On killing Read online

  — U.S. Special Forces officer and Vietnam veteran T H E B U R D E N O F KILLING

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  I fired again and somehow got him in the head. There was so much blood . . . I vomited, until the rest of the boys came up.

  — Israeli Six-Day War veteran

  So this new Peugeot comes towards us, and we shoot. And there was a family there — three children. And I cried, but I couldn't take the chance. . . . Children, father, mother. All the family was killed, but we couldn't take the chance.

  — Israeli Lebanon Incursion veteran

  The magnitude of the trauma associated with killing became particularly apparent to me in an interview with Paul, a V F W post commander and sergeant of the 101st Airborne at Bastogne in World War II. He talked freely about his experiences and about comrades who had been killed, but when I asked him about his own kills he stated that usually you couldn't be sure who it was that did the killing. Then tears welled up in Paul's eyes, and after a long pause he said, "But the one time I was sure . . . " and then his sentence was stopped by a little sob, and pain racked the face of this old gentleman. "It still hurts, after all these years?" I asked in wonder. "Yes," he said, "after all these years." And he would not speak of it again.

  T h e next day he told me, " Y o u know, Captain, the questions you're asking, you must be very careful not to hurt anyone with these questions. N o t me, you know, I can take it, but some of these young guys are still hurting very badly. These guys don't need to be hurt anymore." These memories were the scabs of terrible, hidden wounds in the minds of these kind and gentle men.

  Not to Kill, and the Guilt Thereof

  With very few exceptions, everyone associated with killing in combat reaps a bitter harvest of guilt.

  The Soldier's Guilt . . .

  Numerous studies have concluded that men in combat are usually motivated to fight not by ideology or hate or fear, but by group pressures and processes involving (1) regard for their comrades, 90 KILLING AND C O M B A T T R A U M A

  (2) respect for their leaders, (3) concern for their o w n reputation with both, and (4) an urge to contribute to the success of the group.5

  Repeatedly we see combat veterans describe the powerful bonds that men forge in combat as stronger than those of husband and wife. J o h n Early, a Vietnam veteran and an ex—Rhodesian mercenary, described it to Dyer this way:

  This is going to sound really strange, but there's a love relationship that is nurtured in combat because the man next to you — you're depending on him for the most important thing you have, your life, and if he lets you down you're either maimed or killed. If you make a mistake the same thing happens to him, so the bond of trust has to be extremely close, and I'd say this bond is stronger than almost anything, with the exception of parent and child. It's a hell of a lot stronger than man and wife — your life is in his hands, you trust that person with the most valuable thing you have.

  This bonding is so intense that it is fear of failing these comrades that preoccupies most combatants. Countless sociological and psychological studies, the personal narratives of numerous veterans, and the interviews I have conducted clearly indicate the strength of the soldier's concern for failing his buddies. T h e guilt and trauma associated with failing to fully support men w h o are bonded with friendship and camaraderie on this magnitude is profoundly intense.

  Yet every soldier and every leader feels this guilt to one degree or another. For those w h o k n o w that they have not fired while their friends died around them, the guilt is traumatic.

  . . . And the Leader's Guilt

  T h e responsibilities of a combat leader represent a remarkable paradox. To be truly good at what he does, he must love his m e n and be bonded to them with powerful links of mutual responsibility and affection. And then he must ultimately be willing to give the orders that may kill them.

  To a significant degree, the social barrier between officer and enlisted man, and between sergeant and private, exists to enable the superior to send his men into mortal danger and to shield him T H E B U R D E N O F KILLING

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  from the inevitable guilt associated with their deaths. For even the best leaders make some mistakes that will weigh forever upon their consciences. Just as any good coach can analyze his conduct of even a winning game and see where he could have done better, so does every good combat leader think, at some level, that if he had just done something different these men — these men he loved like sons and brothers — might not have died.

  It is extraordinarily difficult to get these leaders to reminisce along these lines:

  Now tactically I had done everything the way it was supposed to be done, but we lost some soldiers. There was no other way. We could not go around that field; we had to go across it. So did I make a mistake? I don't know. Would I have done it differently

  [another time]? I don't think I would have, because that's the way I was trained. Did we lose less soldiers by my doing it that way?

  That's a question that'll never be answered.

  — Major Robert Ooley, Vietnam veteran

  quoted in Gwynne Dyer, War

  This is a deadly, dangerous line of thought for leaders, and the honors and decorations that are traditionally heaped upon military leaders at all levels are vitally important for their mental health in the years that follow. These decorations, medals, mentions in dispatches, and other forms of recognition represent a powerful affirmation from the leader's society, telling him that he did well, he did the right thing, and no one blames him for the lives lost in doing his duty.

  Denial and the Burden of Killing

  Balancing the obligation to kill with the resulting toll of guilt forms a significant cause of psychiatric casualties on the battlefield.

  Philosopher-psychologist Peter Marin speaks of the soldier's lesson in responsibility and guilt. What the soldier knows as a result of war is that "the dead remain dead, the maimed are forever maimed, and there is no way to deny one's responsibility or culpability, for those mistakes are written, forever and as if in fire, in others' flesh."

  92 K I L L I N G AND C O M B A T T R A U M A Ultimately there may be no way to deny one's responsibility or culpability for mistakes written "forever and as if in fire, in others' flesh," but combat is a great furnace fed by the small flickering flames of attempts at denial. T h e burden of killing is so great that most men try not to admit that they have killed. They deny it to others, and they try to deny it to themselves. Dinter quotes a hardened veteran who, upon being asked about killing, stated emphatically that

  Most of the killing you do in modern war is impersonal. A thing few people realize is that you hardly ever see a German. Very few men — even in the infantry — actually have the experience of aiming a weapon at a German and seeing the man fall.

  Even the language of m e n at war is full of denial of the enormity of what they have done. Most soldiers do not "kill," instead the enemy was knocked over, wasted, greased, taken out, and mopped up. T h e enemy is hosed, zapped, probed, and fired on. T h e enemy's humanity is denied, and he becomes a strange beast called a Kraut, Jap, R e b , Yank, dink, slant, or slope. Even the weapons of war receive benign names — Puff the Magic Dragon, Walleye, T O W , Fat Boy, and Thin Man — and the killing weapon of the individual soldier becomes a piece or a hog, and a bullet becomes a round.

  O u r enemies do the same thing. Matt Brennan tells of Con, a Vietnamese scout assigned to his platoon. This individual had been a loyal Viet Cong until a North Vietnamese squad made a mistake and killed his wife and children. Now he loved to run ahead of the Americans, hunting for [North Vietnamese soldiers]. . . . He called the Communists gooks, just as we did, and one night I asked him why.

  "Con, do you think it's right to call the VC gooks and dinks?"

  He shrugged. "It makes no difference to me. Everything has a name. Do you think the Americans are the only ones who do that? . . . My company in the jungle . . . called you Big Hairy Monkeys. We kill monkeys, and" —
he hesitated for an instant— "we eat them."

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  T h e dead soldier takes his misery with him, but the man w h o killed him must forever live and die with him. The lesson becomes increasingly clear: Killing is what war is all about, and killing in combat, by its very nature, causes deep wounds of pain and guilt.

  The language of war helps us to deny what war is really about, and in doing so it makes war more palatable.

  Chapter Eight

  The Blind Men and the Elephant

  The man who ranges in No Man's Land

  Is dogged by shadows on either hand6

  — James H. Knight-Adkin

  "No Man's Land"

  A Host of Observers and a Multitude of Answers As we have examined each of the components and subcomponents of psychiatric casualty causation, we have consistently found authorities w h o would claim that their perspective of the problem represents the major or primary cause of stress in battle. Many have held that fear of death and injury was the primary cause of psychiatric casualties. Bartlett feels that "there is perhaps no general condition which is more likely to produce a large crop of nervous and mental disorders than a state of prolonged and great fatigue."

  General Fergusson states that "lack of food constitutes the single biggest assault upon morale." And Murry holds that "coldness is enemy number o n e , " while Gabriel makes a powerful argument for emotional exhaustion caused by extended periods of autonomic fight-or-flight activation. Holmes, on the other hand, spends a chapter of his book convincing us of the horror of battle, and he claims that "seeing friends killed, or, almost worse, being unable T H E B L I N D M E N AND THE ELEPHANT 95

  to help them when wounded, leaves enduring scars." In addition to these more obvious factors of fear, exhaustion, and horror, I have added the less obvious but vitally important factors represented by the W i n d of Hate and the Burden of Killing.

  Like the blind men of the proverb, each individual feels a piece of the elephant, and the enormity of what he has found is overwhelming enough to convince each blindly groping observer that he has found the essence of the beast. But the whole beast is far more enormous and vastly more terrifying than society as a whole is prepared to believe.

  It is a combination of factors that forms the beast, and it is a combination of stressors that is responsible for psychiatric casualties.

  For instance, when we see incidents of mass psychiatric casualties caused by the use of gas in World W a r I, we must ask ourselves what caused the soldiers' trauma. Were they traumatized by fear and horror at the gas and the unknown aspect of death and injury that it represented? Were they traumatized by the realization that someone would hate them enough to do this horrible thing to them? Or were they simply sane men unconsciously selecting insanity in order to escape from an insane situation, sane men taking advantage of a socially and morally acceptable opportunity to cast off the burden of responsibility in combat and escape from the mutual aggression of the battlefield? Obviously, a concise and complete answer would conclude that all of these factors, and more, are responsible for the soldier's dilemma.

  Forces That Impede an Understanding of the Beast A culture raised on R a m b o , Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker, and James Bond wants to believe that combat and killing can be done with impunity — that we can declare someone to be the enemy and that for cause and country the soldiers will cleanly and remorselessly wipe him from the face of the earth. In many ways it is simply too painful for society to address what it does when it sends its young men off to kill other young men in distant lands.

  And what is too painful to remember, we simply choose to 96 KILLING AND C O M B A T T R A U M A

  forget. Glenn Gray spoke from personal experience in World War II when he wrote:

  Few of us can hold on to our real selves long enough to discover the real truths about ourselves and this whirling earth to which we cling. This is especially true of men in war. The great god Mars tries to blind us when we enter his realm, and when we leave he gives us a generous cup of the waters of Lethe to drink.

  Even the field of psychology seems to be ill prepared to address the guilt caused by war and the attendant moral issues. Peter Marin condemns the "inadequacy" of our psychological terminology in describing the magnitude and reality of the "pain of human conscience." As a society, he says, we seem unable to deal with moral pain or guilt. Instead it is treated as a neurosis or a pathology,

  "something to escape rather than something to learn from, a disease rather than — as it may well be for the vets — an appropriate if painful response to the past." Marin goes on to note the same thing that I have in my studies, and that is that Veterans Administration psychologists are seldom willing to deal with problems of guilt; indeed, they often do not even raise the issue of what the soldier did in war. Instead they simply, as one VA psychologist put it to Marin, "treat the vet's difficulties as problems in adjustment."

  Toward a Greater Understanding of the Heart of Darkness During the American Civil War the soldier's first experience in combat was called "seeing the elephant." Today the existence of our species and of all life on this planet may depend on our not just seeing but knowing and controlling the beast called war — and the beast within each of us. No more important or vital subject for research exists, yet there is that within us that would turn away in disgust. And so the study of war has been largely left to the soldiers. But Clausewitz warned almost two hundred years ago that "it is to no purpose, it is even against one's better interest, to turn away from the consideration of the affair because the horror of its elements excites repugnance."

  S E C T I O N I I I

  Killing and Physical Distance:

  From a Distance, You Don't Look Anything

  Like a Friend

  Unless he is caught up in murderous ecstasy, destroying is easier when done from a little remove. With every foot of distance there is a corresponding decrease in reality. Imagination flags and fails altogether when distances become too great. So it is that much of the mindless cruelty of recent wars has been perpetrated by warriors at a distance, who could not guess what havoc their powerful weapons were occasioning.

  — Glenn Gray

  The Warriors

  T h e link between distance and ease of aggression is not a new discovery. It has long been understood that there is a direct relationship between the empathic and physical proximity of the victim, and the resultant difficulty and trauma of the kill. This concept has fascinated and concerned soldiers, philosophers, anthropolo-gists, and psychologists alike.

  At the far end of the spectrum are bombing and artillery, which are often used to illustrate the relative ease of long-range killing.

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  KILLING AND PHYSICAL DISTANCE

  As we draw toward the near end of the spectrum, we begin to realize that the resistance to killing becomes increasingly more intense. This process culminates at the close end of the spectrum, when the resistance to bayoneting or stabbing becomes tremendously intense, and killing with the bare hands (through such common martial arts techniques as crushing the throat with a blow or gouging a thumb through the eye and into the brain) becomes almost unthinkable. Yet even this is not the end, as we will discover when we address the macabre region at the extreme end of the scale, where sex and killing intermingle.

  In the same way that the distance relationship has been identified, so too have many observers identified the factor of emotional or empathic distance. But no one has yet attempted to dissect this factor in order to determine its components and the part they play in the killing process.

  Chapter One

  Distance:

  A Qualitative Distinction in Death

  The soldier-warrior could kill his collective enemy, which now included women and children, without ever seeing them. The cries of the wounded and dying went unheard by those who inflicted the pain. A man might slay hundreds and never see their blood flow. . . .

  Less than a century
after the Civil War ended, a single bomb, delivered miles above its target, would take the lives of more than 100,000 people, almost all civilians. The moral distance between this event and the tribal warrior facing a single opponent is far greater than even the thousands of years and transformations of culture that separate them. . . .

  The combatants in modern warfare pitch bombs from 20,000

  feet in the morning, causing untold suffering to a civilian population, and then eat hamburgers for dinner hundreds of miles away from the drop zone. The prehistoric warrior met his foe in a direct struggle of sinew, muscle, and spirit. If flesh was torn or bone broken he felt it give way under his hand. And though death was more rare than common (perhaps because he felt the pulse of life 100 KILLING AND PHYSICAL D I S T A N C E

  and the nearness of death under his fingers), he also had to live his days remembering the man's eyes whose skull he crushed.

  — Richard Heckler

  In Search of the Warrior Spirit

  Hamburg and Babylon: Examples at Extreme Ends of the Spectrum

  On July 28, 1943, the British Royal Air Force firebombed H a m -

  burg. Gwynne Dyer tells us that they used the standard mixture of bombs, with

  huge numbers of four-pound incendiaries to start fires on roofs and thirty-pound ones to penetrate deeper inside buildings, together with four thousand-pound high explosive bombs to blow in doors and windows over wide areas and fill the streets with craters and rubble to hinder fire-fighting equipment. But on a hot, dry summer night with good visibility, the unusually tight concentration of the bombs in a densely populated working class district created a new phenomenon in history: a firestorm.

  Eventually it covered an area of about four square miles, with an air temperature at the center of eight hundred degrees Celsius and convection winds blowing inward with hurricane force. One survivor said the sound of the wind was "like the Devil laughing."

  . . . Practically all the apartment blocks in the firestorm area had underground shelters, but nobody who stayed in them survived; those who were not cremated died of carbon monoxide poisoning.