#because none of the good guys ever disobeys a direct order in modern warfare.

[exfil]

one of soap's defining character traits is righteousness. be it helping his comrades in al mazrah over the mission objective (are you saying we shouldn't have helped?) or walking into a cartel villa unarmed to bring down el sin nombre (we came here to stop a missile, so let's stop it), it is clear that his main motivation is to do the right thing. so is the protection of innocent people - soap is almost always the one who articulates the involvement of civilians (what happened to the families here? / they're innocent people. / he's killing civilians - his own people.)

for soap, in this righteousness, and in the protection of these innocent people, the threat and execution of violence is the right thing. killing is not the avoidable means to an end, but the objective - as long as the people killed are evil (my job is to kill the enemy. guess what you are). he shows a clear favoritism for vigilante justice (you're going down for what you did / makes me want to commit a few war crimes of my own / you will hang for this) and has to be actively dissuaded from executing people instead of having them face due process on multiple occasions (you can't be serious he is right here / i will blow your brains out i swear i will do it).

and it is soap who decides who is evil and who is not. while he and ghost condemn graves' killing civilians as putting himself above the law (he is jury judge and executioner now) soap justifies the killing of dozens of mexicans without jurisdiction as part of a foreign army due to their cartel involvement (there are no civilians here). he never judges the violence of his own allies, only the lack of it (should have killed him when we had the chance).

a seargant hell-bent on doing the right thing but operating with both a brutal reverence to violence as the only option and a morality of black and white that does not survive closer scrutiny. he is clearly not a good person - if the amount of people he killed in cold blood is any indication - but he not only thinks that he is good but can tell whether a person is good or not to the point that he sees himself as a rightful executioner. now that's a character!