On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (29 page)

Bill Jordan, law-enforcement expert, career U.S. Border Patrol officer, and veteran of many a gunfight, combines this denial process with desensitization in his advice to young law-enforcement officers:

[There is] a natural disinclination to pull the trigger . . . when your weapon is pointed at a human. Even though their own life was at stake, most officers report having this trouble in their first fight.

To aid in overcoming this resistance it is helpful if you can will yourself to think of your opponent as a mere target and not as a human being. In this connection you should go further and pick a spot on the target. This will allow better concentration and further remove the human element from your thinking. If this works for you, try to continue this thought in allowing yourself no remorse.

A man who will resist an officer with weapons has no respect for the rules by which decent people are governed. He is an outlaw who has no place in world society. His removal is completely justified, and should be accomplished dispassionately and without regret.

Jordan calls this process manufactured contempt, and the combination of denial of, and contempt for, the victim's role in society (desensitization), along with the psychological denial of, and contempt for, the victim's humanity (developing a denial defense mechanism), is a mental process that is tied in and reinforced every time the officer fires a round at a target. And, of course, police, like the military, no longer fire at bull's-eyes; they "practice" on man-shaped silhouettes.

T h e success of this conditioning and desensitization is obvious and undeniable. It can be seen and recognized both in individuals and in the performance of nations and armies.

DESENSITIZATION AND CONDITIONING IN VIETNAM 257

The Effectiveness of the Conditioning

Bob, a U.S. Army colonel, knew of Marshall's study and accepted that Marshall's World War II firing rates were probably correct.

He was not sure what mechanism was responsible for increasing the firing rate in Vietnam, but he realized that somehow the rate had been increased. When I suggested the conditioning effects of modern training, he immediately recognized that process in himself. His head snapped up, his eyes widened slightly, and he said,

"Two shots. Bam-bam. Just like we had been trained in 'quick kill.' When I killed, I did it just like that. Just like I'd been trained.

Without even thinking."

Jerry, another veteran who survived six six-month tours in Cambodia as an officer with Special Forces (Green Berets), when asked how he was able to do the things that he did, acknowledged simply that he had been "programmed" to kill, and he accepted it as necessary for his survival and success.

One interviewee, an ex-CIA agent named Duane, who was then working as a high-level security executive in a major aerospace corporation, had conducted a remarkable number of successful interrogations during his lifetime, and he considered himself to be an expert on the process known popularly as brainwashing. He felt that he had been "to some extent brainwashed" by the CIA and that the soldiers receiving modern combat training were being similarly brainwashed. Like every other veteran whom I have discussed the matter with, he had no objections to this, understanding that psychological conditioning was essential to his survival and an effective method of mission accomplishment. He felt that a very similar and equally powerful process was taking place in the shoot-no shoot program, which federal and local law-enforcement agencies all over the nation conduct. In this program the officer selectively fires blanks at a movie screen depicting various tactical situations, thereby mimicking and rehearsing the process of deciding when and when not to kill.

The incredible effectiveness of modern training techniques can be seen in the lopsided close-combat kill ratios between the British and Argentinean forces during the Falklands War and the U.S.

258

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and Panamanian forces during the 1989 Panama Invasion.3 During his interviews with British veterans of the Falklands War, Holmes described Marshall's observations in World War II and asked if they had seen a similar incidence of nonfirers in their own forces.

Their response was that they had seen no such thing occur with their soldiers, but there was "immediate recognition that it applied to the Argentineans, whose snipers and machine-gunners had been very effective while their individual riflemen had not." Here we see an excellent comparison between the highly effective and competent British riflemen, trained by the most modern methods, and the remarkably ineffective Argentinean riflemen, who had been given old-style, World War II-vintage training.

Similarly, Rhodesia's army during the 1970s was one of the best trained in the world, going up against a very poorly trained but well-equipped insurgent force. The security forces in Rhodesia maintained an overall kill ratio of about eight-to-one in their favor throughout the guerrilla war. And the highly trained Rhodesian Light Infantry achieved kill ratios ranging from thirty-five-to-one to fifty-to-one.

One of the best examples in recent American history involved a company of U.S. Army Rangers who were ambushed and trapped while attempting to capture Mohammed Aidid, a Somali warlord sought by the United Nations. In this circumstance no artillery or air strikes were used, and no tanks, armored vehicles, or other heavy weapons were available to the American forces, which makes this an excellent assessment of the relative effectiveness of modern small-arms training techniques. The score? Eighteen U.S. troops killed, against an estimated 364 Somali who died that night.

And we might remember that American forces were never once defeated in any major engagement in Vietnam. Harry Summers says that when this was pointed out to a high-ranking North Vietnamese soldier after the war, the answer was "That may be true, but it is also irrelevant." Perhaps so, but it does reflect the individual close-combat superiority of the U.S. soldier in Vietnam.

Even with allowance for unintentional error and deliberate exaggeration, this superior training and killing ability in Vietnam, Pan-DESENSITIZATION AND CONDITIONING IN VIETNAM 259

ama, Argentina, and Rhodesia amounts to nothing less than a technological revolution
on
the battlefield, a revolution that represents total superiority in close combat.

A Side Effect of the Conditioning

Duane, the CIA veteran, told of one incident that provides some insight into a side effect of this conditioning or brainwashing. He was guarding a Communist defector in a safe house in West Germany during the mid-1950s. The defector was a very large, strong, and particularly murderous member of the Stalinist regime then in power. By all accounts he was quite insane. Having defected because he had lost favor among his Soviet masters, he was now beginning to have second thoughts about his new masters and was trying to escape.

Alone for days in a locked and barred house with this man, the young CIA agent assigned to watch him was subject to a series of attacks. The defector would charge at him with a club or a piece of furniture, and each time he would break off the attack at the last minute as Duane pointed his weapon at him. The agent called his superiors over the phone and was ordered to draw an imaginary line on the floor and shoot this unarmed (though very hostile and dangerous) individual if he crossed that line. Duane felt certain that this line was going to be crossed and mustered up all of his conditioning. "He was a dead man. I knew I would kill him.

Mentally I
had
killed him, and the physical part was going to be easy." But the defector (apparently not quite as crazy or desperate as he appeared to be) never crossed that line.

Still, some aspect of the trauma of the kill was there. "In my mind," Duane told me, "I have always felt that I had killed that man." Most Vietnam veterans did not necessarily execute a personal kill in Vietnam. But they had participated in dehumanizing the enemy in training, and the vast majority of them
did
fire, or knew in their hearts that they were prepared to fire, and the very fact that they were prepared and able to fire ("Mentally I
had
killed him") denied them an important form of escape from the burden of responsibility that they brought back from that war. Although 260

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they had not killed, they had been taught to think the unthinkable and had thereby been introduced to a part of themselves that under ordinary circumstances only the killer knows. The point is that
this
program of desensitization, conditioning, and denial defense mechanisms,
combined with subsequent participation in a war, may make it possible to
share the guilt of killing without ever having killed.

A Safeguard in the Conditioning

It is essential to understand that one of the most important aspects of this process is that soldiers are
always
under authority in combat.

No army can tolerate undisciplined or indiscriminate firing, and a vital — and easily overlooked — facet of the soldier's conditioning revolves around having him fire only when and where he is told to. The soldier fires only when told to by a higher authority and then only within his designated firing lane. Firing a weapon at the wrong time or in the wrong direction is so heinous an offense that it is almost unthinkable to the average soldier.

Soldiers are conditioned throughout their training and throughout their time in the military to fire
only under authority.
A gunshot cannot be easily hidden, and on rifle ranges or during field training any gunshot at inappropriate times (even when firing blank ammunition) must be justified, and if it is not justifiable it will be immediately and firmly punished.

Similarly, most law-enforcement officers are presented with a variety of targets representing both innocent bystanders and gun-wielding criminals during their training. And they are severely sanctioned for engaging the wrong target. In the FBI's shoot-no shoot program, failure to demonstrate a satisfactory ability to distinguish when an officer can and cannot fire can result in revocation of the officer's right to carry a weapon.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that there is not any distinguishable threat of violence to society from the veterans returning to the United States from any of the wars of this century. There are Vietnam vets who commit violent crimes, but statistically there is no greater a population of violent criminals among veterans than there is among nonveterans.4 What is a potential threat to society D E S E N S I T I Z A T I O N AND C O N D I T I O N I N G IN VIETNAM 261

is the
unrestrained
desensitization, conditioning, and denial defense mechanisms provided by modern interactive video games and violent television and movies, but that is a topic for the last section in this book, "Killing in America: What Are We Doing to O u r Children?"

Chapter Two

What Have We Done to Our Soldiers?

The Rationalization of Killing and

How It Failed in Vietnam

The Rationalization and Acceptance of Killing
But after the fires and the wrath,

But after searching and pain,

His Mercy opens us a path

To live with ourselves again.

— Rudyard Kipling

"The Choice"

We have previously examined the killing response stages of concern, killing exhilaration, remorse, and rationalization and acceptance. Let us now apply this model to the Vietnam veteran in order to understand how the process of rationalization and acceptance of killing failed in Vietnam.

The rationalization Process

Something unique seems to have occurred in the rationalization process available to the Vietnam veteran. Compared with earlier American wars the Vietnam conflict appears to have reversed most

WHAT HAVE WE D O N E TO O U R SOLDIERS?

263

The Killing Response Stages

of the processes traditionally used to facilitate the rationalization and acceptance of killing experiences. These traditional processes involve:

• Constant praise and assurance to the soldier from peers and superiors that he "did the right thing" (One of the most important physical manifestations of this affirmation is the awarding of medals and decorations.)

• The constant presence of mature, older comrades (that is, in their late twenties and thirties) who serve as role models and stabilizing personality factors in the combat environment

• A careful adherence to such codes and conventions of warfare by both sides (such as the Geneva conventions, first established in 1864), thereby limiting civilian casualties and atrocities

• Rear lines or clearly defined safe areas where the soldier can go to relax and depressurize during a combat tour

• The presence of close, trusted friends and confidants who have 264 KILLING IN V I E T N A M

been present during training and are present throughout the combat experience

• A cooldown period as the soldier and his comrades sail or march back from the wars

• Knowledge of the ultimate victory of their side and of the gain and accomplishments made possible by their sacrifices

• Parades and monuments

• Reunions and continued communication (via visits, mail, and so on) with the individuals w h o m the soldier bonded with in combat

• An unconditionally warm and admiring welcome by friends, family, communities, and society, constantly reassuring the soldier that the war and his personal acts were for a necessary, just, and righteous cause

• T h e proud display of medals

What Made Vietnam Different

In the case of the Vietnam veteran all but the first of these rationalization processes were not only mostly absent, but many of them were inverted and became sources of great pain and trauma to the veteran.

The Teenage War

It's easier if you catch them young. You can train older men to be soldiers; it's done in every major war. But you can never get them to believe that they like it, which is the major reason armies try to get their recruits before they are twenty. There are other reasons too, of course, like the physical fitness, lack of dependents, and economic dispensability of teenagers, that make armies prefer them, but the most important qualities teenagers bring to basic training are enthusiasm and naivete. . . .

The armed forces of every country can take almost any young male civilian and turn him into a soldier with all the right reflexes and attitudes in only a few weeks. Their recruits usually have no more than twenty years' experience of the world, most of it as W H A T HAVE W E D O N E T O O U R SOLDIERS? 265

children, while the armies have had all of history to practice and perfect their technique.

— Gwynne Dyer

War

T h e combatants of all wars are frightfully young, but the American combatants in Vietnam were significantly younger than in any war in American history. Most were drafted at eighteen and experienced combat during one of the most malleable and vulnerable stages of their lives. This was America's first "teenage war," with the average combatant having not yet seen his twentieth birthday, and these combatants were without the leavening of mature, older soldiers that has always been there in past wars.

Developmental psychologists have identified this stage in an adolescent's psychological and social development as being a crucial period in which the individual establishes a stable and enduring personality structure and a sense of self.

In past wars the impact of combat on adolescents has been buffered by the presence of older veterans who can serve as role models and mentors throughout the process. But in Vietnam there were precious few such individuals to turn to. By the end of the war many sergeants were coming out of "Shake 'n Bake" school and had only a few months more training and maturity than their comrades. Even many officers were coming out of O C S (Officer Candidate School) without any college training whatsoever, and they too had little more training and maturity than their soldiers.

They were teenagers leading teenagers in a war of endless, small-unit operations, trapped together in a real-world reenactment of
The Lord of the Flies
with guns, and destined to internalize the horrors of combat during one of the most vulnerable and susceptible stages of life.

The "Dirty" War

Simultaneously everyone leveled his weapon at him and fired.

"Jesus Christ!" somebody gasped behind me as we watched his body reverse course back toward the trees; chunks of meat and 266 KILLING IN V I E T N A M

bone flew through the air and stuck to the huge boulders. One of our rounds detonated a grenade the soldier carried, and his body smashed to the ground beneath a shower of blood. . . .

The young Viet Cong was a good soldier, even if he was a communist. He died for what he believed in. He was not a gunner for Hanoi, he was a VC. His country was not North Vietnam, he was South Vietnamese. His political beliefs did not coincide with those of the Saigon government, so he was labeled an enemy of the people. . . .

A young Vietnamese girl appeared out of nowhere and sat down next to one of the dead VC. She just sat there staring at the pile of weapons, and slowly rocking herself back and forth. I couldn't tell if she was crying, because she never once looked over at us.

She just sat there. A fly crawled along her cheek, but she paid no attention to it.

She just sat there.

She was the 7-year-old daughter of a Viet Cong soldier, and I wondered if she had been conditioned to accept death and war and sorrow. She was an orphan now, and I wondered if there were confusion in her mind, or sadness, or just an emptiness that no one could understand.

I wanted to go over and comfort her, but I found myself walking down the hill with the others. I never looked back.

— Nick Uhernik

"Battle of Blood"

At a Vietnam Vets Coalition meeting in Florida, one vet told me about his cousin, w h o was also a vet, w h o would only say: " T h e y trained me to kill. They sent me to Vietnam. They didn't tell me that I'd be fighting kids." For many, this is the distilled essence of the horror of what happened in Vietnam.

The killing is always traumatic. But when you have to kill women and children, or when you have to kill men in their homes, in front of their wives and children, and when you have to do it W H A T H A V E W E D O N E T O O U R SOLDIERS? 267

not from twenty thousand feet but up close where you can watch them die, the horror appears to transcend description or understanding.

Much of the war in Vietnam was conducted against an insurgent force. Against men, women, and children w h o were often defending their own homes and w h o were dressed in civilian clothing.

This resulted in a deterioration of traditional conventions and an increase in civilian casualties, atrocities, and resultant trauma.

Neither the ideological reasons for the war, nor the target population, was the same as that associated with previous wars.

T h e standard methods of on-the-scene rationalization fail when the enemy's child comes out to mourn over her father's body or when the enemy is a child throwing a hand grenade. And the North Vietnamese and Vietcong understood this. Among the many excellent narratives gained from personal interviews in Al Santoli's book
To Bear Any Burden
is the story of T r o u n g "Mealy," a former Vietcong agent in the M e k o n g Delta. "Children were trained,"

said Mealy, " t o throw grenades, not only for the terror factor, but so the government or American soldiers would have to shoot them. T h e n the Americans feel very ashamed. And they blame themselves and call their soldiers war criminals."

And it worked.

W h e n a soldier shoots a child who is throwing a grenade the child's weapon explodes, and there is only the mutilated body left to rationalize. There is no convenient weapon indisputably telling the world of the victim's lethality and the killer's innocence; there is only a dead child, speaking mutely of horror and innocence lost.

The innocence of childhood, soldiers, and nations, all lost in a single act reenacted countless times for ten endless years until a weary nation finally retreats in horror and dismay from its long nightmare.

The Inescapable War

There were no real lines of demarcation, and just about any area was subject to attack. . . . It was an endless war with invisible enemies and no ground gains—just a constant flow of troops in and out of the country. The only observable outcome was an 268

KILLING IN VIETNAM

interminable production of maimed, crippled bodies and countless corpses.

—Jim Goodwin

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders

In
The Face of Battle,
John Keegan traces conflicts across the centuries, noting in particular how the duration of a battle and the depth of the battlefield increased over the years. From a duration of a few hours and a depth of only a few hundred yards in the Middle Ages, battle grew to the point where, in this century, the depth of the danger zone extended for miles into the rear areas, and the battles could last for months, even blending into one another to create one endless conflict that would last for years.

In World War I and World War II we discovered that this endless battle would take a horrendous psychological toll on the combatant, and we were able to deal with this endless batlle by rotating soldiers into the rear lines. Within Vietnam, the danger zone increased exponentially, and for ten years we fought a war unlike any we had experienced before. In Vietnam there were no rear lines to escape to, there was no escape from the stress of combat, and the psychological stress of continuously existing at

"the front" took an enormous, if delayed, toll.

The Lonely War

Prior to Vietnam the American soldier's first experience with the battlefield was usually as a member of a unit that had been trained and bonded together prior to combat. The soldier in these wars usually knew that he was in for the duration or until he had established sufficient points on some type of scale that kept track of his combat exposure; either way the end of combat for him was at some vague point in an uncertain future.

Vietnam was distinctly different from any war we have fought before or since, in that it was a war of individuals. With very few exceptions, every combatant arrived in Vietnam as an individual replacement on a twelve-month tour — thirteen months for the U.S. Marines.

WHAT HAVE WE DONE TO O U R SOLDIERS? 269

The average soldier had only to survive his year in hell and thus, for the first time, had a clear-cut way out of combat other than as a physical or psychological casualty. In this environment it was far more possible, even natural, that many soldiers would remain aloof, and their bonding would never develop into the full, mature, lifelong relationships of previous wars. This policy (combined with the use of drugs, maintenance of proximity to the combat zone, and establishment of an expectancy of returning to combat) resulted in an all-time-record low number of psychiatric casualties
in Vietnam.

Military psychiatrists and leaders believed that they had found a solution for the age-old problem of battlefield psychiatric casualties, a problem that, at one point in World War II, was creating casualties faster than we could replace them. Given a less traumatic war and an unconditionally positive World War II—style welcome to the returning veteran, this might have been an acceptable system, but in Vietnam what appears to have happened is that many a combatant simply endured traumatic experiences (experiences that might otherwise have been unbearable) by refusing to come to terms with his grief and guilt and turned instead to the escapist therapy of a "short timer's calendar" and the promise of "only forty-five days and a wake-up."

This rotation policy (combined with the extensive use of psychi-atrically and self-prescribed drugs) did create an environment in which the incidence of psychiatric casualties
on the battlefield
was much lower than that of past wan in this century. But a tragic, long-term price, a price that was far too high, was paid for the short-term gains of this policy.