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

by Dave Grossman

In his book No More Heroes Richard Gabriel

The prisoners were unarmed, impotent, and strangely at peace with their lot in life. They had no personal capacity or responsibility to kill, and they had no reason to believe that the incoming artillery or bombs were a personal matter. The guards, on the other hand, took the matter as a personal affront. They still had a capacity and a responsibility to fight, and they were faced with the irrefutable evidence that someone was intent on killing them and that they had a responsibility to do likewise. The psychiatric casualties among the guards—as among most other soldiers in the same circumstances—represented an accepted method of escape from the unbearable responsibility inherent in their roles as soldiers.

When POW wouldn’t get Psychological problems even when they were under fire but their guards would

Dyer observes that there has never been a similar resistance to killing among artillerymen or bomber crews or naval personnel. “Partly,” he says, this is due to “the same pressure that keeps machine-gun crews firing, but even more important is the intervention of distance and machinery between them and the enemy.” They can simply “pretend they are not killing human beings.”

This is one historical circumstance in which noncombatants did suffer a horrifyingly high incidence of psychiatric casualties and post-traumatic stress. Physical exhaustion is not the only or even the primary factor involved here. And neither is the horror of the death and destruction around them principally responsible for the psychic shock of this situation. The distinguishing characteristic here, as opposed to numerous other noncombatant circumstances marked by an absence of psychiatric casualties, is that those in concentration camps had to face aggression and death on a highly personal, face-to-face basis. Nazi Germany placed a remarkable concentration of aggressive psychopaths in charge of these camps, and the lives of these victims were completely dominated by the personalities of these terrifyingly brutal individuals.

Ultimately there may be no way to deny one’s responsibility or culpability for mistakes written “forever and as if in fire, in others’ flesh,” but combat is a great furnace fed by the small flickering flames of attempts at denial. The burden of killing is so great that most men try not to admit that they have killed. They deny it to others, and they try to deny it to themselves.

Even the language of men at war is full of denial of the enormity of what they have done. Most soldiers do not “kill,” instead the enemy was knocked over, wasted, greased, taken out, and mopped up. The enemy is hosed, zapped, probed, and fired on. The enemy’s humanity is denied, and he becomes a strange beast called a Kraut, Jap, Reb, Yank, dink, slant, slope, or raghead. Even the weapons of war receive benign names—Puff the Magic Dragon, Walleye, TOW, Fat Boy, and Thin Man—and the killing weapon of the individual soldier becomes a piece or a hog, and a bullet becomes a round.

But when it is done from thousands of feet in the air, where the screams cannot be heard and the burning bodies cannot be seen, it is easy.

Incredibly, yet undeniably, there is a qualitative distinction in the eyes of those who suffered: the survivors of Auschwitz were personally traumatized by criminals and suffered lifelong psychological damage from their experiences, whereas the survivors of Hamburg were incidental victims of an act of war and were able to put it behind them.

is a touching fact that men, dying in battle, often call upon their mothers. I have heard them do so in five languages.”

It is when the bayonet charge has forced one side’s soldiers to turn their backs and flee that the killing truly begins, and at some visceral level the soldier intuitively understands this and is very, very frightened when he has to turn his back to the enemy.

The second factor that enables killing from behind is a process in which close proximity on the physical distance spectrum can be negated when the face cannot be seen.

- Proximity of the authority figure to the subject. Marshall noted many specific World War II incidents in which almost all soldiers would fire their weapons while their leaders observed and encouraged them in a combat situation, but when the leaders left, the firing rate immediately dropped to 15 to 20 percent.

Photographs of the killed mans family makes the attacker’s real

There is a constant danger on the battlefield that, in periods of extended close combat, the combatants will get to know and acknowledge one another as individuals and subsequently may refuse to kill each other. This danger and the process by which it can occur is poignantly represented by Henry Metelmann’s account of his experiences as a German soldier on the Russian front during World War II.

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.

Hannah Arendt noted this failure to resist the Nazis in her study The Banality of Evil.

An understanding of the killing response stages permits understanding of individual responses to violence outside of combat. For instance, we may now be able to recognize some of the psychology behind murder-suicides. A murderer, particularly an individual who kills several victims in a spree of violent passion, may very well be fixated in the exhilaration stage of killing. But once there is a lull, and the murderer has a chance to dwell on what he has done, the revulsion stage sets in with such intensity that suicide is a very common response.

Watson’s book War on the Mind