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

by Dave Grossman

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

Swank and Marchand’s much-cited 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. Swank and Marchand also found a common trait among the 2 percent who are able to endure sustained combat: a predisposition toward “aggressive psychopathic personalities.”

But when most people think of those who bombed Hamburg or Hiroshima, there is no feeling of disgust for the deed, certainly not the intensity of disgust felt for Nazi executioners. When we mentally empathize with the bomber crews, when we put ourselves in their places, most cannot truly see themselves doing any different than they did. Therefore we do not judge them as criminals. We rationalize their actions and most of us have a gut feeling that we could have done what the bomber crews did, but could not ever have done what the executioners did.

“man is not a killer, but the group is.”

Moral distance establishes that the enemy’s cause is clearly wrong, his leaders are criminal, and his soldiers are either simply misguided or are sharing in their leader’s guilt. But the enemy is still a human, and killing him is an act of justice rather than the extermination that is often motivated by cultural distance.[2]

The establishment of the enemy’s guilt and the need to punish or avenge is a fundamental and widely accepted justification for violence.

The affirmation of the legality of one’s own case is the flip side of punishment motivation. This process of asserting the legitimacy of your cause is one of the primary mechanisms enabling violence in civil wars, since the similarities of the combatants make it difficult to develop cultural distance.

On the next battlefield our soldiers may commit war crimes and thereby cause us to lose one of the basic combat multipliers that we have available to us: the tendency of an oppressed people to become disloyal to their nation.

But many men who are not cowards are simply unprepared for the fact of human savagery. They have not thought about it (incredible as this may appear to anyone who reads the papers or listens to the news) and they just don’t know what to do. When they look right into the face of depravity or violence they are astonished and confounded.

And the killer must violently suppress any dissonant thought that he has done anything wrong. Further, he must violently attack anyone or anything that would threaten his beliefs.

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.

On rare occasions those who are commanded to execute human beings have the remarkable moral fiber necessary to stare directly into the face of the obedience-demanding authority and refuse to kill. These situations represent such a degree of moral courage that they sometimes become legendary.

All of us would like to believe that we would not participate in atrocities. That we could deny our friends and leaders and even turn our weapons on them if need be. But there are profound processes involved that prevent such confrontation of peers and leaders in atrocity circumstance.

There are no half measures when one sells one’s soul.