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Not of the princes and prelates with periwigged charioteers
Riding triumphantly laureled to lap the fat of the years,
Rather the scorned—the rejected—the men hemmed in with spears;
The men in tattered battalion which fights till it dies,
Dazed with the dust of the battle, the din and the cries,
The men with the broken heads and the blood running into their eyes.
Not the be-medalled Commander, beloved of the throne,
Riding cock-horse to parade when the bugles are blown,
But the lads who carried the hill and cannot be known.
Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the mirth,
The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth;—
Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth!
Theirs be the music, the colour, the glory, the gold;
Mine be a handful of ashes, a mouthful of mould.
Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold—
Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tale be told. Amen.
—John Masefield
“A Consecration”
Acknowledgments
War has always interested me; not war in the sense of maneuvers devised by great generals…but the reality of war, the actual killing. I was more interested to know in what way and under the influence of what feelings one soldier kills another than to know how the armies were arranged at Austerlitz and Borodino.
—Leo Tolstoy
I have been assisted in this study by a host of great men and women who have stood beside me and gone before me in this endeavor. These I do now gratefully acknowledge.
To my wonderful and infinitely patient wife, Jeanne, for her staunch support; to my mother, Sally Grossman; and to Duane Grossman, my father and co-conspirator, whose many hours of help in research and concept made this book possible.
To Jan Camp, who helped with preparing the final draft and getting quotation authorizations.
To Major Bob Leonhard, Captain Rich Hooker, Lieutenant Colonel Bob Harris, Major/Dr. Duane Tway, and that indomitable team, Harold Thiele and Elantu Viovoide: peers, friends, and fellow believers who have endured many a crude draft and contributed much time and effort to assisting and supporting me in this work.
To Richard Curtis, my literary agent, who contributed significantly and then waited long and patiently for the completion of this work. And to Roger Donald and Geoff Kloske, my editors at Little, Brown and Company, who had faith in this book and then worked long and hard to help me to fine-tune it into a professional product.
To that magnificent group of soldier-scholars at the U.S. Military Academy whom I had the privilege of working with: Colonel Jack Beach, Colonel John Wattendorf, Lieutenant Colonel Jose Picart, and all the gang in the PL100 committee. And to that superb group of West Point cadets who volunteered to spend their summer conducting interviews, testing some of the theories presented in this book.
To my fellow students at the British Army Staff College at Camberley, England, who provided me with one of the finest and most intellectually stimulating years of my life.
To all of those remarkable soldiers who have molded, mentored, befriended, and commanded me, patiently giving of their wisdom and experiences over twenty years: First Sergeant Donald Wing-rove, Sergeant First Class Carmel Sanchez, Lieutenant Greg Parlier, Captain Ivan Middlemiss, Major Jeff Rock, Lieutenant Colonel Ed Chamberlain, Lieutenant Colonel Rick Everett, Colonel George Fisher, Major General William H. Harrison, and countless others to whom I owe so much. And to Chaplain Jim Boyle: Ranger buddy, friend, and true brother. For most of these this is not their current rank, but that was what they were when I needed them most.
To Dr. John Warfield and Dr. Phillip Powell, at the University of Texas at Austin, who gave unselfishly of their wealth of wisdom and knowledge, while trusting me and letting me do it my way. And to Dr. John Lupo and Dr. Hugh Rodgers at Columbus College, in Columbus, Georgia, from whom I learned to love history.
I also need to make special acknowledgment of the extensive use I have made of the recent and excellent books by Paddy Griffith, Gwynne Dyer, John Keegan, Richard Gabriel, and Richard Holmes. Paddy Griffith was a boon mentor, friend, and companion during my stay in England, and along with Richard Holmes and John Keegan he is one of the world’s true giants in this field today. And I particularly want to note that this study would have been much more difficult to complete without drawing on the tremendous body of insight and personal narratives collected in Richard Holmes’s book Acts of War. Holmes’s superb book will be the primary reference source for generations of scholars who study the processes of men in battle. My correspondence with him has confirmed that he is a gentleman, a gentle man, and a soldier-scholar of the highest order.
And I need to recognize that one of this study’s most valuable and unusual sources of individual narratives has been the pages of Soldier of Fortune magazine. The image of the traumatized Vietnam veteran being spit upon, insulted, and degraded upon return to the United States is not mythical, but based upon literally thousands of such incidents—as chronicled in Bob Greene’s excellent book, Homecoming. In this environment of condemnation and accusation, many Vietnam veterans felt that they had only one national forum in which they could attain some degree of closure by writing of their experiences in a sympathetic and nonjudgmental environment, and that forum was Soldier of Fortune magazine. To those who would prejudge this material and automatically reject anything coming from this quarter as mindless machismo, I ask that you read these narratives first. I am particularly indebted to Colonel Harris for his recommendation of this novel resource, and for the loan of his personal collection of these magazines. Most of all I need to thank Colonel (retired) Alex McColl, at Soldier of Fortune, for his support in using these quotes. It is good to know that there are still places where an officer is a gentleman, his word is his bond, and that is all that is required.
And to the many young American warriors who have been entrusted to me for leadership and training—West Point cadets, ROTC cadets, soldiers, marines, and police officers—it has been my privilege to teach them, and my honor to guide them in the way of the warrior.
Last, and most important, to all the veterans throughout history who have recorded their responses to killing, and to those in my own life who permitted me to interview them. To Rich, Tim, Bruce, Dave, “Sarge” (Arf!), the Sheepdog Committee, and a hundred others who have shared secrets with me. And to their wives, who sat beside them and held their hands while they wept and told of things they had never told before. To Brenda, Nan, Lorraine, and dozens of others. All those who spoke with me have been promised anonymity in return for their secret thoughts, but my debt to them is such that it can never be paid.
To all of these I wish to say thank you. I do truly stand on the shoulders of giants. But the responsibility for the report given from this august height is strictly my own. Thus, the views presented here do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Defense or its components, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, or Arkansas State University.
David A. Grossman
Jonesboro, Arkansas
A Brief Note Concerning Gender
War has often been a sexist environment, but death is an equal opportunity employer. Gwynne Dyer tells us:
Women have almost always fought side by side with men in guerrilla or revolutionary wars, and there isn’t any evidence they are significantly worse at killing people—which may or may not be comforting, depending on whether you see war as a male problem or a human one.
With but one exception, all of my interviewees have been male, and when speaking of the soldier the words of war turn themselves easily to terms of “he,” “him,” and “his”; but it could just as readily be “she,” “her,” and “hers.” While the masculine reference is used throughout this study, it is used solely out of convenience, and there is no intention to exclude the feminine gender from any of the dubious honors of war.
Introduction to the Revised Edition
Since the first publication of On Killing in 1995, the basic concepts set forth in this book have been validated and supported by a host of judges. In post–9/11 America, On Killing has become required reading at the FBI Academy, the DEA Academy, and a great many other law enforcement agencies nationwide. In the midst of conducting major wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the globe, the USMC has placed On Killing on the Commandant’s Required Reading List, and the book is required reading at West Point, the U.S. Air Force NCO Academy, and many other military schools.
The harsh, unforgiving environment of warfare is a realm in which only the best and most valuable tactics, strategies, and ideas are preserved, and that which has no utility is quickly cast off. Wishful thinking and pie-in-the-sky theories are usually among the first victims of warfare.
In the daily crucible of combat experience, at home and abroad, On Killing has passed the ultimate acid test: it is being read and reread by countless thousands of warriors who are called upon by our nation to kill in combat.
And it is the single greatest honor of my life to have been of service to these magnificent men and women in their hour of need.
If you are a virgin preparing for your wedding night, if you or your partner are having sexual difficulties, or if you are just curious…then there are hundreds of scholarly books available to you on the topic of sexuality. But if you are a young “virgin” soldier or law-enforcement officer anticipating your baptism of fire, if you are a veteran (or the spouse of a veteran) who is troubled by killing experiences, or if you are just curious…then, on this topic, there has been absolutely nothing available in the way of scholarly study or writing.
Until now.
Over a hundred years ago Ardant du Picq wrote his Battle Studies, in which he integrated data from both ancient history and surveys of French officers to establish a foundation for what he saw as a major tendency toward nonparticipation in warfare. From his experiences as the official historian of the European theater in World War II, Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall wrote Men Against Fire, in which he made some crucial observations on the firing rates of men in war. In 1976 John Keegan wrote his definitive Face of Battle, focusing again exclusively on war. With Acts of War, Richard Holmes wrote a key book exploring the nature of war. But the link between killing and war is like the link between sex and relationships. Indeed, this last analogy applies across the board. All previous authors have written books on relationships (that is, war), while this is a book on the act itself: on killing.
These previous authors have examined the general mechanics and nature of war, but even with all this scholarship, no one has looked into the specific nature of the act of killing: the intimacy and psychological impact of the act, the stages of the act, the social and psychological implications and repercussions of the act, and the resultant disorders (including impotence and obsession). On Killing is a humble attempt to rectify this. And in doing so, it draws a novel and reassuring conclusion about the nature of man: despite an unbroken tradition of violence and war, man is not by nature a killer.
The Existence of the “Safety Catch”
One of my early concerns in writing On Killing was that World War II veterans might take offense at a book demonstrating that the vast majority of combat veterans of their era would not kill. Happily, my concerns were unfounded. Not one individual from among the thousands who have read On Killing has disputed this finding.
Indeed, the reaction from World War II veterans has been one of consistent confirmation. For example, R. C. Anderson, a World War II Canadian artillery forward observer, wrote to say the following:
I can confirm many infantrymen never fired their weapons. I used to kid them that we fired a hell of a lot more 25-pounder [artillery] shells than they did rifle bullets.
In one position…we came under fire from an olive grove to our flank.
Everyone dived for cover. I was not occupied, at that moment, on my radio, so, seeing a Bren [light machine gun], I grabbed it and fired off a couple of magazines. The Bren gun’s owner crawled over to me, swearing, “Its OK for you, you don’t have to clean the son of a bitch.” He was really mad.
Colonel (retired) Albert J. Brown, in Reading, Pennsylvania, exemplifies the kind of response I have consistently received while speaking to veterans’ groups. As an infantry platoon leader and company commander in World War II, he observed that “Squad leaders and platoon sergeants had to move up and down the firing line kicking men to get them to fire. We felt like we were doing good to get two or three men out of a squad to fire.”
There has been controversy concerning S. L. A. Marshall’s findings about World War II firing rates. Basically, a small group of scholars claimed that Marshall had fabricated and falsified his research. His methodology may not meet modern scholarly standards, but when faced with scholarly concern about a researcher’s methodology, a scientific approach involves replicating the research. In Marshall’s case, every available parallel scholarly study replicates his basic findings. Ardant du Picq’s surveys and observations of the ancients, Holmes’s and Keegan’s numerous accounts of ineffectual firing, Holmes’s assessment of Argentine firing rates in the Falklands War, Griffith’s data on the extraordinarily low killing rates among Napoleonic and American Civil War regiments, the British Army’s laser reenactments of historical battles, the FBI’s studies of nonfiring rates among law-enforcement officers in the 1950s and 1960s, and countless other individual and anecdotal observations all confirm Marshall’s conclusion that the vast majority of combatants throughout history, at the moment of truth when they could and should kill the enemy, have found themselves to be unable to kill. And David Lee, in his excellent book, Up Close and Personal, has collected a superb body of World War II narratives and research demonstrating that a handful of elite units, pioneering the realistic training that Marshall advocated, were able to achieve far higher firing rates than normal units.
The definitive U.S. military source, the United States Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) historical monograph titled “SLAM, the Influence of S. L. A. Marshall on the United States Army,” strongly defends Marshall’s observations. His work was widely accepted at the end of World War II when our Army featured a high ratio of veteran leaders who had led us through one of the most horrific wars in history. In Korea and Vietnam, Marshall was treated with the deepest respect by men in the midst of war, and he was asked repeatedly to visit, train, and study.
Were all of these military leaders wrong? Did Marshall fool the world until a few people discovered the “truth”? Marshall may have padded his résumé in a few small areas with regard to his World War I experience. He claimed that he had received a battlefield commission while he was actually an OCS graduate after the war (although he may have been assigned to an officer’s position prior to the training). He also claimed to be in an infantry unit while he was really in an engineer unit, but it is common practice to break engineer units into small detachments and attach them to line infantry units. Admittedly, Marshall’s methodology does not meet some rigorous modern standards, but that does not mean he lied. Let us hope that our life’s work gets better treatment after we are dead and gone.
Basically, all that S. L. A. Marshall was arguing was that some of our warriors do not shoot in combat, and more realistic targets will raise the firing rate. Marshall was the pioneer whose research and writing spurred modern trainers to change from bull’s-eye targets to realistic combat simulations. We can disagree about how much of an advantage this gives us, or exactly how much of an increase in the firing rate this kind of realistic training has created, but today no one wants to go back to shooting at bull’s-eye targets. And every modern soldier or police officer who shoots at a silhouette or a photo-realistic target or a video training simulator should take a moment to remember and thank S. L. A. Marshall.
Today the body of scientific data supporting realistic training is so powerful that there is a Federal Circuit Court decision which states that, for law-enforcement firearms training to be legally sufficient, it must incorporate realistic training, to include stress, decision-making, and shoot–don’t shoot training. This is the Tuttle v. Oklahoma decision (1984, 10th Federal Circuit Court), and today many law-enforcement trainers teach that law-enforcement agencies are probably not in compliance with federal circuit court guidance if they are still shooting at anything other than a clear, realistic depiction of a deadly force threat. And, again, we have S. L. A. Marshall to thank for that.
There can be no doubt that Marshall has been vindicated. As Shakespeare put it in Hamlet: “There’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year.”
Taking Off the Safety Catch
Slightly more controversial than claims of low firing rates in World War II have been observations about high firing rates in Vietnam resulting from training or “conditioning” techniques designed to enable killing in the modern soldier. From among thousands of readers and listeners, there were two senior officers with experience in Vietnam who questioned R. W. Glenn’s finding of a 95 percent firing rate among American soldiers in Vietnam. In both cases their doubt was due to the fact that they had found a lack of ammunition expenditure among some soldiers in the rear of their formations. In each instance they were satisfied when it was pointed out that both Marshall’s and Glenn’s data revolved around two questions: “Did you see the enemy?” and “Did you fire?” In the jungles of Vietnam there were many circumstances in which combatants were completely isolated from comrades who were only a short distance away; but among those who did see the enemy, there appears to have been extraordinarily consistent high firing rates.
High firing rates resulting from modern training/conditioning techniques can also be seen in Holmes’s observation of British firing rates in the Falklands and in FBI data on law-enforcement firing rates since the introduction of modern training techniques in the late 1960s. And initial reports from researchers using formal and informal surveys to replicate Marshall’s and Glenn’s findings all indicate universal concurrence.
A Worldwide Virus of Violence
The observation that violence in the media is causing violence in our streets is nothing new. The American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association have both made unequivocal statements about the link between media violence and violence in our society. The APA, in its 1992 report Big World, Small Screen, concluded that the “scientific debate is over.” And in July 2000, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry made the following joint statement before a bipartisan, bicameral Congressional hearing:
Well over 1,000 studies point overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children. The conclusion of the public health community, based on over 30 years of research, is that viewing entertainment violence can lead to increases in aggressive attitudes, values and behavior, particularly in children. Its effects are measurable and long-lasting. Moreover, prolonged viewing of media violence can lead to emotional desensitization toward violence in real life.
Preliminary studies indicate that the negative impact of interactive electronic media [violent video games] may be significantly more severe than that wrought by television, movies or music.
A thousand sound scholarly studies have proven that if we put media violence in a child’s life, we are more likely to get violent behavior. And now Stanford University Medical School has introduced the “SMART” (media turn-off) curriculum, which demonstrates that if we take media violence out of a child’s life, we can cut school violence and school bullying in half, reduce obesity, and raise test scores by double digits.
There are people who claim that cigarettes don’t cause cancer, and we know where their money is coming from. There are also people who claim that media violence does not cause violence in society, and we know which side of their bread is buttered. Such individuals can always get funding for their research and are guaranteed coverage by the media that they protect. But these individuals have staked out the same moral and scientific ground as scientists in the service of cigarette manufacturers.
On Killing’s contribution to this debate is its explanation as to how and why violence in the media and in interactive video games is causing violence in our streets, and the way this process replicates the conditioning used to enable soldiers and law-enforcement officers to kill…but without the safeguards.
An understanding of this “virus of violence” must begin with an assessment of the magnitude of the problem: ever-increasing incidence of violent crime, in spite of the way that medical technology is holding down the murder rate, and in spite of the role played by an ever-growing number of incarcerated violent criminals and an aging population in holding down the violence.
It is not just an American problem, it is an international phenomenon. In Canada, Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Japan, and across Europe, assault rates are skyrocketing. In countries like India, where there is no significant infrastructure of medical technology to hold it down, the escalating murder rate best reflects the problem. Around the world the result is the same: an epidemic of violence.
How It Works: Acquired Violence Immune Deficiency
When people become angry, or frightened, they stop thinking with their forebrain (the mind of a human being) and start thinking with their midbrain (which is indistinguishable from the mind of an animal). They are literally “scared out of their wits.” The only thing that has any hope of influencing the midbrain is also the only thing that influences a dog: classical and operant conditioning.
That is what is used when training firefighters and airline pilots to react to emergency situations: precise replication of the stimulus that they will face (in a flame house or a flight simulator) and then extensive shaping of the desired response to that stimulus. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, stimulus-response. In the crisis, when these individuals are scared out of their wits, they react properly and they save lives.
This is done with anyone who will face an emergency situation, from children doing a fire drill in school to pilots in a simulator. We do it because, when people are frightened, it works. We do not tell schoolchildren what they should do in case of a fire, we condition them; and when they are frightened, they do the right thing. Through the media we are also conditioning children to kill; and when they are frightened or angry, the conditioning kicks in.
It is as though there were two filters that we have to go through to kill. The first filter is the forebrain. A hundred things can convince your forebrain to put a gun in your hand and go to a certain point: poverty, drugs, gangs, leaders, politics, and the social learning of violence in the media—which is magnified when you are from a broken home and are searching for a role model. But traditionally all these things have slammed into the resistance that a frightened, angry human being confronts in the midbrain. And except with sociopaths (who, by definition, do not have this resistance), the vast, vast majority of circumstances are not sufficient to overcome this midbrain safety net. But if you are conditioned to overcome these midbrain inhibitions, then you are a walking time bomb, a pseudosociopath, just waiting for the random factors of social interaction and forebrain rationalization to put you at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Another way to look at this is to make an analogy to AIDS. AIDS does not kill people; it simply destroys the immune system and makes the victim vulnerable to death by other factors. The “violence immune system” exists in the midbrain, and conditioning in the media creates an “acquired deficiency” in this immune system. With this weakened immune system, the victim becomes more vulnerable to violence-enabling factors, such as poverty, discrimination, drug addiction (which can provide powerful motives for crime in order to fulfill real or perceived needs), or guns and gangs (which can provide the means and “support structure” to commit violent acts).
And thus America has seen a generation of immune deficient citizens who have given us Jonesboro in the middle school, Columbine in the high school, and Virginia Tech in the college.
Governments around the globe, try as they might, have not been able to protect their immune-deficient citizens. And they will never truly be able to control violent crime unless they stop infecting their children.
“Just Turn It Off” or “Let Them Eat Cake”
One common response to any concern about media violence is, “We have adequate controls. They are called the ‘off’ switch. If you don’t like it, just turn it off.”
Unfortunately, this is a tragically inadequate response to the problem. In today’s society the family structure is breaking down and even in intact families there is enormous economic and social pressure for mothers to work. Single mothers, broken homes, latchkey kids, and parental neglect are increasingly the norm. Through herculean effort, parents might be able to protect their own kids in today’s world, but that doesn’t do much good if the kid next door is a killer.
The worst thing about the “off switch” solution is that it is so blatantly, profoundly racist in its effect, if not its intent, because the black community in America is the “culture” or “nation” that has borne the brunt of the electronic media’s violence-enabling. In this case, poverty, drugs, gangs, discrimination, and the availability of firearms all predispose more blacks than whites toward violence. These factors defeat the first filter; then the absence of the second, midbrain filter becomes noticeable.
Bronson James, a black Texas-based radio commentator whose show I was on, observed that this is identical to the genocidal process in which for centuries the white man used alcohol in a systematic policy to destroy the culture of the American Indian. For a variety of cultural and genetic reasons, the Indians were predisposed toward alcoholism, and we dumped it into them as a crucial part of the process that ultimately destroyed their civilization.
The pumping of media violence into the ghettos today is equally genocidal. Media violence-enabling in the ghetto is the moral equivalent of shouting, “FIRE!” in a crowded theater. As a result, murder is the number-one cause of death among black male teens, and 25 percent of all black males in their twenties are in jail, on probation, or on parole.
If this isn’t genocide, then it is close.
What makes the “off switch” solution so racist is that, if these murders and incarceration rates were happening to the sons of white upper-and middle-class America, you can bet that we would have seen some drastic action by now. Viewed in this light, I think that most individuals would agree that the “just turn it off” solution probably rates right up there with “let them eat cake” and “I was just following orders” as all-time offensive statements.
In developmental psychology there is a general understanding that an individual must master the twin areas of sexuality and aggression (Freud’s Eros and Thanatos) in order to have truly achieved adulthood. In the same way, the maturation of the human race necessitates our collective mastery of these two areas. In recent years we have made significant progress in the field of sexology, and this book is dedicated to the creation and exploration of the equivalent field of “killology.”
After an attack with weapons of mass destruction by a terrorist group or a terrorist nation, the next major threat to our existence is the violent decay of our civilization due to violence-enabling in the electronic media. This book appears to be well on its way to making a difference in the desperate worldwide battle against the virus of violence.
May it be so, and may you, the reader, find what you seek in these pages.
Introduction
Killing and Science: On Dangerous Ground
This is the time of year when people would slaughter, back when people did that—Rollie and Eunice Hochstetter, I think, were the last in Lake Wobegon. They kept pigs, and they’d slaughter them in the fall when the weather got cold and the meat would keep. I went out to see them slaughter hogs once when I was a kid, along with my cousin and my uncle, who was going to help Rollie.
Today, if you are going to slaughter an animal for meat, you send it in to the locker plant and pay to have the guys there do it. When you slaughter pigs, it takes away your appetite for pork for a while. Because the pigs let you know that they don’t care for it. They don’t care to be grabbed and dragged over to where the other pigs went and didn’t come back.
It was quite a thing for a kid to see. To see living flesh, and the living insides of another creature. I expected to be disgusted by it, but I wasn’t—I was fascinated. I got as close as I could.
And I remember that my cousin and I sort of got carried away in the excitement of it all and we went down to the pigpen and we started throwing little stones at pigs to watch them jump and squeal and run. And all of a sudden, I felt a big hand on my shoulder, and I was spun around, and my uncle’s face was three inches away from mine. He said “If I ever see you do that again I’ll beat you ’til you can’t stand up, you hear?” And we heard.
I knew at the time that his anger had to do with the slaughter, that it was a ritual and it was done as a Ritual. It was done swiftly, and there was no foolishness. No joking around, very little conversation. People went about their jobs—men and women—knowing exactly what to do. And always with respect for the animals that would become our food. And our throwing stones at pigs violated this ceremony, and this ritual, which they went through.
Rollie was the last one to slaughter his own hogs. One year he had an accident; the knife slipped, and an animal that was only wounded got loose and ran across the yard before it fell. He never kept pigs after that. He didn’t feel he was worthy of it.
It’s all gone. Children growing up in Lake Wobegon will never have a chance to see it.
It was a powerful experience, life and death hung in the balance.
A life in which people made do, made their own, lived off the land, lived between the ground and God. It’s lost, not only to this world: but also to memory.
—Garrison Keillor
“Hog Slaughter”
Why should we study killing? One might just as readily ask, Why study sex? The two questions have much in common. Richard Heckler points out that “it is in the mythological marriage of Ares and Aphrodite that Harmonia is born.” Peace will not come until we have mastered both sex and war, and to master war we must study it with at least the diligence of Kinsey or Masters and Johnson. Every society has a blind spot, an area into which it has great difficulty looking. Today that blind spot is killing. A century ago it was sex.
For millennia man sheltered himself and his family in caves, or huts, or one-room hovels. The whole extended family—grandparents, parents, and children—all huddled together around the warmth of a single fire, within the protection of a single wall. And for thousands of years sex between a husband and wife could generally take place only at night, in the darkness, in this crowded central room.
I once interviewed a woman who grew up in an American Gypsy family, sleeping in a big communal tent with aunts, uncles, grandparents, parents, cousins, brothers, and sisters all around her. As a young child, sex was to her something funny, noisy, and slightly bothersome that grown-ups did in the night.
In this environment there were no private bedrooms. Until very recently in human history, for the average human being, there was no such luxury as a bedroom, or even a bed. Although by today’s sexual standards this situation may seem awkward, it was not without its benefits. One advantage was that sexual abuse of children could not happen without at least the knowledge and tacit consent of the entire family. Another, less obvious benefit of this age-old living arrangement was that throughout the life cycle, from birth to death, sex was always before you, and no one could deny that it was a vital, essential, and a not-too-mysterious aspect of daily human existence.
And then, by the period that we know as the Victorian era, everything had changed. Suddenly the average middle-class family lived in a multiroom dwelling. Children grew up having never witnessed the primal act. And suddenly sex became hidden, private, mysterious, frightening, and dirty. The era of sexual repression in Western civilization had begun.
In this repressed society, women were covered from neck to ankle, and even the furniture legs were covered with skirts, since the sight of these legs disturbed the delicate sensitivities of that era. Yet at the same time that this society repressed sex, it appears to have become obsessed by it. Pornography as we know it blossomed. Child prostitution flourished. And a wave of sexual child abuse began to ripple down through the generations.
Sex is a natural and essential part of life. A society that has no sex has no society in one generation. Today our society has begun the slow, painful process of escaping from this pathological dichotomy of simultaneous sexual repression and obsession. But we may have begun our escape from one denial only to fall into a new and possibly even more dangerous one.
A new repression, revolving around killing and death, precisely parallels the pattern established by the previous sexual repression.
Throughout history man has been surrounded by close and personal death and killing. When family members died of disease, lingering injury, or old age they died in the home. When they died anywhere close to home, their corpses were brought to the house—or cave, or hut, or hovel—and prepared for burial by the family.
Places in the Heart is a movie in which Sally Field portrays a woman on a small cotton farm early in the twentieth century. Her husband has been shot and killed and is brought to the house. And, repeating a Ritual that has been enacted for countless centuries by countless millions of wives, she lovingly washes his naked corpse, preparing it for burial as tears streak down her face.
In that world each family did its own killing and cleaning of domestic animals. Death was a part of life. Killing was undeniably essential to living. Cruelty was seldom, if ever, a part of this killing. Mankind understood its place in life, and respected the place of the creatures whose deaths were required to perpetuate existence. The American Indian asked forgiveness of the spirit of the deer he killed, and the American farmer respected the dignity of the hogs he slaughtered.
As Garrison Keillor records in “Hog Slaughter,” the slaughter of animals has been a vital Ritual of daily and seasonal activity for most people until this last half century of human existence. Despite the rise of the city, by the opening of the twentieth century the majority of the population, even in the most advanced industrial societies, remained rural. The housewife who wanted a chicken dinner went out and wrung the chicken’s neck herself, or had her children do it. The children watched the daily and seasonal killings, and to them killing was a serious, messy, and slightly boring thing that everyone did as a part of life.
In this environment there was no refrigeration, and few slaughterhouses, mortuaries, or hospitals. And in this age-old living arrangement, throughout the life cycle, from birth to death, death and killing were always before you—either as a participant or a bored spectator—and no one could deny that it was a vital, essential, and common aspect of daily human existence.
And then, in just the last few generations, everything began to change. Slaughterhouses and refrigeration insulated us from the necessity of killing our own food animals. Modern medicine began to cure diseases, and it became increasingly rare for us to die in the youth and prime of our lives, and nursing homes, hospitals, and mortuaries insulated us from the death of the elderly. Children began to grow up having never truly understood where their food came from, and suddenly Western civilization seemed to have decided that killing, killing anything at all, was increasingly hidden, private, mysterious, frightening, and dirty.
The impact of this ranges from the trivial to the bizarre. Just as the Victorians put skirts around their furniture to hide the legs, now mousetraps come equipped with covers to hide the killer’s handiwork. And laboratories conducting medical research with animals are broken into, and lifesaving research is destroyed by animal-rights activists. These activists, while partaking of the medical fruits of their society—fruits based upon centuries of animal research—attack researchers. Chris DeRose, head of the Los Angeles–based activist group Last Chance for Animals, says: “If the death of one rat cured all diseases it wouldn’t make any difference to me. In the scheme of life we’re equal.”
Any killing offends this new sensibility. People wearing fur or leather coats are verbally and physically attacked. In this new order people are condemned as racists (or “speciests”) and murderers when they eat meat. Animal-rights leader Ingrid Newkirk says, “A rat is a pig is a boy,” and compares the killing of chickens to the Nazi Holocaust. “Six million people died in concentration camps,” she told the Washington Post, “but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses.”
Yet at the same time that our society represses killing, a new obsession with the depiction of violent and brutal death and dismemberment of humans has flourished. The public appetite for violence in movies, particularly in splatter movies such as Natural Born Killers, Kill Bill, Saw, Friday the 13th, Halloween, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; the cult status of “heroes” like Jason and Freddy; the popularity of bands with names like Megadeth and Guns N’ Roses; and skyrocketing murder and violent crime rates—all these are symptoms of a bizarre, pathological dichotomy of simultaneous repression and obsession with violence.
Sex and death are natural and essential parts of life. Just as a society without sex would disappear in a generation, so too would a society without killing. Every major city in our nation must exterminate millions of rats and mice each year or become uninhabitable. And granaries and grain elevators must exterminate millions of rats and mice each year. If they fail to do this, instead of being the world’s breadbasket the United States would be unable to feed itself, and millions of people around the world would face starvation.
Certain genteel sensitivities of the Victorian era are not without value and benefit to our society, and few would argue for a return to communal sleeping arrangements. In the same way, those who hold and espouse modern sensibilities about killing are generally gentle and sincere human beings who in many ways represent the most idealistic characteristics of our species, and their concerns have great potential value once we bring them into perspective. As technology enables us to butcher and exterminate whole species (including our own), it is vital that we learn restraint and self-discipline. But we must also remember that death has its place in the natural order of life.
It seems that when a society does not have natural processes (such as sex, death, and killing) before it, that society will respond by denying and warping that aspect of nature. As our technology insulates us from a specific aspect of reality, our societal response seems to be to slip deep into bizarre dreams about that which we flee. Dreams spun from the fantasy stuff of denial. Dreams that can become dangerous societal nightmares as we sink deeper into their tempting web of fantasy.
Today, even as we waken from the nightmare of sexual repression, our society is beginning to sink into a new denial dream, that of violence and horror. This book is an attempt to bring the objective light of scientific scrutiny into the process of killing. A. M. Rosenthal tells us:
The health of humankind is not measured just by its coughs and wheezes but by the fevers of its soul. Or perhaps more important yet, by the quickness and care we bring against them.
If our history suggests unreason’s durability, our experience teaches that to neglect it is to indulge it and that to indulge it is to prepare hate’s triumph.
“To neglect it is to indulge it.” This is, therefore, a study of aggression, a study of violence, and a study of killing. Most specifically, it is an attempt to conduct a scientific study of the act of killing within the Western way of war and of the psychological and sociological processes and prices exacted when men kill each other in combat.
Sheldon Bidwell held that such a study would by its very nature lay on “dangerous ground because the union between soldier and scientist has not yet passed beyond flirtation.” I would seek to go in harm’s way and effect not just a serious union between soldier and scientist, but a tentative ménage à trois between soldier, scientist, and historian.
I have combined these skills to conduct a lifelong program of research into the previously taboo topic of killing in combat. In this study it is my intention to delve into this taboo subject of killing and to provide insight into the following:
- The existence of a powerful, innate human resistance toward killing one’s own species and the psychological mechanisms that have been developed by armies over the centuries to overcome that resistance
- The role of atrocity in war and the mechanisms by which armies are both empowered and entrapped by atrocity
- What it feels like to kill, a set of standard response stages to killing in combat, and the psychological price of killing
- The techniques that have been developed and applied with tremendous success in modern combat training in order to condition soldiers to overcome their resistance to killing
- How the American soldier in Vietnam was first psychologically enabled to kill to a far greater degree than any other soldier in previous history, then denied the psychologically essential purification ritual that exists in every warrior society, and finally condemned and accused by his own society to a degree that is unprecedented in Western history. And the terrible, tragic price that America’s three million Vietnam veterans, their families, and our society have paid for what we did to our soldiers in Vietnam
- Finally, and perhaps most important, I believe that this study will provide insight into the way that rifts in our society combine with violence in the media and in interactive video games to indiscriminately condition our nation’s children to kill. In a fashion very similar to the way the army conditions our soldiers. But without the safeguards. And we will see the terrible, tragic price that our nation is paying for what we are doing to our children.
A Personal Note
I am a soldier of twenty-four years’ service. I have been a sergeant in the 82d Airborne Division, a platoon leader in the 9th (High Tech Test Bed) Division, and I have been a general staff officer and a company commander in the 7th (Light) Infantry Division. I am a parachute infantryman and an army Ranger. I have been deployed to the Arctic tundras, the Central American jungles, NATO headquarters, the Warsaw Pact, and countless mountains and deserts. I am a graduate of military schools ranging from the XVIII Airborne Corps NCO Academy to the British Army Staff College. I graduated summa cum laude from my undergraduate training as a historian, and Kappa Delta Pi from my graduate training as a psychologist. I have had the privilege of being a cospeaker with General Westmoreland before the national leadership of the Vietnam Veterans Coalition of America, and I have served as the keynote speaker for the Sixth Annual Convention of the Vietnam Veterans of America. I have served in academic positions ranging from a junior-high-school counselor to a West Point psychology professor. And I have served as the Professor of Military Science and Chair of the Department of Military Science at Arkansas State University.
But for all this experience, I, like Richard Holmes, John Keegan, Paddy Griffith, and many others who have gone before me in this field, have not killed in combat. Perhaps I could not be as dispassionate and objective as I need to be if I had to carry a load of emotional pain myself. But the men whose words fill this study have killed.
Very often what they shared with me was something that they had never shared with anyone before. As a counselor I have been taught, and I hold it to be a fundamental truth of human nature, that when someone withholds something traumatic it can cause great damage. When you share something with someone it helps to place it in perspective, but when you hold it inside, as one of my psychology students once put it, “it eats you alive from the inside out.” Furthermore, there is great therapeutic value in the catharsis that comes with lancing these emotional boils. The essence of counseling is that pain shared is pain divided, and there was much pain shared during these periods.
The ultimate objective of this book is to uncover the dynamics of killing, but my prime motivation has been to help pierce the taboo of killing that prevented these men, and many millions like them, from sharing their pain. And then to use the knowledge gained in order to understand first the mechanisms that enable war and then the cause of the current wave of violent crime that is destroying our nation. If I have succeeded, it is because of the help given to me by the men whose tales are told herein.
Many copies of early drafts of this work had circulated among the Vietnam veterans’ community for years prior to its initial publication, and many veterans carefully edited and commented on those drafts. Many of these vets read this book and shared it with their spouses. Then those wives shared it with other wives, and these wives shared it with their husbands. And so on. Many times the veterans and/or their wives contacted me and let me know how they were able to use this book to communicate and understand what had happened in combat. Out of their pain has come understanding, and out of that understanding has come the power to heal lives and, perhaps, to heal a nation that is being consumed with violence.
The men whose personal narratives appear in this study are noble and brave men who trusted others with their experiences in order to contribute to the body of human knowledge. Many killed in combat. But they killed to save their lives and the lives of their comrades, and my admiration and affection for them and their brothers are very real. John Masefield’s poem “A Consecration” serves as a better dedication than any I could write. The exception to this admiration is, of course, addressed in the section “Killing and Atrocities.”
If in my absence of euphemisms and my effort to clearly and clinically speak of “killers” and “victims,” if in these things the reader senses moral judgment or disapproval of the individuals involved, let me flatly and categorically deny it.