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January 2 - January 19, 2019
despite an unbroken tradition of violence and war, man is not by nature a killer.
The first decision point in an intraspecies conflict usually involves deciding between fleeing or posturing. A threatened baboon or rooster who elects to stand its ground does not respond to aggression from one of his own kind by leaping instantly to the enemy’s throat. Instead, both creatures instinctively go through a series of posturing actions that, while intimidating, are almost always harmless. These actions are designed to convince an opponent, through both sight and sound, that the posturer is a dangerous and frightening adversary.
First intimidate and threaten but don't attack .
When a man is frightened, he literally stops thinking with his forebrain (that is, with the mind of a human being) and begins to think with the midbrain (that is, with the portion of his brain that is essentially indistinguishable from that of an animal),
Vormeer references forebrain and midbrain in an overheard conversation - flashback.
“literally thousands of hours of repetitive drilling” paired with “the ever-present incentive of physical violence as the penalty for failure to perform correctly.”
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.
experienced them, these hallucinations (which were usually about food) seemed to be real. We carried forty-pound rucksacks over the mountains of Georgia and Tennessee and through the swamps of Florida on endless tactical operations while constantly being assessed on our leadership ability. The mind teetered on the brink of madness, and anyone could drop out at any time simply by failing to perform or asking to quit.
The point of such remarkable exercises in self-flagellation is to introduce the combat leader to an intense degree of stress and thereby inoculate him against psychological trauma.
The four factors of (1) physiological arousal caused by the stress of existing in what is commonly understood as a continual fight-or-flight-arousal condition, (2) cumulative loss of sleep, (3) the reduction in caloric intake, and (4) the toll of the elements—such as rain, cold, heat, and dark of night—assaulting the soldier all combine to form the “state of prolonged and great fatigue” that is the Weight of Exhaustion.
Another potential enemy of the soldier is the sensory deprivation of darkness, which can conspire with the cold and the rain to produce a degree of misery such as the protected shall never know.
And so we see that lack of sleep, lack of food, the impact of the elements, and emotional exhaustion caused by constant fight-or-flight-response activation all conspire to contribute to the soldier’s exhaustion.
Hear the pitiful screams of the wounded and dying. Smell the butcher-house smells of feces, blood, burned flesh, and rotting decay, which combine into the awful stench of death. Feel the shudder of the ground as the very earth groans at the abuse of artillery and explosives, and feel the last shiver of life and the flow of warm blood as friends die in your arms. Taste the salt of blood and tears as you hold a dear friend in mutual grieving, and you do not know or care if it is the salt of your tears or his.
in post-traumatic stress disorders “the disorder may be especially severe or longer lasting when the stressor is of human design.” We want desperately to be liked, loved, and in control of our lives; and intentional, overt, human hostility and aggression—more than anything else in life—assaults our self-image, our sense of control, our sense of the world as a meaningful and comprehensible place, and, ultimately, our mental and physical health.
“heroism, the Caucasian mountaineers say, is endurance for one moment more.”
…And the Leader’s Guilt The responsibilities of a combat leader represent a remarkable paradox. To be truly good at what he does, he must love his men and be bonded to them with powerful links of mutual responsibility and affection. And then he must ultimately be willing to give the orders that may kill them.
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.
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.
The dead soldier takes his misery with him, but the man who killed him must forever live and die with him. The lesson becomes increasingly clear: Killing is what war is all about, and killing in combat, by its very nature, causes deep wounds of pain and guilt. The language of war helps us to deny what war is really about, and in doing so it makes war more palatable.
Killing and Physical Distance: From a Distance, You Don’t Look Anything Like a Friend Unless he is caught up in murderous ecstasy, destroying is easier when done at a little remove. With every foot of distance there is a corresponding decrease in reality. Imagination flags and fails altogether when distances become too great. So it is that much of the mindless cruelty of recent wars has been perpetrated by warriors at a distance, who could not guess what havoc their powerful weapons were occasioning.
At the far end of the spectrum are bombing and artillery, which are often used to illustrate the relative ease of long-range killing. As we draw toward the near end of the spectrum, we begin to realize that the resistance to killing becomes increasingly more intense.
From a distance, I can deny your humanity; and from a distance, I cannot hear your screams.
the term “personal kill” was used to distinguish the act of killing a specific individual with a direct-fire weapon and being absolutely sure of having done it oneself. The vast majority of personal kills and the resultant trauma occur at this range.
At close range the euphoria stage, although brief, fleeting, and not often mentioned, still appears to be experienced in some form by most soldiers. Upon being asked, most of the combat veterans whom I have interviewed will admit to having experienced a brief feeling of elation upon succeeding in killing the enemy.
At close range the resistance to killing an opponent is tremendous. When one looks an opponent in the eye, and knows that he is young or old, scared or angry, it is not possible to deny that the individual about to be killed is much like oneself.
As men draw this near it becomes extremely difficult to deny their humanity. Looking in a man’s face, seeing his eyes and his fear, eliminate denial. At this range the interpersonal nature of the killing has shifted. Instead of shooting at a uniform and killing a generalized enemy, now the killer must shoot at a person and kill a specific individual.
The eyes are the window of the soul, and if one does not have to look into the eyes when killing, it is much easier to deny the humanity of the victim. The eyes bulging out “like prawns” and blood shooting out of the mouth are not seen. The victim remains faceless, and one never needs to know one’s victim as a person.
The U.S. Army, along with armies in many other nations, trains its Rangers and Green Berets to execute a knife kill from the rear by plunging the knife through the lower back and into the kidney. Such a blow is so remarkably painful that its effect is to completely paralyze the victim as he quickly dies, resulting in an extremely silent kill.
The single most effective and mechanically easiest way to inflict significant damage on a human being with one’s hand is to punch a thumb through his eye and on into the brain, subsequently stirring the intruding digit around inside the skull, cocking it off toward the side, and forcefully pulling the eye and other matter out with the thumb.
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
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
Killing comes with a price, and societies must learn that their soldiers will have to spend the rest of their lives living with what they have done.
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.
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.
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.
Trump administration.......? Ahem.
It is vital that future soldiers understand that this is a normal and very common response to the abnormal circumstances of combat, and they need to understand that their feelings of satisfaction at killing are a natural and fairly common aspect of combat.
The triad of methods used to achieve this remarkable increase in killing are desensitization, conditioning, and denial defense mechanisms.
We’d run PT [physical training] in the morning and every time your left foot hit the deck you’d have to chant “kill, kill, kill, kill.”
Men have always used a variety of mechanisms to convince themselves that the enemy was different, that he did not have a family, or that he was not even human. Most primitive tribes took names that translate as “man” or “human being,” thereby automatically defining those outside of the tribe as simply another breed of animal to be hunted and killed.
the notion that their purpose is not just to be brave or to fight well; it is to kill people.
Instead of lying prone on a grassy field calmly shooting at a bull’s-eye target, the modern soldier spends many hours standing in a foxhole or crouching behind cover, with full combat equipment draped about his body, looking over an area of lightly wooded rolling terrain. At periodic intervals one or two olive-drab, man-shaped targets at varying ranges will pop up in front of him for a brief time, and the soldier must instantly aim and shoot at the target(s). When he hits a target it provides immediate feedback by instantly and very satisfyingly dropping backward—just as a living target would.
“engage” the targets—a standard euphemism for “kill.”
Every aspect of killing on the battlefield is rehearsed, visualized, and conditioned.
Denial and defense mechanisms are unconscious methods for dealing with traumatic experiences.
Basically the soldier has rehearsed the process so many times that when he does kill in combat he is able to, at one level, deny to himself that he is actually killing another human being. This careful rehearsal and realistic mimicry of the act of killing permit the soldier to convince himself that he has only “engaged” another target.
brainwashed. Like every other veteran whom I have discussed the matter with, he had no objections to this, understanding that psychological conditioning was essential to his survival and an effective method of mission accomplishment.
Most Vietnam veterans did not necessarily execute a personal kill in Vietnam. But they had participated in dehumanizing the enemy in training, and the vast majority of them did fire, or knew in their hearts that they were prepared to fire, and the very fact that they were prepared and able to fire (“Mentally I had killed him”) denied them an important form of escape from the burden of responsibility that they brought back from that war. 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
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No army can tolerate undisciplined or indiscriminate firing, and a vital—and easily overlooked—facet of the soldier’s conditioning revolves around having him fire only when and where he is told to.
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….
Manifestations of PTSD include recurrent and intrusive dreams and recollections of the experience, emotional blunting, social withdrawal, exceptional difficulty or reluctance in initiating or maintaining intimate relationships, and sleep disturbances.
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.
“The men were taught to shoot but also given a special type of ‘Clockwork Orange’ training to quell any qualms they may have about killing. Men are shown a series of gruesome films, which get progressively more horrific. The trainee is forced to watch by having his head bolted in a clamp so he cannot turn away, and a special device keeps his eyelids open.” In psychological terms, this step-by-step reduction of a resistance is a form of classical (Pavlovian) conditioning called systematic desensitization.
