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

by Dave Grossman

Thus, according to Stouffer’s research, 44 percent of American soldiers in World War II said they would “really like to kill a Japanese soldier,” but only 6 percent expressed that degree of enthusiasm for killing Germans. In Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, cultural distance would have backlashed against us, since our enemy was racially and culturally indistinguishable from our allies. Therefore we tried hard (at a national policy level) not to emphasize any cultural distance from our enemies. The primary psychological distance factor utilized in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, was moral distance, deriving from our moral “crusades” against communism and terrorism. But try as we might we were not completely successful at keeping the genie of racial hatred in its bottle.