An Israeli paratrooper came face to face with a huge Jordanian during the capture of the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967. “We looked at each other for half a second and I knew that it was up to me, personally, to kill him, there was no one else there. The whole thing must have lasted less than a second, but it’s printed on my mind like a slow motion movie. I fired from the hip and I can still see the bullets splashed against the wall about a meter to his left. I moved the Uzi, slowly, slowly it seemed, until I hit him in the body. He slipped to his knees, then he raised his head, with his face terrible, twisted in pain and hate, yes such hate. 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.”
Close range involves any kill with a projectile weapon from pointblank range, extending to midrange. The key factor in close range is the undeniable certainty of responsibility on the part of the killer. In Vietnam the term “personal kill” was used to distinguish the act of killing a specific individual with a direct-fire weapon and being absolutely sure of having done it oneself. The vast majority of personal kills and the resultant trauma occur at this range.
For analysis purposes I have divided examples of close-range encounters into those in which the narrator elects to kill, and those in which he does not kill.
To Kill…
At close range the euphoria stage, although brief, fleeting, and not often mentioned, still appears to be experienced in some form by most soldiers. Upon being asked, most of the combat veterans whom I have interviewed will admit to having experienced a brief feeling of elation upon succeeding in killing the enemy. Usually this euphoria stage is almost instantly overwhelmed by the guilt stage as the soldier is faced with the undeniable evidence of what he has done, and the guilt stage is often so strong as to result in physical revulsion and vomiting.
When the soldier kills at close range, it is by its very nature an intensely vivid and personal matter. A U.S. Special Forces (Green Beret) officer described his revulsion during a personal kill while reacting to an ambush in Vietnam:
I took two of the men and went around the flank… to outflank them and take them out. Well, I got around to the side and pointed my M16 at them and this person turned around and just stared, 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.
Author and World War II marine veteran William Manchester vividly described the same psychological responses to his own close-range kill:
I was utterly terrified — petrified — but I knew there had to be a Japanese sniper in a small fishing shack near the shore. He was firing in the other direction at Marines in another battalion, but I knew as soon as he picked off the people there — there was a window on our side — that he would start picking us off. And there was nobody else to go… and so I ran towards the shack and broke in and found myself in an empty room.
There was a door which meant there was another room and the sniper was in that — and I just broke that down. I was just absolutely gripped by the fear that this man would expect me and would shoot me. But as it turned out he was in a sniper harness and he couldn’t turn around fast enough. He was entangled in the harness so I shot him with a .45 and I felt remorse and shame. I can remember 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.
At this range the screams and cries of the enemy can be heard, adding greatly to the extent of the trauma experienced by the killer. Major General Frank Richardson told Holmes that “it is a touching fact that men, dying in battle, often call upon their mothers. I have heard them do so in five languages.”
Oftentimes the death inflicted on the enemy during a close-range kill is not instant, and the killer finds himself in the position of comforting his victim in his last moments. Here we see Harry Stewart, a Ranger and U.S. Army master sergeant — the epitome of toughness and professionalism — telling of a remarkable incident that occurred during the Tet offensive in 1968:
All of a sudden there was a guy firing a pistol right at us. It looked as big as a 175 [mm howitzer] just then. The first round hit the fireman on my left in the chest. The second round hit me in the right arm, although I didn’t know it. The third round hit the fireman on my right in the gut. By this time I had bounced off the wall to my left….
I charged the VC [Viet Cong], firing my M-16. He fell at my feet. He was still alive but would soon die. I reached down and took the pistol from his hand. I can still see those eyes, looking at me in hate….
Later I walked over to take another look at the VC I had shot. He was still alive and looking at me with those eyes. The flies were beginning to get all over him. I put a blanket over him and rubbed water from my canteen onto his lips. That hard stare started to leave his eyes. He wanted to talk but was too far gone. I lit a cigarette, took a few puffs, and put it to his lips. He could barely puff. We each had a few drags and that hard look had left his eyes before he died.[18]
Even when the killer has every motivation to hate and despise his victim, and every reason to quickly depart his close-range kill, he is often riveted, frozen by the magnitude of what he has done. Here Lieutenant Dieter Dengler — recipient of the Navy Cross, America’s second-highest decoration for heroism, and the only U.S. flier to escape from a Southeast Asian prison camp after being shot down and captured — found himself in just such a situation. Upon securing a weapon and breaking out of prison, Dieter was confronted by one of the sadistic guards who had tormented him:
Only three feet away, Moron [their nickname for this particular guard] was coming at me full gallop, his machete cocked high over his head. I fired from the hip point-blank into him. The force of the blast hung him in the air, his machete still raised, and then spun him backwards to the ground. There was blood gushing from a huge hole in his back. I stood over him with my mouth open wide, amazed that a single slug could do such damage and mindful of nothing but the horrible-looking back.
In all of these narratives it is this emotional reaction that the writer wanted to tell us about. Of all the things that occurred in the months and years of war experienced by these men, the close-range kills quoted here, and all the many throughout this study, appear to be something these veterans wanted to get off their chests. A first sergeant who was a Vietnam Special Forces veteran once put it this way when describing combat to me: “When you get up close and personal,” he drawled with a cud of chewing tobacco in his cheek, “where you can hear ’em scream and see ’em die,” and here he spit tobacco for emphasis, “it’s a bitch.”
