On Killing

I told the sarge, I said, “Sarge, I’ve pissed too,” or something like that and he grinned and said, “Welcome to the war.”

— World War II veteran

quoted in Barry Broadfoot Six Year War, 1939-1945

To understand the intensity of the body’s physiological response to the stress of combat we must understand the mobilization of resources caused by the body’s sympathetic nervous system, and then we must understand the impact of the body’s parasympathetic backlash response.

The sympathetic nervous system mobilizes and directs the body’s energy resources for action. 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.

A soldier must pay a physiological price for an energizing process this intense. The price that the body pays is an equally powerful backlash when the neglected demands of the parasympathetic system return. This parasympathetic backlash occurs as soon as the danger and the excitement is over, and it takes the form of an incredibly powerful weariness and sleepiness on the part of the soldier.

Napoleon stated that the moment of greatest danger was the instant immediately after victory, and in saying so he demonstrated a remarkable understanding of how soldiers become physiologically and psychologically incapacitated by the parasympathetic backlash that occurs as soon as the momentum of the attack has halted and the soldier briefly believes himself to be safe. During this period of vulnerability a counterattack by fresh troops can have an effect completely out of proportion to the number of troops attacking.

It is basically for this reason that the maintenance of fresh reserves has always been essential in combat, with battles often revolving around which side can hold out and deploy their reserves last. Clausewitz cautioned that these reserves should always be maintained out of sight of the battle. These same basic psychophysiological principles explain why successful military leaders have historically maintained the momentum of a successful attack. Pursuing and maintaining contact with a defeated enemy are vital in order to completely destroy the enemy (the vast majority of the killing in historical battles occurred during the pursuit when the enemy had turned his back), but it is also valuable to maintain contact with the enemy as long as possible in order to delay that inevitable pause in the battle that will result in the culmination point during which pursuing forces will slip into parasympathetic backlash and become vulnerable to a counterattack. Again, an unblown reserve ready to complete this pursuit is of great value in ensuring that this most destructive phase of the battle is effectively executed.

In continuous combat the soldier roller-coasters through seemingly endless surges of adrenaline and subsequent backlashes, and the body’s natural, useful, and appropriate response to danger ultimately becomes extremely counterproductive. Unable to flee, and unable to overcome the danger through a brief burst of fighting, posturing, or submission, the bodies of modern soldiers quickly exhaust their capacity to energize and they slide into a state of profound physical and emotional exhaustion of such a magnitude and dimension that it appears to be almost impossible to communicate it to those who have not experienced it. A soldier in this state will inevitably collapse from nervous exhaustion — the body simply will burn out.

Lack of Sleep

I have already mentioned the hallucinations and zombielike states commonly experienced due to lack of sleep in intensive training, such as in the U.S. Army Ranger school. In combat it is often far worse. Holmes’s research indicates that tremendous periods of sleep loss are the norm in combat. In one study it was determined that of American soldiers in Italy in 1944, 31 percent averaged fewer than four hours’ sleep a night, and another 54 percent averaged fewer than six. Those individuals with the lower amounts of sleep were most likely to have come from the frontline units, which is also where the highest incidence of psychological casualties occurred.

Lack of Food

Lack of nourishment resulting from bad, cold food, and a loss of appetite caused by fatigue, can have a singularly devastating impact on combat effectiveness. “I would say without hesitation,” wrote the British general Bernard Fergusson, “that lack of food constitutes the single biggest assault upon morale…. Apart from its purely chemical effects upon the body, it has woeful effects upon the mind.”

In numerous historical incidents lack of food was believed to have been the single most important military factor. The Army Historical Series volume on logistics affirms that “lack of food probably more than any other factor forced the end of resistance on Bataan” early in World War II, and the Germans at Stalingrad were “literally starving at the time of their capitulation.”

Impact of the Elements

Soldiering, by its very nature, involves facing the forces of nature as well as the forces of the foe. Limited to those few amenities that they can carry on their backs after room has been made for the equipment of their profession, most soldiers are more or less at the mercy of the elements. Thus endless cold, rain, heat, and suffering become the soldier’s lot.

Lord Moran believed that “armies wilt when exposed to the elements.” For him the worst was “the harsh violence of winter,” which can “find a flaw even in picked men.” And the constant torment of the rain led Henri Barbusse to write that “dampness rusts men like rifles, more slowly but more deeply.”

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. For Simon Murry, a French veteran of Algeria, coldness was “enemy number one.” For him, “the misery of crawling into a sleeping-bag which is wet and sodden in total blackness on top of a mountain with the rain pissing down” was misery “without parallel.”

Heat, too, can exhaust and kill; and rats, lice, mosquitoes, and other living elements of nature take their turns at exacting both a physical and a psychological toll upon the soldier, but the most deadly of all these natural enemies that the soldier must face is probably disease. In every American war up until World War II more soldiers died from disease than from enemy action.

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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. This is a burden that, if not capable of causing psychiatric casualties in and of itself, needs to be taken into consideration as being capable of predisposing the soldier’s psyche toward seeking escape from the deprivations that surround him.