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

by Dave Grossman

If we accept that we need an army, then we must accept that it has to be as capable of surviving as we can make it.

then that society has an obligation to deal forthrightly, intelligently, and morally with the result and its repercussions upon the soldier and the society.

valid not only for those who killed, but for those who supported the killing.”

“The truck driver who drove the ammo up,” he explained, “also drove dead bodies back.

“society didn’t make any distinction in who they spat on.”

In rapes, we have come to understand the magnitude of the trauma inflicted upon the victim by the defense tactic of accusing the victim during trials and have taken legal steps to prevent and constrain such attacks upon the victim by a defendant’s attorneys.

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.

Pride of the Marines.

For our infantryman that means that his highly traumatic experience was largely (but perhaps not completely) negated by the very supportive social structure he returned to.

but at the top of the trauma scale there probably isn’t much value in trying to distinguish between shades of black.

They departed with a mixture of joy at having survived and shame at having left their buddies behind.

but it does so by giving a piece of the killer’s guilt to others, and those others must then deal with it just as surely as must the killer.

“Societies that ask men to fight on their behalf should be aware of what the consequences and what the price of their actions may so easily be.”

in spite of what we did to them, Vietnam veterans have done surprisingly well.)

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

Whatever he does to the web he does to himself.

we have a moral responsibility to consider the long-term effects of our commands.

On Combat.)

“The United States should not commit forces to combat unless our vital interests are at stake.”

commit them in sufficient numbers and with sufficient support to win.”

clearly defined political and militar...

never again commit forces to a war we do not ...

some reasonable assurance of the support of the American people and their elected representatives in the Congress….

Nor will the American people sit by and watch U.S. troops committed as expendable pawns

the commitment of U.S. troops should be as a last resort.”

we must understand the need for cooldown periods, parades, and unit integrity during the vulnerable period of returning from war.

we must make sure that we always do so in the future.

we must attempt to understand the basic act of killing, not just in war, but throughout our society.

they simply want to be understood.

all too often did it thanklessly.

The aggravated assault rate indicates the incidence of Americans trying to kill one another,

medical technology advances since 1970 have prevented approximately three out of four murders.

How much longer can America afford to imprison larger and larger percentages of its population? And how much longer can advances in medical technology continue to keep up with advances in the aggravated assault rate?

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.

we can see the way in which all of these factors interact to enable violence in America.

What makes today’s children bring those guns to school when their parents did not?

In contemporary horror, terror is personified by characters who resemble our next-door neighbor,

Here breasts are taboo if they are on a live woman, but permissible on a mutilated corpse?

We may believe that tabloids and tabloid TV make us exceedingly conscious of the suffering of others as they spread the stories of victims.

But the reality is that they are desensitizing us and trivializing these issues as each year they have to find increasingly more bizarre stories to satisfy their increasingly jaded audiences.

We are learning to kill, and we are learning to like it.

with particular emphasis on ensuring that the U.S. soldier acts only under authority.

the U.S. armed forces are taking extensive

measures to control, constrain, and channel the violence of their troops in future conflicts.

As they play they solve problems and overcome instructions that are intentionally inadequate and vague.

We might prefer to see children reading or getting exercise and interacting with the real

real world by playing outside, but video games are definitely preferable to most television.

The kind of games that are very definitely enabling violence are the ones in which you actually hold a weapon in your hand and fire it at human-shaped targets on the screen.

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

Vicarious reinforcement.