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March 28 - September 27, 2024
Fear of death and injury, or fear of failure and guilt?
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. Indeed, fear may be one of the least important of these factors.
This theory, established by Douhet and later echoed by many other authorities, played a key role in establishing the foundation for the German attempt to bomb Britain into submission at the beginning of World War II and the subsequent Allied attempt to do the same to Germany.
Indeed, bombing seemed to have served primarily to harden the hearts and empower the killing ability of the nations that endured it.
The theory of gain through illness, however, fails for two reasons: soldiers in combat will become psychiatric casualties even when they have nothing to gain by doing so—such is the nature of insanity—and second, these individuals did have much to gain by “letting slip the bonds of reality” and escaping into the countryside, or better yet escaping to the psychiatric clinics that were usually located far from the targets of strategic bombing.
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.
They can simply “pretend they are not killing human beings.”
Instead of killing people up close and personal, modern navies kill ships and airplanes.
As previously noted, World War I and World War II pilots, in relatively slow-moving aircraft, could see enemy pilots, and thus large numbers of them failed to fight aggressively.
It is an operation completely free of any obligation or intention to directly confront or kill the enemy.
Thus, by their very nature, such combat patrols involve far less random killing and are therefore less conducive to psychiatric casualties.
that the extremely rare “natural soldiers” who are most capable of killing
can be found “mostly congregating in the commando-type special forces [units].”
they are not obligated to engage in face-to-face aggressive activities against the enemy.
but the officer also has a far smaller burden of individual responsibility for killing on the battlefield.
he doesn’t have to do it personally.
They simply didn’t take it personally.
bombing victims did not were the two-edged responsibility of (1) being expected to kill (the irreconcilable balancing of to kill and not to kill) and (2) the stress of looking their potential killers in the face (the Wind of Hate).
The first quality of a soldier is constancy in enduring fatigue and hardship. Courage is only the second. Poverty, privation and want are the school of the good soldier. —Napoleon
And the graduates of this school—and, to varying degrees, the U.S. Navy SEAL and Underwater Demolitions School, the U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Berets) and Airborne (paratrooper) courses, and U.S. Marine boot camp—are respected by soldiers around the world as individuals who can be trusted to maintain their cool in stressful situations.
In every American war up until World War II more soldiers died from disease than from enemy action.
Strangely, such horrifying memories seem to have a much more profound effect on the combatant—the participant in battle—than the noncombatant, the correspondent, civilian, POW, or other passive observer of the battle zone.
It is as though every enemy dead is a human being he has killed, and every friendly dead is a comrade for whom he was responsible.
To a large extent our society—particularly our young men—actively and vicariously pursues physical danger.
Many medical authorities believe that it is the constant hostility and lack of acceptance that they must face—and the resulting stress—that are responsible for the dramatic rate of high blood pressure in African Americans.
“the disorder may be especially severe or longer lasting when the stressor is of human design.”
The ultimate fear and horror in most modern lives is to be raped or beaten, to be physically degraded in front of our loved ones, to have our family harmed and the sanctity of our homes invaded by aggressive and hateful intruders.
but rather acts of personal depredation and domination by our fellow human beings that strike terror and loathing in our hearts.
The trauma of rape, like that of combat, involves minimal fear of death or injury;
the impotence, shock, and horror in being so hated and despised as to be debased and abused by a fellow human being.
and he dreads facing the irrational aggression and hostility embodied in the enemy.
these men would rather die or mutilate themselves than face the aggression and hostility of a very hostile world.
An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior. —Victor Frankl, Nazi concentration-camp survivor
Even the briefest review of available literature reveals that these individuals did suffer from great, lifelong, psychological damage as a result of their experiences in concentration camps, even though they did not have any obligation or ability to kill their tormentors.[4]
This is one historical circumstance in which noncombatants did suffer a horrifyingly high incidence of psychiatric casualties and post-traumatic stress.
had to face aggression and death on a highly personal, face-to-face basis.
Unlike the victims of aerial bombing, the victims of these camps had to look their sadistic killers in the face and know that another human being denied their humanity and hated them enough to personally slaughter them, their families, and their race as though they were nothing more than animals.
Not only does the average soldier’s psyche resist killing and the obligation to kill, but he is equally horrified when exposed to the aggression of an enemy who hates him and denies his humanity enough to kill him.
The advocates of such theories persist in their beliefs even in the face of evidence, such as the post–World War II U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which, in the words of Paul Fussell, ascertained that “German military and industrial production seemed to increase—just like civilian determination not to surrender—the more bombs were dropped.”
effective, but only in the front lines when they are combined with the Wind of Hate,
Such bombardments without an accompanying close-range assault, or at least the threat of such an assault, are ineffective and may even serve no other purpose than to stiffen the will and resolve of the enemy!
this process of inoculation is exactly what occurs in boot camps and in every other military school worthy of its name.
(which they “escape” through weekend passes and, ultimately, graduation) they are—among many other things—being inoculated against the stresses of combat.
The drill sergeant who screams into the face of a recruit is manifesting overt interpersonal hostility.
USMC pugil-stick training during boot camp
he realizes at both conscious and unconscious levels that he can overcome such overt interpersonal hostility. He has become partially inoculated against hate.
By understanding the role of hate on the battlefield, we now can finally and truly understand the military value of what armies have done for so long and some of the processes by which they have enabled the soldier to physically and psychologically survive on the battlefield.
“heroism, the Caucasian mountaineers say, is endurance for one moment more.” In the trenches of World War I Lord Moran learned that courage “is not a chance gift of nature like aptitude…it is willpower that can be spent—and when it is used up—men are finished.
Memory defects became so extreme that he could not be counted on to relay a verbal order….
