A future officer wrote:"All my life all I have wanted to do was lead men in battle and kill people. "
Now, and I am addressing this to him, first you had spoken about killing the enemy; someone commented on that as dehumanizing, you bought it and now try to be correct in wanting to kill people. Yet again you are dehumanizing.
Do you want to kill civilians? Do you want to kill only those you must or just any one person will do?
It seemed more reasonable that you dreamed of killing “the enemy” because our fantasies involve such clear cut distinctions of good/evil, little in-between. The crimes of war consist in killing people rather than killing legitimate targets, such as those wearing an AK-47 pointed at your position.
My counsel to you is in investigating this. If it is that you dream of killing women and children and men, collectively understood as “people”, then you should not go on with your enterprise.
It is the same advise I would give to a football player who did not know how to stop once the whistle blew or was as prone to takle his own team-mate as quickly as the other team’s players, simply because he dreamed all his life about “tackling people”.