Shoes of innocent Holocaust victims on exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

The shoes. What I will never forget are the shoes. The piles and piles of dusty old shoes are the visceral images seared in my mind from my initial military indoctrination. They smell like old clothes kept in your grandmother’s attic for years. Up close, you can see that some are clearly from children, and others are from adult women and men. There are shoes of every size. These are clearly not military-issued uniform shoes. These are what remains of the genocide of millions of innocent civilians. As the poem on the wall reads, “We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses…” to one of the worst atrocities in human history.

In the summer of 1995, I was a plebe aspiring to become a U.S. Naval Officer. Our seasoned instructors took us on an unforgettable field trip to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. We saw clearly the horrors of a war perpetrated by Nazi Germany without warrior ethics. It was meant to be prophylactic for us — a heavy dose of preventative medicine that would embolden us to keep something like this from ever happening again.

In a more dramatic version of this immersive experience, U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower (who later became President) made a point of personally going to see the Nazi concentration camps and war crimes with his own eyes. He wisely brought cameramen and reporters with him to interview survivors and document the atrocities. Upon his return, he famously wrote:

I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda’.

In our ethics and leadership studies at Annapolis, we engaged in frequent character development discussions to establish a true north for our moral compasses. We knew that one day we might face tough decisions under the stress and uncertainty of combat and still need to do the right thing, especially when it is the hardest decision to make. I remember distinctly studying the Mỹ Lai massacre from the Vietnam War and the war crimes committed by U.S. Army Lieutenant William Calley and his soldiers. Calley was convicted of 22 counts of premeditated murder and ordered his men to destroy an entire village full of innocent people (estimated 300–500 deaths), which included the gang rape and mutilation of several women and children before they were killed. This was a horrendous crime. A crime where no shred of a warrior code was followed. I was equally appalled when I learned President Nixon commuted Calley’s sentence from life in prison to just three years in house arrest. This was dishonor piled on top of dishonor. The U.S. should still be ashamed of the Mỹ Lai massacre— both the horrendous war crimes and the lack of consequences for those who committed them. It is a lesson we should never forget.

The U.S. has not had a spotless record on war crimes since the Vietnam War — from enemy prisoner torture to intentionally killing innocent civilians, we have committed some reprehensible acts. We have even had some recent Presidential pardons, against the advice of senior military leaders, of disgraced U.S. servicemen who admitted to committing war crimes. Former Marine Corps commandant, retired General Charles Krulak wrote that this leniency by our then Commander-In-Chief “relinquishes the United States’ moral high ground…Disregard for the law undermines our national security by reducing combat effectiveness, increasing the risks to our troops, hindering cooperation with allies, alienating populations whose support the United States needs in the struggle against terrorism, and providing a propaganda tool for extremists who wish to do us harm.” The U.S. should be in constant pursuit of the moral high ground, especially right now.

The overwhelming majority of our servicemen and women live by the code of the warrior and detest those who would dishonor us with their heinous acts. For example, on the first day of the war in Iraq in 2003, my team and I were responsible for 131 Iraqi prisoners of war. Some of them had surrendered to us and some of them we captured during a firefight. We fed them, gave them water to drink, provided medical attention to those who needed it, and we interrogated their senior officers which led to valuable intelligence. The only torture these men experienced was at the hands of their own regime. Many of them had the scars to prove it. We didn’t even have enough zip ties to put them all in handcuffs. So, we had a Marine infantry squad set up a perimeter to guard them.

Several days into the ground war, a news reporter flew in and asked to interview someone responsible for interrogating enemy prisoners of war. The battalion commander asked me to take the interview. This conversation bothered me so much that I wrote about it in an LA Times OpEd in 2006, Fire From the Home Front:

“During an interview with an American journalist, he charged that our military’s supposed inhumane treatment of Iraqi prisoners had undercut any justification for the war. In response, I told him how I had personally protected hundreds of captured Iraqis who had been tortured under Hussein’s regime and faced retaliation from insurgents. When I then showed him the copy of the Geneva Convention that I carried in my cargo pocket, he ended our conversation.”

While the U.S. has a far from perfect record when it comes to war crimes, we do have a long history of highly honorable service and sacrifice against the forces of evil. Most of our warriors do the right thing most of the time. Doing the right thing now means stopping the systematic Russian military massacre of innocent Ukrainian civilians. As Ukrainian troops recently retook the suburbs of Kiev, the evidence of Russian war crimes and genocide is widespread and apparent. Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said Sunday:

This is a special appeal aimed at drawing the world’s attention to those war crimes, crimes against humanity, which were committed by Russian troops in Bucha, Irpin and Hostomel. These are liberated cities, a picture from horror movies, a post-apocalyptic picture. Victims of these war crimes have already been found, including raped women who they tried to burn, local government officials killed, children killed, elderly people killed, men killed, many of them with tied hands, traces of torture and shot in the back of the head. Robberies, attempts to take gold, valuables, carpets, washing machines. It, of course, will be taken into account by the Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine and law enforcement agencies and international criminal courts.

Right now, as the whole world sees this, “we are the shoes, we are the last witnesses.” According to the mayor of Bucha, they have uncovered a mass grave that has nearly 300 people in it and the streets are littered with civilians handcuffed and killed execution-style with a bullet to the back of the head. Like Eisenhower’s prescient quote, the Russian government is claiming that the hard evidence of these atrocities is fake and Ukrainian propaganda. Tell that to the family of the pregnant woman who died outside of the maternity and children’s hospital that was intentionally bombed in Mariupol. Tell that to the families of the estimated 300 civilians killed in the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater that was marked “children” from above so it wouldn’t be targeted. The Russians bombed it anyway. In my combat experience, I made several extremely tough decisions regarding what targets to engage and how to engage them. I was constantly thinking about taking the fight and overwhelming force to the enemy while minimizing, to the greatest extent possible, damage to civilians. This is the code of the warrior.

Putin is no warrior. Putin has no honor code. Everyone continues to speculate about his end game. We know what Putin’s end game is — he wants his legacy to be the reunification of the Russian Empire and he is willing to commit genocide to get it. Have no doubt that an agreement with Putin, just like the Budapest Memorandum, will be violated by him the day it is signed. What does a neutral Ukraine even mean? Ukraine stands for freedom and the fight against oppression. We need to urgently ask ourselves, what is the end game of the liberal democracies of the world? What do the U.S. and Europe want the history books to say about what we did or did not do in Ukraine — the new frontline of freedom? Imagine, after killing thousands of innocent people, Putin settles for some foothold territories in Ukraine. Then what? Do you believe he will stop there? No. Should Russia stay on the UN Security Council? No. The G20? No. Should we relax sanctions? No. Is there any peace in this world with Putin still in it? No. If history has taught us anything, the path of appeasement is paved with countless lost souls. What are we willing to do, right now, to keep from filling another exhibit full of shoes?