The magnitude of the trauma associated with killing became particularly apparent to me in an interview with Paul, a VFW post commander and sergeant of the 101st Airborne at Bastogne in World War II. He talked freely about his experiences and about comrades who had been killed, but when I asked him about his own kills he stated that usually you couldn’t be sure who it was that did the killing. Then tears welled up in Paul’s eyes, and after a long pause he said, “But the one time I was sure…” and then his sentence was stopped by a little sob, and pain racked the face of this old gentleman. “It still hurts, after all these years?” I asked in wonder. “Yes,” he said, “after all these years.” And he would not speak of it again.
The next day he told me, “You know, Captain, the questions you’re asking, you must be very careful not to hurt anyone with these questions. Not me, you know, I can take it, but some of these young guys are still hurting very badly. These guys don’t need to be hurt anymore.” These memories were the scabs of terrible, hidden wounds in the minds of these kind and gentle men.
Not to Kill, and the Guilt Thereof
With very few exceptions, everyone associated with killing in combat reaps a bitter harvest of guilt.
Numerous studies have concluded that men in combat are usually motivated to fight
Repeatedly we see combat veterans describe the powerful bonds that men forge in combat as stronger than those of husband and wife. John Early, a Vietnam veteran and an ex-Rhodesian mercenary, described it to Dyer this way:
This is going to sound really strange, but there’s a love relationship that is nurtured in combat because the man next to you — you’re depending on him for the most important thing you have, your life, and if he lets you down you’re either maimed or killed. If you make a mistake the same thing happens to him, so the bond of trust has to be extremely close, and I’d say this bond is stronger than almost anything, with the exception of parent and child. It’s a hell of a lot stronger than man and wife — your life is in his hands, you trust that person with the most valuable thing you have.
This bonding is so intense that it is fear of failing these comrades that preoccupies most combatants. Countless sociological and psychological studies, the personal narratives of numerous veterans, and the interviews I have conducted clearly indicate the strength of the soldier’s concern for failing his buddies. The guilt and trauma associated with failing to fully support men who are bonded with friendship and camaraderie on this magnitude is profoundly intense. Yet every soldier and every leader feels this guilt to one degree or another. For those who know that they have not fired while their friends died around them, the guilt is traumatic.
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The responsibilities of a combat leader represent a remarkable paradox. To be truly good at what he does, he must love his men and be bonded to them with powerful links of mutual responsibility and affection. And then he must ultimately be willing to give the orders that may kill them.
To a significant degree, the social barrier between officer and enlisted man, and between sergeant and private, exists to enable the superior to send his men into mortal danger and to shield him from the inevitable guilt associated with their deaths. For even the best leaders make some mistakes that will weigh forever upon their consciences. Just as any good coach can analyze his conduct of even a winning game and see where he could have done better, so does every good combat leader think, at some level, that if he had just done something different these men — these men he loved like sons and brothers — might not have died.
It is extraordinarily difficult to get these leaders to reminisce along these lines:
Now tactically I had done everything the way it was supposed to be done, but we lost some soldiers. There was no other way. We could not go around that field; we had to go across it. So did I make a mistake? I don’t know. Would I have done it differently [another time]? I don’t think I would have, because that’s the way I was trained. Did we lose less soldiers by my doing it that way? That’s a question that’ll never be answered.
This is a deadly, dangerous line of thought for leaders, and the honors and decorations that are traditionally heaped upon military leaders at all levels are vitally important for their mental health in the years that follow. These decorations, medals, mentions in dispatches, and other forms of recognition represent a powerful affirmation from the leader’s society, telling him that he did well, he did the right thing, and no one blames him for the lives lost in doing his duty.
Denial and the Burden of Killing
Balancing the obligation to kill with the resulting toll of guilt forms a significant cause of psychiatric casualties on the battlefield. Philosopher-psychologist Peter Marin speaks of the soldier’s lesson in responsibility and guilt. What the soldier knows as a result of war is that “the dead remain dead, the maimed are forever maimed, and there is no way to deny one’s responsibility or culpability, for those mistakes are written, forever and as if in fire, in others’ flesh.”
Ultimately there may be no way to deny one’s responsibility or culpability for mistakes written “forever and as if in fire, in others’ flesh,” but combat is a great furnace fed by the small flickering flames of attempts at denial. The burden of killing is so great that most men try not to admit that they have killed. They deny it to others, and they try to deny it to themselves. Dinter quotes a hardened veteran who, upon being asked about killing, stated emphatically that:
Most of the killing you do in modern war is impersonal. A thing few people realize is that you hardly ever see a German. Very few men — even in the infantry — actually have the experience of aiming a weapon at a German and seeing the man fall.
Even the language of men at war is full of denial of the enormity of what they have done. Most soldiers do not “kill,” instead the enemy was knocked over, wasted, greased, taken out, and mopped up. The enemy is hosed, zapped, probed, and fired on. The enemy’s humanity is denied, and he becomes a strange beast called a Kraut, Jap, Reb, Yank, dink, slant, or slope. Even the weapons of war receive benign names — Puff the Magic Dragon, Walleye,
