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

by Dave Grossman

Moreover, prolonged viewing of media violence can lead to emotional desensitization toward violence in real life.

if we take media violence out of a child’s life, we can cut school violence and school bullying in half, reduce obesity, and raise test scores by double digits.

When people become angry, or frightened, they stop thinking with their forebrain (the mind of a human being) and start thinking with their midbrain (which is indistinguishable from the mind of an animal). They are literally “scared out of their wits.” The only thing that has any hope of influencing the midbrain is also the only thing that influences a dog: classical and operant conditioning.

“handful of ashes, a mouthful of mould. / Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold.”

That missing factor is the simple and demonstrable fact that there is within most men an intense resistance to killing their fellow man. A resistance so strong that, in many circumstances, soldiers on the battlefield will die before they can overcome it.

Submission is a surprisingly common response, usually taking the form of fawning and exposing some vulnerable portion of the anatomy to the victor, in the instinctive knowledge that the opponent will not kill or further harm one of its own kind once it has surrendered.

Dyer also studied the matter carefully, building his knowledge on those who knew, and he too understood that “men will kill under compulsion—men will do almost anything if they know it is expected of them and they are under strong social pressure to comply—but the vast majority of men are not born killers.”

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.

No, it is not a military conspiracy. There is, indeed, a cover-up and a “conspiracy of silence,” but it is a cultural conspiracy of forgetfulness, distortion, and lies that has been going on for thousands of years. And just as we have begun to wipe away the cultural conspiracy of guilt and silence concerning sex, we must now wipe away this similar conspiracy that obscures the very nature of war.

One of Freud’s most valuable insights involves the existence of the life instinct (Eros) and the death instinct (Thanatos).

Nations customarily measure the “costs of war” in dollars, lost production, or the number of soldiers killed or wounded. Rarely do military establishments attempt to measure the costs of war in terms of individual human suffering. Psychiatric breakdown remains one of the most costly items of war when expressed in human terms. —Richard Gabriel

Swank and Marchand’s much-cited World War II study determined that after sixty days of continuous combat, 98 percent of all surviving soldiers will have become psychiatric casualties of one kind or another. 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.”

Some psychiatric casualties have always been associated with war, but it was only in the twentieth century that our physical and logistical capability to sustain combat outstripped our psychological capacity to endure it.

One often noted response is Ganzer syndrome, in which the soldier will begin to make jokes, act silly, and otherwise try to ward off the horror with humor and the ridiculous.

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.

In most circumstances in which nonkillers are faced with the threat of death and injury in war, the instances of psychiatric casualties are notably absent.

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.”

The point is that fear is only one of many factors, and it seldom, if ever, is the sole cause of psychiatric casualties.

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 understanding that limits are mostly in the mind and can be overcome; the knowledge that I could keep going and be an effective leader in spite of fear, fatigue, and hunger.

The parasympathetic system is responsible for the body’s digestive and recuperative processes. Usually these two systems sustain a general balance between their demands upon the body’s resources, but during extremely stressful circumstances the fight-or-flight response kicks in and the sympathetic nervous system mobilizes all available energy for survival. In combat this very often results in nonessential activities such as digestion, bladder control, and sphincter control being completely shut down. This process is so intense that soldiers very often suffer stress diarrhea, and it is not at all uncommon for them to urinate and defecate in their pants as the body literally “blows its ballast” in an attempt to provide all the energy resources required to ensure its survival.

In every American war up until World War II more soldiers died from disease than from enemy action.

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.

Most avoid confrontations at all costs, and to work ourselves up to an aggressive verbal action—let alone a physical confrontation—is extremely difficult.

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.

It is not fear of death and injury from disease or accident but rather acts of personal depredation and domination by our fellow human beings that strike terror and loathing in our hearts.

Like many of their civilian counterparts who commit suicide, these men would rather die or mutilate themselves than face the aggression and hostility of a very hostile world.

the victims of these camps had to look their sadistic killers in the face and know that another human being denied their humanity and hated them enough to personally slaughter them, their families, and their race as though they were nothing more than animals.

Just as those who were slaves in America.

Faced with the soldier’s encounters with horror, guilt, fear, exhaustion, and hate, each man draws steadily from his own private reservoir of inner strength and fortitude until finally the well runs dry.

The resistance to the close-range killing of one’s own species is so great that it is often sufficient to overcome the cumulative influences of the instinct for self-protection, the coercive forces of leadership, the expectancy of peers, and the obligation to preserve the lives of comrades.

First we must recognize that it is psychologically easier to kill with an edged weapon that permits a long stand-off range, and increasingly more difficult as the stand-off range decreases. Thus it is considerably easier to impale a man with a twenty-foot pike than it is to stab him with a six-inch knife.

Ultimately the phalanx was only replaced by the advent of the superior posturing and psychological leverage provided by gunpowder projectile weapons.

The second corollary to the distance relationship is that it is far easier to deliver a slashing or hacking blow than a piercing blow. To pierce is to penetrate, while to slash is to sidestep or deny the objective of piercing into the enemy’s essence.

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 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.

Erich Hartmann, the World War II German ace—unquestionably the greatest fighter pilot of all time, with 351 confirmed victories—claimed that 80 percent of his victims never knew he was in the same sky with them.

The presence of aggression, combined with the absence of empathy, results in sociopathy.

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.

In 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.

when people are dying they often go through a series of emotional stages, including denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

concern about killing, the actual kill, exhilaration, remorse, and rationalization and acceptance.

first-time deer hunters: concern over the possibility of getting buck fever (i.e., failing to fire when an opportunity arises); the actual kill, occurring almost without thinking; the exhilaration and self-praise after a kill; brief remorse and revulsion (many lifelong woodsmen still become ill while gutting and cleaning a deer). And finally the acceptance and rationalization process—which in this case is completed by eating the game and honoring its trophy.

In World War II, 80 to 85 percent of riflemen did not fire their weapons at an exposed enemy, even to save their lives and the lives of their friends.

In Vietnam the nonfiring rate was close to 5 percent.

The triad of methods used to achieve this remarkable increase in killing are desensitization, conditioning, and denial defense mechanisms.

Jordan calls this process manufactured contempt, and the combination of denial of, and contempt for, the victim’s role in society (desensitization), along with the psychological denial of, and contempt for, the victim’s humanity (developing a denial defense mechanism), is a mental process that is tied in and reinforced every time the officer fires a round at a target.

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.

The processes that make someone a desirable role model include: - Vicarious reinforcement. You see the role model being reinforced in a manner that you can experience vicariously. - Similarity to the learner. You perceive that the role model has a key trait that makes him/her similar to you. - Social power. The role model has the power to reward (but does not necessarily do so). - Status envy. You envy the role model’s receipt of rewards from others.

The American Psychological Association’s commission on violence and youth concluded in 1993 that “there is absolutely no doubt that higher levels of viewing violence on television are correlated with increased acceptance of aggressive attitudes and increased aggressive behavior.”