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

by Dave Grossman

The German-Russian conflict during World War II is an excellent example of a vicious cycle in which both sides became totally invested in atrocity and rape.

Sharia. The thing to understand here is that gang rapes and gang or cult killings in times of peace and war are not “senseless violence.” They are instead powerful acts of group bonding and criminal enabling that, quite often, have a hidden purpose of promoting the wealth, power, or vanity of a specific leader or cause…at the expense of the innocent.

The sheer horror of atrocity serves not only to terrify those who must face it, but also to generate disbelief in distant observers. Whether it is ritual cult killings in our society or mass murders by established governments in the world at large, the common response is often one of total disbelief. And the nearer it hits to home, the harder we want to disbelieve it.

women. It is their very goodness and decency that cause them to be so completely incapable of believing that someone or something they approve of could be so completely evil.

And this simple, naive tendency to disbelieve or look the other way is, possibly more than any other factor, responsible for the perpetuation of atrocity and horror in our world today.

The process of bonding men by forcing them to commit an atrocity requires a foundation of legitimacy for it to continue for any length of time.

Forcing men to commit atrocities is much easier than getting them to accept the atrocity as a bonding and empowering process. But once they have accepted the empowering process and firmly believe that their enemy is less than human and is deserving of what has happened to him, then they are stuck in a profound psychological trap.

Those who choose the path of atrocity have burned their bridges behind them. There is no turning back.

During the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, a German SS unit massacred a group of American POWs at Malmédy. Word of this massacre spread like wildfire through the American forces, and thousands of soldiers resolved never to surrender to the Germans.

In its endeavors against Chechen rebels, the Russian army used videotapes of the rebels beheading Russian soldiers to convince their troops that they must never surrender.

The worst part is that when you institute and execute a policy of atrocity, you and your society must live with what you have done.

There was no honor here, no virtue. The standards of behavior taught in the homes, churches, and schools of America had no place in battle.

Those who commit atrocity have made a Faustian bargain with evil. They have sold their conscience, their future, and their peace of mind for a brief, fleeting, self-destructive advantage.

On rare occasions those who are commanded to execute human beings have the remarkable moral fiber necessary to stare directly into the face of the obedience-demanding authority and refuse to kill.

In a way, the obedience-demanding authority, the killer, and his peers are all diffusing the responsibility among themselves. The authority is protected from the trauma of, and responsibility for, killing because others do the dirty work. The killer can rationalize that the responsibility really belongs to the authority and that his guilt is diffused among everyone who stands beside him and pulls the trigger with him. This diffusion of responsibility and group absolution of guilt is the basic psychological leverage that makes all firing squads and most atrocity situations function.

Group absolution can work within a group of strangers (as in a firing-squad situation), but if an individual is bonded to the group, then peer pressure interacts with group absolution in such a way as to almost force atrocity participation.

Through atrocity the oppressed population can be numbed into a learned helplessness state of submission and compliance. The effect on the atrocity-committing soldiers appears to be very similar. Human life is profoundly cheapened by these acts, and the soldier realizes that one of the lives that has been cheapened is his own.

way, every soldier who refuses to kill in combat, secretly or openly, represents the latent potential for nobility in mankind.

The “good” that is not willing to overcome its resistance to killing in the face of an undeniable “evil” may be ultimately destined for destruction. Those who cherish liberty, justice, and truth must recognize that there is another force at large in this world. There is a twisted logic and power resident in the forces of oppression, injustice, and deceit, but those who claim this power are trapped in a spiral of destruction and denial that must ultimately destroy them and any victims they can pull with them into the abyss.

There are no half measures when one sells one’s soul.

The basic response stages to killing in combat are concern about killing, the actual kill, exhilaration, remorse, and rationalization and acceptance. Like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous stages in response to death and dying, these stages are generally sequential but not necessarily universal. Thus, some individuals may skip certain stages, or blend them, or pass through them so fleetingly that they do not even

Once you’ve shot down two or three [planes] the effect is terrific and you’ll go on till you’re killed. It’s love of the sport rather than sense of duty that makes you go on.

Here we have seen some aspects of how rationalization and acceptance works, but we need to remember that these are just some aspects of a lifelong process. If the process fails it can result in post-traumatic stress disorder.

wrote…“Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared.”

“My God, I just killed a man and I enjoyed it. What is wrong with me?” They feel bad that they don’t feel bad! But there is absolutely nothing wrong with them. Indeed, among mature warriors, among individuals who have mentally and emotionally prepared themselves for combat, this is one of the most common reactions.

Psychological conditioning was applied en masse to a body of soldiers, who, in previous wars, were shown to be unwilling or unable to engage in killing activities. When these soldiers, already inwardly shaken by their inner killing experiences, returned to be condemned and attacked by their own nation, the result was often further psychological trauma and long-term psychic damage.

At the end of World War II the problem became obvious: Johnny can’t kill. A firing rate of 15 to 20 percent among soldiers is like having a literacy rate of 15 to 20 percent among proofreaders. Once those in authority realized the existence and magnitude of the problem, it was only a matter of time until they solved it.

And thus, since World War II, a new era has quietly dawned in modern warfare: an era of psychological warfare—psychological warfare conducted not upon the enemy, but upon one’s own troops.

but in the second half of the twentieth century, psychology began to have an impact as great as that of technology on the modern battlefield.

The triad of methods used to achieve this remarkable increase in killing are desensitization, conditioning, and denial defense mechanisms.

Indeed, this desensitization process is almost a smoke screen for what I believe is the most important aspect of modern training. What Dyer and many other observers have missed is the role of (1) Pavlovian classical conditioning and (2) Skinnerian operant conditioning in modern training.

The method used to train today’s—and the Vietnam era’s—U.S. Army and USMC soldiers is nothing more than an application of conditioning techniques to develop a reflexive “quick shoot” ability.

Instead of lying prone on a grassy field calmly shooting at a bull’s-eye target, the modern soldier spends many hours standing in a foxhole or crouching behind cover, with full combat equipment draped about his body, looking over an area of lightly wooded rolling terrain. At periodic intervals one or two olive-drab, man-shaped targets at varying ranges will pop up in front of him for a brief time, and the soldier must instantly aim and shoot at the target(s). When he hits a target it provides immediate feedback by instantly and very satisfyingly dropping backward—just as a living target would. Soldiers are highly rewarded and recognized for success in this skill and suffer mild punishment (in the form of retraining, peer pressure, and failure to graduate from boot camp) for failure to quickly and accurately “engage” the targets—a standard euphemism for “kill.”

In addition to traditional marksmanship, what is being taught in this environment is the ability to shoot reflexively and instantly and a precise mimicry of the act of killing on the modern battlefield.

In a form of “token economy” these hits are then exchanged for marksmanship badges that usually have some form of privilege

Every aspect of killing on the battlefield is rehearsed, visualized, and conditioned. On special occasions even more realistic and complex targets are used. Balloon-filled uniforms moving across the kill zone (pop the balloon and the target drops to the ground), red-paint-filled milk jugs, and many other ingenious devices are used. These make the training more interesting, the conditioned stimuli more realistic, and the conditioned response more assured under a variety of different circumstances.

What makes this training process work is the same thing that made Pavlov’s dogs salivate and B. F. Skinner’s rats press their bars. What makes it work is the single most powerful and reliable behavior modification process yet discovered by the field of psychology, and now applied to the field of warfare: operant conditioning.

Prepackaged denial defense mechanisms are a remarkable contribution from modern U.S. Army training.

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.

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.

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, the U.S. and Panamanian forces during the 1989 Panama Invasion,[3] or the U.S. and Iraqi forces during the invasion of Iraq. 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.

Even with allowance for unintentional error and deliberate exaggeration, this superior training and killing ability in Vietnam, Panama, Argentina, Rhodesia, Afghanistan, and Iraq amounts to nothing less than a technological revolution on the battlefield, a revolution that represents total superiority in close combat.

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 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.

What is a potential threat to society is the unrestrained desensitization, conditioning, and denial defense mechanisms provided by modern interactive video games and violent television and movies,

but the most important qualities teenagers bring to basic training are enthusiasm and naivete….

The combatants of all wars are frightfully young, but the American combatants in Vietnam were significantly younger than in any war in American history.

and these combatants were without the leavening of mature, older soldiers that had always been there in past wars.

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.

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

The 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.