On Killing

given James Bond, Luke Skywalker, Rambo, and Indiana Jones blithely and remorselessly killing off men by the hundreds. The point here is that there is as much disinformation and as little insight concerning the nature of killing coming from the media as from any other aspect of our society.

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Even after Marshall’s World War II revelations, the subject of nonfirers is an uncomfortable one for today’s military. Writing in Army magazine — the U.S. Army’s foremost military journal — Colonel Mater states that his experiences as an infantry company commander in World War II strongly supported Marshall’s findings and noted several World War I anecdotes that suggest that the problem of nonfirers was just as serious in that war.

Mater then bitterly — and appropriately — complains that “thinking back over my many years of service, I cannot remember a single official lecture or class discussion of how to assure that your men will fire.” This included “such formal schooling as the wartime Infantry Leadership and Battle School I attended in Italy and the Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, that I attended in 1966. Nor do I remember any articles on the subject in Army magazine or other military publications.”[7] Colonel Mater concludes, “It is as if there were a conspiracy of silence around this subject: ‘We don’t know what to do about it — so let’s forget it.’”

There does indeed seem to be a conspiracy of silence on this subject. In his book War on the Mind, Peter Watson observes that Marshall’s findings have been largely ignored by academia and the fields of psychology and psychiatry, but they were very much taken to heart by the U.S. Army, and a number of training measures were instituted as a result of Marshall’s suggestions. According to studies by Marshall, these changes resulted in a firing rate of 55 percent in Korea and, according to a study by Scott, a 90 to 95 percent firing rate was attained in Vietnam. Some modern soldiers use the disparity between the firing rates of World War II and Vietnam to claim that Marshall had to be wrong, for the average military leader has great difficulty in believing that any significant body of his soldiers will not do their job in combat. But these doubters don’t give sufficient credit to the revolutionary corrective measures and training methods introduced since World War II.

The training methods that increased the firing rate from 15 percent to 90 percent are referred to as “programming” or “conditioning” by some of the veterans I have interviewed, and they do appear to represent a form of classical and operant conditioning (a la Pavlov’s dog and B. F. Skinner’s rats), which is addressed in detail in the section “Killing in Vietnam.” The unpleasantness of this subject, combined with the remarkable success of the army’s training programs, and the lack of official recognition might imply that it is classified. But there is no secret master plan responsible for the lack of attention given to this subject. There is instead, in the words of philosopher-psychologist Peter Marin, “a massive unconscious cover-up” in which society hides itself from the true nature of combat. Even among the psychological and psychiatric literature on war, “there is,” writes Marin, “a kind of madness at work.” He notes, “Repugnance toward killing and the refusal to kill” are referred to as “acute combat reaction.” And psychological trauma resulting from “slaughter and atrocity are called ‘stress,’ as if the clinicians… are talking about an executive’s overwork.” As a psychologist I believe that Marin is quite correct when he observes, “Nowhere in the [psychiatric and psychological] literature is one allowed to glimpse what is actually occurring: the real horror of the war and its effect on those who fought it.”

It would be almost impossible to keep something of this nature classified for more than fifty years now, and those in the military who do understand — the Marshalls and the Maters — are crying out their messages, but no one wants to hear their truths.

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.

CHAPTER FOUR The Nature and Source of the Resistance

Where does this resistance to killing one’s fellow man come from? Is it learned, instinctive, rational, environmental, hereditary, cultural, or social? Or some combination thereof?

One of Freud’s most valuable insights involves the existence of the life instinct (Eros) and the death instinct (Thanatos). Freud believed that within each individual there is a constant struggle between the superego (the conscience) and the id (that dark, lurking mass of destructive and animal urges residing within each of us), and that the struggle is mediated by the ego (the self). One wit once referred to this situation as “a struggle in a locked, dark basement; between a homicidal sex-crazed monkey and a puritanical old maid; being mediated by a timid accountant.”

In battle we see the id, the ego, the superego, Thanatos, and Eros in turmoil within each soldier. The id wields the Thanatos like a club and screams at the ego to kill. The superego appears to have been neutralized, for authority and society say that now it is good to do what has always been bad. Yet something stops the soldier from killing. What? Could it be that Eros, the life force, is much stronger than ever before understood?

Much has been made of the obvious existence and manifestation of Thanatos in war, but what if there is within most men a stronger drive than Thanatos? What if there is within each person a force that understands at some gut level that all humanity is inextricably interdependent and that to harm any part is to harm the whole?

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius understood this force even as he fought desperate battles against the barbarians who would ultimately destroy Rome. “Every individual dispensation,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, more than a millennia and a half ago, “is one of the causes of the prosperity, success, and even survival of. That which administers the universe. To break off any particle, no matter how small, from the continuous concatenation — whether of causes or of any other elements — is to injure the whole.”

Holmes records another veteran who, almost two millennia after Marcus Aurelius, grasped the same concept when he observed that some of the marines he was with in Vietnam reached a point of reflection after battle in which they “came to see the young Vietnamese they had killed as allies in a bigger war of individual existence, as young men with whom they were united throughout their lives against the impersonal ‘thems’ of the world.” Holmes then makes a timeless and powerful perception about the psyche of the American soldier when he notes that “in killing the grunts of North Vietnam, the grunts of America had killed a part of themselves.”

Perhaps this is why we avoid this truth. Perhaps to truly understand the magnitude of the resistance to killing is also to understand the magnitude of man’s inhumanity to man. Glenn Gray, driven by his own personal guilt and anguish resulting from his World War II experiences, cries out with the pain of every self-aware soldier who has thought this matter through: “I, too, belong to this species. I am ashamed not only of my own deeds, not only of my nation’s deeds, but of human deeds as well. I am ashamed to be a man.

“This,” says Gray, “is the culmination of a passionate logic which begins in warfare with the questioning of some act the soldier has been ordered to perform contrary to his conscience.” If this process continues, then “consciousness of failure to act in response to conscience can lead to the greatest revulsion, not only for oneself, but for the human species.”

We may never understand the nature of this force in man that causes him to strongly resist killing his fellow man, but we can give praise for it to whatever force we hold responsible for our existence. And although military leaders responsible for winning a war may be distressed by it, as a race we can view it with pride.

There can be no doubt that this resistance to killing one’s fellow man is there and that it exists as a result of a powerful combination of instinctive, rational, environmental, hereditary, cultural, and social factors. It is there, it is strong, and it gives us cause to believe that there may just be hope for mankind after all.

SECTION II