Instead, he took him prisoner.

Years later, this became one of the stories people used to explain why Medicine Crow’s reputation cannot be reduced to toughness.

Physical courage mattered, but restraint mattered too.

The old warrior traditions in which he had been raised were not simply permission to kill.

They were part of a moral system in which bravery was judged publicly and character mattered after the immediate danger had passed.

Medicine Crow’s decision also exposes something about combat that heroic summaries often erase.

At close range, an enemy stops being an abstraction.

He becomes a frightened human being with a voice, a face, and a family somewhere beyond the battlefield.

Medicine Crow had grown up listening to stories about warfare between Native nations and between the Crow and U.S. forces.

He understood that those stories contained victories, losses, alliances, mistakes, grief, and consequences.