I'll tell you a story.
In the 90s a team from the 10 Special Forces Group went to do a shooting house exercise to work on procedures of how you clear room, shoot the bad guys but don't shoot the good guys. This shooting house had steel plates 3/4 of an inch thick between the rooms and dirt-filled tires filled with sand inside of each room holding the steel plate in place. The team had done a walk-through, dry fire (no ammo), then a live fire. During one of the iterations, a bullet hit the seam between the metal plates somehow got through two layers of dirt filled tires, hit a teammate in the next room in the arm hole of his body armor and clipped a bone chip off the back of one of his vertebrae. Bad news.
General Jerry Boykin, the commander of Special Forces Command, sent a team to investigate the accident. Boykin said, "The unit was doing the right thing (close quarters battle), they had taken reasonable precautions (walk through, dry fire, then live fire. The rooms has steel plates between them and the guys were wearing body armor. Boykin said, "No (permanent) harm, no foul. My battalion commander kept his job.
Then, later that year, when the unit was conducting Winter Environmental Training (WET) in the mountains of Colorado in January, a soldier got frostbite. That is a showstopper in the Army. Boykin consent another investigation team to find out the facts. They examined unit training schedules of how soldiers were prepared for operating the environment, they examine the equipment that have been issued, they looked at meteorological data and the temperature just dropped to -40 on very short notice and the guys could not build a snow caves fast enough. Once again, Boykin said "you were doing the right stuff you took reasonable precautions. Sometimes bad stuff happens. It is a dangerous business and I do not want to build an officer corps that is risk averse." Boykin did not relieve the battalion commander.
In the USAF or Army aviation or artillery, when something bad happens, everyone gets relieved and normally, their careers are over.
I really appreciate Jerry Boykin's approach. Doing the right stuff? Took reasonable precautions? No relief. Sometimes bad things happen.
Rest of the story, my battalion commander went on to be Lieutenant General and commander of US Army Special Operations Command (the higher headquarters for Jerry Boykin's headquarters),. Boykin saw potential and did not want to waste it.
Now in the case of the Gettysburg skipper? Yet to be determined.
