On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (12 page)

Chapter Four

The Mud of Guilt and Horror

I am sick and tired of war. It's glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.

— William Tecumseh Sherman

The Impact of the Senses

Beyond fear and exhaustion is a sea of horror that surrounds the soldier and assails his every sense.

Hear
the pitiful screams of the wounded and dying.
Smell
the butcher-house smells of feces, blood, burned flesh, and rotting decay, which combine into the awful stench of death.
Feel
the shudder of the ground as the very earth groans at the abuse of artillery and explosives, and
feel
the last shiver of life and the flow of warm blood as friends die in your arms.
Taste
the salt of blood and tears as you hold a dear friend in mutual grieving, and you do not k n o w or care if it is the salt of your tears or his. And
see
what hath been wrought:

You tripped over strings of viscera fifteen feet long, over bodies which had been cut in half at the waist. Legs and arms, and heads THE M U D OF GUILT AND H O R R O R 75

bearing only necks, lay fifty feet from the closest torsos. As night fell the beachhead reeked with the stench of burning flesh.

— William Manchester,

Goodbye, Darkness

The Impact of Memory and the Role of Guilt
Strangely, such horrifying memories seem to have a much more profound effect on the combatant — the participant in battle —

than the noncombatant, the correspondent, civilian, POW, or other passive observer of the battle zone. The combat soldier appears to feel a deep sense of responsibility and accountability for what he sees around him. It is as though every enemy dead is a human being he has killed, and every friendly dead is a comrade for whom he was responsible. With every effort to reconcile these two responsibilities, more guilt is added to the horror that surrounds the soldier.

Richard Holmes speaks of "a brave and distinguished" old veteran who, after nearly seventy years, "wept softly . . . as he described a popular officer who had been literally disemboweled by a shell fragment." Often you can keep these things out of your mind when you are young and active, but they come back to haunt your nights in your old age. "We thought we had managed all right," he told Holmes, "kept the awful things out of our minds, but now I'm an old man and they come out from where I hid them. Every night."

And yet, all of this, this horror, is just
one
of the many factors among those that conspire to drive the soldier from the painful field.

Chapter Five

The Wind of Hate

Hate and Trauma in Our Daily Lives

When we consider the matter, are we truly surprised to discover that it is
not
danger that causes psychiatric stress? And is the existence of an intense resistance to participating in aggressive situations really so unexpected?

To a large extent our society — particularly our young men —

actively and vicariously pursues physical danger. Through roller coasters, action and horror movies, drugs, rock climbing, white-water rafting, scuba diving, parachuting, hunting, contact sports, and a hundred other methods, our society enjoys danger. To be sure, danger in excess grows old fast, particularly when we feel that we have lost control of it. And the potential for death and injury is an important ingredient in the complex mixture that makes combat so stressful, but it is
not
the major cause of stress in either our daily lives or in combat.

But facing aggression and hatred in our fellow citizens is an experience of an entirely different magnitude. All of us have had to face hostile aggression. On the playground as children, in the impoliteness of strangers, in the malicious gossip and comments of acquaintances, and in the animosity of peers and superiors in the workplace. In all of these instances everyone has known hostil-T H E W I N D O F H A T E

77

ity and the stress it can cause. Most avoid confrontations at all costs, and to work ourselves up to an aggressive verbal action — let alone a physical confrontation — is extremely difficult.

Simply confronting the boss about a promotion or a raise is one of the most stressful and upsetting things most people can ever bring themselves to do, and many never even get that far. Facing down the school bully or confronting a hostile acquaintance is something that most will avoid at all costs. Many medical authorities believe that it is the constant hostility and lack of acceptance that they must face — and the resulting stress — that are responsible for the dramatic rate of high blood pressure in African Americans.

The
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III-R),
the bible of psychology, states that in post-traumatic stress disorders "the disorder is apparently more severe and longer lasting when the stressor is of human design." We want desperately to be liked, loved, and in control of our lives; and intentional, overt,
human
hostility and aggression — more than anything else in life —

assaults our self-image, our sense of control, our sense of the world as a meaningful and comprehensible place, and, ultimately, our mental and physical health.

The ultimate fear and horror in most modern lives is to be raped or beaten, to be physically degraded in front of our loved ones, to have our family harmed and the sanctity of our homes invaded by aggressive and hateful intruders. Death and debilitation by disease or accident are statistically far more likely to occur than death and debilitation by malicious action, but the statistics do not calm our basically irrational fears. It is not fear of death and injury from disease or accident but rather acts of personal depredation and domination by our fellow human beings that strike terror and loathing in our hearts.

In rape the psychological harm usually far exceeds the physical injury. The trauma of rape, like that of combat, involves minimal fear of death or injury; far more damaging is the impotence, shock, and horror in being so hated and despised as to be debased and abused by a fellow human being.

The average citizen resists engaging in aggressive and assertive activities and dreads facing the irrational aggression and hatred of 78

KILLING AND COMBAT TRAUMA

others. The soldier in combat is no different: he resists the powerful obligation and coercion to engage in aggressive and assertive actions on the battlefield, and he dreads facing the irrational aggression and hostility embodied in the enemy.

Indeed, history is full of tales of soldiers who have committed suicide or inflicted terrible wounds upon themselves to avoid combat. It isn't fear of death that motivates these men to kill themselves.

Like many of their civilian counterparts who commit suicide, these men would rather die or mutilate themselves than face the aggression and hostility of a very hostile world.

The Impact of Hate in Nazi Death Camps

An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.

— Victor Frankl, Nazi concentration-camp survivor Perhaps a deeper understanding of the power of the buffeting of hate can be obtained from a study of survivors of Nazi concentration camps. Even the briefest review of available literature reveals that these individuals did suffer from great, lifelong, psychological damage as a result of their experiences in concentration camps, even though they did not have any obligation or ability to kill their tormentors.4 Among bombing victims, POWs under artillery fire, sailors in naval combat, and soldiers on patrols behind enemy lines we do not find any large-scale incidence of psychiatric casualties, but in such places as Dachau and Auschwitz they were the rule rather than the exception.

This is one historical circumstance in which noncombatants
did
suffer a horrifyingly high incidence of psychiatric casualties and post-traumatic stress. Physical exhaustion is not the only or even the primary factor involved here. And neither is the horror of the death and destruction around them principally responsible for the psychic shock of this situation. The distinguishing characteristic here, as opposed to numerous other noncombatant circumstances marked by an absence of psychiatric casualties, is that those in concentration camps had to face aggression and death on a highly personal, face-to-face basis. Nazi Germany placed a remarkable concentration of aggressive psychopaths in charge of these camps, T H E W I N D O F H A T E

79

and the lives of victims of these camps were completely dominated by the personalities of these terrifyingly brutal individuals.

Dyer tells us that concentration camps were staffed, whenever possible, with "both male and female thugs and sadists." Unlike the victims of aerial bombing, the victims of these camps had to look their sadistic killers in the face and know that another human being denied their humanity and hated them enough to personally slaughter them, their families, and their race as though they were nothing more than animals.

During strategic bombing the pilots and bombardiers were protected by distance and could deny to themselves that they were attempting to kill any specific individual. In the same way, civilian bombing victims were protected by distance, and they could deny that anyone was personally trying to kill them. And among the P O W s w h o were subject to bombing (as we saw earlier) the bombs were not personal, and the guards were no threat to the P O W s as long as they played by the rules. But in the death camps it was starkly, horribly personal. Victims of this horror had to look the darkest, most loathsome depths of human hatred in the eye. There was no room for denial, and the only escape was more madness.

It is here, in this sordid account of man's inhumanity to man, that we see the flip side of the aversion to killing in combat.

N o t only does the average soldier's psyche resist killing and the obligation to kill, but he is equally horrified by the inescapable fact that someone hates him and denies his humanity enough to kill him.

T h e soldier's response to the overtly hostile actions of the enemy is usually one of profound shock, surprise, and outrage. Countless veterans echo novelist and Vietnam veteran Phillip Caputo's first reaction to enemy fire in Vietnam. " W h y does he want to kill
me?"
thought Caputo. "What did I ever do to
him?"

O n e Vietnam-era pilot told me that he was largely undisturbed by the impersonal flak around him, but he was memorably disturbed when he once focused on one lone enemy soldier "standing casually next to his hooch [hut], carefully firing up at m e . " It was one of the rare times he had ever been able to distinguish an individual enemy soldier, and his immediate response was an 80

KILLING AND COMBAT TRAUMA

indignant "What did I ever do to him?" Then came a hurt and angry "I do not like you Sam I Am, I do not like you one damned bit." And he then directed all the resources and assets of his aircraft to kill this one individual and "blow up his little hooch."

An Application: Attrition Versus Maneuver Warfare
In the field of strategy and tactics the impact and influence of the Wind of Hate have been widely overlooked. Numerous tacticians and strategists advocate attrition warfare theories, in which the will of enemy forces is destroyed through the application of long-range artillery and bombing. The advocates of such theories persist in such beliefs even in the face of evidence, such as the post-World War II U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which, in the words of Paul Fussell, ascertained that "German military and industrial production seemed to increase —just like civilian determination not to surrender — the more bombs were dropped." Psychologically, aerial and artillery bombardments are effective, but only in the front lines when they are combined with the Wind of Hate, as manifested in the threat of the personal infantry attack that usually follows such bombardments.

This is why there were mass psychiatric casualties following World War I artillery bombardments, but World War II's mass bombings of cities were surprisingly counterproductive in breaking the enemy's will. Such bombardments without an accompanying close-range assault, or at least the threat of such an assault, are ineffective and may even serve no other purpose than to stiffen the will and resolve of the enemy!

Today a few pioneering authors such as William Lind and Robert Leonhard have focused their research and writings on the field of maneuver warfare, in which they attempt to refute the advocates of attrition warfare and understand the process of destroying the enemy's
will
to fight rather than his
ability
to fight. What maneuver warfare advocates have discovered is that over and over in history, civilians and soldiers have withstood the
actuality
of fear, horror, death, and destruction during artillery bombardments and aerial bombardments without losing their will to fight, while the mere THE WIND OF HATE

81

threat
of invasion and close-up interpersonal aggression has consistently turned whole populations into refugees fleeing in panic.

This is why putting unfriendly troop units in the enemy's rear is infinitely more important and effective than even the most comprehensive bombardments in his rear or attrition along his front. We saw this in the Korean War, in which, during the early years of the war, the rate of psychiatric casualties was almost seven times higher than the average rate for World War II. Only after the war settled down, lines stabilized, and the threat of having enemy in the rear areas decreased, did the average rate go down to slightly less than that of World War II. The
potential
of close-up, inescapable, interpersonal hatred and aggression is more effective and has greater impact on the morale of the soldier than the
presence
of inescapable, impersonal death and destruction.

Hate and Psychological Inoculation

Martin Seligman developed the concept of inoculation from stress from his famous studies of learning in dogs. He put dogs in a cage that had an electric shock pass through the floor at random intervals.

Initially the dogs would jump, yelp, and scratch pitifully in their attempts to escape the shocks, but after a time they would fall into a depressed, hopeless state of apathy and inactivity that Seligman termed "learned helplessness." After falling into a state of learned helplessness the dogs would not avoid the shocks even when provided with an obvious escape route.

Other dogs were given a means of escape after receiving some shocks but before falling into learned helplessness. These dogs learned that they could and would eventually escape from the shocks, and after only one such escape they became inoculated against learned helplessness. Even after long periods of random, inescapable shocks these inoculated dogs would escape when finally provided with a means to do so.

This is all a very interesting theoretical concept, but what is important to us is to understand that this process of inoculation is exactly what occurs in boot camps and in every other military school worthy of its name. When raw recruits are faced with seemingly 82 KILLING AND COMBAT TRAUMA

sadistic abuse and hardship (which they "escape" through weekend passes and, ultimately, graduation) they are — among many other things — being inoculated against the stresses of combat.

Combining an understanding of (a) those factors that cause combat trauma with (b) an understanding of the inoculation process permits us to understand that in most of these military schools the inoculation is specifically oriented toward hate.

The drill sergeant who screams into the face of a recruit is manifesting overt interpersonal hostility. Another effective means of inoculating a trainee against the Wind of Hate can be seen in U.S. Army and USMC pugil-stick training during boot camp or at the U.S. Military Academy and the British Airborne Brigade, where boxing matches are a traditional part of the training and initiation process. When in the face of all of this manufactured contempt and overt physical hostility the recruit overcomes the situation to graduate with honor and pride, he realizes at both conscious and unconscious levels that he can overcome such overt interpersonal hostility.
He has become partially inoculated against hate.

I do not believe that military organizations have truly understood the nature of the Wind of Hate, or of the resultant need for this kind of inoculation. It is only since Seligman's research that we have really had the foundation for a clinical understanding of these processes. However, through thousands of years of institutional memory and the harshest kind of survival-of-the-fittest evolution, this kind of inoculation has manifested itself in the traditions of the finest and most aggressive fighting units of many nations. By understanding the role of hate on the battlefield, we now can finally and truly understand the military value of what armies have done for so long and some of the processes by which they have enabled the soldier to physically and psychically survive on the battlefield.