On Killing

When raw recruits are faced with seemingly sadistic abuse and hardship (which they “escape” through weekend passes and, ultimately, graduation) they are — among many other things — being inoculated against the stresses of combat.

Combining an understanding of (a) those factors that cause combat trauma with (b) an understanding of the inoculation process permits us to understand that in most of these military schools the inoculation is specifically oriented toward hate.

The drill sergeant who screams into the face of a recruit is manifesting overt interpersonal hostility. Another effective means of inoculating a trainee against the Wind of Hate can be seen in U.S. Army and USMC pugil-stick training during boot camp or at the U.S. Military Academy and the British Airborne Brigade, where boxing matches are a traditional part of the training and initiation process. When in the face of all of this manufactured contempt and overt physical hostility the recruit overcomes the situation to graduate with honor and pride, he realizes at both conscious and unconscious levels that he can overcome such overt interpersonal hostility. He has become partially inoculated against hate.

I do not believe that military organizations have truly understood the nature of the Wind of Hate, or of the resultant need for this kind of inoculation. It is only since Seligman’s research that we have really had the foundation for a clinical understanding of these processes. However, through thousands of years of institutional memory and the harshest kind of survival-of-the-fittest evolution, this kind of inoculation has manifested itself in the traditions of the finest and most aggressive fighting units of many nations. By understanding the role of hate on the battlefield, we now can finally and truly understand the military value of what armies have done for so long and some of the processes by which they have enabled the soldier to physically and psychically survive on the battlefield.

CHAPTER SIX The Well of Fortitude

Stay with me, God. The night is dark.
The night is cold: my little spark
of courage dies. The night is long;
be with me, God, and make me strong.

— Junius, Vietnam veteran

Many authorities speak and write of emotional stamina on the battlefield as a finite resource. I have termed this the Well of Fortitude. Faced with the soldier’s encounters with horror, guilt, fear, exhaustion, and hate, each man draws steadily from his own private reservoir of inner strength and fortitude until finally the well runs dry. And then he becomes just another statistic. I believe that this metaphor of the well is an excellent one for understanding why at least 98 percent of all soldiers in close combat will ultimately become psychiatric casualties.

Fortitude and Individuals

George Keenan tells us that “heroism, the Caucasian mountaineers say, is endurance for one moment more.” In the trenches of World War I Lord Moran learned that courage “is not a chance gift of nature like aptitude… it is willpower that can be spent — and when it is used up — men are finished. ‘Natural courage’ does exist; but it is really fearlessness… as opposed to the courage of control.”

In sustained combat this process of emotional bankruptcy is seen in 98 percent of all soldiers who survive physically. Lord Moran presented the case of Sergeant Taylor, who “was wounded and came back unchanged; he seemed proof against the accidents of his life, he stood in the Company like a rock; men were swept up to him and eddied round him for a little time and ebbed away again, but he remained.” He finally suffered a near miss from an artillery shell. When Sergeant Taylor went to the well he found it to be empty, and this indomitable rock shattered: completely and catastrophically.

Fortitude and Depression

Holmes has gathered a list of the symptoms of men suffering from combat exhaustion. For these individuals the demands of combat have caused too great a drain on their own personal stocks of fortitude, resulting in conditions such as

a general slowing down of mental processes and apathy, as far as they were concerned the situation was one of absolute hopelessness…. The influence and reassurance of understanding officers and NCOs failed to arouse these soldiers from their hopelessness…. The soldier was slow-witted…. Memory defects became so extreme that he could not be counted on to relay a verbal order…. He could then best be described as one leading a vegetative existence…. He remained almost constantly in or near his slit trench, and during acute actions took no part, trembling constantly.

This is a vivid description of severe depression. Exhaustion, memory defects, apathy, hopelessness, and all the rest of these are precise descriptions of clinical depression that can be taken straight from the DSM-III-R. This is why “fortitude,” rather than “courage,” is the proper word to describe what is occurring here. It is not just a reaction to fear, but rather a reaction to a host of stressors that suck the will and life out of a man and leave him clinically depressed. The opposite of courage is cowardice, but the opposite of fortitude is exhaustion. When the soldier’s well is dry, his very soul is dry, and, in Lord Moran’s words, “he had gazed upon the face of death too long until exhaustion had dried him up making him so much tinder, which a chance spark of fear might set alight.”

Fortitude from Other Men’s Wells, and Replenishment Through Victory

A brave captain is as a root, out of which, as branches, the courage of his soldiers doth spring.

— Sir Philip Sidney

One key characteristic of a great military leader is an ability to draw from the tremendous depths of fortitude within his own well, and in doing so he is fortifying his own men by permitting them to draw from his well. Many writers have recorded this process as being at work in the combat situations they observed. Lord Moran noted that “a few men had the stuff of leadership in them, they were like rafts to which all the rest of humanity clung for support and hope.”