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

by Dave Grossman

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 battle by rotating soldiers into the rear lines.

World War II soldiers joined for the duration. A soldier may have come into combat as an individual replacement, but he knew that he would be with his unit for the rest of the war. He was very invested in establishing himself with his newfound unit, and those who were already in the unit had equal cause to bond with this individual, who they knew would be their comrade until the war was over. These individuals developed very mature, fulfilling relationships that for most of them have lasted throughout their lives.

All but the best of units became just a collection of men experiencing endless leavings and arrivals, and that sacred process of bonding, which makes it possible for men to do what they must do in combat, became a tattered and torn remnant of the support structure experienced by veterans of past American wars.

What happened in Vietnam is the moral equivalent of giving a soldier a local anesthetic for a gunshot wound and then sending him back into combat.

At their best these drugs only served to delay the inevitable confrontation with the pain, suffering, grief, and guilt that the Vietnam veteran repressed and buried deep inside himself. And at worst they actually increased the impact of the trauma suffered by the soldier.

In this study he concluded that all warrior societies, tribes, and nations incorporate some form of purification ritual for their returning soldiers, and this ritual appears to be essential to the health of both the returning warrior and the society as a whole.

Societies have always recognized that war changes men, that they are not the same after they return. That is why primitive societies often require soldiers to perform purification rites before allowing them to rejoin their communities. These rites often involved washing or other forms of ceremonial cleansing. Psychologically, these rituals provided soldiers with a way of ridding themselves of stress and the terrible guilt that always accompanies the sane after war. It was also a way of treating guilt by providing a mechanism through which fighting men could decompress and relive their terror without feeling weak or exposed. Finally,

When soldiers are denied these rituals they often tend to become emotionally disturbed. Unable to purge their guilt or be reassured that what they did was right, they turned their emotions inward. Soldiers returning from the Vietnam War were victims of this kind of neglect.

Parades are an essential rite of passage to the returning veteran in the same way that bar mitzvahs, confirmations, graduations, weddings, and other public ceremonies are to other individuals at key periods of their lives. Memorials and monuments mean to the grieving veteran what funerals and tombstones do to any bereaved loved one. But rather than parades and memorials the Vietnam veteran, who had only done what society had trained and ordered him to do, was greeted by a hostile environment in which he was ashamed to even wear the uniform and decorations that became such a vital part of who he was.

“guilt about leaving one’s buddies to an unknown fate in Vietnam apparently proved so strong that many veterans were often too frightened to find out what happened to those left behind.”

The Vietnam veteran’s defensive response to a nation accusing him of being a baby killer and murderer is consistently, as it was to Mantell and has been so many times to me, “No, it never really bothered me…. You get used to it.” This defensive repression and denial of emotions appear to have been one of the major causes of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Never in American history, perhaps never in all the history of Western civilization, has an army suffered such an agony of many blows from its own people. And today we reap the legacy of those blows in a bitter harvest of PTSD in our Vietnam veterans.

experience.” Manifestations of PTSD include recurrent and intrusive dreams and recollections of the experience, emotional blunting, social withdrawal, exceptional difficulty or reluctance in initiating or maintaining intimate relationships, and sleep disturbances.

In study after study two factors show up again and again as critical to the magnitude of the post-traumatic response. First and most obvious is the intensity of the initial trauma. The second and less obvious but absolutely vital factor is the nature of the social support structure available to the traumatized individual.

Jim Goodwin notes in his book how resort hotels were taken over and made into redistribution stations to which these veterans brought their wives and devoted two weeks to reacquainting themselves with their family on the best possible terms, in an environment in which they were still surrounded by the company of their fellow veterans.

The Vietnam vet, the average vet who did no killing, is suffering an agony of guilt and torment created by society’s condemnation.

At one level many, even most, of these horrified, confused veterans accepted society’s media-driven, kangaroo-court conviction as justice and locked themselves in prisons of the worst kind, prisons in their mind. A prison whose name was PTSD.

It may indeed be necessary to engage in a war, but we must begin to understand the potential long-term price of such endeavors.

We may have enhanced the killing ability of the average soldier through training (that is, conditioning), but at what price? The ultimate cost of our body counts in Vietnam has been, and continues to be, much more than dollars and lives. We can, and have, conditioned soldiers to kill—they are eager and willing and trust our commands. But in doing so we have not made them capable of handling the moral and social burdens of these acts, and we have a moral responsibility to consider the long-term effects of our commands.

Thus, it is probably a conservative statement to say that if today we had 1930s-level evacuation notification and medical technology (no automobiles and telephones for most people, and no antibiotics), then we would have ten times the murder rate we currently do.

The three major psychological processes at work in enabling violence are classical conditioning (à la Pavlov’s dog), operant conditioning (à la B. F. Skinner’s rats), and the observation and imitation of vicarious role models in social learning.

not? And the answer to that question may be that the important ingredient, the vital, new, different ingredient in killing in modern combat and in killing in modern American society, is the systematic process of defeating the normal individual’s age-old, psychological inhibition against violent, harmful activity toward one’s own species.

Today a similar process of systematic desensitization, conditioning, and vicarious learning is unleashing an epidemic, a virus of violence in America.

In psychological terms, this step-by-step reduction of a resistance is a form of classical (Pavlovian) conditioning called systematic desensitization.

Our military no longer tolerates this kind of desensitization, but for decades it was a key mechanism for desensitizing and indoctrinating adolescent males into a cult of violence in basic training.

And thus, at that malleable age of seventeen and eighteen, the age at which armies have traditionally begun to indoctrinate the soldier into the business of killing, American youth, systematically desensitized from childhood, takes another step in the indoctrination into the cult of violence.

Even in movies where the killer is not an obvious sociopath, the common formula is to validate violent acts of vengeance by beginning the movie with a vivid depiction of the villain performing horrible acts on some innocents. These victims are usually related in some way to the hero, thereby justifying the hero’s subsequent (and vividly depicted) vigilante acts.

Make these films entertaining as well as violent, and then simultaneously provide the (usually) adolescent viewers with candy, soft drinks, group companionship, and the intimate physical contact of a boyfriend or girlfriend. Then understand that these adolescent viewers are learning to associate these rewards with what they are watching.

We are doing a better job of desensitizing and conditioning our citizens to kill than anything Commander Narut ever dreamed of.

The answer to that question is that we, as a society, have become systematically desensitized to the pain and suffering of others.

We are reaching that stage of desensitization at which the inflicting of pain and suffering has become a source of entertainment: vicarious pleasure rather than revulsion. We are learning to kill, and we are learning to like it.

The important distinction between the killing-enabling process that occurs in video arcades and that of the military is that the military’s is focused on the enemy soldier, with particular emphasis on ensuring that the U.S. soldier acts only under authority.

We are now entering an era of virtual reality, in which you wear a helmet that has a video screen before your eyes. As you turn your head the screen changes just as though you were within the video world.

Through operant conditioning B. F. Skinner held that he could turn any child into anything he wanted to.

The basic training camp was designed to undermine all the past concepts and beliefs of the new recruit, to undermine his civilian values, to change his self-concept—subjugating him entirely to the military system. —Ben Shalit The Psychology of Conflict and Combat

social learning. This third level of learning, in its most powerful form, revolves primarily around the observation and imitation of a role model.

This means that you can learn behavior, and form attitudes and beliefs, by seeing a role model get rewarded for a behavior.

An analysis of these processes can help us understand the role of the drill sergeant as a role model in violence enabling in military training, and it can help us understand why a new type of violent role model is so popular among America’s youth.

The drill sergeant is a role model. He is the ultimate role model. He is carefully selected, trained, and prepared to be a role model who will inculcate the soldierly values of aggression and obedience. He is also the reason that military service has always been a positive factor for young people from delinquent or disadvantaged backgrounds.

The lesson that the drill sergeant teaches is that physical aggression is the essence of manhood and that violence is an effective and desirable solution for the problems that the soldier will face on the battlefield.

But while the drill sergeant teaches and models aggression in obedience to law and authority, the aggression taught by Hollywood’s new role models is unrestrained by any obedience to law. And while the drill sergeant has a profound one-time impact, the aggregate effect of a lifetime of media may very well be even greater than that of the drill sergeant.

But today there is a new kind of hero in movies, a hero who operates outside the law. Vengeance is a much older, darker, more atavistic, and more primitive concept than law, and these new antiheroes are depicted as being motivated and rewarded for their obedience to the gods of vengeance rather than those of law.

Look at the role models, look at the archetypes that police officers have grown up with. Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry became the archetype for a new generation of police officers who were not constrained by the law, and when Hollywood’s new breed of cop was rewarded for placing vengeance above the law, the audience was also vicariously rewarded for this same behavior.

The increase in divorces, teenage mothers, and single-parent families in our society has often been noted and lamented, but a little-noted side effect of this trend has been to make America’s children even more susceptible to this new breed of violent role models.

Violent video games hardwire young people for shooting at humans. The entertainment industry conditions the young in exactly the same way the military does. Civilian society apes the training and conditioning techniques of the military at its peril.

If violence in television and movies were a form of sublimation, and if it were at all effective, then per capita violence should be going down. Instead it has multiplied nearly five times in the span of the same generation in which this supposed sublimation has become available. It is not sublimation, or even neutral entertainment. It is classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and social learning, all focused toward the violence enabling of an entire society.

It is really not new or profound to point out that television executives have for years claimed that they are not capable of influencing our actions or changing behavior, but for decades America’s major corporations have paid them billions of dollars for a paltry few seconds or a minute to do just that. To sponsors, media executives claim that just a few well-placed seconds can control how America will spend its hard-earned money. But to Congress and other watchdog agencies they argue that they are not responsible for causing viewers to change the way they will respond to any emotionally charged, potentially violent circumstance that they may subsequently find themselves in.

It is an intrinsic effect of such “bell curve” distribution that small changes in the average imply major changes at the extremes. Thus, if an exposure to television causes 8 percent of the population to shift from below-average aggression to above-average aggression, it follows that the homicide rate will double.

Ultimately, in the face of all this evidence, the deglamorization and condemnation of violence in the media are inevitable. It will be done in simple self-defense as our society rises up against the enabling of the violent crimes that are destroying our lives, our cities, and our civilization. When it occurs this process will probably be similar to the deglamorization of drugs and tobacco that has occurred in recent years, and for much the same reasons.

Every destructive act gnaws away at the restraint of other men. Each act of violence eats away at the fabric of our society like a cancer, spreading and reproducing itself in ever-expanding cycles of horror and destruction. The genie of violence cannot really ever be stuffed back into the bottle. It can only be cut off here and now, and then the slow process of healing and resensitization can begin.