commando trying to get to my airplane. I'm thinking about how much longer I can wait before I piss in this monster can and then eat my still frozen in the middle Chef Boyardee can of ravioli.

Think about that next time you attack some soldiers in some foreign country from the comfort of your couch. Don't kill them with patriotism and joy. End them swiftly, out of mercy. If the dead could talk, they would thank you for it.