He is freaking out because he was forced to kill someone. I don’t know a single cop who was forced to kill someone who did not pay a heavy emotional toll. And I know several. It’s easy to talk about what one would do in such situations, it’s another thing to actually kill someone. And as a former prosecutor, I made the very difficult decision on more than one occasion to seek the death penalty. It was a horribly difficult decision. More so to ask a jury to give it, then worst of all, going and witnessing it carried out. Knowing I had a hand in taking a life. Making the decision to take a human life isn’t easy and it is emotionally devastating. I grieved for that officer. And I know he will struggle with this for a long time. I want that type of cop. Not the trigger happy kind.
In sixties, I met somebody, who in WWII was manning some post in Ardennes. There was a German soldier approaching.
He shot, German felt into the snow. He never figured out what happened to this German.
From the way he volunteered to tell me the story, I was sure, this soldier (20 years later) was still haunted by it!