On killing Read online

  Moral distance establishes that the enemy's cause is clearly wrong, his leaders are criminal, and his soldiers are either simply misguided or are sharing in their leader's guilt. But the enemy is still a human, and killing him is an act of justice rather than the extermination that is often motivated by cultural distance.2

  In the same way that this process has traditionally enabled violence in police forces, it can also enable violence on the battlefield.

  Alfred Vagts recognized this as a process in which enemies are to be deemed criminals in advance, guilty of starting the war; the business of locating the aggressor is to begin before or shortly after the outbreak of the war; the methods of conducting the war are to be branded as criminal; and victory is not to be a triumph of honour and bravery over honour and bravery but the E M O T I O N A L D I S T A N C E

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  climax of a police hunt for bloodthirsty wretches who have violated law, order, and everything else esteemed good and holy.

  Vagts felt that this kind of propaganda has had an increasing influence on modern war, and he may well be right. But this is really nothing new. In the West it dates back at least to those days when the pope, then the undisputed moral leader of Western civilization, established the moral justification for the tragic and bloody wars we call the Crusades.

  Punishment Justification: "Remember the Alamo/Maine/

  Pearl Harbor"

  The establishment of the enemy's guilt and the need to punish or avenge is a fundamental and widely accepted justification for violence. Most nations reserve the right to "administer" capital punishment, and if a state directs a soldier to kill a criminal w h o is guilty of a sufficiently heinous crime, then the killing can be readily rationalized as nothing more than the administration of justice.

  T h e mechanism of punishment justification is so fundamental that it can sometimes be artificially manipulated. In World War II, some Japanese leaders cultivated an artificial punishment justification. "Colonel Masonobu Tsuji," says Holmes, who masterminded Japanese planning for the invasion of Malaya, wrote a tract designed, amongst other things, to screw his soldiers to a pitch of fighting fury. "When you encounter the enemy after landing, think of yourself as an avenger come at last face to face with your father's murderer. Here is the man whose death will lighten your heart of its burden of brooding anger. If you fail to destroy him utterly you can never rest in peace."

  Legal Affirmation: "We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident"

  When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of 166

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  mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. . . .

  We hold these truths to be self-evident.

  — Declaration of Independence

  T h e affirmation of the legality of one's own case is the flip side of punishment motivation. This process of asserting the legitimacy of your cause is one of the primary mechanisms enabling violence in civil wars, since the similarities of the combatants make it difficult to develop cultural distance. But moral distance is, in varying degrees, also a violence-enabling factor in all wars, not just civil wars.

  O n e of the major manifestations of moral distance is what might be called the home-court advantage. T h e moral advantage associated with defending one's own den, home, or nation has a long tradition that can be found in the animal kingdom as well, and it should not be neglected in assessing the impact of moral distance in empowering a nation's violence. Winston Churchill said that

  "it is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in, and to punish with exceptional severity all members of their own race who have warmed their hands at the invader's hearth."

  American wars have usually been characterized by a distinctive tendency toward moral rather than cultural distance. Cultural distance has been a little harder to develop in America's comparatively egalitarian culture with its ethnically and racially diverse population. In the American Revolution the Boston Massacre provided a degree of punishment justification, and the Declaration of Independence ("We hold these truths to be self-evident") represented the legal affirmation that set the tone for American wars for the next two centuries. T h e War of 1812 was waged in "self-defense"

  with the home-court advantage very much on our side and the burning of the White House and the bombardment of Fort McHenry ("Oh! say, can you see, by the dawn's early light") serving as rallying points for punishment justification. T h e moral foundations of our legal affirmation for our nation's concern for the oppression of others can be seen in the Civil War and the very sincere motivation on the part of many Northern soldiers to E M O T I O N A L D I S T A N C E

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  end slavery ("Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord"), while a degree of punishment motivation can be seen in the bombardment of Fort Sumter.

  In the last hundred years we have moved slightly away from moral affirmation as a justification for starting wars and have focused more on the punishment aspect of moral distance. In the Spanish-American War it was the sinking of the Maine that provided the punishment justification for war. In World War I it was the Lusitania, in World War II it was Pearl Harbor, in Korea it was an unprovoked attack on American troops, in Vietnam it was the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, and in the Gulf W a r it was the invasion of Kuwait.3

  It is interesting to note that although punishment was used to justify starting American involvement in these wars, moral affirmation came into play later and lent a very American flavor to some of these conflicts. Once the Allies began to liberate concentration camps, General Eisenhower began to view World W a r II as a Crusade, and the justification for the Cold War had consistent underpinnings as a moral battle against totalitarianism and o p -

  pression.

  Moral distance processes tend to provide a foundation upon which other killing-enabling processes can be built. In general they are less likely to produce atrocities than cultural distance processes, and they are more in keeping with the kind of "rules"

  (deterring aggression and upholding individual human dignity) that organizations such as the United Nations have attempted to uphold.

  But as with cultural distance, there is a danger associated with moral distance. That danger is, of course, that every nation seems to think that God is on its side.

  Social Distance: Death across the Swine Log While working as a sergeant in the 82d Airborne Division in the 1970s, I once visited a sister battalion's operations office. Most such offices have a large in-out roster as you come in the door.

  Usually these rosters have a list of all the people in the office, organized by rank; but this one had a different twist. On top of the list were the officers, then there was a divider section labeled 168

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  "Swine Log," and then there was a list of all the enlisted personnel in the office. This concept of the "Swine Log" was a fairly common one, and although it was usually used in good humor, and usually more subtly, there is a social distance between officers and enlisted personnel. I have been a private, a sergeant, and an officer. My wife, my children, and I have all experienced this class structure and the social distance that goes with it. Officers, noncommissioned officers (NCOs), and enlisted members (EMs) all have separate clubs on a military base. Their wives go to separate social functions.

  Their families five in separate housing areas.

  To understand the role of the Swine Log in the military we must understand how hard it is to be the one to give the orders that will send your friends to their deaths, and how easy is the alternative of surrendering honorably and ending the horror. The essence of the military is that to be a good leader you must truly love (in a strangely detached fa
shion) your men, and then you must be willing to kill (or at least give the orders that will result in the deaths of) that which you love. The paradox of war is that those leaders who are most willing to endanger that which they love can be the ones who are most liable to win, and therefore most likely to protect their men. The social class structure that exists in the military provides a denial mechanism that makes it possible for leaders to order their men to their deaths. But it makes military leadership a very lonely thing.

  This class structure is even more pronounced in the British army. During my year at the British Army Staff College, the British officers who were my friends felt very strongly (and I agree with them) that their lifetime of experience in the British class system made them better officers. The influence of social distance must have been very powerful in ages past, when all officers came from the nobility and had a lifetime's experience in wielding the power of life and death.

  In nearly all historical batlles prior to the age of Napoleon, the serf who looked down his spear or musket at the enemy saw another hapless serf very much like himself, and we can understand that he was not particularly inclined to kill his mirror image. And E M O T I O N A L D I S T A N C E 169

  so it is that the great majority of close-combat killing in ancient history was not done by the mobs of serfs and peasants w h o formed the great mass of combatants. It was the elite, the nobility, who were the real killers in these battles, and they were enabled by, among other things, social distance.

  Mechanical Distance: "I Don't See People . . ."

  The development of new weapon systems enables the soldier, even on the battlefield, to fire more lethal weapons more accurately to longer ranges: his enemy is, increasingly, an anonymous figure encircled by a gunsight, glowing on a thermal imager, or shrouded in armour plate.

  — Richard Holmes

  Acts of War

  Social distance is generally fading as a form of killing enabling in Western war. But even as it disappears in this more egalitarian age, it is being replaced by a new, technologically based form of psychological distance. During the Gulf War this was referred to as "Nintendo warfare."

  The infantry kills the enemy up close and personal, but in recent decades the nature of this close-in battle has changed significantly.

  Until recently in the U.S. Army the night sight was a rare and exotic piece of equipment. N o w we fight primarily at night, and there is a thermal-imagery device or a night-vision device for almost every combat soldier. Thermal imagery "sees" the heat emitted by a body as if it were light. Thus it works to see through rain, fog, and smoke. It permits you to perceive through camou-flage, and it makes it possible to detect enemy soldiers deep in wood lines and vegetation that would once have completely con-cealed them.

  Night-vision devices provide a superb form of psychological distance by converting the target into an inhuman green blob.

  The complete integration of thermal-imagery technology into the modern battlefield will extend to daylight hours the mechanical distance process that currently exists during the night. W h e n this 170

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  happens the battlefield will appear to every soldier as it did to Gad, an Israeli tank gunner who told Holmes that "you see it all as if it were happening on a TV screen. . . . It occurred to me at the time; I see someone running and I shoot at him, and he falls, and it all looks like something on TV. I don't see people, that's one good thing about it."

  Chapter Four

  The Nature of the Victim:

  Relevance and Payoff

  The Shalit Factors: Means, Motive, and Opportunity Given an opportunity to kill and time to think about it, a soldier in combat becomes very much like a killer in a classical murder mystery, assessing his "means, motive, and opportunity." Israeli military psychologist Ben Shalit has developed a model of target attractiveness revolving around the nature of the victim, which has been modified slightly and incorporated into our overall model of the killing-enabling factors.

  Shalit takes into consideration:

  • The relevance and effectiveness of available strategies for killing the victim (that is, the means and opportunity)

  • The relevance of the victim and the payoff of killing in terms of the killer's gain and the enemy's loss (the motive) Relevance of Available Strategies: Means and Opportunity Man taxes his ingenuity to be able to kill without running the risk of being killed.

  — Ardant du Picq

  Battle Studies

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  Tactical and technological advantages increase the effectiveness of the combat strategies available to the soldier. Or, as one soldier put it, "You want to make damn sure you don't get your own ass shot off while you are hosing the enemy." This is what has always been achieved by gaining a tactical advantage through ambushes, flank attacks, and rear attacks. In modern warfare this is also achieved by firing through night sights and thermal-imagery devices at a technologically inferior enemy who does not have this capability. This kind of tactical and technological advantage provides the soldier with "means" and "opportunity," thereby increasing the probability that he will kill the enemy.

  An example of the influence of this process is outlined in the after-action reports describing the activities of Sergeant First Class Waldron in the section "Killing and Physical Distance." Sergeant Waldron was a sniper, and in this case his killing was made possible by the fact that he was firing at night, at extremely long ranges, with a night-vision scope and a noise suppressor on his rifle. The result was an incredibly sterile kind of killing in which the killer was not at all endangered by his actions:

  The first Viet Cong in the group was taken under fire . . . resulting in one Viet Cong killed. Immediately the other Viet Cong formed T H E N A T U R E OF THE V I C T I M 173

  a huddle around the fallen body, apparently not quite sure of what had taken place [emphasis added]. Sergeant Waldron continued engaging the Viet Cong one by one until a total of [all] five Viet Cong were killed.

  We have seen before that when the enemy is fleeing or has his back turned, he is far more likely to be killed. O n e reason for this is that in doing so he has provided both means and opportunity for his opponent to kill without endangering himself. Steve Banko achieved both means and opportunity when he was able to sneak up on and shoot a Vietcong soldier. " T h e y didn't know I existed,"

  said Banko, and that made it possible for him to muster his courage, and he "squeezed softly on the trigger."

  Relevance of the Victim and Payoff for the Killer: T h e Motive After a soldier is confident that he is "able to kill without running the risk of being killed," the next question that comes to mind is, Which enemy soldier should I shoot at? In Shalit's model the question could be phrased: Is killing this individual relevant to the tactical situation, and will there be a payoff for doing so? In our analogy to the classical murder mystery, this is the motive for the killing.

  The most obvious motive for killing in combat is the kill-or-be-killed circumstances of self-defense or the defense of one's friends. We have observed this factor many times in the case studies observed thus far:

  [He] was coming at me full gallop, his machete cocked high over his head. . . . All of a sudden there was a guy firing a pistol right at us . . . all of a sudden he turned his whole body and pointed his automatic weapon at me. . . . I knew . . . that he would start picking us off.

  It is not very profound to observe that in choosing from a group of enemy targets to kill, a soldier is more likely to kill the one that represents the greatest gain to him and the greatest loss to the enemy. But if no particular soldier poses a specific threat by virtue 174 AN ANATOMY OF KILLING

  of his actions, then the process of selecting the most high-value target can take more subtle forms.

  One consistent tendency is to elect to shoot leaders and officers.

  We have already noted the marine sniper who told Truby, "You don't like to hit ordinary troops, because they're u
sually scared draftees or worse. . . . The guys to shoot are big brass. "Throughout military history the leaders and the flag bearers were selected as targets for enemy weapons, since these would represent the highest payoff in terms of the enemy's loss. General James Gavin, the commander of the 82d Airborne Division in World War II, carried an Ml Garand rifle, then the standard American-infantry weapon of World War II. He advised young infantry officers not to carry any equipment that would make them stand out in the eyes of the enemy.

  Oftentimes the criteria for deciding whom to kill are dictated by deciding who is manning the most dangerous weapon. In Steve Banko's case he selected the Vietcong soldier who "was sitting closest to the machine gun, and he would die because of it."

  Every surrendering soldier instinctively knows that the first thing he should do is drop his weapon, but if he is smart he will also ditch his helmet. Holmes notes that "Brigadier Peter Young, in the second world war, had no more regret about shooting a helmeted German than he would about 'banging a nail on the head.' But somehow he could never bring himself to hit a bareheaded man."

  It is because of this response to helmets that United Nations peacekeeping forces prefer to wear their traditional beret rather than a helmet, which might very well stop a bullet or save their lives in an artillery barrage.

  Killing Without Relevance or Payoff

  Being able to identify your victim as a combatant is important to the rationalization that occurs after the kill. If a soldier kills a child, a woman, or anyone who does not represent a potential threat, then he has entered the realm of murder (as opposed to a legitimate, sanctioned combat kill), and the rationalization process becomes quite difficult. Even if he kills in self-defense, there is enormous T H E N A T U R E OF THE V I C T I M 175

  resistance associated with killing an individual who is not normally associated with relevance or a payoff.

  Bruce, a Ranger team leader in Vietnam, had several personal kills, but the one time that he could not bring himself to kill, even when he was directly ordered to do so, was when the target was a Vietcong soldier w h o was also a woman. Many other narratives and books from Vietnam cover in great detail the shock and horror associated with killing female Vietcong soldiers. And although fighting and killing women in combat is new to Americans and relatively uncommon throughout military history, it is not completely unprecedented. During the French Dahomey expedition in 1892, hardened French foreign legionnaires faced a bizarre army of female warriors, and Holmes notes that many of these tough veterans "experienced a few seconds' hesitation about shooting or bayoneting a half-naked Amazon [and] their delay had fatal results."