On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (21 page)

E M O T I O N A L D I S T A N C E

163

But try as we might we were not completely successful at keeping the genie of racial hatred in its bottle.

Most of the Vietnam veterans I have interviewed developed a profound love for the Vietnamese culture and people. Many married Vietnamese women. This egalitarian tendency to mingle with and accept, admire, and even love another culture is an American strong point. Because of it America was able to turn occupied Germany and Japan from defeated enemies to friends and allies.

But many U.S. soldiers in Vietnam spent their year in-country isolated from the positive, friendly aspects of Vietnamese culture and people. T h e only Vietnamese they met were either trying to kill them or were suspected of being or supporting Vietcong. This environment had the capacity to develop profound suspicion and hatred. O n e Vietnam veteran told me that, to him, "they were less than animals."

Because of this ability to accept other cultures, Americans probably committed fewer atrocities than most other nations would have under the circumstances associated with guerrilla warfare in Vietnam. Certainly fewer than was the track record of most colonial powers. Yet still we had our My Lai, and our efforts in that war were profoundly, perhaps fatally, undermined by that single incident.

It can be easy to unleash this genie of racial and ethnic hatred in order to facilitate killing in time of war. It can be more difficult to keep the cork in the bottle and completely restrain it. O n c e it
is
out, and the war is over, the genie is not easily put back in the bottle. Such hatred lingers over the decades, even centuries, as can be seen today in Lebanon and what was once Yugoslavia.

It would be easy to feel some smug, self-righteous sense of superiority and convince ourselves that such lingering hatred exists only in distant, insular nations like Lebanon or Yugoslavia. T h e truth is that we are still trying to suppress racism more than a century after the end of slavery, and our limited use of cultural distance in World War II and Vietnam still tarnishes our dealings with our opponents in those wars.

On some future battlefield we may be tempted to once again manipulate this two-edged sword of cultural distance to our 164

A N A N A T O M Y O F KILLING

advantage. But before we do, we would be well advised to carefully consider the costs. T h e costs both during the war and in the peace that we hope to have attained when the war is over.

Moral Distance: "Their Cause Is Holy, So H o w Can They
Sin?"

We who strike the enemy where his heart beats have been slandered as "baby-killers" and "murders of women." . . . What we do is repugnant to us too, but necessary. Very necessary. Nowadays there is no such animal as a non-combatant; modern warfare is total warfare. A soldier cannot function at the front without the factory worker, the farmer, and all the other providers behind him. You and I, Mother, have discussed this subject, and I know you understand what I say. My men are brave and honourable. Their cause is holy, so how can they sin while doing their duty? If what we do is frightful, then may frightfulness be Germany's salvation.

— Captain Peter Strasser, head of Germany's World War I airship division, in a letter quoted in Gwynne Dyer,
War
Moral distance involves legitimizing oneself and one's cause. It can generally be divided into two components. T h e first component usually is the determination and condemnation of the enemy's guilt, which, of course, must be punished or avenged. T h e other is an affirmation of the legality and legitimacy of one's own cause.

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

165

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

A N A N A T O M Y O F KILLING

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

167

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

A N A N A T O M Y O F KILLING

"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 fashion) 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."