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

by Dave Grossman

When people become angry, or frightened, they stop thinking with their forebrain (the mind of a human being) and start thinking with their midbrain (which is indistinguishable from the mind of an animal). They are literally “scared out of their wits.” The only thing that has any hope of influencing the midbrain is also the only thing that influences a dog: classical and operant conditioning.

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.

the “off switch” solution is that it is so blatantly, profoundly racist in its effect, if not its intent, because the black community in America is the “culture” or “nation” that has borne the brunt of the electronic media’s violence-enabling.

For a variety of cultural and genetic reasons, the Indians were predisposed toward alcoholism, and we dumped it into them as a crucial part of the process that ultimately destroyed their civilization.

I hold it to be a fundamental truth of human nature, that when someone withholds something traumatic it can cause great damage.

The essence of counseling is that pain shared is pain divided,

Out of their pain has come understanding, and out of that understanding has come the power to heal lives and, perhaps, to heal a nation that is being consumed with violence.

“The soldier above all other people,” said MacArthur, “prays for peace, for they must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars

of war.”

“The guy pulling the trigger,” wrote Allen Cole and Chris Bunch, “never suffers as much as the person on the receiving end.” It is the existence of the victim’s pain and loss, echoing forever in the soul of the killer, that is at the heart of his pain.

At the vital point he becomes a conscientious objector.

Killing is a private, intimate occurrence of tremendous intensity, in which the destructive act becomes psychologically very much like the procreative act.

only 15 to 20 percent of the American riflemen in combat during World War II would fire at

the enemy.

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.

Submission is a surprisingly common response, usually taking the form of fawning and exposing some vulnerable portion of the anatomy to the victor, in the instinctive knowledge that the opponent will not kill or further harm one of its own kind once it has surrendered.

When a man is frightened, he literally stops thinking with his forebrain (that is, with the mind of a human being) and begins to think with the midbrain (that is, with the portion of his brain that is essentially indistinguishable from that of an animal), and in the mind of an animal it is the one who makes the loudest noise or puffs himself up the largest who will win.

soldiers in battle have a desperate urge to fire their weapons even when (perhaps especially when) they cannot possibly do the enemy any harm.

In other words, the intentional miss can be a very subtle form of disobedience.

while soldiers may become exhausted and “enter into a dazed condition in which all sharpness of consciousness is lost” they can still “function like cells in a military organism, doing what is expected of them because it has become automatic.”

evidence of a conditioned reflex so powerful that it is completed without conscious thought as the last dying act of a soldier with a bullet through the brain.

civil wars are usually more bloody, prolonged, and unrestrained than other types of war.

“deviant behavior by members of our own group is perceived as more disturbing and produces stronger retaliation than that of others with whom we are less involved.”

This is the root reason for the incredible ineffectiveness of musket fire during this era.

Only when artillery (with its close supervision and mutual surveillance processes among the crew) is brought into play can any significant change in this killing rate be observed.

greater distance

increases its effect...

“the average and healthy individual…has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance towards killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility…. At the vital point,”

In his experience the philosophy of the World War I soldier was “Let ’em go; we’ll get ’em some other time.”

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.

but those who did not fire do, indeed, have something to hide.

for the most part there have been two such institutions about which the male ego has always justified selective memory, self-deception, and lying. These two institutions are sex and combat…love and war.

A belief that most soldiers will not kill the enemy in close combat is contrary to what we want to believe about ourselves, and it is contrary to what thousands of years of military history and culture have told us.

There are exceptions—such as Gene Hackman’s Bat 21, in which an air force pilot has to kill people on the ground, up close and personal for a change and is horrified at what he has done—

the U.S. Army’s foremost military journal—Colonel Mater states that his experiences as an infantry company commander in World War II strongly supported Marshall’s findings and noted several World War I anecdotes that suggest that the problem of nonfirers was just as serious in that war.

According to studies by Marshall, these changes resulted in a firing rate of 55 percent in Korea and, according to a study by R. W. Glenn, a 90 to 95 percent firing rate was attained in Vietnam.

psychological trauma resulting from “slaughter and atrocity are called ‘stress,’ as if the clinicians…are talking about an executive’s overwork.”

What if there is within each person a force that understands at some gut level that all humanity is inextricably interdependent and that to harm any part is to harm the whole?

“in killing the grunts of North Vietnam, the grunts of America had killed a part of themselves.”

“consciousness of failure to act in response to conscience can lead to the greatest revulsion, not only for oneself, but for the human species.”

Rarely do military establishments attempt to measure the costs of war in terms of individual human suffering.

“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.”

World War II study determined that after sixty days of continuous combat, 98 percent of all surviving soldiers will have become psychiatric casualties of one kind or another.

But this was made possible only by the British policy of rotating men out of combat for four days of rest after approximately twelve days of combat,

Some psychiatric casualties have always been associated with war, but it was only in the twentieth century that our physical and logistical capability to sustain combat outstripped our psychological capacity to endure it.

the only real cure is evacuation and rest.

during both world wars cases of contractive paralysis of the arm were quite common,

A soldier may become hysterical after being knocked out by a concussion, after receiving a minor nondebilitating wound, or after experiencing a near miss.

emotional hypertension,