snipng and PTSD

(from sff.net)

My feeling of it, which is reinforced by my reading, is that most soldiers who
kill people under orders are not completely freaked out by it. But most of
us kill at a considerable distance. A book I read (_On Killing_) claimed, with
reasonable evidence, that the psychological damage a soldier sustains from killing
strangers is an inverse function of the distance between the soldier and his
victim. Snipers were pretty detached from the death of their target -- squeeze
the trigger and the tiny image of a man falls down -- but people who are a social
distance away, close enough to speak to or even touch the man they killed --
are more or less profoundly damaged by the experience.

The people I killed were usually miles away when they died, and I usually didn't
have to deal with their bodies. So it's kind of an abstraction, even though
you're ultimately causing the death.

I'm glad I had that emotional insulation, but of course the men are just as
dead as if I had throttled them to death. If one had a philosophical bent,
one could get bent oneself.

Joe