This is unlikely to be true in many, if not most cases. But a lot of the proposal’s appeal derives from the emotional correction it seems to provide to what many of Trump’s supporters believe (as do I, for that matter) to be the overly restrictive rules of engagement imposed by the Obama administration. Moreover, it’s easy for Trump supporters to blur the lines regarding what their candidate is actually proposing. War is hell, after all, and families do get killed. But calling for the specific targeting of the families—women and children, after all—of combatants by way of retribution or deterrence is to destroy the ethical line that separates the American military from the terrorists.

The fact that the call came from a man who did everything he could to avoid military service himself during Vietnam only heightens its outrageousness. If Trump had served, maybe he would have understood that troops not only can refuse to follow illegal orders—they must refuse to follow illegal orders, or they will very likely be headed to prison themselves. Trump didn’t walk back his position because he decided he was in the wrong, but because the leaders of the U.S. military were likely going to publicly embarrass him by making this fact clear.

I have the unhappy distinction, as do many other veterans, of having looked upon the bodies of women and children who were inadvertently killed in exchanges between my Marines and insurgents. There is little that is worse. The notion that a presidential candidate would publicly advocate dispatching troops specifically to murder noncombatant family members, on the pretext that “they must have known,” is repulsive, un-American, disqualifying—and shouldn’t be forgotten just because the candidate was grudgingly forced to walk it back.