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

by Dave Grossman

that just as the distance involved helped the pilots and bombardiers to partially deny that they were personally killing thousands of innocent civilians, so too did the circumstances and distances involved buffer civilian and POW bombing victims, sailors, and patrols behind enemy lines from the Wind of Hate (which we will examine shortly) and permit them to successfully deny that anyone was personally trying to kill them. They simply didn’t take it personally. Indeed, one might think that the civilians’ and the POW’s inability to fight back would be a source of stress, but just the opposite appears to be true: most bomber crews and artillery crews would eventually sustain psychiatric casualties, while the noncombatants they attacked generally did not.