I had put up some Dire Straits in my post Money For Nothing (about the Federal Reserve) and commenter Kathy brought up the subject of anti-war songs. I brought up the fact that you want as high a proportion of psychopaths as you can get in front line troops because they will be less affected by the stress of modern warfare. It is VERY stressful.
Well that made me go looking for more information on the subject. I came across this post. The Psychology Of Killing. It is a doozy.
Distance from the other human directly affects how easy it is to kill him. Bomber pilots don’t have trouble laying waste to kilometers of land and killing hundreds or thousands because they don’t see or hear the dead or dying. For infantry units, this takes on a different aspect, they see the fear in the other person’s eyes, the sweat on his brow, the pain in his face, the blood spurting from the wound, the desperate cries for help or mercy. The enemy becomes very real and vivid, the enemy becomes someone with hopes, dreams, fears, a mother, a father, maybe a wife, just like the shooter. In a way the shooter can see the enemy as little different than himself and killing that enemy soldier is like killing oneself. This is why infantrymen are more traumatized by war than any other field.
Wars are about humans fighting each other, it is horror and chaos, fear and trauma. This is why the shooting rate among troops is lower than most people would think. People will be willing to face death and dismemberment more willingly if they didn’t have to kill anyone. Medics for instance are notorious for risking life and limb to save someone while a regular trooper may stand by doing nothing but fire impotently at the enemy.
And it gets worse.
…units are rotated back from the front to a relatively secure area. If the enemy has penetrated friendly lines and there is no ‘secure’ area then it is little different than being on the front. This might be another reason so many people suffered in Vietnam because there were no ‘front lines’ and no ‘safe’ areas.
Units are frequently rotated into the reserves to allow them time to ‘recover’.
To understand the ‘sixty day’ concept lets look at what happens when a unit goes into combat.
Within the first ten days a unit becomes ‘battlewise’, they become used to the demands of watching from every direction, they learn to deal with the enemy threat and they become more ‘undisturbed’ by what goes on around them. Between ten and thirty days, they reach maximum efficiency. The fall into the pattern of combat.
After about thirty days they may become over confidant and believe their efficiency is not decreasing when it is. Their bodies are running out of stored energy and the battle field environment is beginning to take its toll on more than just their mind. Combat exhaustion begins to set in. Combat exhaustion is the effect of the elements, poor food, and physical exhaustion. It also includes what happens to the body. When a human experiences an adrenaline rush there is a price to pay afterwards. Combat is like a roller coaster in this way with high’s being the adrenaline rush and lows coming after the rush. This ‘roller coaster’ affects a human body dramatically because of the highs and lows, and can be severely draining physically and emotionally.
After about forty-five days Emotional Exhaustion may set in and the unit’s efficiency decreases dramatically. Troops aren’t willing to attack, they are unwilling to dig fighting positions or run patrols. They lack the will they had before
That is more than enough to give you a taste. You should read it all.
I suppose I should say something about the author, William S. Frisbee Jr. His own words are best.
I was US Marine Non-Commisioned Officer and a squad leader. I served in Desert Storm and Desert Shield. While I was in the Marines my hobby was small unit tactics. I enjoyed learning about all manner of small unit fighting from guerrilla wars to large scale conflicts. I was an NCO, not an officer so my viewpoints are that of a small unit leader who loved his job and strove for excellence.
This may be why I like Military Science Fiction so much. I despise writers who are too lazy to do their research and that may be why I shy away from most modern fiction. Movies are a sore point with me especailly because most producers are stupid and believe their audience is stupid too. The Rambo series is an excellent example of a producer’s stupidity and ignorance. Ask any combat veteran.
He suggests this book on the subject. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
I think Yoda had a very good point when he said, “Wars not make one great”.
I liked a review of “On Killing…” by Andrew McCaffrey which I will quote in part:
Grossman spends a great deal of time discussing the trauma that the solder who kills faces when he returns to civilian life. Nowhere is this more apparent than in those veterans who returned from Vietnam. Those soldiers had been psychologically trained to kill in a way that no previous army had gone through, and there was no counteragent working to heal their psychological wounds. Grossman takes great pains to discuss how horrifying the act of killing is, and points out how detrimental it is to one’s mental health. When the Vietnam veterans returned home to no counseling and the spit and bile of anti-war protestors, the emotional effect was astounding. Most of Grossman’s thesis is supported by in-depth interviews and psychological profiles, but it is the story of the Vietnam veterans that comes across as the most disturbing.
I served in ‘Nam but aboard ship (DLGN-25). I was in the “combat zone” for about 3 or 4 months. Our ship never fired a shot in anger nor was it fired on. I did get to watch the planes take off from the Enterprise (CVAN-65) which was the center of the task force our ship was part of. When I got back to civilian life I was accorded “band of brothers” status from those more directly involved in combat. That peaked for me in Chicago in 1986 the year when Veterans put on their own parades to welcome themselves home. I bought some Navy fatigues and marched at the end of the parade for about a mile or two. I did pass General Westmoreland on the reviewing stand.
BTW contra the Tribune article – the soldiers won the war in 1973 or so. It was the Democrats in Congress in 1975 who refused material support to South Vietnam so they could defend themselves against communists attacking in force. Bastards. It only gets worse. There were the boat people. About half a million. About a quarter million died at sea. And now some 35 years later the Vietnamese government wants to join the Western System as China has done. There is resistance to that which will probably not effectively end for another ten or fifteen years.
And just to ride my hobby horse:
General use of cannabis for PTSD Symptoms
More and More US Veterans are Smoking Weed to Treat Their PTSD
Medical Marijuana – A Magic Bullet for Treating PTSD?
Maine October 2013 –> Post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers qualify for medical marijuana – well that is a little late for the ‘Nam boys who have been persecuted almost every step of their way back home.
Comments
20 responses to “On Killing – The Psychology Of Warfare”
They actually won it twice. They crushed the Viet Cong in 1968; the VC were never a factor in the subsequent years. And they the NVA in 1973 (or so) forcing a peace treaty, which the communists in Congress refused to honor. Most of the ground forces in 1973 were South Vietnamese, we were doing logistics and air support. If Congress has lived up to its treaty obligations, it is likely that the South Vietnamese could have staved off the 1975 offensive.
There is defensively a process of dehumanizing the enemy. I was in a Marine Infantry battalion in Desert Storm. Seeing dead and wounded Iraqi’s we would simply shrug and say – “better him than me, better them than us.”
Simon-
A couple of times, I’ve seen the expression of relief on a veteran’s face when I told them the real history of Vietnam from 1973 to ’75. It’s not every day you get to see 40 years of weight lifted off a man’s shoulders. It’s criminal that the lifting had to be done one a retail basis by a little ‘ol engineer with a history hobby, rather than wholesale by our cultural institutions.
Another thing–win or lose, Vietnam was not a waste. It was necessary. In 1963, after Korea, the Bay of Pigs, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, Europe had serious doubts that America would actually stand behind its allies against Russia. In order to stick with NATO, they needed to see the U.S. bleed. Sad, but true. I suspect that if someone other than Johnson had been in office, it could have been accomplished with less blood–I’m not excusing the mistakes. But without the blood of Vietnam, there very well may not have been a November 9th.
Bram-
My colleagues who spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan the last several years seem mostly to cope in this fashion. Al Qaeda made it easy for them, though–it’s easy to dehumanize people who use women and children as cover.
Put another way, contempt for the enemy’s morality is of great assistance in sustaining a war–which, come to think of it, explains much of the last 500 years of history.
I think dehumanizing the enemy is an important point.
If you can convince your population that the enemy is less than human, it makes them easier to kill. Recall how the Germans dehumanized the Jews and Poles before WWII. I don’t know how to quantify it but I am sure it gives the killer an edge.
Tangentially related perhaps. The Left has been attempting to dehumanize the Right, particularly, TEA Partiers and conservatives for some years now.
While my principles are Christian Conservative Libertarian, I believe that the practical problem of war is the issue. When national enemies try to eff with you, what do you do? Nation versus nation is, was, and always be a POWER STRUGGLE!!! Not a reasoned debate, and, so, there’s your war, ladies and gentlemen!!! Governments are not reason, nor are they eloquence; like Geo Washington said, government is FORCE, and FORCE is the only argument it knows.
feeblemind,
I wrote about how drug users are dehumanized about 15 years ago.
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2004/09/how-to-put-end-to-drug-users.html
That is how we can make war on them and still claim our humanity – such as it is.
James,
I don’t consider what I wrote anti-war. I am not. I just thought the practical problems of war fighting needed a wider audience.
FYI, I am anti-war. That’s why I’m what they call a “hawk” – I want war over and done with as QUICKLY as possible. Because there is (we’ve proved this a few times) no such thing as “the war to end all wars”.
See the above referenced article if you want to know why I’m anti war.
And I agree about Vietnam. We could have WON. In fact, we basically did, until we surrendered. The Fall of Saigon was our shame, not the Vietnam war.
FWIW,the military does not want psychopaths and works very hard to keep them out. Among other reasons, Psychopaths have major problems with authority and do not follow orders very well.
Simon, you will have to dismount your hobby horse when it comes to PTSD. You see, Rev. Kenneth Copeland and historian (cough) David Barton have boldly told us all the truth by explaining that PTSD isn’t biblical. Per these two worthies, counseling and drug therapy are the wrong way to go when addressing PTSD as all one needs to do is pray and the problem is solved.
Just thought I’d point this out to save you the embarrassment. Link below:
http://www.religionnews.com/2013/11/12/david-barton-kenneth-copeland-soldiers-suffer-ptsd-according-bible/
Sarcasm off now.
Great post. To comment on the main theme, I once recall reading that WWII recruits found it difficult to actually shoot at human-like targets during their training prior to deployment. I can’t remember how the trainers addressed this problem. Just an FYI.
Perhaps part of it was dehumanizing the enemy, but I discussed this “few men actually fired their weapons” perception with my 7th Infantry Division, front lines serving father (Aleutians, Kwajalien, Philippines, Okinawa) and he wasn’t buying it. While such may have applied to a few men, when large numbers of people on the other side of no-man’s land are trying their damnedest to kill you, you do everything you can to try and kill them first. And once they’re killed, you move on and kill some more until the b*stards give up. I think there’s a lot of anti-war psy-ops behind this theory.
And more to the point, if such a theory was the case, I doubt there would have been as much shooting of men trying to surrender or even of prisoners as there was. Even off the battlefield men view the enemy as very much an evil “other”, not a “there but for the grace of God go I”. Now perhaps later, after the war or campaign is over, such a philosophical perspective hits, but I find it very hard to believe there is much of that on the battle field.
WTP,
The shooting of retreating men is discussed in the full article. You might want to give it a read.
Never having been in infantry combat I have no direct experience with the issues discussed.
I do know that when I was in a MC gang I abhorred killing and did my best to see that none was done. And none was done in my presence.
Simon,
Not much time available to invest right now but I did click over to the original article this morning. Statements like this, without supporting info, bug me:
” it is a fact that only 15-20 percent of the soldiers fired at the enemy. ” Source? Are we counting support personnel? Are we talking about guys on the front lines? Guys in just one or two battles? How is this counted? There’s lots of slippery wiggle room in that statement.
” only one percent of the pilots accounted for thirty to forty percent of enemy fighters shot down in the air. Some pilots didn’t shoot down a single enemy plane.”
All fighter pilots? Bomber gunners? Guys flying missions over Japan faced little resistance. Are we counting those?
The wording in that document leaves me with far more questions than answers.
One other thing I recall from conversations with the old man, he passed 6 or 7 years ago, was his description of fighting in the Philippines and how the Japanese hid amongst the civilians. I think I can recall it damn near word for word. “When we went into a village where we knew the Japs were hiding, we shot everything. Man, woman, pig, child, if it moved you shot it. When it stopped moving you shot it again. We were 19/20 year old kids and scared as hell.”
WTP,
I trust the writer of the article because he was a combat vet. But you do make some very good points.
Simon, not the time now to read all he has written, but do you know him personally? I see his home page stating “I was US Marine Non-Commisioned Officer and a squad leader. I served in Desert Storm and Desert Shield. While I was in the Marines my hobby was small unit tactics. I enjoyed learning about all manner of small unit fighting from guerrilla wars to large scale conflicts. I was an NCO, not an officer so my viewpoints are that of a small unit leader who loved his job and strove for excellence.”
But his forums link states “The forums are no longer available. I don’t have time to deal with immature brats.” Doesn’t seem very open to questioning.
WTP,
SF is infected with lefties and anti-war types these days. Sarah Hoyt used to deal with that when she was writing here.
So I can see his point.
Thanks, Simon, but I’m still uneasy with that blogger’s point of view. Ran it past another blogger with some A’stan experience and he doesn’t buy into the numbers either unless we start counting support personnel or such, which is a bit disingenuous as the article is written. Also, the psychopath thing actually sounds like the typical anti-war propaganda itself. I don’t see how having a psychopath on the front lines could possibly be good for morale of the other troops. They lack discipline and critical thinking skills. Not good material for a good soldier. My guess is that it is very likely most psychopaths never make it past their physicals.
WTP,
Maybe psychopath is the wrong word. But I read about it from a paper on the military that explained how to select the best front line troops. Eager trigger pullers. Psychologically unmoved by killing. IIRC the paper said that those kind make up about 4% of any unit of infantry.