On Killing

CHAPTER FOUR

The Mud of Guilt and Horror

I am sick and tired of war. It’s glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.

— William Tecumseh Sherman

The Impact of the Senses

Beyond fear and exhaustion is a sea of horror that surrounds the soldier and assails his every sense.

Hear the pitiful screams of the wounded and dying. Smell the butcher-house smells of feces, blood, burned flesh, and rotting decay, which combine into the awful stench of death. Feel the shudder of the ground as the very earth groans at the abuse of artillery and explosives, and feel the last shiver of life and the flow of warm blood as friends die in your arms. Taste the salt of blood and tears as you hold a dear friend in mutual grieving, and you do not know or care if it is the salt of your tears or his. And see what hath been wrought:

You tripped over strings of viscera fifteen feet long, over bodies which had been cut in half at the waist. Legs and arms, and heads bearing only necks, lay fifty feet from the closest torsos. As night fell the beachhead reeked with the stench of burning flesh.

— William Manchester

“Goodbye, Darkness”

The Impact of Memory and the Role of Guilt

Strangely, such horrifying memories seem to have a much more profound effect on the combatant — the participant in battle — than the noncombatant, the correspondent, civilian, POW, or other passive observer of the battle zone. The combat soldier appears to feel a deep sense of responsibility and accountability for what he sees around him. It is as though every enemy dead is a human being he has killed, and every friendly dead is a comrade for whom he was responsible. With every effort to reconcile these two responsibilities, more guilt is added to the horror that surrounds the soldier.

Richard Holmes speaks of “a brave and distinguished” old veteran who, after nearly seventy years, “wept softly… as he described a popular officer who had been literally disemboweled by a shell fragment.” Often you can keep these things out of your mind when you are young and active, but they come back to haunt your nights in your old age. “We thought we had managed all right,” he told Holmes, “kept the awful things out of our minds, but now I’m an old man and they come out from where I hid them. Every night.”

And yet, all of this, this horror, is just one of the many factors among those that conspire to drive the soldier from the painful field.

CHAPTER FIVE The Wind of Hate

Hate and Trauma in Our Daily Lives

When we consider the matter, are we truly surprised to discover that it is not danger that causes psychiatric stress? And is the existence of an intense resistance to participating in aggressive situations really so unexpected?

To a large extent our society — particularly our young men — actively and vicariously pursues physical danger. Through roller coasters, action and horror movies, drugs, rock climbing, whitewater rafting, scuba diving, parachuting, hunting, contact sports, and a hundred other methods, our society enjoys danger. To be sure, danger in excess grows old fast, particularly when we feel that we have lost control of it. And the potential for death and injury is an important ingredient in the complex mixture that makes combat so stressful, but it is not the major cause of stress in either our daily lives or in combat.

But facing aggression and hatred in our fellow citizens is an experience of an entirely different magnitude. All of us have had to face hostile aggression. On the playground as children, in the impoliteness of strangers, in the malicious gossip and comments of acquaintances, and in the animosity of peers and superiors in the workplace. In all of these instances everyone has known hostility and the stress it can cause. Most avoid confrontations at all costs, and to work ourselves up to an aggressive verbal action — let alone a physical confrontation — is extremely difficult.

Simply confronting the boss about a promotion or a raise is one of the most stressful and upsetting things most people can ever bring themselves to do, and many never even get that far. Facing down the school bully or confronting a hostile acquaintance is something that most will avoid at all costs. Many medical authorities believe that it is the constant hostility and lack of acceptance that they must face — and the resulting stress — that are responsible for the dramatic rate of high blood pressure in African Americans.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III-R), the bible of psychology, states that in post-traumatic stress disorders “the disorder is apparently more severe and longer lasting when the stressor is of human design.” 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.

The ultimate fear and horror in most modern lives is to be raped or beaten, to be physically degraded in front of our loved ones, to have our family harmed and the sanctity of our homes invaded by aggressive and hateful intruders. Death and debilitation by disease or accident are statistically far more likely to occur than death and debilitation by malicious action, but the statistics do not calm our basically irrational fears. 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.

In rape the psychological harm usually far exceeds the physical injury. The trauma of rape, like that of combat, involves minimal fear of death or injury; far more damaging is the impotence, shock, and horror in being so hated and despised as to be debased and abused by a fellow human being.

The average citizen resists engaging in aggressive and assertive activities and dreads facing the irrational aggression and hatred of others. The soldier in combat is no different: he resists the powerful obligation and coercion to engage in aggressive and assertive actions on the battlefield, and he dreads facing the irrational aggression and hostility embodied in the enemy.

Indeed, history is full of tales of soldiers who have committed suicide or inflicted terrible wounds upon themselves to avoid combat. It isn’t fear of death that motivates these men to kill themselves. Like many of their civilian counterparts who commit suicide, these men would rather die or mutilate themselves than face the