American soldiers have long faced unlawful orders. They need courage and our support to resist.

White and Native American men gather at the Camp Weld peace conference in September 1864. Kneeling at front right is Silas Soule, the cavalry captain who would later stand his men down at the Sand Creek Massacre. In the middle row, third from left, is Chief Black Kettle, whose village was destroyed at Sand Creek by Major John Chivington. (Photo from University of Denver)

When the attack came, Black Kettle believed it must have been a mistake. The old chief gathered a 33-star United States flag that had been given to him a few years before as a sign of friendship with the federal government and, along with a white flag, hoisted them above his tipi.

But the dawn attack on the Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment at Big Sandy Creek on the cold and snowy high plains of eastern Colorado was no mistake, as would be testified to later at an Army inquiry and a Congressional investigation. The intent of Col. John M. Chivington, commanding more than 700 Union troops that day, was slaughter.

“I long to be wading in gore,” Chivington had declared just days before.

We know what happened next that day from the Army’s perspective largely because of one man, a 26-year-old captain named Silas Soule who refused an unlawful order and stood down his cavalry company while the rest engaged in carnage and worse.

The question of resisting illegal orders becomes a flash point in American politics every generation or so — just think of the My Lai Massacre of 1968 — and it comes today because of revelations about the Trump administration’s boat strikes in international waters. As first reported by The Washington Post, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s spoken order directing the first boat attack was “kill them all.” When two survivors were seen clinging to burning wreckage, missiles were launched to kill them, too.

It is a war crime to kill shipwrecked combatants under the international laws of war, as understood by the U.S. military. The situation is further compounded because no war has been declared in the action that has killed more than 80 individuals alleged to have been drug traffickers, without any evidence given to Congress or the public.

In addition, six Democratic lawmakers, all with prior service, are under investigation by Trump’s FBI for recording a video reminding service members they have a duty to refuse unlawful orders. The video doesn’t mention the boat strikes, but it doesn’t have to.

What is sickening about the threads that runs through Sand Creek, My Lai, and the supposed drug boat strikes, is the inherent racism and coordinated cruelty. In each case, the U.S. military targeted non-white groups of civilians. After annihilating them with superior firepower, their villages were burned to the ground or their boats turned into flotsam, all without trial. But in the cases of Sand Creek and My Lai, there were service members who resisted.

At Sand Creek, it was Silas Soule.

On March 16, 1968, it was 25-year-old helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr. who flew over My Lai and noted the bodies of women and children in an irrigation ditch. He landed and asked Lt. William Calley what was going on.

“Just following orders,” Calley replied.

“Orders? Whose orders?”

“Just following …”

“But these are human beings,” Thompson argued, “unarmed civilians, sir.”

Thompson and his crew got back into their chopper. Those still alive in the ditch were being executed and some of the women raped. At the edge of the village, he spotted soldiers going after about 10 villagers who were running for a bomb shelter. Realizing he was about to witness murder, Thompson landed his helicopter between the soldiers and the villagers. His intervention ended the massacre.

Thompson reported the atrocities to superiors, but his complaints were ignored until news of the massacre broke in the American press. There is no official count of the dead at My Lai, but estimates place the number between 300 and 500. Calley was eventually tried in 1970 and convicted of 22 murders. Calley was one of 25 charged in the case, but the only one convicted.

The Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site stretched out before a photographer in 2016. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)

The Sand Creek Massacre of Nov. 29, 1864, is among the darkest chapters in American history, in which hundreds of Indigenous people — mostly women and children — were slaughtered as retribution for the murder of a family of white settlers at their cabin on Box Elder Creek, more than 100 miles to the northwest. It was assumed they had been killed by an Arapaho raiding party. The mutilated bodies of the four Hungates had been exhumed and put on display in downtown Denver, whipping the city into hysteria. But there was no conclusive evidence that linked the attack to the Arapahos or any other first nation.

In winter 1864, the Civil War was winding down in the states — Colorado was still a frontier territory — and what would come to be known as the Plains Indian Wars was just getting started. Territorial Gov. John Evans had placed Chivington in command of an Indian-fighting regiment, one mostly composed of soldiers who had enlisted for just 100 days and others who were in volunteer companies who had fought the confederates at Glorietta Pass in New Mexico Territory and elsewhere.

Silas Soule was born in Maine and was a radical abolitionist, like his parents. The family came to Lawrence in Kansas Territory in October 1855, settling into a cabin along Coal Creek. Silas became a friend of John Brown and was among the “Immortal Ten” who freed an operator of the Underground Railroad from a Missouri jail.

Silas had sought his fortune during the Pikes Peak gold rush, but at the start of the Civil War he enlisted in a Colorado infantry company. He saw action in New Mexico Territory against the Confederates, including the 1862 battle at Glorieta Pass. By 1864, Soule was captain of a cavalry company assigned to Fort Lyon on the Santa Fe Trail. With his commanding officer, Maj. Edward Wynkoop, he attended several significant peace talks with Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders, including one at Camp Weld at Denver with Black Kettle.

Black Kettle was a leading advocate for peace for his people.

“All we ask is that we have peace with the white,” he said during the Camp Weld Conference, according to the National Park Service page about his life. “We want to hold you by the hand.”

The Cheyenne and other nations were feeling the pressure from white settlement, were buffeted by the volatility of the Civil War, and faced a scarcity of food on the barren lands to which they were increasingly confined. The new reserve at Big Sandy Creek offered a meager bounty. Some of the First Peoples had turned to cattle theft to keep from starving, while others engaged in a shooting war and sometimes took white hostages. There were scores of dead on both sides.

In late November 1864, Chivington — who wanted a victory against the Indians to launch a political career — decided to attack the encampment at Big Sandy Creek. Black Kettle thought the camp was safe from attack because he had reported to Fort Lyon and had been told to return to his camp to await an official delegation.

Chivington, the “fighting parson,” had been a Methodist missionary in Kansas and Nebraska but allowed his men to drink heavily the night before the attack. Along the way, he had posted guards at farms and outposts to prevent anyone from warning Black Kettle. He also had a heated argument with Soule, who said he thought the encampment of Cheyenne and Arapaho were not preparing for war.

“Any man that would take part in the murders, knowing the circumstances as we do, is a low-lived cowardly son of a bitch,” Soule said.

Chivington accused Soule of inciting mutiny and threatened to have him hanged. During the attack, Soule refused to take part and led his company of about 100 men a distance away, across the creek.

Barking dogs alerted the village of Chivington’s approach.

Chivington’s troops circled the village and separated the inhabitants from their pony herds. He then fired withering volleys of grape shot from his quartet of 12-pounder mountain howitzers. Then for the next eight hours — using artillery, rifles, pistols, hatchets and knives — his troops slaughtered hundreds of men, women and children.

Soule may not have interfered because his company was outnumbered by Chivington’s men 6 to 1.

There is no definitive count of the dead, but estimates range from 150 to 600. The National Park Service places the number at 230. Some warriors resisted the onslaught, but most of those in the encampment ran for their lives, seeking refuge in crevices along the banks of the Big Sandy or farther out on the plains. Others fled down the creek and dug sand pits for protection. They were blasted with more cannon fire.

Some of Chivington’s men raped the village women, killed babies, and mutilated bodies. Chivington had illegally ordered his men to take scalps, but a few also hacked genitalia from their female victims as trophies and later displayed them in Denver.

“When the Indians found there was no hope for them they went for the Creek and got under the banks and some of the (men) got their bows and a few rifles and defended themselves as well as they could,” Soule would later write his friend, Wynkoop. “By this time there was no organization among our troops. They were a perfect mob — every man on his own hook. My (company) was the only one that kept their formation, and we did not fire a shot.”

He described some of the atrocities that followed.

“I tell you, Ned, it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized,” he wrote. “One (woman) was wounded a fellow took a hatchet to finish her, and he cut one arm off, and held the other with one hand and dashed the hatchet through her brain. One squaw with her two children, were on their knees, begging for the lives … the (mother) took a knife and cut the throats of both children and then killed herself.”

Although the killings were initially reported as a victory in Denver, reports of a massacre began to circulate. Investigations were launched, and Soule was the star witness. Chivington claimed the village was hostile and that the sand pits were actually pre-dug rifle pits, but the evidence was overwhelmingly against him. Although Chivington was condemned by a military justice panel, no charges were brought — against him or anyone else.

Black Kettle survived the massacre, as did his wife Medicine Woman Later, who was wounded nine times. Both were shot to death four years later by Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Washita River near present-day Cheyenne, Oklahoma. It should be noted that the Cheyenne and Arapaho have their own histories of Sand Creek, which differ in significant ways from the predominantly white military narrative. I referred to some of these accounts in a chapter in my 2018 University Press of Kansas book, “Elevations.”

Soule lived only a few months after Sand Creek. He was killed by an assassin outside his Denver home on April 23, 1865.

Soule and Thompson have been called heroes, but the term falls short. They had courage, either to stand down or to stand up, but to describe their actions as heroic fails the element of basic human decency behind their decisions. They did what a rational person, familiar with American law and military custom, should do in similar circumstances. They were citizens, sworn to the U.S. Constitution, and beholden to an ideal instead of a commander. War is an awful business, fraught with moral ambiguity, but atrocities like Sand Creek and My Lai present a bright clear line of duty and conscience.

Seldom has that line been so apparent, and crossed so flagrantly as in the current boat attacks.

Assuming the boats were transporting drugs — and again, there has been no evidence presented to support that claim — the military should not be used as an execution force at the whim of politicians. We are not engaged in a war with drug traffickers. Annihilating a boat in the Caribbean is not the same as sending Seal Team 6 to kill Osama bin Laden, who personally directed the hijackers responsible the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The continuing drug boat executions is contrary to the ideals of American democracy, military code and international law. But this time the atrocities are coming not from commanders on the ground but from the very top, the secretary of defense. In doing so, Hegseth displays a chilling embrace of killing civilians for political capital. His disproportionate use of power is the point.

A recent closed-door viewing by lawmakers of video from the Sept. 2 “double tap” strike that killed the shipwrecked survivors raised new questions, according to reporting by The New York Times. The men were monitored for up to an hour before the second attack, clinging to the bow of their capsized boat and trying in vain to right it. They were also seen in the video waving, although it wasn’t clear whether they were trying to summon help or ward off another attack.

Adm. Mitch Bradley, the operation’s commander, reportedly told lawmakers in the closed session that Hegseth hadn’t issued a “no quarter” order when it came to survivors. Trump administration explanations for the second strike have ranged from sinking the boat so it wouldn’t be a navigation hazard to stopping the men from recovering floating bales of drugs and continuing their mission.

But eliminating witnesses to the murders of other civilians might be the real motive. Somebody, somewhere, should have had the guts to try to stop this atrocity.

What allowed Soule and Thompson and others unknown to make the difficult choice to place themselves in physical and political jeopardy was a belief in the limits of force. These men were not pacifists. But they understood the civic sin of indiscriminate killing and wanton slaughter. In this, they separated themselves — and us — from those whose only excuse was that they were just following orders.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.