Yeah, to clarify, the kind of analysis I gave in the comment is really dependent on the intended tone of the piece. When I'm killing time on a plane playing Advance Wars I'm not exactly screaming "WILL NO ONE THINK OF THE POOR WIDOWS OF ORANGE STAR" lol. Furthermore, upon further reflection, I don't think this is all that dissimilar to the stuff I was writing back in college, so I'm not exactly immune either.
I interpreted the tone as going for more ethical depth, but, somewhat ironically given your preferences, it read much closer to a "traditional" war story, just without the action scenes. That all said, I am literally the only person who seems to have any issue here, so while I stand by my analysis since that's an honest assessment of how I processed the text, I can also accept that I'm the weird one.
Big wolf man make sword go brrr. Cheers.