This is sad.

It's perhaps partially reassuring that some soldiers were sufficiently disturbed by an order to kill three-year olds that they spoke to newspapers about this. That deploying an army inevitably loosens psychopaths with guns on an innocent world needs to be reckoned among costs of military action. In the first reports, the speechless victim is always victimized. In this case, we might have been led to think that this girl had to be shot because she may have been carrying explosives. No, it turns out she was running away. And she was carrying schoolbooks. In real life, unlike in literature where writers are encouraged to practice restraint, the irony's mawkish.