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

by Dave Grossman

Sex and death are natural and essential parts of life. Just as a society without sex would disappear in a generation, so too would a society without killing.

What it feels like to kill, a set of standard response stages to killing in combat, and the psychological price of killing - The techniques that have been developed and applied with tremendous success in modern combat training in order to condition soldiers to overcome their resistance to killing

I started interviewing combat veterans as a part of this study, I discussed some of the psychological theories concerning the trauma of combat with one crusty old sergeant. He laughed scornfully and said, “Those bastards don’t know anything about it. They’re like a world of virgins studying sex, and they got nothing to go on but porno movies. And it is just like sex, ’cause the people who really do it just don’t talk about it.”

Only when artillery (with its close supervision and mutual surveillance processes among the crew) is brought into play can any significant change in this killing rate be observed.

When he first joined the service in 1933, Mater asked his uncle, a veteran of World War I, about his combat experience. “I was amazed to find that the experience foremost in his mind was ‘draftees who wouldn’t shoot.’ He expressed it something like this: ‘They thought if they didn’t shoot at the Germans, the Germans wouldn’t shoot at them.’ ”

This lack of enthusiasm for killing the enemy causes many soldiers to posture, submit, or flee, rather than fight; it represents a powerful psychological force on the battlefield; and it is a force that is discernible throughout the history of man.

Looking another human being in the eye, making an independent decision to kill him, and watching as he dies due to your action combine to form one of the most basic, important, primal, and potentially traumatic occurrences of war.

During World War II more than 800,000 men were classified 4-F (unfit for military service) due to psychiatric reasons. Despite this effort to weed out those mentally and emotionally unfit for combat, America’s armed forces lost an additional 504,000 men from the fighting effort because of psychiatric collapse—enough to man fifty divisions! At one point in World War II, psychiatric casualties were being discharged from the U.S. Army faster than new recruits were being drafted in.

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.”

Fear, combined with exhaustion, hate, horror, and the irreconcilable task of balancing these with the need to kill, eventually drives the soldier so deeply into a mire of guilt and horror that he tips over the brink into that region that we call insanity. Indeed, fear may be one of the least important of these factors.

if a soldier feels he is letting his friends down if he doesn’t kill, and if he can get others to share in the killing process (thus diffusing his personal responsibility by giving each individual a slice of the

guilt), then killing can be easier.

The United States is a comparatively egalitarian nation and therefore has a little more difficulty getting its population to wholeheartedly embrace wartime ethnic and racial hatreds. But in combat against Japan we had an enemy so different and alien that we were able to effectively implement cultural distance (combined with a powerful dose of moral distance, since we were “avenging” Pearl Harbor). 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.

It can be easy to unleash this genie of racial and ethnic hatred in order to facilitate killing in time of war. But once the genie is out and the war is over, it is not easily put back in the bottle. Such hatred lingers over the decades, even centuries, as can be seen today in Lebanon and what was once Yugoslavia.

“Atrocity” can be defined as the killing of a noncombatant, either an erstwhile combatant who is no longer fighting or has given up or a civilian. But modern war, and particularly guerrilla warfare, makes such distinctions blurry.

Many kills in modern combat are ambushes and surprise attacks in which the enemy represents no immediate threat to the killer, but is killed anyway, without opportunity to surrender. Steve Banko provides an excellent example of such a kill: “They didn’t know I existed…but I sure as hell saw them…. This is one f———ed up way to die, I thought as I squeezed softly on the trigger.” 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.

Between 30 and 40 million people were killed in peacetime in the daily routine of socialist rule.

Soviet Marxists killed more peasants, more workers, and even more communists than all the capitalist governments combined since the beginning of time.

And for the entire duration of this nightmare, the William Buckleys and Ronald Reagans and other anti-communists went on telling the world exactly what was happening. And all that time the pro-Soviet Left went on denouncing them as reactionaries and liars, using the same contemptuous terms…. The left would still be denying the Sov...

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.

The standards of behavior taught in the homes, churches, and schools of America had no place in battle. They were mythical concepts good only for the raising of children, to be cast aside forever from this moment on. No, I didn’t feel guilt, shame, or remorse at killing my fellow man—I felt pride!

One of the best examples in recent American history involved the company of U.S. Army Rangers (in the famous “Black Hawk Down” incident) who were ambushed and trapped while attempting to capture Mohammed Aidid, a Somali warlord sought by the United Nations. In this circumstance no artillery or air strikes were used, and no tanks, armored vehicles, or other heavy weapons were available to the American forces, which makes this an excellent assessment of the relative effectiveness of modern small-arms training techniques. The score? Eighteen U.S. troops killed, against an estimated 364 Somali who died that night.

“Mealy,” a former Vietcong agent in the Mekong Delta. “Children were trained,” said Mealy, “to throw grenades, not only for the terror factor, but so the government or American soldiers would have to shoot them. Then the Americans feel very ashamed. And they blame themselves and call their soldiers war criminals.” And it worked.

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.