On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (22 page)

The infantry kills the enemy up close and personal, but in recent decades the nature of this close-in battle has changed significantly.

Until recently in the U.S. Army the night sight was a rare and exotic piece of equipment. N o w we fight primarily at night, and there is a thermal-imagery device or a night-vision device for almost every combat soldier. Thermal imagery "sees" the heat emitted by a body as if it were light. Thus it works to see through rain, fog, and smoke. It permits you to perceive through camou-flage, and it makes it possible to detect enemy soldiers deep in wood lines and vegetation that would once have completely con-cealed them.

Night-vision devices provide a superb form of psychological distance by converting the target into an inhuman green blob.

The complete integration of thermal-imagery technology into the modern battlefield will extend to daylight hours the mechanical distance process that currently exists during the night. W h e n this 170

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happens the battlefield will appear to every soldier as it did to Gad, an Israeli tank gunner who told Holmes that "you see it all as if it were happening on a TV screen. . . . It occurred to me at the time; I see someone running and I shoot at him, and he falls, and it all looks like something on TV. I don't see people, that's one good thing about it."

Chapter Four

The Nature of the Victim:

Relevance and Payoff

The Shalit Factors: Means, Motive, and Opportunity
Given an opportunity to kill and time to think about it, a soldier in combat becomes very much like a killer in a classical murder mystery, assessing his "means, motive, and opportunity." Israeli military psychologist Ben Shalit has developed a model of target attractiveness revolving around the nature of the victim, which has been modified slightly and incorporated into our overall model of the killing-enabling factors.

Shalit takes into consideration:

• The relevance and effectiveness of available strategies for killing the victim (that is, the means and opportunity)

• The relevance of the victim and the payoff of killing in terms of the killer's gain and the enemy's loss (the motive)
Relevance of Available Strategies: Means and Opportunity
Man taxes his ingenuity to be able to kill without running the risk of being killed.

— Ardant du Picq

Battle Studies

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Tactical and technological advantages increase the effectiveness of the combat strategies available to the soldier. Or, as one soldier put it, "You want to make damn sure you don't get your own ass shot off while you are hosing the enemy." This is what has always been achieved by gaining a tactical advantage through ambushes, flank attacks, and rear attacks. In modern warfare this is also achieved by firing through night sights and thermal-imagery devices at a technologically inferior enemy who does not have this capability. This kind of tactical and technological advantage provides the soldier with "means" and "opportunity," thereby increasing the probability that he will kill the enemy.

An example of the influence of this process is outlined in the after-action reports describing the activities of Sergeant First Class Waldron in the section "Killing and Physical Distance." Sergeant Waldron was a sniper, and in this case his killing was made possible by the fact that he was firing at night, at extremely long ranges, with a night-vision scope and a noise suppressor on his rifle. The result was an incredibly sterile kind of killing in which the killer was not at all endangered by his actions:

The first Viet Cong in the group was taken under fire . . . resulting in one Viet Cong killed. Immediately the other Viet Cong formed T H E N A T U R E OF THE V I C T I M 173

a huddle around the fallen body,
apparently not quite sure of what
had taken place
[emphasis added]. Sergeant Waldron continued engaging the Viet Cong one by one until a total of [all] five Viet Cong were killed.

We have seen before that when the enemy is fleeing or has his back turned, he is far more likely to be killed. O n e reason for this is that in doing so he has provided both means and opportunity for his opponent to kill without endangering himself. Steve Banko achieved both means and opportunity when he was able to sneak up on and shoot a Vietcong soldier. " T h e y didn't know I existed,"

said Banko, and that made it possible for him to muster his courage, and he "squeezed softly on the trigger."

Relevance of the Victim and Payoff for the Killer: T h e Motive
After a soldier is confident that he is "able to kill without running the risk of being killed," the next question that comes to mind is, Which enemy soldier should I shoot at? In Shalit's model the question could be phrased: Is killing this individual relevant to the tactical situation, and will there be a payoff for doing so? In our analogy to the classical murder mystery, this is the motive for the killing.

The most obvious motive for killing in combat is the kill-or-be-killed circumstances of self-defense or the defense of one's friends. We have observed this factor many times in the case studies observed thus far:

[He] was coming at me full gallop, his machete cocked high over his head. . . . All of a sudden there was a guy firing a pistol right at us . . . all of a sudden he turned his whole body and pointed his automatic weapon at me. . . . I knew . . . that he would start picking us off.

It is not very profound to observe that in choosing from a group of enemy targets to kill, a soldier is more likely to kill the one that represents the greatest gain to him and the greatest loss to the enemy. But if no particular soldier poses a specific threat by virtue 174 AN ANATOMY OF KILLING

of his actions, then the process of selecting the most high-value target can take more subtle forms.

One consistent tendency is to elect to shoot leaders and officers.

We have already noted the marine sniper who told Truby, "You don't like to hit ordinary troops, because they're usually scared draftees or worse. . . . The guys to shoot are big brass. "Throughout military history the leaders and the flag bearers were selected as targets for enemy weapons, since these would represent the highest payoff in terms of the enemy's loss. General James Gavin, the commander of the 82d Airborne Division in World War II, carried an Ml Garand rifle, then the standard American-infantry weapon of World War II. He advised young infantry officers not to carry any equipment that would make them stand out in the eyes of the enemy.

Oftentimes the criteria for deciding whom to kill are dictated by deciding who is manning the most dangerous weapon. In Steve Banko's case he selected the Vietcong soldier who "was sitting closest to the machine gun, and he would die because of it."

Every surrendering soldier instinctively knows that the first thing he should do is drop his weapon, but if he is smart he will also ditch his helmet. Holmes notes that "Brigadier Peter Young, in the second world war, had no more regret about shooting a helmeted German than he would about 'banging a nail on the head.' But somehow he could never bring himself to hit a bareheaded man."

It is because of this response to helmets that United Nations peacekeeping forces prefer to wear their traditional beret rather than a helmet, which might very well stop a bullet or save their lives in an artillery barrage.

Killing Without Relevance or Payoff

Being able to identify your victim as a combatant is important to the rationalization that occurs after the kill. If a soldier kills a child, a woman, or anyone who does not represent a potential threat, then he has entered the realm of murder (as opposed to a legitimate, sanctioned combat kill), and the rationalization process becomes quite difficult. Even if he kills in self-defense, there is enormous T H E N A T U R E OF THE V I C T I M 175

resistance associated with killing an individual who is not normally associated with relevance or a payoff.

Bruce, a Ranger team leader in Vietnam, had several personal kills, but the one time that he could not bring himself to kill, even when he was directly ordered to do so, was when the target was a Vietcong soldier w h o was also a woman. Many other narratives and books from Vietnam cover in great detail the shock and horror associated with killing female Vietcong soldiers. And although fighting and killing women in combat is new to Americans and relatively uncommon throughout military history, it is not completely unprecedented. During the French Dahomey expedition in 1892, hardened French foreign legionnaires faced a bizarre army of female warriors, and Holmes notes that many of these tough veterans "experienced a few seconds' hesitation about shooting or bayoneting a half-naked Amazon [and] their delay had fatal results."

The presence of w o m e n and children can inhibit aggression in combat, but only if the women and children are not threatened.

If they are present, if they become threatened, and if the combatant accepts responsibility for them, then the psychology of battle changes from one of carefully constrained ceremonial combat among males to the unconstrained ferocity of an animal w h o is defending its den.

Thus the presence of women and children can also increase violence on the battlefield. The Israelis have consistently refused to put w o m e n in combat since their experiences in 1948. I have been told by several Israeli officers that this is because in 1948

they experienced recurring incidences of uncontrolled violence among male Israeli soldiers w h o had had their female combatants killed or injured in combat, and because the Arabs were extremely reluctant to surrender to women.

Holmes has a firm understanding of the inhibiting influences of women and children in combat when he observes: When Barbary apes wish to approach a senior male, they borrow a young animal which they carry, in order to inhibit the senior's aggression. Some soldiers do likewise. A British infantryman watched Germans emerging from a dugout to surrender in WWI: 176

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"they were holding up photographs of their families and offering watches and other valuables in an attempt to gain mercy."

However, in some circumstances, even this is not enough. In this instance "as the Germans came up the steps a soldier, not from our battalion, shot each one in the stomach with a burst from his Lewis gun." This soldier, w h o was willing to kill helpless, surrendering Germans one by one, was probably influenced by yet another factor that enables killing on the battlefield. And that factor is the predisposition of the killer, which we will now examine in detail.

Chapter Five

Aggressive Predisposition of the Killer:

Avengers, Conditioning, and the 2 Percent

Who Like It

World War Il-era training was conducted on a grassy firing range (a known-distance, or KD, range), on which the soldier shot at a bull's-eye target. After he fired a series of shots the target was checked, and he was then given feedback that told him where he hit.

Modern training uses what are essentially B. F. Skinner's operant conditioning techniques to develop a firing behavior in the soldier.4

This training comes as close to simulating actual combat conditions as possible. The soldier stands in a foxhole with full combat equipment, and man-shaped targets pop up briefly in front of him.

These are the eliciting stimuli that prompt the target behavior of shooting. If the target is hit, it immediately drops, thus providing immediate feedback. Positive reinforcement is given when these hits are exchanged for marksmanship badges, which usually have some form of privilege or reward (praise, recognition, three-day passes, and so on) associated with them.

Traditional marksmanship training has been transformed into a combat simulator. Watson states that soldiers who have conducted

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this kind of simulator training "often report, after they have met a real life emergency, that they just carried out the correct drill and completed it before they realized that they were not in the simulator." Vietnam veterans have repeatedly reported similar experiences. Several independent studies indicate that this powerful conditioning process has dramatically increased the firing rate of American soldiers since World War II.

Richard Holmes has noted the ineffectiveness of an army trained in traditional World War II methods as opposed to an army whose soldiers have been conditioned by modern training methods.

Holmes interviewed British soldiers returning from the Falklands War and asked them if they had experienced any incidence of nonfiling similar to that observed by Marshall in World War II.

The British, who had been trained by modern methods, had not seen any such thing in their soldiers, but they had definitely observed it in the Argentineans, who had received World War I I -

style training and whose only effective fire had come from machine guns and snipers.5

The value of this modern battleproofing can also be seen in the war in Rhodesia in the 1970s. The Rhodesian security force was a highly trained modern army fighting against an ill-trained band of guerrillas. Through superior tactics
and training
the security force maintained an overall kill ratio of about eight-to-one throughout AGGRESSIVE P R E D I S P O S I T I O N OF THE KILLER 179

the war. Their commando units actually improved their kill ratio from thirty-five-to-one to fifty-to-one. T h e Rhodesians achieved this in an environment in which they did not have air and artillery support, nor did they have a significant advantage in weapons over their Soviet-supported opponents. T h e only thing they had going for them was superior training, and the advantage this gave them added up to nothing less than total tactical superiority.6

T h e effectiveness of modern conditioning techniques that enable killing in combat is irrefutable, and their impact on the modern battlefield is enormous.

Recent Experiences: "That's for My Brother"

Bob Fowler, F Company's popular, tow-headed commander, had bled to death after being hit in the spleen. His orderly, who adored him, snatched up a submachine gun and unforgivably massacred a line of unarmed Japanese soldiers who had just surrendered.

— William Manchester

Goodbye, Darkness

The recent loss of friends and beloved leaders in combat can also enable violence on the battlefield. T h e deaths of friends and comrades
can
stun, paralyze, and emotionally defeat soldiers. But in many circumstances soldiers react with anger (which is one of the well-known response stages to death and dying), and then the loss of comrades can enable killing.

O u r literature is full of examples, and even our law includes concepts such as temporary insanity and extenuating and mitigating circumstances. Revenge killing during a burst of rage has been a recurring theme throughout history, and it needs to be considered in the overall equation of factors that enable killing on the battlefield.

T h e soldier in combat is a product of his environment, and violence can beget violence. This is the nurture side of the nature-nurture question. But he is also very much influenced by his temperament, or the nature side of the nature-nurture equation, and that is a subject that we will n o w address in detail.

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T h e Temperament of the "Natural Soldier"

There is such a thing as a "natural soldier": the kind who derives his greatest satisfaction from male companionship, from excitement, and from the conquering of physical obstacles. He doesn't want to kill people as such, but he will have no objections if it occurs within a moral framework that gives him justification — like war — and if it is the price of gaining admission to the kind of environment he craves. Whether such men are born or made, I do not know, but most of them end up in armies (and many move on again to become mercenaries, because regular army life in peacetime is too routine and boring).

But armies are not full of such men. They are so rare that they form only a modest fraction even of small professional armies, mostly congregating in the commando-type special forces. In large conscript armies they virtually disappear beneath the weight of numbers of more ordinary men. And it is these ordinary men, who do not like combat at all, that armies must persuade to kill. Until only a generation ago, they did not even realize how bad a job they were doing.

— Gwynne Dyer

War

Swank and Marchand's World War II study noted the existence of 2 percent of combat soldiers w h o are predisposed to be "aggressive psychopaths" and apparently do not experience the normal resistance to killing and the resultant psychiatric casualties associated with extended periods of combat. But the negative connotations associated with the term "psychopath," or its modern equivalent

"sociopath," are inappropriate here, since this behavior is a generally desirable one for soldiers in combat.

It would be absolutely incorrect to conclude that 2 percent of all veterans are psychopathic killers. Numerous studies indicate that combat veterans are no more inclined to violence than nonvets.

A more accurate conclusion would be that there is 2 percent of the male population that, if pushed or if given a legitimate reason, will kill without regret or remorse. What these individuals repre-AGGRESSIVE P R E D I S P O S I T I O N OF THE K I L L E R 181

sent — and this is a terribly important point that I must emphasize — is the capacity for the levelheaded participation in combat that we as a society glorify and that Hollywood would have us believe that all soldiers possess. In the course of interviewing veterans as a part of this study I have met several individuals w h o may fit within this 2 percent, and since returning from combat they have, without fail, proven themselves to be above-average contrib-utors to the prosperity and welfare of our society.

Dyer draws from his o w n personal experiences as a soldier for understanding:

Aggression is certainly part of our genetic makeup, and necessarily so, but the normal human being's quota of aggression will not cause him to kill acquaintances, let alone wage war against strangers from a different country. We live among millions of people who have killed fellow human beings with pitiless efficiency — machine-gunning them, using flame throwers on them, dropping explosive bombs on them from twenty thousand feet up — yet we do not fear these people.

The overwhelming majority of those who have killed, now or at any time in the past, have done so as soldiers in war, and we recognize that that has practically nothing to do with the kind of personal aggression that would endanger us as their fellow citizens.

Marshall's World War II figure of a 15 to 20 percent firing rate does not necessarily contradict Swank and Marchand's 2 percent figure, since many of these firers were under extreme empowering circumstances, and many may have been in a posturing mode and merely firing wildly or above the enemy's heads. And later figures of 55 percent (Korea) and 90 to 95 percent (Vietnam) firing rates represent the actions of men empowered by increasingly more effective conditioning processes, but these figures also do not tell us h o w many were posturing.

Dyer's World War II figure of 1 percent of U.S. Army Air Corps fighter pilots being responsible for 40 percent of all kills is also generally in keeping with the Swank and Marchand estimates.

Erich Hartmann, the World War II German ace — unquestionably the greatest fighter pilot of all time, with 351 confirmed victories —

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claimed that 80 percent of his victims never knew he was in the same sky with them. This claim, if accurate, provides a remarkable insight into the nature of such a killer. Like the kills of most successful snipers and fighter pilots, the vast majority of the killing done by these men were what some would call simple ambushes and back shootings. No provocation, anger, or emotion empowered
these
killings.

Several senior U.S. Air Force officers have told me that when the U.S. Air Force tried to preselect fighter pilots after World War II, the only common denominator they could find among their World War II aces was that they had been involved in a lot of fights as children. Not bullies — for most true bullies avoid fights with anyone who is reasonably capable of fighting them — but fighters. If you can recapture or imagine the anger and indignity a child feels in a school-yard fight and magnify that into a way of life, then you can begin to understand these individuals and their capacity for violence.

T h e
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IH-R)
of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) indicates that the incidence of "anti-social personality disorder" (that is, sociopaths) among the general population of American males is approximately 3 percent. These sociopaths are not easily used in armies, since by their very nature they rebel against authority, but over the centuries armies have had considerable success at bending such highly aggressive individuals to their will during wartime. So if two out of three of this 3 percent were able to accept military discipline, a hypothetical 2 percent of soldiers would, by the APA's definition, "have no remorse about the effects of their behavior on others."7

There is strong evidence that there exists a genetic predisposition for aggression. In all species the best hunter, the best fighter, the most aggressive male, survives to pass his biological predispositions on to his descendants. There are also environmental processes that can fully develop this predisposition toward aggression; when we combine this genetic predisposition with environmental development we get a killer. But there is another factor: the presence or AGGRESSIVE P R E D I S P O S I T I O N OF THE K I L L E R 183

absence of empathy for others. Again, there may be biological and environmental causes for this empathic process, but, whatever its origin, there is undoubtedly a division in humanity between those who can feel and understand the pain and suffering of others, and those w h o cannot. T h e presence of aggression, combined with the absence of empathy, results in sociopathy. T h e presence of aggression, combined with the presence of empathy, results in a completely different kind of individual from the sociopath.

O n e veteran I interviewed told me that he thought of most of the world as sheep: gentle, decent, kindly creatures who are essentially incapable of true aggression. In this veteran's mind there is another human subspecies (of which he is a member) that is a kind of dog: faithful, vigilant creatures w h o are very much capable of aggression when circumstances require. But, according to his model, there are wolves (sociopaths) and packs of wild dogs (gangs and aggressive armies) abroad in the land, and the sheepdogs (the soldiers and policemen of the world) are environmentally and biologically predisposed to be the ones w h o confront these predators.

Some experts in the psychological and psychiatric community think that these men are simply sociopaths and that the above view of killers is romanticizing. But I believe that there is another category of human beings out there. We k n o w about sociopaths because their condition is, by definition, a pathology or a psychological disorder. But the psychological community does not recognize this other category of human beings, these metaphoric sheepdogs, because their personality type does not represent pathology or disorder. Indeed, they are valuable and contributing members of our society, and it is only in time of war, or on police forces, that these characteristics can be observed.

I have met these men, these "sheepdogs," over and over again as I interviewed veterans. They are men like one U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, a Vietnam veteran, w h o told me: "I learned early on in life that there are people out there who will hurt you if given the chance, and I have devoted my life to being prepared to face t h e m . " These men are quite often armed and always vigilant.