Continuing the literary realism of a war zone from earlier: This hard and brutal story during Irene’s turmoil this weekend.
An Army Ranger captain supposedly killed four people in two states, one a young boy, wounded a couple of cops during a firefight on a rainy Pennsylvania highway, and although was at-large, armed-and-dangerous for awhile, was later found dead from a gunshot wound.
Two of the victims were his ex-people — ex-wife, ex-mother-in-law.
Reportedly, he shot and killed the ex, her boyfriend and his son in Chesterfield County, Va., then drove through the heavy Irene rains to Buckingham, Pa., near Philadelphia, where supposedly he shot to death the mother of his ex-wife.
And while doing all this driving and shooting, he was also hauling around his own 6-year-old daughter in his truck.

A key note from the BBC:

Egland had served in the US Army for nearly two decades and had deployed numerous times to war zones, authorities said.
It was unclear what drove him to kill.

Apparently and actually, he’d been called upon to kill for way-too-long.

And one doesn’t readily forget Don Rumsfeld’s most-callous performance in December 2004:

Specialist Thomas Wilson, a scout with a Tennessee National Guard unit scheduled to roll into Iraq this week, said soldiers had to scrounge through local landfills here for pieces of rusty scrap metal and bulletproof glass — what they called “hillbilly armor” — to bolt on to their trucks for protection against roadside bombs in Iraq.
“Why don’t we have those resources readily available to us?” Specialist Wilson asked Mr. Rumsfeld, drawing cheers and applause from many of the 2,300 troops assembled in a cavernous hangar here to meet the secretary.
Mr. Rumsfeld responded that the military was producing extra armor for Humvees and trucks as fast as possible.
A few minutes later, a soldier from the Idaho National Guard’s 116th Armor Cavalry Brigade asked Mr. Rumsfeld what he and the Army were doing “to address shortages and antiquated equipment” National Guard soldiers heading to Iraq were struggling with.
Mr. Rumsfeld seemed taken aback by the question and a murmur began spreading through the ranks before he silenced them.
“Now settle down, settle down,” he said.
“Hell, I’m an old man, it’s early in the morning and I’m gathering my thoughts here.”
He said all organizations had equipment, materials and spare parts of different vintages, but he expressed confidence that Army leaders were assigning the newest and best equipment to the troops headed for combat who needed it most.
Nonetheless, he warned that equipment shortages would probably continue to bedevil some American forces entering combat zones like Iraq.
“You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time,” Mr. Rumsfeld said.

A war of choice based on fabricated evidence — Don really has some kind of un-mitigated gall, huh?.