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Many students of German conduct during World War II are puzzled by the paradox of the Nazis’ handling of the war against Russia. On the one hand the Nazis had a remarkably competent war-fighting organization, while on the other hand they failed to capitalize on opportunities to “liberate” the Ukraine and convert defecting Soviet units to their cause. The problem was that the Nazis were entrapped by the very thing that enabled them. Their racist, atrocity-based denial of the humanity of their enemies made their forces powerful in battle, while it simultaneously prevented them from treating
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surrendered en masse, but they soon began to realize that there was something that was even worse than Stalinist Russia.
a way, the obedience-demanding authority, the killer, and his peers are all diffusing the responsibility among themselves. The authority is protected from the trauma of, and responsibility for, killing because others do the dirty work. The killer can rationalize that the responsibility really belongs to the authority and that his guilt is diffused among everyone
who stands beside him and pulls the trigger with him. This diffusion of responsibility and group absolution of guilt is the basic psychological leverage that makes all firing squads and most atrocity situations function. 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. Thus it is extraordinarily difficult for a man who is bonded by links of mutual affection and interdependence to break away and openly
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The “good” that is not willing to overcome its resistance to killing in the face of an undeniable “evil” may be ultimately destined for destruction. 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.
The basic response stages to killing in combat are concern about killing, the actual kill, exhilaration, remorse, and rationalization and acceptance. Like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous stages in response to death and dying, these stages are generally sequential but not necessarily universal. Thus, some individuals may skip certain stages, or blend them, or pass through them so fleetingly that they do not even acknowledge their presence.
Those who are truly fixated with the exhilaration of killing either are extremely rare or simply don’t talk about it much. A combination of both of these factors is responsible for the lack of individuals (outside of fighter pilots) who like to write about or dwell upon the satisfaction they derived from killing. There is a strong social stigma against saying that one enjoyed killing in combat.
This narrative gives a remarkable—and almost certainly unintentional—insight into the early aspects of rationalizing a personal kill. Note the writer’s recognition of the killer’s humanity associated with the use of words such as “he,” “him,” and “his.” But then the enemy’s weapon is noted, the rationalization process begins, and “he” becomes “the body” and ultimately “the gook.” Once the process begins, irrational and irrelevant supporting evidence is gathered, and the possession of U.S.-made shoes and a watch becomes a cause for depersonalization rather than identification.
“Look, we did our job and we did it well, and it needed doing even though we didn’t like it; but sometimes we just had to go above and beyond what was expected of us in order to avoid the killing.” And maybe by writing and publishing this article he is telling us that “this time, the time when I didn’t have to kill anybody, this is the time that I want to tell you about. This is the time that I want to be remembered for.”
First we see the actual, initial blow being struck reflexively without thinking: “without a moment’s hesitation I backhanded him in the face.” Then the exhilaration and euphoria stage occurs: “I was suddenly released from all restraints…. it was now my right to unleash the fury I felt.” And suddenly the revulsion stage sets in: “What I saw stopped me in horror…. A searing pain spread through my chest and heart.”
If the demands from authority and the threatening enemy are intense enough to overcome a soldier’s resistance, it is only understandable that he feel some sense of satisfaction. He has hit his target, he has saved his friends, and he has saved his own life. He has resolved the conflict successfully. He won. He is alive! But a good portion of the subsequent remorse and guilt appears to be a horrified response to this perfectly natural and common feeling of exhilaration. It is vital that future soldiers understand that this is a normal and very common response to the abnormal circumstances of
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Eric’s case brings out two points. The first is that when you have cause to identify with your victim (that is, you see him participate in some act that emphasizes his humanity, such as urinating, eating, or smoking) it is much harder to kill him, and there is much less satisfaction associated with the kill, even if the victim represents a direct threat to you and your comrades at the time you kill him. The second point is that subsequent kills are always easier, and there is much more of a tendency to feel satisfaction or exhilaration after the second killing experience, and less tendency to
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The triad of methods used to achieve this remarkable increase in killing are desensitization, conditioning, and denial defense mechanisms.
Even with allowance for unintentional error and deliberate exaggeration, this superior training and killing ability in Vietnam, Panama, Argentina, Rhodesia, Afghanistan, and Iraq amounts to nothing less than a technological revolution on the battlefield, a revolution that represents total superiority in close combat.
Although they had not killed, they had been taught to think the unthinkable and had thereby been introduced to a part of themselves that under ordinary circumstances only the killer knows. 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.
Numerous studies have demonstrated that there is not any distinguishable threat of violence to society from the veterans returning to the United States from any of the wars of the twentieth century, and this remains true into the twenty-first century. There are veterans who commit violent crimes, but statistically the returning veteran is less likely to commit a violent crime than a nonveteran of the same age and sex.[4] What is a potential threat to society is the unrestrained desensitization, conditioning, and denial defense mechanisms provided by modern interactive video games and violent
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These traditional processes involve: - Constant praise and assurance to the soldier from peers and superiors that he “did the right thing” (One of the most important physical manifestations of this affirmation is the awarding of medals and decorations.) - The constant presence of mature, older comrades (that is, in their late twenties and thirties) who serve as role models and stabilizing personality factors in the combat environment - A careful adherence to codes and conventions of warfare by both sides (such as the Geneva conventions, first established in 1864), thereby limiting civilian
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- The presence of close, trusted friends and confidants who have been present during training and are present throughout the combat experience - A cooldown period as the soldier and his comrades sail or march back from the wars - Knowledge of the ultimate victory of their side and of the gain and accomplishments made possible by their sacrifices - Parades and monuments - Reunions and continued communication (via visits, mail, and so on) with the individuals whom the soldier bonded with in combat - An unconditionally warm and admiring welcome by friends, family, communities, and society,
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It’s easier if you catch them young. You can train older men to be soldiers; it’s done in every major war. But you can never get them to believe that they like it, which is the major reason armies try to get their recruits before they are twenty. There are other reasons too, of course, like the physical fitness, lack of dependents, and economic dispensability of teenagers, that make armies prefer them, but the most important qualities teenagers bring to basic training are enthusiasm and naivete….
The combatants of all wars are frightfully young, but the American combatants in Vietnam were significantly younger than in any war in American history. Most were drafted at eighteen and experienced combat during one of the most malleable and vulnerable stages of their lives. This was America’s first “teenage war,” with the average combatant having not yet seen his twentieth birthday, and these combatants were without the leavening of mature, older soldiers that had always been there in past wars.
Prior to Vietnam the American soldier’s first experience with the battlefield was usually as a member of a unit that had been trained and bonded together prior to combat. The soldier in these wars usually knew that he was in for the duration or until he had established sufficient points on some type of scale that kept track of his combat exposure; either way the end of combat for him was at some vague point in an uncertain future. Vietnam was distinctly different from any war we have fought before or since, in that it was a war of individuals. With very few exceptions, every combatant arrived
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This policy (combined with the use of drugs, maintenance of proximity to the combat zone, and establishment of an expectancy of returning to combat) resulted in an all-time-record low number of psychiatric casualties in Vietnam.
Given a less traumatic war and an unconditionally positive World War II–style welcome to the returning veteran, this might have been an acceptable system, but in Vietnam what appears to have happened is that many a combatant simply endured traumatic experiences (experiences that might otherwise have been unbearable) by refusing to come to terms with his grief and guilt and turned instead to the escapist therapy of a “short timer’s calendar” and the promise of “only forty-five days and a wake-up.”
But a tragic, long-term price, a price that was far too high, was paid for the short-term gains of this policy.
But then, all too soon, his friends left him via death, injury, or the end of their tours, and he too became a short timer, whose only concern was surviving until the end of his tour of duty. Unit morale, cohesion, and bonding suffered tremendously. All but the best of units became just a collection of men experiencing endless leavings and arrivals, and that sacred process of bonding, which makes it possible for men to do what they must do in combat, became a tattered and torn remnant of the support structure experienced by veterans of past American wars.
In the same way, many soldiers “self-prescribed” marijuana and, to a lesser extent, opium and heroin to help them deal with the stress they were facing. At first it appeared that this widespread use of illegal drugs had no negative psychiatric result, but we soon came to realize that the effect of these drugs was much the same as the effect of the legally prescribed tranquilizers.
Societies have always recognized that war changes men, that they are not the same after they return. That is why primitive societies often require soldiers to perform purification rites before allowing them to rejoin their communities. These rites often involved washing or other forms of ceremonial cleansing. Psychologically, these rituals provided soldiers with a way of ridding themselves of stress and the terrible guilt that always accompanies the sane after war. It was also a way of treating guilt by providing a mechanism through which fighting men could decompress and relive their terror
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When soldiers are denied these rituals they often tend to become emotionally disturbed. Unable to purge their guilt or be reassured that what they did was right, they turned their emotions inward. Soldiers returning from the Vietnam War were victims of this kind of neglect. There were no long troopship voyages where they could confide in their comrades. Instead, soldiers who had finished their tour of duty were flown home to arrive “back in the world” often within days, and sometimes within hours, of their last combat with the enemy. There were no fellow soldiers to meet them and to serve as a
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For too many years the Vietnam veterans knew only the defeat of a nation they fought and suffered for and the victory of a regime that many of them believed to be evil and malignant enough to risk dying to fight against.
According to Gabriel, early in the war evacuations for psychiatric conditions reached only 6 percent of total medical evacuations, but by 1971, the percentage represented by psychiatric casualties had increased to 50 percent. These psychiatric casualty ratings were similar to home-front approval ratings for the war, and an argument can be made that psychiatric casualties can be impacted by public disapproval.
These returning veterans had shamefully and silently accepted the accusations of their fellow citizens. They had broken the ultimate taboo, they had killed, and at some level they felt that they deserved to be spit upon and punished. When they were publicly insulted and humiliated the trauma was magnified and reinforced by the soldier’s own impotent acceptance of these events. And these acts, combined with their acceptance of them, became the confirmation of their deepest fears and guilt.
The Vietnam veteran’s defensive response to a nation accusing him of being a baby killer and murderer is consistently, as it was to Mantell and has been so many times to me, “No, it never really bothered me…. You get used to it.” This defensive repression and denial of emotions appear to have been one of the major causes of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Vietnam was an American nightmare that hasn’t yet ended for veterans of the war. In the rush to forget the debacle that became our longest war, America found it necessary to conjure up a scapegoat and transferred the heavy burden of blame onto the shoulders of the Vietnam veteran. It’s been a crushing weight for them to carry. Rejected by the nation that sent them off to war, the veterans have been plagued with guilt and resentment which has created an identity crisis unknown to veterans of previous wars. —D. Andrade
During the Vietnam era millions of American adolescents were conditioned to engage in an act against which they had a powerful resistance. This conditioning is a necessary part of allowing a soldier to succeed and survive in the environment where society has placed him. Success in war and national survival may necessitate killing enemy soldiers in battle. 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. But if society prepares a soldier to overcome his resistance to killing and
places him in an environment in which he will kill, then that society has an obligation to deal forthrightly, intelligently, and morally with the result and its repercussions upon the soldier and the society. Largely through an ignorance of the processes and implications involved, this has not happened with the Vietnam veteran.
In study after study two factors show up again and again as critical to the magnitude of the post-traumatic response. First and most obvious is the intensity of the initial trauma. The second and less obvious but absolutely vital factor is the nature of the social support structure available to the traumatized individual. 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
