I think that your response is an interesting one, particularly when you mention this:

The only takeaway I got from it was something I'm still working out for myself, which is the foray many veterans took into the darker side of human nature. It's one thing to be the victim of malice and sadism and a whole other to grab the reins and enjoy doing it.

which for me, runs alongside this line from the article:

We may have had a later start in life on our formal education, but our real world knowledge runs deep.

The thing of it is, that military or not, "college age" is about the age when people head out into the "real world" and have brushes with that darker side of humanity. I'd also say to the writer that "real world" is a strange term to use, since the majority of "the real world" does not exist in war. In fact, war is a very special circumstance where social norms, values and mores are suspended to make way for all kinds of behaviors.

I've never been a part of the military, but from the outside, human beings doing awful things to each other is somewhat expected. It's not ok, but I can see how it would happen. Give a kid a gun and the backing of a military and a government and I think it would be really hard not to give in to a sense of power over other people.

What I have seen, is some pretty awful behavior perpetrated by people who did things without any of that support, people who were not otherwise pretty decent people. People who chose to do shitty things through some sort of twisted rationale. In another thread, I mentioned that I haven't come up against anyone I thought of as truly evil and that's so. But I will say that I have met people of very odd morality and only through observing them for a long time was I able to understand where they were coming from.

What I have seen even more often of college-aged people is people testing their limits as well as the limits of the societies they exist within. This is how an otherwise "good" person by the standards of a society might do something truly awful, for example taking sexual advantage of an inebriated person. The difference is, the kid in college who does something like that, still lives in a place where that is not ok, whereas the kid in the war zone might be surrounded by people who are doing similar things, without any consequences except for how it will affect them personally down the line.

What I see this article suffering from the most is attribution: that is, projecting one's expectations on to another person or group of people and then not bothering to verify whether or not that is so. Of course, this is hard to do when choosing to speak in such broad strokes, but it is almost always easier. Military training as I understand it, exists to help soldiers function under circumstances that are not considered the norm for most of society. For example, if people's initial reactions to threats were to destroy, kill or dismantle those threats, it would be very hard to maintain the kinds of social bonds that allow societies to function in the ways that they do.

From what I understand, transitioning from the military back to the civilian way of life can be really difficult and very much a culture shock. I don't know who this guy is or what he's been through, but I do think that you're right that his views may well change a bit over time.