On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (24 page)

" 'Not for you,' I said."

"Did you kill her?"

"Hell, I blew 'er f in' 'ead off," he replied

"My platoon all gathered 'round and smiled. 'You are our
tuan

[Malay for "sir" or "leader"],' my sergeant said. 'You are our
tuan.''
"

I'm not a priest. I'm not even an officer any more. . . . I hoped my look told Harry that I liked him, that it was okay with me if he forgave himself. It's hard to do though.

This is the spectrum of atrocity, this is how atrocity happens, but not why. Let us n o w examine the why of atrocity, the rationale of atrocity, and the dark power that atrocity lends to those w h o wield it.

Chapter Two

The Dark Power of Atrocity

The Problem: "Righteousness Comes Out of a Gun Barrel [?]"

On a cold, rainy training day at Fort Lewis, Washington, I listened to soldiers talk who had just completed a prisoner of war exercise.

One held that the enemy troops should be marched through an area saturated with persistent nerve gas. Another stated that the claymore mine presented the most cost-effective and energy-efficient method of disposing of POWs. His buddy claimed that they were both being wasteful and that POWs could best be used for minefield clearing and reconnaissance for nuclear- and chemical-contaminated areas. The battalion chaplain, who was standing nearby, began to address this obvious moral issue.

The chaplain cited the Geneva conventions and discussed our nation as a force of righteousness and the support of God for our cause. To pragmatic soldiers this moral approach didn't go far.

The Geneva convention was dismissed, and our forward observer said that in school they had told him that "the Geneva convention says you can't fire white phosphorus at troops; so you call it in on their equipment." The young artilleryman's logic was "if we're gonna find ways around the Geneva convention, what do you think the enemy is gonna do?" Another said, "If we get captured by the Russians, we might as well kiss it off, so why not give them a dose of the same medicine?" To the chaplain's 204

KILLING AND A T R O C I T I E S

"righteousness" and "support of God" comments, the cold, wet soldiers' answers were along the lines of "righteousness comes out of a gun barrel" and "the victor writes history."

At Fort Benning I too had heard the "Geneva convention and white phosphorous on equipment" line during the artillery pitch in Officer Candidate School, the Infantry Officer Basic Course, Ranger school, and the Infantry Mortar Platoon Officers Course.

The treatment of POWs had been addressed by an instructor at Ranger school, and he clearly communicated his personal belief that in a raid or an ambush, a patrol could not be expected to take POWs. I had noted that most of the outstanding young soldiers coming to us from the Ranger Battalion shared this Ranger-school belief.

A Solution: 'I'll Shoot You Myself"

To confront this belief I said basically, "If the enemy finds just one massacre, like our soldiers did at Malmedy in the Battle of the Bulge, then thousands of enemy soldiers will swear never to surrender, and they'll be very tough to fight. Just like our troops were in the Battle of the Bulge when word got around that the Germans were shooting POWs. In addition, that's all the excuse the enemy needs to kill our captured soldiers. So by murdering a few prisoners, who were just poor, tired soldiers like you, you'll make the enemy force a damn-sight tougher, and cause the deaths —

murders — of a whole bunch of our boys.

"On the other hand, if you disarm, tie up, and leave a POW

out in a clearing somewhere because you can't take him with you, then the word will spread that Americans treat POWs honorably, even when the chips are down, and a whole bunch of scared, tired soldiers will surrender rather than die. In World War II an entire Soviet army corps defected to the Germans. The Germans were treating Soviet POWs like dogs, and yet a whole corps came over to their side. How would they behave if they faced a humane enemy?

"The last thing you ought to know is that if 7 ever catch any of you heroes killing a POW,
I'll
shoot you right on the spot.

Because it's illegal, because it's wrong, because it's
dumb,
and it's one of the worst things you could do to help us win a war."

T H E D A R K P O W E R O F A T R O C I T Y 205

I didn't bother to include the possibility of organizing Soviet P O W s and defectors into combat units and the very real importance of capturing P O W s for intelligence purposes.

The Lesson and the Greater Problem

The most important point here is that nobody has ever pointed out to me the potential repercussions of improper P O W handling.

No leader of mine has ever stood up and clearly stated this position to me and defended it. In fact, the opposite has occurred. As a private and a sergeant, I have had enlisted superiors strongly defend the execution of P O W s whenever it was inconvenient to take them alive, and at the time I accepted it as reasonable. But they never made me understand the vital importance and the deadly ramifications of P O W handling (or mishandling) on the battlefield because I think they themselves did not understand.

On the next battlefield our soldiers may commit war crimes and thereby cause us to lose one
of
the basic combat multipliers that we have available to us: the tendency of an oppressed people to become disloyal to their nation.

O n e interviewer of World War II P O W s told me that German soldiers repeatedly told him that relatives with World W a r I combat experience had advised, "Be brave, join the infantry, and surrender to the first American you see." T h e American reputation for fair play and respect for human life had survived over generations, and the decent actions of American soldiers in World War I had saved the lives of many soldiers in World War II.

This is America's position on the role of atrocity in combat, and this is the logic behind it. But there is another position that many nations have taken on the use of atrocity in warfare, and there is another logic to be considered. This other logic is the twisted logic of atrocity, which we must understand if we are to completely understand killing.

The Empowerment

War. . . has no power to transform, it merely exaggerates the good and evil that are in us.

— Lord Moran

Anatomy of Courage

206

KILLING AND A T R O C I T I E S

Empowerment Through Death

The first time I saw a soldier plummet to his death in a parachute jump it took years to sort out my emotions. Part of me was horrified at this soldier's death, but as I watched him fight his tangled reserve chute all the way down another part of me was filled with pride.

His death validated and affirmed all that I believe about paratroopers, who stare death in the face daily. That brave, doomed soldier became a living sacrifice to the spirit of the airborne.

After talking to my fellow paratroopers and drinking a toast to the memory of our departed comrade, I began to understand that his death had magnified our own belief in the danger, nobility, and superiority inherent in our elite unit. Instead of being diminished by his loss, we were strangely magnified and empowered by it.1 This phenomenon is not limited to, although it is always present in, elite fighting groups. Nations celebrate their costliest battles, even losing ones — the Alamo, Pickett's Charge, Dunkerque, Wake Island, and Leningrad are examples — due to the bravery and nobility of the sacrifices involved.

Empowerment Through Atrocity

As churlish as it might be to compare the death of a paratrooper in an airborne action with the sacrifice of the Jews in World War II, I believe that the same process that existed in me when I saw a soldier die exists in a greatly magnified form among those who commit atrocities.

The Holocaust is sometimes misunderstood as the senseless killing of Jews and innocent people. But this killing was not senseless.

Vile and evil, but not senseless. Such murders have a very powerful but twisted logic of their own. A logic that we must understand if we are to confront it.

There are many benefits reaped by those who tap the dark power of atrocity. Those who engage in a policy of atrocity usually strike a bargain that exchanges their future for a brief gain in the present. Though brief, that gain is nonetheless real and powerful.

In order to understand the attraction of atrocity, we must understand and clearly acknowledge those benefits that cause individuals, groups, and nations to turn to it.

T H E D A R K P O W E R OF A T R O C I T Y 207

Terrorism

O n e of the most obvious and blatant benefits of atrocity is that it quite simply scares the hell out of people. The raw horror and savagery of those w h o murder and abuse cause people to flee, hide, and defend themselves feebly, and often their victims respond with mute passivity. We see this in the newspapers daily when we read of victims who are faced with mass murderers and simply do nothing to protect themselves or others. Hannah Arendt noted this failure to resist the Nazis in her study
The Banality of Evil.

Jeff Cooper, writing from experience in criminology, comments on this tendency in civilian life:

Any study of the atrocity list of recent years — Starkweather, Speck, Manson, Richard Hickok and Cary Smith, et al — shows immediately that the victims, by their appalling ineptitude and timidity, virtually assisted in their own murders. . . .

Any man who is a man may not, in honor, submit to threats of violence. But many men who are not cowards are simply unprepared for the fact of human savagery. They have not thought about it (incredible as this may appear to anyone who reads the papers or listens to the news) and they just don't know what to do. When they look right into the face of depravity or violence they are astonished and confounded.

This process that empowers criminals and outcasts in society can work even better when institutionalized as policy by revolutionary organization, armies, and governments. North Vietnam and its Vietcong proxies represent one force that blatantly used atrocity as a policy and was triumphant because of it. In 1959, 250 South Vietnamese officials were assassinated by the Vietcong. T h e Vietcong found that assassination was easy, it was cheap, and it worked.

A year later this toll of murder and horror went up to 1,400, and it continued for twelve more years.

Throughout these years the attrition warfare advocates in the United States visited impotent, futile bombings upon the North.

The methodology and targets of these bombings made them very ineffectual compared with the strategic bombing conducted in World War II, yet our o w n post-World War II studies showed 208

KILLING AND A T R O C I T I E S

that in England and Germany little was accomplished by such bombings except to steel the resolve of the enemy.

But while the United States was fruitlessly bombing the North, the N o r t h was efficiently murdering the infrastructure of the South, one by one in their beds and homes. As we have seen before, death from twenty thousand feet is strangely impersonal and psychologically impotent. But death up close and personal, visiting the manifest intensity of the enemy's Wind of Hate upon its victims, such death can be hideously effective at sapping the will of the enemy and ultimately achieving victory: A squad with a death order entered the house of a prominent community leader and shot him, his wife, his married son, and daughter-in-law, a male and female servant and their baby. The family cat was strangled, the family dog was clubbed to death, and the goldfish scooped out of the fishbowl and tossed onto the floor.

When the communists left, no life remained in the house — a

"family unit" had been eliminated.

—Jim Graves

"The Tangled Web"

There is a simple, horrifying, and obvious value resident in atrocity.

The Mongols were able to make entire nations submit without a fight just on the basis of their reputation for exterminating whole cities and nations that had resisted them in the past. The term

"terrorist" simply means "one w h o uses terror," and we don't have to look very far — around the world or back in history — to find instances of individuals and nations who have succeeded in achieving power through the ruthless and effective use of terror.

Killing Empowerment

Mass murder and execution can be sources of mass empowerment.

It is as if a pact with the devil had been made, and a host of evil demons had lived and thrived on the victims of the Nazi SS

(to select just one example), empowering its nation with an evil strength as a reward for its blood sacrifices. Each killing affirmed and T H E D A R K P O W E R O F A T R O C I T Y

209

validated in blood the demon of Nazi racial superiority — thereby establishing a powerful pseudospeciation (categorizing a victim as an inferior species) based on moral distance, social distance, and cultural distance.

Dyer's book
War
has a remarkable photograph of Japanese soldiers bayoneting Chinese prisoners. Prisoners in an endless line are in a deep ditch on their knees with their hands bound behind their backs. Along the banks of the ditch stands another endless line of Japanese soldiers with bayonets fixed on their rifles. O n e by one these soldiers go down into the ditch and inflict the "intimate brutality" of the bayonet on a prisoner. T h e prisoners hang their heads in dull acceptance and mute horror. Those being bayoneted have their faces contorted in agony. Remarkably, the killers have their faces contorted in a way similar to their victims.

In these execution situations strong forces of moral distance, social distance, cultural distance, group absolution, close proximity, and obedience-demanding authority all join to compel the soldier to execute, overcoming the forlorn forces of his natural and learned decency and his natural resistance to killing.

Each soldier w h o actively or passively participates in such mass executions is faced with a stark choice. On the one hand, the soldier can resist the incredibly powerful array of forces that call for him to kill, and he will instantly be denied by his nation, his leaders, and his friends and will most likely be executed along with the other victims of this horror. On the other hand, the soldier can bow before the social and psychological forces that demand that he kill, and in doing so he will be strangely empowered.

The soldier who does kill must overcome that part of him that says that he is a murderer of women and children, a foul beast w h o has done the unforgivable. He
must
deny the guilt within him, and he
must
assure himself that the world is not mad, that his victims are less than animals, that they are evil vermin, and that what his nation and his leaders have told him to do is right.