On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society

by Dave Grossman

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

Prior to World War II it had always been assumed that the average soldier would kill in combat simply because his country and his leaders had told him to do so and because it was essential to defend his own life and the lives of his friends. When the point came that he didn’t kill, it was assumed that he panicked and ran.

During World War II U.S. Army Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall asked these average soldiers what it was that they did in battle. His singularly unexpected discovery was that, of every hundred men along the line of fire during the period of an encounter, an average of only 15 to 20 “would take any part with their weapons.” This was consistently true “whether the action was spread over a day, or two days or three.”

only 15 to 20 percent of the American riflemen in combat during World War II would fire at the enemy. Those who would not fire did not run or hide (in many cases they were willing to risk great danger to rescue comrades, get ammunition, or run messages), but they simply would not fire their weapons at the enemy, even when faced with repeated waves of banzai charges.

That missing factor is the simple and demonstrable fact that there is within most men an intense resistance to killing their fellow man. A resistance so strong that, in many circumstances, soldiers on the battlefield will die before they can overcome it.

“Of course it is hard to kill someone,” they would say. “I could never bring myself to do it.” But they would be wrong. With the proper conditioning and the proper circumstances, it appears that almost anyone can and will kill. Others might respond, “Any man will kill in combat when he is faced with someone who is trying to kill him.” And they would be even more wrong, for in this section we shall observe that throughout history the majority of men on the battlefield would not attempt to kill the enemy, even to save their own lives or the lives of their friends.

The notion that the only alternatives to conflict are fight or flight is embedded in our culture, and our educational institutions have done little to challenge it. The traditional American military policy raises it to the level of a law of nature. —Richard Heckler In Search of the Warrior Spirit One of the roots of our misunderstanding of the psychology of the battlefield lies in the misapplication of the fight-or-flight model to the stresses of combat. This model holds that in the face of danger a series of physiological and psychological processes prepare and support the endangered creature for either fighting or fleeing. The fight-or-flight dichotomy is the appropriate set of choices for any creature faced with danger other than that which comes from its own species. When we examine the responses of creatures confronted with aggression from their own species, the set of options expands to include posturing and submission. This application of animal kingdom intraspecies response patterns (that is, fight, flee, posture, and submit) to human warfare is, to the best of my knowledge, entirely new.

All have the same “patterns of aggression” and all have “very orchestrated, highly ritualized” patterns of posturing, mock battle, and submission. These rituals restrain and focus the violence on relatively harmless posturing and display. What is created is a “perfect illusion of violence.” Aggression, yes. Competitiveness, yes. But only a “very tiny, tiny level” of actual violence.

“There is,” concludes Gwynne Dyer, “the occasional psychopath who really wants to slice people open,” but most of the participants are really interested in “status, display, profit, and damage limitation.” Like their peacetime contemporaries, the kids who have fought in close combat throughout history (and it is kids, or adolescent males, whom most societies traditionally send off to do their fighting), killing the enemy was the very least of their intentions. In war, as in gang war, posturing is the name of the game.

Posturing can be seen in the plumed helmets of the ancient Greeks and Romans, which allowed the bearer to appear taller and therefore fiercer to his foe, while the brilliantly shined armor made him seem broader and brighter. Such plumage saw its height in modern history during the Napoleonic era, when soldiers wore bright uniforms and high, uncomfortable shako hats, which served no purpose other than to make the wearer look and feel like a taller, more dangerous creature.

A modern equivalent to the Civil War occurrence mentioned above can be seen in this Army Historical Series account of a French battalion’s participation in the defense of Chipyong-Ni during the Korean War: The [North Korean] soldiers formed one hundred or two hundred yards in front of the small hill which the French occupied, then launched their attack, blowing whistles and bugles, and running with bayonets fixed. When this noise started, the French soldiers began cranking a hand siren they had, and one squad started running toward the Chinese, yelling and throwing grenades far to the front and to the side. When the two forces were within twenty yards of each other the Chinese suddenly turned and ran in the opposite direction. It was all over within a minute.

Gunpowder’s superior noise, its superior posturing ability, made it ascendant on the battlefield. The longbow would still have been used in the Napoleonic Wars if the raw mathematics of killing effectiveness was all that mattered, since both the longbow’s firing rate and its accuracy were much greater than that of a smoothbore musket. But a frightened man, thinking with his midbrain and going “ploink, ploink, ploink” with a bow, doesn’t stand a chance against an equally frightened man going “BANG! BANG!” with a musket.

Ardant du Picq became one of the first to document the common tendency of soldiers to fire harmlessly into the air simply for the sake of firing. Du Picq made one of the first thorough investigations into the nature of combat with a questionnaire distributed to French officers in the 1860s. One officer’s response to du Picq stated quite frankly that “a good many soldiers fired into the air at long distances,” while another observed that “a certain number of our soldiers fired almost in the air, without aiming, seeming to want to stun themselves, to become drunk on rifle fire during this gripping crisis.”

Muzzle-loading muskets could fire from one to five shots per minute, depending on the skill of the operator and the state of the weapon. With a potential hit rate of well over 50 percent at the average combat ranges of this era, the killing rate should have been hundreds per minute, instead of one or two. The weak link between the killing potential and the killing capability of these units was the soldier. The simple fact is that when faced with a living, breathing opponent instead of a target, a significant majority of the soldiers revert to a posturing mode in which they fire over their enemy’s heads.

Richard Holmes, in his superb book Acts of War, examines the hit rates of soldiers in a variety of historical battles. At Rorkes Drift in 1897 a small group of British soldiers were surrounded and vastly outnumbered by the Zulu. Firing volley after volley into the massed enemy ranks at point-blank range, it seems as if no round could have possibly missed, and even a 50 percent hit rate would seem to be low. But Holmes estimates that in actuality approximately thirteen rounds were fired for each hit.

Lieutenant George Roupell encountered this same phenomenon while commanding a British platoon in World War I. He stated that the only way he could stop his men from firing into the air was to draw his sword and walk down the trench, “beating the men on the backside and, as I got their attention, telling them to fire low.”

The focus of primitive tribesmen on posturing at the expense of fighting in times of war is usually blatant and obvious. Richard Gabriel points out that primitive New Guinea tribes were excellent shots with the bow and arrows they used while hunting, but when they went to war with each other they took the feathers off of the backs of their arrows, and it was only with these inaccurate and useless arrows that they fought their wars. In the same way, the American Indians considered “counting coup,” or simply touching their enemy, to be far more important than killing.

Carl von Clausewitz makes the same point when he notes that the vast majority of combat losses historically occurred in the pursuit after one side or the other had won the battle. (Why this occurs is a subject that will be looked at in detail in the section “Killing and Physical Distance.”)

Missing the target does not necessarily involve firing obviously high, and two decades on army rifle ranges have taught me that a soldier must fire unusually high for it to be obvious to an observer. In other words, the intentional miss can be a very subtle form of disobedience.

Even more remarkable than instances of posturing, and equally indisputable, is the fact that a significant number of soldiers in combat elect not even to fire over the enemy’s head, but instead do not fire at all. In this respect their actions very much resemble the actions of those members of the animal kingdom who “submit” passively to the aggression and determination of their opponent rather than fleeing, fighting, or posturing.

In Marshall’s World War II work and in this account of Civil War battle we see that only a few men actually fire at the enemy, while others gather and prepare ammo, load weapons, pass weapons, or fall back into the obscurity and anonymity of cover. The process of some men electing to load and provide support for those who are willing to shoot at the enemy appears to have been the norm rather than the exception. Those who did fire, and were the beneficiary of all of this support, can be seen in countless reports collected by Griffith, in which individual Civil War soldiers fired one hundred, two hundred, or even an incredible four hundred rounds of ammunition in battle.

There were many who were shot while charging the enemy or were casualties of artillery outside of musket range, and these individuals would never have had an opportunity to fire their weapons, but they hardly represent 95 percent of all casualties.

Looking another human being in the eye, making an independent decision to kill him, and watching as he dies due to your action combine to form one of the most basic, important, primal, and potentially traumatic occurrences of war.

Nations customarily measure the “costs of war” in dollars, lost production, or the number of soldiers killed or wounded. Rarely do military establishments attempt to measure the costs of war in terms of individual human suffering. Psychiatric breakdown remains one of the most costly items of war when expressed in human terms. —Richard Gabriel No More Heroes

Richard Gabriel tells us that “in every war in which American soldiers have fought in [the twentieth century], the chances of becoming a psychiatric casualty—of being debilitated for some period of time as a consequence of the stresses of military life—were greater than the chances of being killed by enemy fire.”

Conversion hysteria can occur traumatically during combat or post-traumatically, years later. Conversion hysteria can manifest itself as an inability to know where one is or to function at all, often accompanied by aimless wandering around the battlefield with complete disregard for evident dangers. Upon occasion the soldier becomes amnesiatic, blocking out large parts of his memory. Often, hysteria degenerates into convulsive attacks in which the soldier rolls into the fetal position and begins to shake violently.

These states are characterized by feelings of total weariness and tenseness that cannot be relieved by sleep or rest, degenerating into an inability to concentrate. When he can sleep, the soldier is often awakened by terrible nightmares. Ultimately the soldier becomes obsessed with death and the fear that he will fail or that the men in his unit will discover that he is a coward. Generalized anxiety can easily slip into complete hysteria. Frequently anxiety is accompanied by shortness of breath, weakness, pain, blurred vision, giddiness, vasomotor abnormalities, and fainting.

The evacuation syndrome is the paradox of combat psychiatry. A nation must care for its psychiatric casualties, since they are of no value on the battlefield—indeed, their presence in combat can have a negative impact on the morale of other soldiers—and they can still be used again as valuable seasoned replacements once they’ve recovered from combat stress. But if soldiers begin to realize that insane soldiers are being evacuated, the number of psychiatric casualties will increase dramatically. An obvious solution to this problem is to rotate troops out of battle for periodic rest and recuperation—this is standard policy in most Western armies—but this is not always possible in combat.

If I had time and anything like your ability to study war, I think I should concentrate almost entirely on the “actualities of war”—the effects of tiredness, hunger, fear, lack of sleep, weather…. The principles of strategy and tactics, and the logistics of war are really absurdly simple: it is the actualities that make war so complicated and so difficult, and are usually so neglected by historians. —Field Marshal Lord Wavell, in a letter to Liddell Hart

Fear of death and injury is not the only, or even the major, cause of psychiatric casualties in combat.

There are deeper underlying causes for the psychiatric casualties suffered by soldiers in combat. Resistance to overt aggressive confrontation, in addition to the fear of death and injury, is responsible for much of the trauma and stress on the battlefield. Thus, the Reign of Fear is represented as only one contributing factor in the soldier’s dilemma. Fear, combined with exhaustion, hate, horror, and the irreconcilable task of balancing these with the need to kill, eventually drives the soldier so deeply into a mire of guilt and horror that he tips over the brink into that region that we call insanity.

Gabriel notes that studies from both the First and Second World Wars show that prisoners of war did not suffer psychiatric reactions when they were subjected to artillery attack or aerial bombardment, but their guards did. Here we see a situation in which noncombatants (prisoners) were not traumatized by death and destruction, while the combatants (guards) with them were.

But in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, psychiatric casualties during naval warfare have been nearly nonexistent. The great military physician Lord Moran noted the remarkable absence of psychological illness among the men he ministered to aboard ships in World War II. Discussing his experience in two ships, he said, “One was sunk after surviving more than two hundred raids and the whole of the first Libyan campaign. The other was in four major actions in addition to many raids at sea and in harbour, and twice sustained actual damage.” Yet the incidence of psychiatric casualties was almost nonexistent. “There were more than five hundred men in the two ships and of these only two came to me about their nerves.” After World War II the fields of psychiatry and psychology attempted to find out why, and again they suggested gain through illness. A sailor obviously had nothing to gain by becoming a psychiatric casualty and therefore did not elect to do so.

Modern sailors suffer and burn and die just as horribly as their land-bound equivalents. Death and destruction fall all about them. Yet they do not crack. Why? The answer is, again, that most of them don’t have to kill anyone directly, and no one is trying to specifically, personally, kill them. Dyer observes that there has never been a similar resistance to killing among artillerymen or bomber crews or naval personnel.

An additional factor to consider here is—as Dyer points out—that the extremely rare “natural soldiers” who are most capable of killing (those identified by Swank and Marchand as the 2 percent predisposed toward aggressive psychopathic tendencies) can be found “mostly congregating in the commando-type special forces [units].” And it is just such units as these that are usually given the mission of conducting combat patrols behind enemy lines.

Fear among Medical Personnel: “They Take Not Their Courage from Anger.” In a vision of the night I saw them, In the battles of the night. ’Mid the roar and the reeling shadows of blood They were moving like light… With scrutiny calm, and with fingers Patient as swift They bind up the hurts and the pain-writhen Bodies uplift… But they take not their courage from anger That blinds the hot being; They take not their pity from weakness; Tender, yet seeing… They endure to have eyes of the watcher In hell and not swerve For an hour from the faith that they follow, The light that they serve. Man true to man, to his kindness That overflows all, To his spirit erect in the thunder When all his forts fall,— This light, in the tiger-mad welter, They serve and they save. What song shall be worthy to sing them— Braver than the brave? —Laurence Binyon, World War I veteran “The Healers”

There is a significant body of evidence that indicates that nonkilling military personnel on the battlefield suffer fewer psychiatric casualties than those whose job it is to kill. Medical personnel in particular have traditionally been bulwarks of dependability and stability in combat.

Efficient, thorough, strong, and brave—his vision is to kill. Force is the hearthstone of his might, the pole-star of his will. His forges glow malevolent: Their minions never tire To deck the goddess of his lust whose twins are blood and fire. —Robert Grant, World War I veteran “The Superman

I am sick and tired of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell. —William Tecumseh Sherman

An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior. —Victor Frankl, Nazi concentration-camp survivor

Martin Seligman developed the concept of inoculation from stress from his famous studies of learning in dogs. He put dogs in a cage that had an electric shock pass through the floor at random intervals. Initially the dogs would jump, yelp, and scratch pitifully in their attempts to escape the shocks, but after a time they would fall into a depressed, hopeless state of apathy and inactivity that Seligman termed “learned helplessness.” After falling into a state of learned helplessness, the dogs would not avoid the shocks even when provided with an obvious escape route. Other dogs were given a means of escape after receiving some shocks but before falling into learned helplessness. These dogs learned that they could and would eventually escape from the shocks, and after only one such escape they became inoculated against learned helplessness. Even after long periods of random, inescapable shocks, these inoculated dogs would escape when finally provided with a means to do so.

When Alexander took command, the men often did not bother to salute an officer, but after their victory of El Alamein all that came to an end, and their self-respect came back. Moran concluded that “achievement is a sharp tonic to morale…. But in the main, time is against the soldier.”

In Normandy during World War II Field Marshal Montgomery had two classes of divisions. Some were veterans of North Africa, and others were green units, without previous combat experience. Montgomery initially tended to rely on his veteran units (particularly during the disastrous Operation Goodwood), but these units performed poorly, while his green units performed well. In this instance, failing to understand the influence of emotional exhaustion and the Well of Fortitude had a significant negative impact on the Allied effort in World War II.

The soldier in combat is trapped within this tragic Catch-22. If he overcomes his resistance to killing and kills an enemy soldier in close combat, he will be forever burdened with blood guilt, and if he elects not to kill, then the blood guilt of his fallen comrades and the shame of his profession, nation, and cause lie upon him. He is damned if he does, and damned if he doesn’t.