This paper looks at two different military operations in which the attacking armies perceived that their enemies used human shields: the US-led first siege of Fallujah (Operation Vigilant Resolve) and the Israeli assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014 (Operation Protective Edge). Various criteria have been outlined by the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to define the tactic of human shields. These criteria include the use of protected persons or structures or the choice of a battlefield full of civilians and civilian objects to render certain areas immune from attack. However, in both of these operations the militants in Fallujah and Gaza were severely limited in their choice of a battlefield due to the military siege around them. This observation throws into question whether the militants in Fallujah and Gaza deliberately used civilians and civilian structures to gain a military advantage, or if they were constrained to fight from densely populated civilian areas. If the later, how then do we explain this reoccurring perception of human shields in counterinsurgency and urban warfare contexts? My paper looks at the way soldiers, military leaders, and politicians communicated this perception to the public. I rely on interviews that appeared in journalistic reports or histories written on these operations. I also look at speeches made by politicians. Using Albert Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement as a framework for discourse analysis, I analyze the perception of the use of human shields during these operations as a spontaneous sense making process that shifts the blame for civilian casualties to the enemy. I argue that this use of language is ideologically structured through these soldiers’ and politicians narratives of the origins of the conflict, of the moral superiority of their national cause, and the rhetoric of their mission. These narratives and rhetoric create the content for moral disengagement mechanisms. The result is an interpretation of battlefield events that is relative to ideology and battlefield trauma, which then gets presented to the public as truth. Moral disengagement theory helps to elucidate the ways in which imperial attitudes structure moral discourses and influence our perception of moral events. It is further relevant to understanding the process discussed by Edward Said in which “discrepant experiences” with imperialism/colonialism produce competing narratives of battlefield events and of entire conflicts.