On killing Read online

  The common response is something like: "My God, I just killed a man and I enjoyed it. What is wrong with me?"

  If the demands from authority and the threatening enemy are intense enough to overcome a soldier's resistance, it is only understandable that he feel some sense of satisfaction. He has hit his target, he has saved his friends, and he has saved his own life. He has resolved the conflict successfully. He won. He is alive! But a good portion of the subsequent remorse and guilt appears to be a horrified response to this perfectly natural and common feeling of exhilaration. It is vital that future soldiers understand that this is a normal and very common response to the abnormal circumstances of combat, and they need to understand that their feelings of satisfaction at killing are a natural and fairly common aspect of combat. I believe that this is the most important insight that can come from an understanding of the killing response stages.

  Again, I should emphasize that not all combatants go through all stages. Eric, a USMC veteran, described how these stages 244 THE KILLING RESPONSE STAGES

  occurred in his combat experiences. His first kill in Vietnam was an enemy soldier whom he had just seen urinating along the trail.

  When this soldier subsequently moved toward him, Eric shot him.

  "It didn't feel good," he said. "It didn't feel good at all." There was no discernible exhilaration, or even any satisfaction. But later, when he killed enemy soldiers who were "coming over the wire"

  in a firefight, he felt what he called "satisfaction, a satisfaction of anger."

  Eric's case brings out two points. The first is that when you have cause to identify with your victim (that is, you see him participate in some act that emphasizes his humanity, such as urinating, eating, or smoking) it is much harder to kill him, and there is much less satisfaction associated with the kill, even if the victim represents a direct threat to you and your comrades at the time you kill him. The second point is that subsequent kills are always easier, and there is much more of a tendency to feel satisfaction or exhilaration after the second killing experience, and less tendency to feel remorse.

  You don't even have to personally kill to experience these response stages and the interaction between the exhilaration and remorse stages. Sol, a veteran of naval combat in World War II, told of his exhilaration when he saw his ship shelling a Japanese-held island. Later, when he saw the charred and mangled Japanese bodies, he felt remorse and guilt, and for the rest of his life he has been trying to rationalize and accept the pleasure he felt. Sol, like thousands of others I have spoken to, was profoundly relieved to realize that his deepest, darkest secrets were no different than those of other soldiers with similar experiences.

  One veteran's letter to the editor in response to Jack Thompson's article "Combat Addiction" reveals the desperate need for an understanding of these processes:

  [Jack Thompson's] insight has always astounded me, but this piece was really out of the ordinary. . . . What was really right on target was the combat addiction part. For quite a long time I thought I was insane off and on.

  APPLICATIONS OF THE M O D E L

  245

  Just a simple understanding of the universality of these emotions helped one man understand that he wasn't really crazy, that he was just experiencing a common human reaction to an uncommon situation. Again, that is the objective of this study: no judgment, no condemnation, just the remarkable power of understanding.

  244 T H E KILLING RESPONSE STAGES

  occurred in his combat experiences. His first kill in Vietnam was an enemy soldier whom he had just seen urinating along the trail.

  When this soldier subsequently moved toward him, Eric shot him.

  "It didn't feel good," he said. "It didn't feel good at all." There was no discernible exhilaration, or even any satisfaction. But later, when he killed enemy soldiers who were "coming over the wire"

  in a firefight, he felt what he called "satisfaction, a satisfaction of anger."

  Eric's case brings out two points. The first is that when you have cause to identify with your victim (that is, you see him participate in some act that emphasizes his humanity, such as urinating, eating, or smoking) it is much harder to kill him, and there is much less satisfaction associated with the kill, even if the victim represents a direct threat to you and your comrades at the time you kill him. The second point is that subsequent kills are always easier, and there is much more of a tendency to feel satisfaction or exhilaration after the second killing experience, and less tendency to feel remorse.

  You don't even have to personally kill to experience these response stages and the interaction between the exhilaration and remorse stages. Sol, a veteran of naval combat in World War II, told of his exhilaration when he saw his ship shelling a Japanese-held island. Later, when he saw the charred and mangled Japanese bodies, he felt remorse and guilt, and for the rest of his life he has been trying to rationalize and accept the pleasure he felt. Sol, like thousands of others I have spoken to, was profoundly relieved to realize that his deepest, darkest secrets were no different than those of other soldiers with similar experiences.

  One veteran's letter to the editor in response to Jack Thompson's article "Combat Addiction" reveals the desperate need for an understanding of these processes:

  [Jack Thompson's] insight has always astounded me, but this piece was really out of the ordinary. . . . What was really right on target was the combat addiction part. For quite a long time I thought I was insane off and on.

  APPLICATIONS OF THE M O D E L 245

  Just a simple understanding of the universality of these emotions helped one man understand that he wasn't really crazy, that he was just experiencing a common human reaction to an uncommon situation. Again, that is the objective of this study: no judgment, no condemnation, just the remarkable power of understanding.

  S E C T I O N V I I

  Killing in Vietnam:

  What Have We Done to Our Soldiers?

  With the frost of his breath wreathing his face, the new president proclaimed, "Now the trumpet summons u s . . . to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle . . . against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself."

  Exactly twelve yean later, in January 1973, an agreement signed in Paris would end U.S. military efforts in Vietnam. The trumpet would be silent, the mood sullen. American fighting men would depart with the war unwon. The United States of America would no longer be willing to pay any price.

  — Dave Palmer

  Summons of the Trumpet

  What happened in Vietnam? W h y do between 400,000 and 1.5

  million Vietnam vets suffer from PTSD as a result of that tragic war?' Just what have we done to our soldiers?

  Chapter One

  Desensitization and Conditioning in Vietnam: Overcoming the Resistance to Killing

  "Nobody Understood": An Incident in a VFW Hall As I conducted interviews for this study in a VFW hall in Florida in the summer of 1989, a Vietnam vet named Roger started talking about his experiences over a beer. It was still early in the afternoon, but down the bar an older woman already began to attack him.

  "You got no right to snivel about your little pish-ant war. World War Two was a real war. Were you even alive then? Huh? I lost a brother in World War Two."

  We tried to ignore her; she was only a local character. But finally Roger had had enough. He looked at her and calmly, coldly, said: "Have you ever had to kill anyone?"

  "Well no!" she answered belligerently.

  "Then what right have you got to tell me anything?"

  There was a long, painful silence throughout the VFW hall, as would occur in a home where a guest had just witnessed an embarrassing family argument.

  Then I asked quietly, "Roger, when you got pushed just now, you came back with the fact that you had to kill in Vietnam. Was that the worst of it for you?"

  "Yah," he said. "That's half of it."

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  I waited for a very long t
ime, but he didn't go on. He only stared into his beer. Finally I had to ask, "What was the other half?"

  " T h e other half was that when we got home, nobody u n -

  derstood."

  What Happened over There, and What Happened over Here As discussed earlier, there is a profound resistance to killing one's fellow man. In World War II, 75 to 80 percent of riflemen did not fire their weapons at an exposed enemy, even to save their lives and the lives of their friends. In previous wars nonfiling rates were similar.

  In Vietnam the nonfiling rate was close to 5 percent.

  T h e ability to increase this firing rate, though, comes with a hidden cost. Severe psychological trauma becomes a distinct possibility when psychological safeguards of such magnitude are overridden. Psychological conditioning was applied en masse to a body of soldiers, w h o , in previous wars, were shown to be unwilling or unable to engage in killing activities. W h e n these soldiers, already inwardly shaken by their inner killing experiences, returned to be condemned and attacked by their own nation, the result was often further psychological trauma and long-term psychic damage.

  Overcoming the Resistance to Killing: The Problem But for the infantry, the problem of persuading soldiers to kill is now a major one. . . . That an infantry company in World War II could wreak such havoc with only about one seventh of the soldiers willing to use their weapons is a testimony to the lethal effects of modern firepower, but once armies realized what was actually going on, they at once set about to raise the average.

  Soldiers had to be taught, very specifically, to kill. "We are reluctant to admit that essentially war is the business of killing,"

  Marshall wrote in 1947, but it is readily enough admitted now.

  — Gwynne Dyer

  War

  At the end of World War II the problem became obvious: Johnny can't kill.

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  A firing rate of 15 to 20 percent among soldiers is like having a literacy rate of 15 to 20 percent among proofreaders. O n c e those in authority realized the existence and magnitude of the problem, it was only a matter of time until they solved it.

  The Answer

  And thus, since World War II, a new era has quietly dawned in modern warfare: an era of psychological warfare — psychological warfare conducted not upon the enemy, but upon one's own troops. Propaganda and various other crude forms of psychological enabling have always been present in warfare, but in the second half of this century psychology has had an impact as great as that of technology on the modern battlefield.

  W h e n S. L. A. Marshall was sent to the Korean War to make the same kind of investigation that he had done in World War II, he found that (as a result of new training techniques initiated in response to his earlier findings) 55 percent of infantrymen were firing their weapons — and in some perimeter-defense crises, almost everyone was. These training techniques were further perfected, and in Vietnam the firing rate appears to have been around 90 to 95 percent.2 T h e triad of methods used to achieve this remarkable increase in killing are desensitization, conditioning, and denial defense mechanisms.

  Desensitization: Thinking the Unthinkable

  The Vietnam era was, of course then at its peak, you know, the kill thing. We'd run PT [physical training] in the morning and every time your left foot hit the deck you'd have to chant "kill, kill, kill, kill." It was drilled into your mind so much that it seemed like when it actually came down to it, it didn't bother you, you know? Of course the first one always does, but it seems to get easier — not easier, because it still bothers you with every one that, you know, that you actually kill and you know you've killed.

  — USMC sergeant and Vietnam veteran, 1982

  quoted in Gwynne Dyer, War

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  This interview from Dyer's book provides an insight into that aspect of our modern training programs that is clearly and distinctly different from those of the past. M e n have always used a variety of mechanisms to convince themselves that the enemy was different, that he did not have a family, or that he was not even human.

  Most primitive tribes took names that translate as " m a n " or "human being," thereby automatically defining those outside of the tribe as simply another breed of animal to be hunted and killed. We have done something similar when we call the enemy Japs, Krauts, gooks, slopes, dinks, and Commies.

  Authors such as Dyer and Holmes have traced the development of this boot-camp deification of killing as having been almost unheard of in World War I, rare in World War II, increasingly present in Korea, and thoroughly institutionalized in Vietnam.

  Here Dyer explains exactly h o w this institutionalization of violent ideation in Vietnam differs from the experiences of previous generations:

  Most of the language used in Parris Island to describe the joys of killing people is bloodthirsty but meaningless hyperbole, and the recruits realize that even as they enjoy it. Nevertheless, it does help to desensitize them to the suffering of an "enemy," and at the same time they are being indoctrinated in the most explicit fashion (as previous generations were not) with the notion that their purpose is not just to be brave or to fight well; it is to kill people.

  Conditioning: Doing the Unthinkable

  But desensitization by itself is probably not sufficient to overcome the average individual's deep-seated-resistance to killing. Indeed, this desensitization process is almost a smoke screen for what I believe is the most important aspect of modern training. What Dyer and many other observers have missed is the role of (1) Pavlovian classical conditioning and (2) Skinnerian operant conditioning in modern training.

  In 1904, I. P. Pavlov was awarded the Nobel Prize for his development of the concepts of conditioning and association in dogs. In its simplest form, what Pavlov did was ring a bell just DESENSITIZATION AND CONDITIONING IN VIETNAM 253

  before feeding a dog. Over time, the dog learned to associate the sound of the bell with eating and would salivate when he heard the bell, even if no food was present. The conditioned stimulus was the bell, the conditioned response was salivation: the dog had been conditioned to salivate upon hearing a bell ring. This process of associating reward with a particular kind of behavior is the foundation of most successful animal training. During the middle of the twentieth century B. F. Skinner further refined this process into what he called behavioral engineering. Skinner and the behav-iorist school represent one of the most scientific and potentially powerful areas of the field of psychology.

  The method used to train today's — and the Vietnam era's —

  U.S. Army and USMC soldiers is nothing more than an application of conditioning techniques to develop a reflexive "quick shoot"

  ability. It is entirely possible that no one intentionally sat down to use operant conditioning or behavior modification techniques to train soldiers in this area. In my two decades of military service not a single soldier, sergeant, or officer, nor a single official or unofficial reference, has communicated an understanding that conditioning was occurring during marksmanship training. But from the standpoint of a psychologist who is also a historian and a career soldier, it has become increasingly obvious to me that this is exactly what has been achieved.

  Instead of lying prone on a grassy field calmly shooting at a bull's-eye target, the modern soldier spends many hours standing in a foxhole, with full combat equipment draped about his body, looking over an area of lightly wooded rolling terrain. At periodic intervals one or two olive-drab, man-shaped targets at varying ranges will pop up in front of him for a brief time, and the soldier must instantly aim and shoot at the target(s). When he hits a target it provides immediate feedback by instantly and very satisfyingly dropping backward—just as a living target would. Soldiers are highly rewarded and recognized for success in this skill and suffer mild punishment (in the form of retraining, peer pressure, and failure to graduate from boot camp) for failure to quickly and accur
ately "engage" the targets — a standard euphemism for

  "kill."

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  In addition to traditional marksmanship, what is being taught in this environment is the ability to shoot reflexively and instantly and a precise mimicry of the act of killing on the modern battlefield.

  In behavioral terms, the man shape popping up in the soldier's field of fire is the "conditioned stimulus," the immediate engaging of the target is the "target behavior." "Positive reinforcement" is given in the form of immediate feedback when the target drops if it is hit. In a form of "token economy" these hits are then exchanged for marksmanship badges that usually have some form of privilege or reward (praise, public recognition, three-day passes, and so on) associated with them.

  Every aspect of killing on the battlefield is rehearsed, visualized, and conditioned. On special occasions even more realistic and complex targets are used. Balloon-filled uniforms moving across the kill zone (pop the balloon and the target drops to the ground), red-paint-filled milk jugs, and many other ingenious devices are used. These make the training more interesting, the conditioned stimuli more realistic, and the conditioned response more assured under a variety of different circumstances.

  Snipers use such techniques extensively. In Vietnam it took an average of 50,000 rounds of ammunition to kill one enemy soldier.

  But the U.S. Army and USMC snipers in Vietnam expended only 1.39 rounds per kill. Carlos Hathcock, with ninety-three confirmed sniper kills in Vietnam, became involved in police and military sniper training after the war. He firmly believed that snipers should train on targets that look like people — not bull's-eyes. A typical command to one of his students (who is firing from one hundred yards at a life-sized photograph of a man holding a pistol to a woman's head) would be "Put three rounds inside the inside corner of the right eye of the bad guy."

  In the same way, Chuck Cramer, the trainer for an Israeli Defense Force antiterrorist sniper course, tried to design his course in such a way that practicing to kill was as realistic as possible. "I made the targets as human as possible," said Kramer.