TOW, Fat Boy, and Thin Man — and the killing weapon of the individual soldier becomes a piece or a hog, and a bullet becomes a round.
Our enemies do the same thing. Matt Brennan tells of Con, a Vietnamese scout assigned to his platoon. This individual had
been a loyal Viet Cong until a North Vietnamese squad made a mistake and killed his wife and children. Now he loved to run ahead of the Americans, hunting for [North Vietnamese soldiers]…. He called the Communists gooks, just as we did, and one night I asked him why.
“Con, do you think it’s right to call the VC gooks and dinks?”
He shrugged. “It makes no difference to me. Everything has a name. Do you think the Americans are the only ones who do that?… My company in the jungle… called you Big Hairy Monkeys. We kill monkeys, and” — he hesitated for an instant — “we eat them.”
The dead soldier takes his misery with him, but the man who killed him must forever live and die with him. The lesson becomes increasingly clear: Killing is what war is all about, and killing in combat, by its very nature, causes deep wounds of pain and guilt. The language of war helps us to deny what war is really about, and in doing so it makes war more palatable.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A Host of Observers and a Multitude of Answers
As we have examined each of the components and subcomponents of psychiatric casualty causation, we have consistently found authorities who would claim that their perspective of the problem represents the major or primary cause of stress in battle. Many have held that fear of death and injury was the primary cause of psychiatric casualties. Bartlett feels that “there is perhaps no general condition which is more likely to produce a large crop of nervous and mental disorders than a state of prolonged and great fatigue.” General Fergusson states that “lack of food constitutes the single biggest assault upon morale.” And Murry holds that “coldness is enemy number one,” while Gabriel makes a powerful argument for emotional exhaustion caused by extended periods of autonomic fight- or-flight activation. Holmes, on the other hand, spends a chapter of his book convincing us of the horror of battle, and he claims that “seeing friends killed, or, almost worse, being unable to help them when wounded, leaves enduring scars.” In addition to these more obvious factors of fear, exhaustion, and horror, I have added the less obvious but vitally important factors represented by the Wind of Hate and the Burden of Killing.
Like the blind men of the proverb, each individual feels a piece of the elephant, and the enormity of what he has found is overwhelming enough to convince each blindly groping observer that he has found the essence of the beast. But the whole beast is far more enormous and vastly more terrifying than society as a whole is prepared to believe.
It is a combination of factors that forms the beast, and it is a combination of stressors that is responsible for psychiatric casualties. For instance, when we see incidents of mass psychiatric casualties caused by the use of gas in World War I, we must ask ourselves what caused the soldiers’ trauma. Were they traumatized by fear and horror at the gas and the unknown aspect of death and injury that it represented? Were they traumatized by the realization that someone would hate them enough to do this horrible thing to them? Or were they simply sane men unconsciously selecting insanity in order to escape from an insane situation, sane men taking advantage of a socially and morally acceptable opportunity to cast off the burden of responsibility in combat and escape from the mutual aggression of the battlefield? Obviously, a concise and complete answer would conclude that all of these factors, and more, are responsible for the soldier’s dilemma.
Forces That Impede an Understanding of the Beast
A culture raised on Rambo, Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker, and James Bond wants to believe that combat and killing can be done with impunity — that we can declare someone to be the enemy and that for cause and country the soldiers will cleanly and remorselessly wipe him from the face of the earth. In many ways it is simply too painful for society to address what it does when it sends its young men off to kill other young men in distant lands.
And what is too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget. Glenn Gray spoke from personal experience in World War II when he wrote:
Few of us can hold on to our real selves long enough to discover the real truths about ourselves and this whirling earth to which we cling. This is especially true of men in war. The great god Mars tries to blind us when we enter his realm, and when we leave he gives us a generous cup of the waters of Lethe to drink.
Even the field of psychology seems to be ill prepared to address the guilt caused by war and the attendant moral issues. Peter Marin condemns the “inadequacy” of our psychological terminology in describing the magnitude and reality of the “pain of human conscience.” As a society, he says, we seem unable to deal with moral pain or guilt. Instead it is treated as a neurosis or a pathology, “something to escape rather than something to learn from, a disease rather than — as it may well be for the vets — an appropriate if painful response to the past.” Marin goes on to note the same thing that I have in my studies, and that is that Veterans Administration psychologists are seldom willing to deal with problems of guilt; indeed, they often do not even raise the issue of what the soldier did in war. Instead they simply, as one VA psychologist put it to Marin, “treat the vet’s difficulties as problems in adjustment.”
Toward a Greater Understanding of the Heart of Darkness
During the American Civil War the soldier’s first experience in combat was called “seeing the elephant.” Today the existence of our species and of all life on this planet may depend on our not just seeing but knowing and controlling the beast called war — and the beast within each of us. No more important or vital subject for research exists, yet there is that within us that would turn away in disgust. And so the study of war has been largely left to the soldiers. But Clausewitz warned almost two hundred years ago that “it is to no purpose, it is even against one’s better interest, to turn away from the consideration of the affair because the horror of its elements excites
