host

You may be someone who is perceptive enough to sort out correctly what is happening, as far as who the aggressor(s) is in the scenario you described, quickly (assuming that you come on scene at an opportune time that is early enough in the sequence of events to afford you time to make and act on reasonable assumptions), and then to control your projection of force in a way that avoids shooting both the perp and the victim.

Consider that police have trouble doing that.....plain clothes officers are sometimes mistakenly shot by uniformed colleagues. Consider that police are trained to police, and to prudently and minimally resort to firearm use.

I may be mistaken, but I assume that your military training was more similar to my stepson's military combat training. At his graduation from a 16 week, enhanced basic training course, his commander described the company of graduates as your former civilian sons and daughters who have been trained to kill. We relearned in post invasion Iraq that combat troops are ill suited for policing duties.

The boot camp graduation description of my stepson's company...civilians transformed into trained killers, actually triggered speculation as to what the military experience does to a person who later tries to transition back to civilian life. Police officers, who receive less intense training than combat troops, have statistically higher rates of divorce, domestic difficulties, than the general population and they tend to lose most former friends who are not employed in law enforcement.

My impression is that you cannot conceive of an outcome where you decided it was appropriate to insert yourself and your firearm into an altercation in progress, where the result was that you did more harm than good, as far as the wellbeing of whoever you perceived was being victimized.

My stepson is now part of an elite military combat unit. I see how three years in the military has changed him. Most likely, he is on the cusp of experiencing a combat environment. Even without that experience, I expect that he has changed to the point that he will have difficulty transitioning unevently back into civilian life. Somebody has to serve in the capacities that you and my stepson chose to serve in. With no intent to detract in any way from the contribution you have made by your service, for all of our benefit, I have to wonder if the military does all that it ought to do to help "debrief" the intesity of the aggressive "mindset" that it intentionally instills in the folks that it transforms and refines into soldiers.

It might be fairer to you if the military trained you to "stand down" around the time of seperation from service, with the same enthusiasm and knowhow that it trained you to "stand up". I don't recognize a commitment to potentially be your "protector". It is a burden for police officers to have that responsibility, it takes a toll on their personal lives, and they get paid to do it.

If a consequence of their work is that they always have a sense that they are "on the job", it isn't fair to them, or to the people who try to love them.
If your service training has left you with that sense of yourself, that isn't fair to you either, IMO. I suspect that the military could be of greater assistance, if it wanted to. They may have decided that it is to their potential advantage, to send you back into civilian life, along with the thinking that you described above. It's slick of them if they imparted that thinking in you, knowing from their collective experience that most former soldiers never recognize it as a burden that amounts to a post service, quality of life issue.