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

by Dave Grossman

Group absolution is represented in this case by comrades, and very often by members of the killer’s family, who endorse and support the killer’s action.

but if he fails to kill then the group will undoubtedly know this failure and there will be a powerful and immediate form of ...

The killer does in fact get “up close and personal” with his victims, but he does not need to see the effect of his action!

In summary, most of the factors that enable killing on the battlefield can be seen in the diffusion of responsibility that exists in an execution by firing squad.

Killing comes with a price, and societies must learn that their soldiers will have to spend the rest of their lives living with what they have done.

although the mechanism of the firing squad ensures killing, the psychological toll on the members of a firing squad can be tremendous.

The basic aim of a nation at war is establishing an image of the enemy in order to distinguish as sharply as possible the act of killing from the act of murder.

This spectrum is intended to address only individual personal kills and will leave out the indiscriminate killing of civilians caused by bombs and artillery.

One of the things that could make combat in Vietnam—and a generation later in Afghanistan, and Iraq—particularly traumatic was that due to the nature of guerrilla warfare, soldiers were often placed in situations in which the line between combatant and non-combatant was blurred:

maybe even make these kinds of mistakes, and he needs desperately to have someone tell him that what he did was right and necessary.

They are, however, completed in the heat of battle and are rarely prosecuted. It is only the individual soldier who must hold himself accountable for his actions most of the time.

The American reputation for fair play and respect for human life

This is America’s position on the role of atrocity in combat,

War…has no power to transform, it merely exaggerates the good and evil that are in us.

The Holocaust is sometimes misunderstood as the senseless killing of Jews and innocent people. But this killing was not senseless. Vile and evil, but not senseless. Such murders have a very powerful but twisted logic of their own.

The soldier who does kill must overcome that part of him that says that he is a murderer of women and children, a foul beast who has done the unforgivable. He must deny the guilt within him,

Götterdämmerung.

This reached the point at which, according to Albert Seaton, Soviet soldiers attacking Germany were told that they were not accountable for civil crimes committed in Germany and that personal property and German women were theirs by right.

estimated that there were one hundred thousand births resulting from rapes in Berlin alone following World War II.

The sheer horror of atrocity serves not only to terrify those who must face it, but also to generate disbelief in distant observers.

Yet even in the face of all this evidence, there is a bizarre minority in our nation—and around the world—that truly believes that it never happened.

But we must not deny it. If we look around the world carefully we will find somebody somewhere wielding the dark power of atrocity to support a cause that we believe in.

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.

Once a group undergoes the process of bonding and empowerment through atrocity, then its members are entrapped in it, as it turns every other force that is aware of their nature against them.

Initially the Ukrainian people greeted the Nazis as liberators, and Soviet forces surrendered en masse, but they soon began to realize that there was something that was even worse than Stalinist Russia.

And for decades the Soviets stayed in power in Russia and Eastern Europe by wielding the dark power of atrocity. But in the end there was a reckoning for the Soviets, and in most cases those who attempt to wield atrocity as a systematic national policy have ultimately been struck down by this two-edged sword.

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.

The focus here is to obtain an understanding of the processes associated with atrocity, an understanding that is in no way intended to slight the pain and suffering of atrocity’s victims.

forcing participation in atrocities is such a strangely effective way of motivating men in combat.

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.

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.

Those who value individual human life and dignity must recognize from whence they draw their strength, and if they are forced to make war they must do so with as much concern for innocent lives as humanly possible.

while most modern veterans have experienced powerful emotions at this stage, they tend to deny their emotions, or at least adjust

to these emotions, and subsequent killing becomes easier.

If the process fails it can result in post-traumatic stress disorder.

This may indeed be stretching the model too far, but perhaps it will give future politicians something to think about when they consider going to war.

no judgment, no

condemnation, just the remarkable power of understanding.

Most of the language used in Parris Island to describe the joys of killing people is bloodthirsty but meaningless hyperbole,

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.

But the military is not, as a rule, a particularly introspective organization, and it has been my experience that those ordering, conducting, and participating in this training do not understand or even wonder (1) what makes it work or (2) what its psychological and sociological side effects might be. It works, and for them that is good enough.

This careful rehearsal and realistic mimicry of the act of killing permit the soldier to convince himself that he has only “engaged” another target.

which makes this an excellent assessment of the relative effectiveness of modern small-arms training techniques.

And we might remember that American forces were never once defeated in any major engagement in Vietnam (or in Iraq or Afghanistan).

it does reflect the individual close-combat superiority of the U.S. soldier

The point is that this program of desensitization, conditioning, and denial defense mechanisms, combined with subsequent participation in a war, may make it possible to share the guilt of killing without ever having killed.

The soldier fires only when told to by a higher authority and then only within his designated firing lane. Firing a weapon at the wrong time or in the wrong direction is so heinous an offense that it is almost unthinkable to the average soldier.

only under authority.

on rifle ranges or during field training any gunshot at inappropriate times (even when firing blank ammunition) must be justified, and if it is not justifiable it will be immediately and firmly punished.

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 that is a topic for the last section in this book, “Killing in America: What Are We Doing to Our Children?”