On killing Read online

  Chapter Six

  Killing at Hand-to-Hand-Combat Range

  In modern battle, which is delivered with combatants so far apart, man has come to have a horror of man. He comes to hand-to-hand fighting only to defend his body or if forced to it.

  — Ardant du Picq

  Battle Studies

  Hand-to-Hand-Combat Range

  At hand-to-hand-combat range the instinctive resistance to killing becomes strongest. While some who have studied the subject claim that man is the only higher-order species that does not have an instinctive resistance to killing his own species, its existence is recognized by almost any high-level karate practitioner.

  An obvious method of killing an opponent involves a crushing blow to the throat. In movie combat we often see one individual grab another by the throat and attempt to choke him. And Hollywood heroes give the enemy a good old punch in the jaw. In both instances a blow to the throat (with the hand held in various prescribed shapes) would be a vastly superior form of disabling or killing the foe, yet it is not a natural act; it is a repellent one.

  The single most effective and mechanically easiest way to inflict significant damage on a human being with one's hand is to punch a thumb through his eye and on into the brain, subsequently 132

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  stirring the intruding digit around inside the skull, cocking it off toward the side, and forcefully pulling the eye and other matter out with the thumb.

  O n e karate instructor trains his high-level students in this killing technique by having them practice punching their thumbs into oranges held or taped over the eye socket of an opponent. As we will observe when we study the process by which the U.S. Army raised its firing rates from 15 to 20 percent in World War II to 90 to 95 percent in Vietnam, this procedure of precisely rehearsing and mimicking a killing action is an excellent way of ensuring that the individual is capable of performing the act in combat.

  In the case of the orange held over the victim's eye, the process is made even more realistic by having the victim scream, twitch, and jerk as the killer punches his thumb to the hilt into the orange and then rips it back out. Few individuals can walk away from their first such rehearsal without being badly shaken and disturbed by the action they have just mimicked. The fact that they are overcoming some form of natural resistance is obvious.

  Tracy Arnold, an actress in the X-rated (for violence) movie Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, passed out twice during the filming of a scene in which her character was portrayed stabbing a man in the eye with a rat-tailed comb. This is a professional actress.

  She can portray killing, lying, and sex on the screen with relative ease, but even the pretense of stabbing someone in the eye seems to have touched a resistance so powerful and deep-seated that her body and emotions — the tools of the professional actress — literally refused to cooperate. In fact, I cannot find any references to anyone in the history of human combat having ever used this simple technique. Indeed, it is almost too painful to think of it.

  Man has a tremendous resistance to killing effectively with his bare hands. When man first picked up a club or a rock and killed his fellow man, he gained more than mechanical energy and m e -

  chanical leverage. He also gained psychological energy and psychological leverage that was every bit as necessary in the killing process.

  In some distant part of man's past he acquired this ability. T w o major religious works, the Bible and the Torah, both speak of KILLING AT H A N D - T O - H A N D C O M B A T R A N G E 133

  partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and one of its first uses was Cain's overcoming his instinctive resistance in order to kill his brother, Abel. He probably did so not with his bare hands, but with an application of mechanical and psychological leverage not available to any other creature on the face of the earth.9

  Chapter Seven

  Killing at Sexual Range: ' 'The Primal Aggression, the Release, and the Orgasmic Discharge"

  One night as a young lieutenant on a long deployment to the Arctic, I sat in our little Officer/Senior NCO Club nursing a beer, while several old sergeants became quite drunk. One old Vietnam vet hit on a popular theme during the discussion and said, "F

  Jane Fonda."

  Another old sergeant vet who was sitting next to me was roused to respond by saying, "F Jane Fonda? Huh! Skull-f Jane Fonda! Pop an eyeball out and skull-f- the bitch."

  This macabre concept of combining sex with death was so offensive that even the hardened veterans around the speaker were momentarily shocked. Yet the procreative act and the destructive act are inextricably interlinked. Much of the attraction to the killing process, and much of the resistance to close-in killing, revolves around the vicious side of ourselves that would pervert sex in such a manner that we can conceive of such things.

  At a surface level, the link between sex and aggression is obvious and not so blatantly offensive. The most powerful stag, stallion, ram, male lion, or gorilla wins the harem; lesser or younger males remain only if they are subservient. Much has been made of the relationship between male sexuality and the power of motorcycles KILLING AT SEXUAL R A N G E

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  (1,200 cc of power throbbing between your legs) and muscle cars.

  The continuing popularity of magazines in which motorcycles and cars are displayed along with scantily clad women in provocative positions make this relationship clear.

  This kind of sex-power linkage also exists in the gun world.

  A video recently advertised in gun magazines, Sexy Girls and Sexy Guns, taps this same vein. "You've got to see this tape to believe it," says the ad. "14 outrageous sexy girls in string bikinis and high heels blasting away with the sexiest full auto machine guns ever produced."

  The psychological state that is satisfied by Sexy Girls and Sexy Guns is not widely shared among gun aficionados and is often viewed with considerable scorn. O n e editorial comment from a magazine that advertised these movies reveals a perceptive understanding of the nature of this kind of "full auto-eroticism and

  'Debbie Does the Paris Arms Show' pap":

  You may have seen the rash of mindless "machine-gun videos"

  that dish out a bilgy froth of bikinis, boobs and burp guns — neither instruction nor entertainment, evidently marketed to exploit a rather narrow spectrum of psychoses which hopes to see pendulous mammillae caught in a closing breach. While these video bikinis might have satisfied the Freudian hostilities of a disturbed few, there has been a need for legitimate orientation-instruction machine gun videos for those who properly regard these weapons as indispensable tools of respectable trades.

  — D. McLean

  "Firestorm"

  Yet, in reality, our Sexy Girls and Sexy Guns video is only a little removed from the not-so-subliminal message of virility implied in the familiar image of a barely clad woman clinging to James Bond as he coolly brandishes a pistol.'0

  Killing as Sex . . .

  T h e linkage between sex and killing becomes unpleasantly apparent when we enter the realm of warfare. Many societies have long 136 K I L L I N G AND PHYSICAL D I S T A N C E

  recognized the existence of this twisted region in which battle, like sex, is a milestone in adolescent masculinity. Yet the sexual aspects of killing continue beyond the region in which both are thought to be rites of manhood and into the area in which killing becomes like sex and sex like killing.

  A British paratrooper w h o served in the Falklands told Holmes that one particular attack was "the most exciting thing since getting my leg across." O n e American soldier compared the killings at My Lai to the closely linked guilt and satisfaction that accompany masturbation.

  T h e Israeli military psychologist Ben Shalit touched on this relationship when he described some of his observations of combat: On my right was mounted a heavy machine gun. The gunner (normally the cook) was firing away with what I can only describe as a beatific smile on his face. He was exhilarate
d by the squeezing of the trigger, the hammering of the gun, and the flight of his tracers rushing out into the dark shore. It struck me then (and was confirmed by him and many others later) that squeezing the trigger — releasing a hail of bullets — gives enormous pleasure and satisfaction. These are the pleasures of combat, not in terms of the intellectual planning — of the tactical and strategic chess game — but of the primal aggression, the release, and the or-gasmic discharge.

  Shalit addresses this subject through symbolic language, but one Vietnam veteran was not nearly so subtle when he told Mark Baker that "a gun is power. To some people carrying a gun was like having a permanent hard-on. It was a pure sexual trip every time you got to pull the trigger." Many men w h o have carried and fired a gun — especially a full automatic weapon — must confess in their hearts that the power and pleasure of explosively spewing a stream of bullets is akin to the emotions felt when explosively spewing a stream of semen.

  O n e of the veterans I interviewed had six tours in Vietnam. He stated that ultimately he "had to get out of there" because he was becoming consumed by what was happening to him. "Killing can KILLING AT SEXUAL R A N G E 137

  be like sex," he told me, "and you can get carried away with it; it can consume you just like sex can."

  . . . And Sex as Killing

  And just as the highly personal, close-up, one-on-one, intense experience of killing can be like sex, so can sex be like killing.

  Glenn Gray speaks of this relationship. " T o be sure," he says, the sexual partner is not actually destroyed in the encounter, merely overthrown. And the psychological aftereffects of sexual lust are different from those of battle lusts. These differences, however, do not alter the fact that the passions have a common source and affect their victims in the same way while they are in their grip.

  T h e concept of sex as a process of domination and defeat is closely related to the lust for rape and the trauma associated with the rape victim. Thrusting the sexual appendage (the penis) deep into the body of the victim can be perversely linked to thrusting the killing appendage (a bayonet or knife) deep into the body of the victim.

  This process can be seen in pornographic movies in which the sexual act is twisted, such that the male ejaculates — or "shoots his wad" — into a female's face. The grip of a firer on the pistol grip of a gun is much like the grip on an erect penis, and holding the penis in this fashion while ejaculating into the victim's face is at some level an act of domination and symbolic destruction. The culmination of this intertwining of sex and death can be seen in snuff films, in which a victim is raped and then murdered on film.

  T h e force of darkness and destruction within us is balanced with a force of light and love for our fellow man. These forces struggle and strive within the heart of each of us. To ignore one is to ignore the other. We cannot k n o w the light if we do not acknowledge the dark. We cannot know life if we do not acknowledge death. The link between sex and war and the process of denial in both fields are well represented by Richard Heckler's observation that "it is in the mythological marriage of Ares [the god of war] and Aphrodite [the god of sex] that Harmonia is b o r n . "

  S E C T I O N I V

  An Anatomy of Killing:

  All Factors Considered

  The starting point for the understanding of war is the understanding of human nature.

  — S. L. A. Marshall

  Men Against Fire

  Chapter One

  The Demands of Authority:

  Milgram and the Military

  Riflemen miss if orders sound unsure;

  They only are secure who seem secure . . .

  — Kingsley Amis

  "The Masters"

  Dr. Stanley Milgram's famous studies at Yale University on obedience and aggression found that in a controlled laboratory environment more than 65 percent of his subjects could be readily manipulated into inflicting a (seemingly) lethal electrical charge on a total stranger. The subjects sincerely believed that they were causing great physical pain, but despite their victim's pitiful pleas for them to stop, 65 percent continued to obey orders, increase the voltage, and inflict the shocks until long after the screams stopped and there could be litlle doubt that their victim was dead.

  Prior to beginning his experiments Milgram asked a group of psychiatrists and psychologists to predict how many of his subjects would use the maximum voltage on their victims. They estimated that a fraction of 1 percent of the subjects would do so. They, like most people, really didn't have a clue — until Milgram taught us this lesson about ourselves.

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  Freud warned us to "never underestimate the power of the need to obey," and this research by Milgram (which has since been replicated many times in half a dozen different countries) validates Freud's intuitive understanding of human nature. Even when the trappings of authority are no more than a white lab coat and a clipboard, this is the kind of response that Milgram was able to elicit:

  I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse. . . . At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered: "Oh God, let's stop it."

  And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter and obeyed to the end.

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  If this kind of obedience could be obtained with a lab coat and a clipboard by an authority figure w h o has been known for only a few minutes, how much more would the trappings of military authority and months of bonding accomplish?

  The Demands of Authority

  The mass needs, and we give it, leaders who have the firmness and decision of command proceeding from habit and an entire faith in their unquestionable right to command as established by tradition, law and society.

  — Ardant du Picq

  Battle Studies

  Someone w h o has not studied the matter would underestimate the influence of leadership in enabling killing on the battlefield, but those w h o have been there know better. A 1973 study by Kranss, Kaplan, and Kranss investigated the factors that make a soldier fire. They found that the individuals who had no combat experience assumed that "being fired u p o n " would be the critical factor in making them fire. However, veterans listed "being told to fire" as the most critical factor.

  More than a century ago, Ardant du Picq found the same thing in his study based on a survey of military officers. He noted one 144

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  incident during the Crimean War in which, during heavy fighting, two detachments of soldiers suddenly met unexpectedly face-to-face, at "ten paces." They "stopped thunderstruck. Then, forget-ting their rifles, threw stones and withdrew." The reason for this behavior, according to du Picq, was that "neither of the two groups had a decided leader."

  Authority Factors

  But it is more complex than the simple influence of orders by a leader. There are many factors in the relationship between the potential killer and the authority that influence the decision to kill.

  In Milgram's experiments the demands of authority were represented by an individual with a clipboard and a white lab coat. This authority figure stood immediately behind the individual who was inflicting shocks and directed that he increase the voltage each time the victim answered a question incorrectly. When the authority figure was not personally present but called over a phone, the number of subjects who were willing to inflict the maximum shock dropped sharply. This process can be generalized to combat circumstances and "operationalized" into a number of subfactors: proximity of the authority figure, respect for the authority figure, intensity of the authority figure's demands, and the authority figure's legitimacy.

  • Proximity of the authority figure to the subject. Marshall noted many specific World War II incidents in which almost all soldiers would fire their weapons while t
heir leaders observed and encouraged them in a combat situation, but when the leaders left, the firing rate immediately dropped to 15 to 20 percent.

  • Killer's subjective respect for the authority figure. To be truly effective, soldiers must bond to their leader just as they must bond to their group. Shalit notes a 1973 Israeli study that shows that the primary factor in ensuring the will to fight is identification with the direct commanding officer. Compared with an established and respected leader, an unknown or discredited leader has much less chance of gaining compliance from soldiers in combat.

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  • Intensity of the authority figure's demands for killing behavior. The leader's mere presence is not always sufficient to ensure killing activity. The leader must also communicate a clear expectancy of killing behavior. When he does, the influence can be enormous.

  When Lieutenant Calley first ordered his men to kill a group of women and children in the village of My Lai, he said, "You know what to do with them," and left. When he came back he asked, "Why haven't you killed them?" The soldier he confronted said, "I didn't think you wanted us to kill them." "No,"

  Calley responded, "I want them dead," and proceeded to fire at them himself. Only then was he able to get his soldiers to start shooting in this extraordinary circumstance in which the soldiers'

  resistance to killing was, understandably, very high.

  • Legitimacy of the authority figure's authority and demands. Leaders with legitimate, societally sanctioned authority have greater influence on their soldiers; and legitimate, lawful demands are more likely to be obeyed than illegal or unanticipated demands. Gang leaders and mercenary commanders have to carefully work around their shortcomings in this area, but military officers (with their trappings of power and the legitimate authority of their nation behind them) have tremendous potential to cause their soldiers to overcome individual resistance and reluctance in combat.