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

by Dave Grossman

Thus, in large crowds, horrendous crimes can occur but the likelihood of a bystander interfering is very low. However, if the bystander is alone and is faced with a circumstance in which there is no one else to diffuse the responsibility to, then the probability of intervention is very high. In the same way groups can provide a diffusion of responsibility that will enable individuals in mobs and soldiers in military units to commit acts that they would never dream of doing as individuals, acts such as lynching someone because of the color of his skin or shooting someone because of the color of his uniform.

The influence of groups on killing occurs through a strange and powerful interaction of accountability and anonymity. Although at first glance the influence of these two factors would seem to be paradoxical, in actuality they interact in such a manner as to magnify and amplify each other in order to enable violence. Police are aware of these accountability and anonymity processes and are trained to unhinge them by calling individuals within a group by name whenever possible. Doing so causes the people so named to reduce their identification with the group and begin to think of themselves as individuals with personal accountability. This inhibits violence by limiting the individuals’ sense of accountability to the group and negating their sense of anonymity.

Several factors were at play here—the bow as a distance weapon, the social distance created by the archers’ having come from the nobility, and the psychological distance created by

using the chariot in pursuit and shooting men in the back—but the key issue is that the chariot crew traditionally consisted of two men: a driver and an archer. And this was all that was needed to provide the same accountability and diffusion of responsibility that, in World War II, permitted nearly 100 percent of crew-served weapons (such as machine guns) to fire while only 15 to 20 percent of the riflemen fired. The chariot was defeated by the phalanx, which succeeded by turning the whole formation into a massive crew-served weapon. Although he did not have the designated leaders of the later Roman formations, each man in the phalanx was under a powerful mutual surveillance system, and in the charge it would be hard to fail to strike home without having others notice that your spear had been raised or dropped at the critical moment. And, of course, in addition to this accountability system the closely packed phalanx provided a high degree of mob anonymity. For nearly half a millennium the Romans’ professional military (with, among other things, their superior application of leadership) eclipsed the phalanx in the Western way of war. But the phalanx’s application of group processes was so simple and so effective that during the

period of more than a thousand years between the fall of the Roman Empire and the full integration of gunpowder, the phalanx and the pike ruled infantry tactics. And when gunpowder was introduced, it was the crew-served cannon, later augmented by the machine gun, that did most of the killing. Gustavus Adolphus revolutionized warfare by introducing a small three-pound cannon that was pulled around by each platoon, thus becoming the first platoon crew-served weapon and presaging the platoon machine guns of today. Napoleon, an artilleryman, recognized the role of the artillery (often firing grapeshot at very close ranges), which was the real killer on the battlefield, and throughout his years he consistently ensured that he had greater numbers of artillery than any of his opponents. During World War I the machine gun was introduced and termed the “distilled essence of the infantr...

The physical distance process has been addressed previously, but distance in war is not merely physical. There is also an emotional distance process that plays a vital part in overcoming the resistance to killing. Factors such as cultural distance, moral distance, social distance, and mechanical distance are just as effective as physical distance in permitting the killer to deny that he is killing a human being.

First the victim experiences an increase in association with the hostage taker. - Then the victim usually experiences a decrease in identification with the authorities who are dealing with the hostage taker.

Finally the hostage taker experiences an increase in identification and bonding with the victim.

Cultural distance, such as racial and ethnic differences, which permit the killer to dehumanize the victim - Moral distance, which takes into consideration the kind of intense belief in moral superiority and vengeful/vigilante actions associated with many civil wars - Social distance, which considers the impact of a lifetime of practice in thinking of a particular class as less than human in a socially stratified environment - Mechanical distance, which includes the sterile Nintendo-game unreality of killing through a TV screen, a thermal sight, a sniper sight, or some other kind of mechanical buffer that permits the killer to deny the humanity of his victim

Often the enemy’s humanity is denied by referring to him as a “gook,” “Kraut,” “Nip,” or “raghead.” In Vietnam this process was assisted by the “body count” mentality, in which we referred to and thought of the enemy as numbers. One Vietnam vet told me that this permitted him to think that killing the NVA and VC was like “stepping on ants.” The greatest master of this in recent times may have been Adolf Hitler, with his myth of the Aryan master race: the Ubermensch, whose duty was to cleanse the world of the Untermensch. The adolescent soldier against whom such propaganda is directed is desperately trying to rationalize what he is being forced to do, and he is therefore predisposed to believe this nonsense. Once he begins to herd people like cattle and then to slaughter them like cattle, he very quickly begins to think of them as cattle—or, if you will, Untermensch.

But the Nazis are hardly the only ones to wield the sword of racial and ethnic hatred in war. European imperial defeat and domination of “the darker races” was facilitated by cultural distance factors. However, this can be a double-edged sword. Once oppressors begin to think of their victims as not being the same species, then these victims can accept and use that cultural distance to kill and oppress their colonial masters when they finally gain the upper hand. This double-edged sword was turned on the oppressors when colonial nations rose up in fierce insurrections such as the Sepoy Mutiny or the Mau Mau Uprising. In the final battles that overthrew imperialism around the world, the backlash of this double-edged sword was a major factor in empowering local populations.

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.

This egalitarian tendency to mingle with and accept, admire, and even love another culture is an American strong-point. Because of it America was able to turn occupied Germany and Japan from defeated enemies to friends and allies.

On some future battlefield we may be tempted to once again manipulate this two-edged sword of cultural distance to our advantage. But before we do, we would be well advised to carefully consider the costs. The costs both during the war and in the peace that we hope to have attained when the war is over.

American wars have usually been characterized by a tendency toward moral rather than cultural distance. Cultural distance has been a little harder to develop in America’s comparatively egalitarian culture with its ethnically and racially diverse population. In the American Revolution the Boston Massacre provided a degree of punishment justification, and the Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident”) represented the legal affirmation that set the tone for American wars for the next two centuries. The War of 1812 was waged in “self-defense” with the home-court advantage very much on our side and the burning of the White House and the bombardment of Fort McHenry (“Oh! say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light”) serving as rallying points for punishment justification. The moral foundations of our legal affirmation for our nation’s concern for the oppression of others can be seen in the Civil War and the very sincere motivation on the part of many Northern soldiers to end slavery (“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord”), while a degree of punishment motivation can be seen in the bombardment of Fort Sumter.

In the last hundred years we have moved slightly away from moral affirmation as a justification for starting wars and have focused more on the punishment aspect of moral distance. In the Spanish-American War it was the sinking of the Maine that provided the punishment justification for war. In World War I it was the sinking of the Lusitania, in World War II it was Pearl Harbor, in Korea it was an unprovoked attack on American troops, in Vietnam it was the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, and in the Gulf War it was the invasion of Kuwait, and in Afghanistan and Iraq it was 9-11 and the possibility of weapons of mass destruction.[3]

In nearly all historical battles prior to the age of Napoleon, the serf who looked down his spear or musket at the enemy saw another hapless serf very much like himself, and we can understand that he was not particularly inclined to kill his mirror image. And so it is that the great majority of close-combat killing in ancient history was not done by the mobs of serfs and peasants who formed the great mass of combatants. It was the elite, the nobility, who were the real killers in these battles, usually in the pursuit phase after the battle, on horseback or from chariots, and they were enabled by, among other things, social distance.

The complete integration of thermal-imagery technology into the modern battlefield has extended to daylight hours the mechanical distance process that currently exists during the night. Now, in many cases, the battlefield appears to every soldier as it did to Gad, an Israeli tank gunner who told Holmes that “you see it all as if it were happening on a TV screen…. It occurred to me at the time; I see someone running and I shoot at him, and he falls, and it all looks like something on TV. I don’t see people, that’s one good thing about it.”

Shalit takes into consideration: - The relevance and effectiveness of available strategies for killing the victim (that is, the means and opportunity)

- The relevance of the victim and the payoff of killing in terms of the killer’s gain and the enemy’s loss (the motive)

Tactical and technological advantages increase the effectiveness of the combat strategies available to the soldier. Or, as one soldier put it, “You want to make damn sure you don’t get your own ass shot off while you are hosing the enemy.” This is what has always been achieved by gaining a tactical advantage through ambushes, flank attacks, and rear attacks. In modern warfare this is also achieved by firing through night sights and thermal-imagery devices at a technologically inferior enemy who does not have this capability. This kind of tactical and technological advantage provides the soldier with “means” and “opportunity,” thereby increasing the probability that he will kill the enemy.

It is not very profound to observe that in choosing from a group of enemy targets to kill, a soldier is more likely to kill the one that represents the greatest gain to him and the greatest loss to the enemy. But if no particular soldier poses a specific threat by virtue of his actions, then the process of selecting the most high-value target can take more subtle forms. One consistent tendency is to elect to shoot leaders and officers. We have already noted the marine sniper who told Truby, “You don’t like to hit ordinary troops, because they’re usually scared draftees or worse…. The guys to shoot are big brass.” Throughout military history the leaders and the flag bearers were selected as targets for enemy weapons, since these would represent the highest payoff in terms of the enemy’s loss.

Every surrendering soldier instinctively knows that the first thing he should do is drop his weapon, but if he is smart he will also ditch his helmet. Holmes notes that “Brigadier Peter Young, in the second world war, had no more regret about shooting a helmeted German than he would about ‘banging a nail on the head.’ But somehow he could never bring himself to hit a bareheaded man.” It is because of this response to helmets that United Nations peacekeeping forces prefer to wear their traditional beret rather than a helmet, which might very well stop a bullet or save their lives in an artillery barrage.

The presence of women and children can inhibit aggression in combat, but only if the women and children are not threatened. If they are present, if they become threatened, and if the combatant accepts responsibility for them, then the psychology of battle changes from one of carefully constrained ceremonial combat among males to the unconstrained ferocity of an animal who is defending its den. Thus the presence of women and children can also increase violence on the battlefield. The Israelis have consistently refused to put women in combat since their experiences in 1948. I have been told by several Israeli officers that this is because in 1948 they experienced recurring incidences of uncontrolled violence among male Israeli soldiers who had had their female combatants killed or injured in combat, and because the Arabs were extremely reluctant to surrender to women.

The British, who had been trained by modern methods, had not seen any such thing in their soldiers, but they had definitely observed it in the Argentineans, who had received World War II-style training and whose only effective fire had come from machine guns and snipers.[5]

The effectiveness of modern conditioning techniques that enable killing in combat is irrefutable, and their impact on the modern battlefield is enormous.

There is such a thing as a “natural soldier”: the kind who derives his greatest satisfaction from male companionship, from excitement, and from the conquering of physical obstacles. He doesn’t want to kill people as such, but he will have no objections if it occurs within a moral framework that gives him justification—like war—and if it is the price of gaining admission to the kind of environment he craves. Whether such men are born or made, I do not know,

but most of them end up in armies (and many move on again to become mercenaries, because regular army life in peacetime is too routine and boring).

This claim, if accurate, provides a remarkable insight into the nature of such a killer. Like the kills of most successful snipers and fighter pilots, the vast majority of the killing done by these men were what some would call simple ambushes and back shootings. No provocation, anger, or emotion empowered these killings.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) indicates that the incidence of “antisocial personality disorder” (that is, sociopaths) among the general population of American males is approximately 3 percent. These sociopaths are not easily used in armies, since by their very nature they rebel against authority, but over the centuries armies have had considerable success at bending such

highly aggressive individuals to their will during wartime. So if two out of three of this 3 percent were able to accept military discipline, a hypothetical 2 percent of soldiers would, by the APA’s definition, “have no remorse about the effects of their behavior on others.”[7]

As stated, 1 percent of fighter pilots in World War II did nearly 40 percent of the air-to-air killing. This 1 percent of World War II fighter pilots, Swank and Marchand’s 2 percent, Griffith’s low Napoleonic and Civil War killing rates, and Marshall’s low World War II firing rates can all be at least partially explained if only a small percentage of these combatants were actually willing to actively kill the enemy in these combat situations. Whether called sociopaths, sheepdogs, warriors, or heroes, they are there, they are a distinct minority, and in times of danger a nation needs them desperately.

Milgram’s famous studies of killing behavior in laboratory conditions (the willingness of subjects to engage in behavior that they believed was killing a fellow subject) identified three primary situational variables that influence or enable killing behavior; in this model I have called these (1) the demands of authority, (2) group absolution (remarkably similar to the concept of diffusion of responsibility), and (3) the distance from the victim.

Demands of Authority - Proximity of the obedience-demanding authority figure to the subject - Subject’s subjective respect for the obedience-demanding authority figure - Intensity of the obedience-demanding authority figure’s demands of killing behavior - Legitimacy of the obedience-demanding authority figure’s authority and demands

Group Absolution - Subject’s identification with the group - Proximity of the group to the subject - Intensity of the group’s support for the kill - Number in the immediate group - Legitimacy of the group Total Distance from the Victim - Physical distance between the killer and the victim - Emotional distance between the killer and the victim, including: —Social distance, which considers the impact of a lifetime of viewing a particular class as less than human in a socially stratified environment —Cultural distance, which includes racial and ethnic differences that permit the killer to “dehumanize” the victim

—Moral distance, which takes into consideration intense belief in moral superiority and “vengeful” actions —Mechanical distance, which includes the sterile “video game” unreality of killing through a TV screen, a thermal sight, a sniper sight, or some other kind of mechanical buffer

- Relevance and effectiveness of available strategies for killing the victim - Relevance of the victim as a threat to the killer and his tactical situation - Payoff of the killer’s action in terms of —Killer’s gain —Enemy’s loss

- Training/conditioning of the soldier (Marshall’s contributions to the U.S. Army’s training program increased the firing rate of the individual infantryman from 15 to 20 percent in World War II to 55 percent in Korea and nearly 90 to 95 percent in Vietnam.) - Recent experiences of the soldier (For example, having a friend or relative killed by the enemy has been strongly linked with killing behavior on the battlefield.)

However, Swank and Marchand did propose the existence of 2 percent of combat soldiers who are predisposed to be “aggressive psychopaths” and who apparently do not experience the trauma commonly associated with killing behavior.

Although it is not an excuse for such behavior, we can at least understand how My Lai could have happened (and possibly prevent such occurrences in the future) by understanding the power of the cumulative factors associated with a soldier ordered to kill by a legitimate, proximate, and respected authority, in the midst of a proximate, respected, legitimate, consenting group, predisposed by desensitization and conditioning during training and recent loss of friends, distanced from his victims by a widely accepted cultural and moral gulf, confronted with an act that would be a relevant loss to an enemy who has denied and frustrated other available strategies.

These are “noble kills,” which place the minimum possible burden on the conscience of the killer. And thus the soldier is able to further rationalize his kill by honoring his fallen foes, thereby gaining stature and peace by virtue of the nobility of those he has slain.

Such a kill is by no means considered an atrocity, but it is also distinctly different from a noble kill and potentially harder for the killer to rationalize and deal with. Until the twentieth century such ambush kills were extremely rare in combat, and many civilizations partially protected themselves and their consciences and mental health by declaring such forms of warfare dishonorable.

Surrender-executions are clearly wrong and counterproductive to a force that has dedicated itself to fighting in a fashion that the nation and the soldiers can live with after battle. 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. Executions in cold blood are another matter entirely.

“Execution” is defined here as the close-range killing of a noncombatant (civilian or POW) who represents no significant or immediate military or personal threat to the killer. The effect of such kills on the killer is intensely traumatic, since the killer has limited internal motivation to kill the victim and kills almost entirely out of external motivations. The close range of the kill severely hampers the killer in his attempts to deny the humanity of the victim and severely hampers denial of personal responsibility for the kill.

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. A logic that we must understand if we are to confront it. There are many benefits reaped by those who tap the dark power of atrocity. Those who engage in a policy of atrocity usually strike a bargain that exchanges their future for a brief gain in the present. Though brief, that gain is nonetheless real and powerful. In order to understand the attraction of atrocity, we must understand and clearly acknowledge those benefits that cause individuals, groups, and nations to turn to it.

One of the most obvious and blatant benefits of atrocity is that it quite simply scares the hell out of people. The raw horror and savagery of those who murder and abuse cause people to flee, hide, and defend themselves feebly, and often their victims respond with mute passivity. We see this in the newspapers daily when we read of victims who are faced with mass murderers and simply do nothing to protect themselves or others. Hannah Arendt noted this failure to resist the Nazis in her study The Banality of Evil.

This process that empowers criminals and outcasts in society can work even better when institutionalized as policy by revolutionary organization, armies, and governments. North Vietnam and its Vietcong proxies represent one force that blatantly used atrocity as a policy and was triumphant because of it. In 1959, 250 South Vietnamese officials were assassinated by the Vietcong. The Vietcong found that assassination was easy, it was cheap, and it worked. A year later this toll of murder and horror went up to 1,400, and it continued for twelve more years.

Although this is a most remarkable example of näiveté, a significant and vocal minority in America was trapped in this program of self-deception. Those who were deceived are mainly good, decent, highly educated men and women. It is their very goodness and decency that cause them to be so completely incapable of believing that someone or something they approve of could be so completely evil. Perhaps denial of mass atrocity is tied to our innate resistance to killing. Just as one hesitates to kill in the face of extreme pressure and despite

the threat of violence, one has difficulty imagining—and believing—the existence of atrocity despite the existence of facts. 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. It is a simple tenet of human nature that it is difficult to believe and accept that anyone we like and identify with is capable of these acts against our fellow human beings. 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. Of course, those who commit atrocities understand that what they are doing will be considered criminal by the rest of the world, and this is why at the level of nation-states they attempt to control their population and press.