On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (6 page)

Richard Holmes, in his superb book
Acts of War,
examines the hit rates of soldiers in a variety of historical battles. At Rorkes Drift in 1897 a small group of British soldiers were surrounded and vastly outnumbered by the Zulu. Firing volley after volley into the massed enemy ranks at point-blank range, it seems as if no round could have possibly missed, and even a 50 percent hit KILLING AND THE E X I S T E N C E OF R E S I S T A N C E

12

rate would seem to be low. But Holmes estimates that in actuality approximately thirteen rounds were fired for each hit.

In the same way, General Crook's men fired 25,000 rounds at Rosebud Creek on June 16, 1876, causing 99 casualties among the Indians, or 252 rounds per hit. And in the French defense from fortified positions during the Battle of Wissembourg, in 1870, the French, shooting at German soldiers advancing across open fields, fired 48,000 rounds to hit 404 Germans, for a hit ratio of 1 hit per 119 rounds fired. (And some, or possibly even the majority, of the casualties
had
to have been from artillery fire, which makes the French killing rate even more remarkable.) Lieutenant George Roupell encountered this same phenomenon while commanding a British platoon in World War I. He stated that the only way he could stop his men from firing into the air was to draw his sword and walk down the trench, "beating the men on the backside and, as I got their attention, telling them to fire l o w . " And the trend can be found in the firefights of Vietnam, when more than fifty thousand bullets were fired for every enemy soldier killed.2 " O n e of the things that amazed m e , " stated Douglas Graham, a medic with the First Marine Division in Vietnam, w h o had to crawl out under enemy and friendly fire to aid wounded soldiers, "is h o w many bullets can be fired during a firefight without anyone getting hurt."

T h e focus of primitive tribesmen on posturing at the expense of fighting in times of war is usually blatant and obvious. Richard Gabriel points out that primitive N e w Guinea tribes were excellent shots with the b o w and arrows they used while hunting, but when they went to war with each other they took the feathers off of the backs of their arrows, and it was only with these inaccurate and useless arrows that they fought their wars. In the same way, the American Indians considered "counting coup," or simply touching their enemy, to be far more important than killing.

This trend can be seen in the roots of the Western way of war.

Sam Keen notes that Professor Arthur N o c k at Harvard was fond of saying that wars between the Greek city-states "were only slightly more dangerous than American football." And Ardant du Picq points out that in all his years of conquest, Alexander the FIGHT OR FLIGHT, POSTURE OR SUBMIT

13

Great lost only seven hundred men to the sword. His enemy lost many, many more, but almost all of this occurred
after
the battle (which appears to have been an almost bloodless pushing match), when the enemy soldiers had turned their backs and begun to run.

Carl
von
Clausewitz makes the same point when he notes that the vast majority of combat losses historically occurred in the pursuit
after
one side or the other had won the battle. (Why this occurs is a subject that will be looked at in detail in the section "Killing and Physical Distance.")

As we shall see, modern training or conditioning techniques can partially overcome the inclination to posture. Indeed, the history of warfare can be seen as a history of increasingly more effective mechanisms for enabling and conditioning men to overcome their innate resistance to killing their fellow human beings.

In many circumstances highly trained modern soldiers have fought poorly trained guerrilla forces, and the tendency of poorly prepared forces to instinctively engage in posturing mechanisms (such as firing high) has given a significant advantage to the more highly trained force. Jack Thompson, a Rhodesian veteran, observed this process in combat against untrained forces. In Rhodesia, says Thompson, their immediate action drill was to "shed our packs and assault into the fire . . .
always.
That was because the [guerrillas]

were not able
to
deliver effective fire, and their bullets went high.

We would quickly establish fire superiority, and rarely ever lost a man."

This psychological and technological superiority in training and killing enabling continues to be a vital factor in modern warfare.

It can be seen in the British invasion of the Falklands and the 1989

United States invasion of Panama, where the tremendous success of the invaders and the remarkable disparity between the kill ratios can be at least partially explained by the degree and quality of training in the different forces.

Missing the target does not necessarily involve firing obviously high, and two decades on army rifle ranges have taught me that a soldier must fire unusually high for it to be obvious to an observer.

In other words, the intentional miss can be a very subtle form of disobedience.

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KILLING AND THE E X I S T E N C E OF R E S I S T A N C E

O n e of the best examples of an intentional miss was the experience of my grandfather John, w h o had been assigned to a firing squad during World War I. A major source of pride from his days as a veteran was that he was able to
not
kill while a member of that firing squad. He knew that the commands would be "Ready, aim, fire," and he knew that if he aimed at the prisoner on the command of "aim," he would hit the target he was aiming at on the command of "fire." His response was to aim slightly away from the prisoner on the command of "aim," enabling him to miss when he pulled the trigger on the command of "fire." My grandfather bragged for the rest of his life about outsmarting the army in this manner. Of course, others in the firing squad did kill the prisoner, but his conscience was clear. In the same way, generations of soldiers appear to have either intentionally or instinctively outwitted the powers that be by simply exercising the soldier's right to miss.

Another excellent example of soldiers exercising their right to miss is this mercenary-journalist's account of going with one of Eden Pastora's (a.k.a. Commandante Zero) Contra units on an ambush of a civilian river launch in Nicaragua: I'll never forget Surdo's words as he gave his imitation of a Pastora harangue prior to going into battle, telling the entire formation, "Si
mata una mujer, mata unapiricuaco; si mata un nino, mata unpiricuaco."

Piricuaco
is a derogatory term, meaning rabid dog, we used for the Sandinistas, so in effect Surdo was saying "If you kill a woman, you're killing a Sandinista, if you kill a child, you're killing a Sandinista." And off we went to kill women and children.

Once again I was part of the 10 men who would actually perform the ambush. We cleared our fields of fire and settled back to await the arrival of women and children and whatever other civilian passengers there might be on this launch.

Each man was alone with his thoughts. Not a word was spoken among us regarding the nature of our mission. Surdo paced back and forth nervously some yards behind us in the protection of the jungle.

. . . The loud throb of the powerful diesels of the 70-foot launch preceded its arrival by a good two minutes. The signal to commence F I G H T OR F L I G H T , P O S T U R E OR SUBMIT 15

firing was given as it appeared in front of us and I watched the RPG-7 [rocket] arc over the boat and into the jungle on the opposite bank. The M60 [machine gun] opened up, I rattled off a 20-round burst from my FAL. Brass was flying as thick as the jungle insects as our squad emptied their magazines.
Every bullet
sailed harmlessly over the civilian craft.

When Surdo realized what was happening he came running out of the jungle cursing violently in Spanish and firing his AK [rifle]

at the disappearing launch. Nicaraguan peasants are mean bastards, and tough soldiers. But they're not murderers. I laughed aloud in relief and pride as we packed up and prepared to move out.

— Dr. John

"American in ARDE"

N o t e the nature of such a "conspiracy to miss." Without a word being spoken, every soldier who was obliged and trained to fire reverted — as millions of others must have over the centuries — to the simple artifice of soldierly incompetence. And like the firing-squad member mentioned earlier, these soldiers took a great and private pleasure in outmaneuvering those w h o would make them do that which they would not.

Even more remarkable than instances of posturing, and equally indisputable, is the fact that a significant number of soldiers in combat elect not even to fire over the enemy's head, but instead do not fire at all. In this respect their actions very much resemble the actions of those members of the animal kingdom w h o "submit"

passively to the aggression and determination of their opponent rather than fleeing, fighting, or posturing.

We have previously observed General S. L. A. Marshall's findings concerning the 15 to 20 percent firing rates of U.S. soldiers in World War II. Both Marshall and Dyer note that the dispersion of the modern battlefield was probably a major factor in this low firing rate, and dispersion is indeed one factor in a complex equation of restraints and enabling mechanisms. Yet Marshall noted that even in situations where there were several riflemen together in a position facing an advancing enemy, only one was likely to fire 16 KILLING AND THE EXISTENCE OF RESISTANCE

while the others would tend to such "vital" tasks as running messages, providing ammo, tending wounded, and spotting targets.

Marshall makes it clear that in most cases the firers were aware of the large body of nonfirers around them. The inaction of these passive individuals did not seem to have a demoralizing effect on actual firers. To the contrary, the presence of the nonfirers seemed to enable the firers to keep going.3

Dyer argues that all other forces on the World War II battlefield must have had somewhere near the same rate of nonfirers. If, says Dyer, "a higher proportion of Japanese or Germans had been willing to kill, then the volume of fire they actually managed to produce would have been three, four, or five times greater than a similar number of Americans — and it wasn't."4

There is ample supporting evidence to indicate that Marshall's observations are applicable not only to U.S. soldiers or even to the soldiers on all sides in World War II. Indeed, there are compel-ling data that indicate that this singular lack of enthusiasm for killing one's fellow man has existed throughout military history.

A 1986 study by the British Defense Operational Analysis Establishment's field studies division used historical studies of more than one hundred nineteenth- and twentieth-century battles and test trials using pulsed laser weapons to determine the killing effectiveness of these historical units. The analysis was designed (among other things) to determine if Marshall's nonfirer figures were correct in other, earlier wars. A comparison of historical combat performances with the performance of their test subjects (who were not killing with their weapons and were not in any physical danger from the "enemy") determined that the killing potential in these circumstances was much greater than the actual historical casualty rates. The researchers' conclusions openly supported Marshall's findings, pointing to "unwillingness to take part [in combat]

as the main factor" that kept the actual historical killing rates significantly below the laser trial levels.

But we don't need laser test trials and battle reenactments to determine that many soldiers have been unwilling to take part in combat. The evidence has been there all along if we had only looked.

Chapter Two

Nonfirers Throughout History

Nonfirers in the Civil War

Imagine a new recruit in the American Civil War.

Regardless of the side he was on, or whether he came in as a draftee or a volunteer, his training would have consisted of mind-numbingly-repetitive drill. Whatever time was available to teach even the rawest recruit was spent endlessly repeating the loading drill, and for any veteran of even a few weeks, loading and firing a musket became an act that could be completed without thinking.

The leaders envisioned combat as consisting of great lines of men firing in unison. Their goal was to turn a soldier into a small cog in a machine that would stand and fire volley after volley at the enemy. Drill was their primary tool for ensuring that he would do his duty on the battlefield.

The concept of drill had its roots in the harsh lessons of military success on battlefields dating back to the Greek phalanx. Such drill was perfected by the Romans. Then, as firing drill, it was turned into a science by Frederick the Great and then mass-produced by Napoleon.

Today we understand the enormous power of drill to condition and program a soldier. J. Glenn Gray, in his book
The Warriors,
states that while soldiers may become exhausted and "enter into a dazed condition in which all sharpness of consciousness is lost"

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KILLING AND THE E X I S T E N C E OF R E S I S T A N C E

they can still "function like cells in a military organism, doing what is expected of them because it has become automatic."

O n e of the most powerful examples of the military's success in developing conditioned reflexes through drill can be found in John Masters's
The Road Past Mandalay,
where he relates the actions of a machine-gun team in combat during World W a r II: The No. 1 [gunner] was 17 yean old — I knew him. His No. 2

[assistant gunner] lay on the left side, beside him, head toward the enemy, a loaded magazine in his hand ready to whip onto the gun the moment the No. 1 said "Change!" The No. 1 started firing, and a Japanese machine gun engaged them at close range. The No.

1 got the first bunt through the face and neck, which killed him instandy. But he did not die where he lay, behind the gun. He rolled over to the right, away from the gun, his left hand coming up in death to tap his No. 2 on the shoulder in the signal that means
Take over.
The No. 2 did not have to push the corpse away from the gun. It was already clear.

The "take over" signal was drilled into the gunner to ensure that his vital weapon was
never
left unmanned should he ever have to leave. Its use in this circumstance is evidence of a conditioned reflex so powerful that it is completed without conscious thought as the last dying act of a soldier with a bullet through the brain.

Gwynne Dyer strikes right to the heart of the matter when he says,
"Conditioning,
almost in the Pavlovian sense, is probably a better word than
Training,
for what was required of the ordinary soldier was not thought, but the ability to . . . load and fire their muskets completely automatically even under the stress of combat."

This conditioning was accomplished by "literally thousands of hours of repetitive drilling" paired with "the ever-present incentive of physical violence as the penalty for failure to perform correctly."

T h e Civil War weapon was usually a muzzle-loading, black-powder, rifled musket. To fire the weapon a soldier would take a paper-wrapped cartridge consisting of a bullet and some gunpowder. He would tear the cartridge open with his teeth, pour the NONFIRERS THROUGHOUT HISTORY

19

powder down the barrel, set the bullet in the barrel, ram it home, prime the weapon with a percussion cap, cock, and fire. Since gravity was needed to pour the powder down the barrel, all of this was done from a standing position. Fighting was a stand-up business.

With the introduction of the percussion cap, and the advent of oiled paper to wrap the cartridge in, weapons had become generally quite reliable even in wet weather. The oiled paper around the cartridge prevented the powder from becoming wet, and the percussion cap ensured a reliable ignition source. In anything but a driving rainstorm, a weapon would malfunction
only
if the ball was put in before the powder (an extremely rare mistake given the drill the soldier had gone through), or if the hole linking the percussion cap with the barrel was fouled — something that
could
happen after a lot of firing, but that was easily corrected.

A minor problem could arise if a weapon was double loaded.

In the heat of battle a soldier might sometimes be unsure as to whether a musket was loaded, and it was not uncommon to place a second load on top of the first. But such a weapon was still quite usable. The barrels of these weapons were heavy, and the black powder involved was relatively weak. Factory tests and demonstra-tions of weapons of this era often involved firing a rifle with various kinds of multiple loads in it, sometimes with a weapon loaded all the way to the end of the barrel. If such a weapon was fired, the first load would ignite and simply push all the other loads out of the barrel.

These weapons were fast and accurate. A soldier could generally fire four or five rounds a minute. In training, or while hunting with a rifled musket, the hit rate would have been at least as good as that achieved by the Prussians with smoothbore muskets when they got 25 percent hits at 225 yards, 40 percent hits at 150 yards, and 60 percent hits at 75 yards while firing at a 100-foot by 6-foot target. Thus, at 75 yards, a 200-man regiment should be able to hit as many as 120 enemy soldiers in the first volley. If four shots were fired each minute, a regiment could potentially kill or wound 480 enemy soldiers in the first minute.

20 KILLING AND THE EXISTENCE OF RESISTANCE

The Civil War soldier was, without a doubt, the best trained and equipped soldier yet seen on the face of the earth. Then came the day of combat, the day for which he had drilled and marched for so long. And with that day came the destruction of all his preconceptions and delusions about what would happen.

At first the vision of a long line of men with every man firing in unison might hold true. If the leaders maintained control, and if the terrain was not too broken, for a while the battle could be one of volleys between regiments. But even while firing in regimental volleys, something was wrong. Terribly, frightfully wrong. An average engagement would take place at thirty yards. But instead of mowing down hundreds of enemy soldiers in the first minute, regiments killed only one or two men per minute. And instead of the enemy formations disintegrating in a hail of lead, they stood and exchanged fire for hours on end.

Sooner or later (and usually sooner), the long lines firing volleys in unison would begin to break down. And in the midst of the confusion, the smoke, the thunder of the firing, and the screams of the wounded, soldiers would revert from cogs in a machine to individuals doing what comes naturally to them. Some load, some pass weapons, some tend the wounded, some shout orders, a few run, a few wander off in the smoke or find a convenient low spot to sink into, and a few, a very few, shoot.

Numerous historical references indicate that, like their World War II equivalents, most soldiers of the muzzle-loading-musket era busied themselves with other tasks during battle. For example, the image of a line of soldiers standing and firing at the enemy is belied by this vivid account by a Civil War veteran describing the Battle of Antietam in Griffith's book: "Now is the pinch. Men and officers . . . are fused into a common mass, in the frantic struggle to shoot fast. Everybody tears cartridges, loads, passes guns, or shoots. Men are falling in their places or running back into the corn."

This is an image of battle that can be seen over and over again.

In Marshall's World War II work and in this account of Civil War battle we see that only a few men actually fire at the enemy, while N O N F I R E R S T H R O U G H O U T H I S T O R Y

21

others gather and prepare ammo, load weapons, pass weapons, or fall back into the obscurity and anonymity of cover.

The process of some men electing to load and provide support for those who are willing to shoot at the enemy appears to have been the norm rather than the exception. Those who did fire, and were the beneficiary of all of this support, can be seen in countless reports collected by Griffith, in which individual Civil War soldiers fired one hundred, two hundred, or even an incredible four hundred rounds of ammunition in battle. This in a period when the standard issue of ammunition was only forty rounds, with a weapon that became so fouled as to be useless without cleaning after firing about forty shots. The extra ammunition and muskets
must
have been supplied and loaded by the firers' less aggressive comrades.

Aside from firing over the enemy's heads, or loading and supporting those who were willing to fire, there was another option well understood by du Picq when he wrote: "A man falls and disappears, who knows whether it was a bullet or the fear of advancing that struck him?" Richard Gabriel, one of the foremost writers in the field of military psychology in our generation, notes that "in engagements the size of Waterloo or Sedan, the opportunity for a soldier not to fire or to refuse to press the attack by merely falling down and remaining in the mud was too obvious for shaken men under fire to ignore." Indeed, the temptation must have been great, and many
must
have done so.

Yet despite the obvious options of firing over the enemy's head (posturing), or simply dropping out of the advance (a type of flight), and the widely accepted option of loading and supporting those who were willing to fire (a limited kind of fighting), evidence exists that during black-powder battles thousands of soldiers elected to passively submit to both the enemy and their leaders through fake or mock firing. The best indicator of this tendency toward mock firing can be found in the salvage of multiply-loaded weapons after Civil War battles.

The Dilemma of
the
Discarded Weapons
Author of the
Civil War Collector's Encyclopedia
F. A. Lord tells us that after the Bade of Gettysburg, 27,574 muskets were recovered 22 KILLING AND THE E X I S T E N C E OF R E S I S T A N C E

from the battlefield. Of these, nearly 90 percent (twenty-four thousand) were loaded. Twelve thousand of these loaded muskets were found to be loaded more than once, and six thousand of the multiply loaded weapons had from three to ten rounds loaded in the barrel. O n e weapon had been loaded twenty-three times.

Why, then, were there so many loaded weapons available on the battlefield, and why did at least twelve thousand soldiers misload their weapons in combat?

A loaded weapon was a precious commodity on the black-powder battlefield. During the stand-up, face-to-face, short-range battles of this era a weapon should have been loaded for only a fraction of the time in battle. More than 95 percent of the time was spent in loading the weapon, and less than 5 percent in firing it. If most soldiers were desperately attempting to kill as quickly and efficiently as they could, then 95 percent should have been shot with an empty weapon in their hand, and any loaded, cocked, and primed weapon available dropped on the battlefield would have been snatched up from wounded or dead comrades and fired.

There were many w h o were shot while charging the enemy or were casualties of artillery outside of musket range, and these individuals would never have had an opportunity to fire their weapons, but they hardly represent 95 percent of all casualties. If there is a desperate need in
all
soldiers to fire their weapon in combat, then many of these men should have died with an empty weapon. And as the ebb and flow of battle passed over these weapons, many of them should have been picked up and fired at the enemy.

T h e obvious conclusion is that most soldiers were
not
trying to kill the enemy. Most of them appear to have not even wanted to fire in the enemy's general direction. As Marshall observed, most soldiers seem to have an inner resistance to firing their weapon in combat. The point here is that the resistance appears to have existed long before Marshall discovered it, and this resistance is the reason for many (if not most) of these multiply loaded weapons.

The physical necessity for muzzle-loaders to be loaded from a standing position, combined with the shoulder-to-shoulder massed N O N F I R E R S T H R O U G H O U T H I S T O R Y 2 3

firing line so beloved of the officers of this era, presented a situation in which — unlike that studied by Marshall — it was very difficult for a man to disguise the fact that he was not shooting. And in this volley-fire situation, what du Picq called the "mutual surveillance" of authorities and peers must have created an intense pressure to fire.

There was not any "isolation and dispersion of the modern battlefield" to hide nonparticipants during a volley fire. Their every action was obvious to those comrades w h o stood shoulder to shoulder with them. If a man truly was not able or willing to fire, the only way he could disguise his lack of participation was to load his weapon (tear cartridge, pour powder, set bullet, ram it home, prime, cock), bring it to his shoulder, and then
not actually
fire,
possibly even mimicking the recoil of his weapon w h e n someone nearby fired.

Here was the epitome of the industrious soldier. Carefully and steadily loading his weapon in the midst of the turmoil, screams, and smoke of battle, no action of his was discernible as being something other than that which his superiors and comrades would find commendable.

T h e amazing thing about these soldiers w h o failed to fire is that they did so in direct opposition to the mind-numbingly repetitive drills of that era. H o w , then, did these Civil War soldiers consistently "fail" their drillmasters when it came to the all-important loading drill?