On Killing

Victory and success in battle also replenish individual and collective wells. Moran tells us that if a soldier is always using up his capital he may from time to time add to it. “There is,” says Moran, “a paying in as well as a paying out.” He gives as an example General Alexander, who took command of the British forces in North Africa in World War II. When Alexander took command, the men often did not bother to salute an officer, but after their victory of El Alamein all that came to an end, and their self-respect came back. Moran concluded that “achievement is a sharp tonic to morale…. But in the main, time is against the soldier.”

Fortitude and Units

Depletion of the finite resource of fortitude can be seen in entire units as well as individuals. The fortitude of a unit is no more than the aggregate of the fortitude of its members. And when the individuals are drained to a dry husk, the whole is nothing more than an aggregate of exhausted men.

In Normandy during World War II Field Marshal Montgomery had two classes of divisions. Some were veterans of North Africa, and others were green units, without previous combat experience. Montgomery initially tended to rely on his veteran units (particularly during the disastrous Operation Goodwood), but these units performed poorly, while his green units performed well. In this instance, failing to understand the influence of emotional exhaustion and the Well of Fortitude had a significant negative impact on the Allied effort in World War II.

In the same way, all of the aspects of combat trauma impact profoundly upon the individual’s contribution to the battlefield and upon the contribution of that aggregate of individuals that we call military units. If we understand these concepts we begin to master the full spectrum of the responses of men in combat. If we ignore them we do so to the detriment of the individual, and to the detriment of that aggregate of individuals that we call our society, our nation, our way of life, and our world. Lord Moran concluded that such ignorance of the ultimate cost of depleting the Well of Fortitude of England’s youth in World War I caused that nation “to dissipate like a spend thrift not only the lives but the moral heritage of the youth of England.”

CHAPTER SEVEN The Burden of Killing

Alfred de Vigny went to the heart of the military experience when he observed that the soldier is both victim and executioner. Not only does he run the risk of being killed and wounded himself, but he also kills and wounds others.

— John Keegan and Richard Holmes

Soldiers

The resistance to the close-range killing of one’s own species is so great that it is often sufficient to overcome the cumulative influences of the instinct for self-protection, the coercive forces of leadership, the expectancy of peers, and the obligation to preserve the lives of comrades.

The soldier in combat is trapped within this tragic Catch-22. If he overcomes his resistance to killing and kills an enemy soldier in close combat, he will be forever burdened with blood guilt, and if he elects not to kill, then the blood guilt of his fallen comrades and the shame of his profession, nation, and cause lie upon him. He is damned if he does, and damned if he doesn’t.

To Kill, and the Guilt Thereof

William Manchester, author and U.S. Marine veteran of World War II, felt remorse and shame after his close-range personal killing of a Japanese soldier. “I can remember,” he wrote, “whispering foolishly, ‘I’m sorry’ and then just throwing up… I threw up all over myself. It was a betrayal of what I’d been taught since a child.” Other combat veterans tell of the emotional responses associated with a close-range kill that echo Manchester’s horror.

The media’s depiction of violence tries to tell us that men can easily throw off the moral inhibitions of a lifetime — and whatever other instinctive restraint exists — and kill casually and guiltlessly in combat. The men who have killed, and who will talk about it, tell a different tale. A few of these quotes, which are drawn from Keegan and Holmes, can be found elsewhere in this study, but here they represent the distilled essence of the soldier’s emotional response to killing:

Killing is the wont thing that one man can do to another man… it’s the last thing that should happen anywhere.

— Israeli lieutenant

I reproached myself as a destroyer. An indescribable uneasiness came over me, I felt almost like a criminal.

— Napoleonic-era British soldier

This was the first time I had killed anybody and when things quieted down I went and looked at a German I knew I had shot. I remember thinking that he looked old enough to have a family and I felt very sorry.

— British World War I veteran after his first kill

It didn’t hit me all that much then, but when I think of it now — I slaughtered those people. I murdered them.

— German World War II veteran

And I froze, ’cos it was a boy, I would say between the ages of twelve and fourteen. When he turned at me and looked, all of a sudden he turned his whole body and pointed his automatic weapon at me, I just opened up, fired the whole twenty rounds right at the kid, and he just laid there. I dropped my weapon and cried.

— U.S. Special Forces officer and Vietnam veteran

I fired again and somehow got him in the head. There was so much blood… I vomited, until the rest of the boys came up.

— Israeli Six-Day War veteran

So this new Peugeot comes towards us, and we shoot. And there was a family there — three children. And I cried, but I couldn’t take the chance…. Children, father, mother. All the family was killed, but we couldn’t take the chance.