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 POWs’ 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.
During World War II, bomber crews generally had the highest casualty rates of any combatants among the Allied forces. In the British Bomber Command, out of every one hundred men only twenty-four survived. Such figures, faced day after day without respite, appear to have been sufficient to result in the tremendous psychiatric casualty rates suffered by these crews. This fear was intermingled with a comparatively small quantity of horror and some burden of responsibility — one Vietnam-era bomber pilot claimed it was the killing of civilians, even at a distance, that eventually drove him to drink and troubled him the most in subsequent years. But fear may have been the predominant psychological enemy in this particular circumstance. The point is that fear is only one of many factors, and it seldom, if ever, is the sole cause of psychiatric casualties.
The magnitude of the exhaustion and the horror suffered by combat veterans and victims of strategic bombing is generally comparable. The stress factors that soldiers experienced and bombing victims
CHAPTER THREE
The first quality of a soldier is constancy in enduring fatigue and hardship. Courage is only the second. Poverty, privation and want are the school of the good soldier.
Exhaustion as Inoculation in Training
The impact of true physical exhaustion is impossible to communicate to those who have not experienced it. I remember sitting in the mud in a state of exhaustion, picking up small frogs from the surrounding swamp, swallowing them one by one, and rinsing them down with water from my canteen. I had not eaten or slept for five days. We were beginning week eight of the eight-week U.S. Army Ranger school, and my peers and I had endured this kind of physical deprivation for seven weeks. At this point swallowing live frogs seemed a very reasonable course of action. And although we were handpicked officers and sergeants in the finest possible condition upon beginning the course, by this time most of us had lost well over twenty pounds of body tissue.
Sunken cheeked and hollow eyed, we were in a state of total starvation-enhanced exhaustion that caused many of us to have repeated hallucinations. These were incredibly vivid dreams that we would experience while wide-awake. To those who 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. Only pride and determination kept us going. For weeks after graduation many of us awoke in panic and disorientation in the middle of the night.
Elite soldiers from all over the world participate in this remarkably effective initiation rite, and fewer than half pass. It is probably the only school in the U.S. Army about which there is no stigma for having failed. “At least,” they say, “you had the guts to try.” And the graduates of this school — and, to varying degrees, the U.S. Navy SEAL and Underwater Demolitions School, the U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Berets) and Airborne (paratrooper) courses, and U.S. Marine boot camp — are respected by soldiers around the world as individuals who can be trusted to maintain their cool in stressful situations.
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. United States Army lieutenant colonel Bob Harris explained how Ranger school had done this for him before going to Vietnam:
It is worth noting that my experiences as a platoon leader convinced me absolutely of the value of Ranger training. While I didn’t have occasion to use all of the techniques and skills I was taught, I did use many. More important was the knowledge I had gained of myself in Fort Benning, and in the north Georgia mountains and in the Florida swamps; 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.
Exhaustion in Combat
Even as we consider the sunken-eyed, frog-eating, emaciated, and exhausted soldier of Ranger school, we must understand that the combat exhaustion associated with
Psychologist F. C. Bartlett emphasized the psychological impact of physical exhaustion in combat. “In war,” he wrote, “there is perhaps no general condition which is more likely to produce a large crop of nervous and mental disorders than a state of prolonged and great fatigue.” 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. Let us briefly review these factors.
And then a shell lands behind us, and another over to the side, and by this time we’re scurrying and the sarge and I and another guy wind up behind a wall. The sergeant said it was an .88 and then he said, “S*** and s*** some more.”
I asked him if he was hit and he sort of smiled and said no, he had just pissed his pants. He always pissed them, he said, just when things started and then he was okay. He wasn’t making any apologies either, and then I realized something wasn’t quite right with me, either. There was something warm down there and it seemed to be running down my leg. I felt, and it wasn’t blood. It was piss.
