range interpersonal aggression. The British Gurkha battalions have been historically effective at this (as can be seen in the Argentinean’s dread of them during the Falklands War), but any unit that puts a measure of faith in the bayonet has grasped a little of the natural dread with which an enemy responds to the possibility of facing an opponent who is determined to come within “skewering range.”
What these units (or at least their leaders) must understand is that actual skewering almost
Combat at close quarters does not exist. At close quarters occurs the ancient carnage when one force strikes the other in the back.
It is when the bayonet charge has forced one side’s soldiers to turn their backs and flee that the killing truly begins, and at some visceral level the soldier intuitively understands this and is very, very frightened when he has to turn his back to the enemy. Griffith dwells on this fear of retreating: “Perhaps this fear of retreat [in the face of the enemy] was linked to a horror of turning one’s back on the threat…. A type of reverse ostrich syndrome may have applied, whereby the danger was bearable only while the men continued to watch it.” And in his superb study of the American Civil War, Griffith also notes many instances in which the most effective firing and killing occurred when the enemy had begun to flee the field.
I believe that there are two factors in play in this increased killing of an enemy whose back is turned, and of the resultant fear of turning one’s back to the enemy. The first factor is the concept of a chase instinct. A lifetime of working with and training dogs has taught me that the worst thing you can ever do is run from an animal. I have never yet met a dog I could not face down or at least incapacitate with a kick as it charged, but I have always known both instinctively and rationally that if I were to turn and run I should be in great danger. There is a chase instinct in most animals that will cause even a well-trained and nonaggressive dog to instinctively chase and pull down anything that runs. As long as your back is turned you are in danger. In the same way, there appears to be a chase instinct in man that permits him to kill a fleeing enemy.
The second factor that enables killing from behind is a process in which close proximity on the physical distance spectrum can be negated when the face cannot be seen. The essence of the whole physical distance spectrum may simply revolve around the degree to which the killer can see the face of the victim. There appears to be a kind of intuitive understanding of this process in our cultural image of back shooting and back stabbing as cowardly acts, and it seems that soldiers intuitively understand that when they turn their backs, they are more apt to be killed by the enemy.
This same enabling process explains why Nazi, Communist, and gangland executions are traditionally conducted with a bullet in the back of the head, and why individuals being executed by hanging or firing squad are blindfolded or hooded. And we know from Miron and Goldstein’s 1979 research that the risk of death for a kidnap victim is much greater if the victim is hooded. In each of these instances the presence of the hood or blindfold ensures that the execution is completed and serves to protect the mental health of the executioners. Not having to look at the face of the victim provides a form of psychological distance that enables the execution party and assists in their subsequent denial and the rationalization and acceptance of having killed a fellow human being.
The eyes are the window of the soul, and if one does not have to look into the eyes when killing, it is much easier to deny the humanity of the victim. The eyes bulging out “like prawns” and blood shooting out of the mouth are not seen. The victim remains faceless, and one never needs to know one’s victim as a person. And the price most killers have to pay for a close-range kill — the memory of the “face terrible, twisted in pain and hate, yes such hate” — this price need never be paid if we can simply avoid looking at our victim’s face.
In combat the impact of back stabbing and the chase instinct can be observed in casualty rates, which increase significantly after the enemy forces have turned their backs and begun to flee. Clausewitz and du Picq both expound at length on the fact that the vast majority of casualties in historical battles were inflicted upon the losing side during the pursuit that followed the victory. In this vein Ardant du Picq holds out the example of Alexander the Great, whose forces, during all his years of warfare, lost fewer than seven hundred men “to the sword.” They suffered so few casualties simply because they never lost a battle and therefore only had to endure the very, very minor casualties inflicted by reluctant combatants in close combat and never had to suffer the very significant losses associated with being pursued by a victorious enemy.
Knife Range
As we bring the physical distance spectrum down to its culmination point we must recognize that killing with a knife is significantly more difficult than killing with the bayonet affixed to the end of a rifle. Many knife kills appear to be of the commando nature, in which someone slips up on a victim and kills him from behind. These kills, like all kills from behind, are less traumatic than a kill from the front, since the face and all its messages and contortions are not seen. But what is felt are the bucking and shuddering of the victim’s body and the warm sticky blood gushing out, and what is heard is the the final breath hissing out.
The U.S. Army, along with armies in many other nations, trains its Rangers and Green Berets to execute a knife kill from the rear by plunging the knife through the lower back and into the kidney. Such a blow is so remarkably painful that its effect is to completely paralyze the victim as he quickly dies, resulting in an extremely silent kill.
This kidney strike is contrary to the natural inclination of most soldiers, who — if they have thought about the matter at all — would prefer to slit the throat while holding a hand over the victim’s mouth. This option, though psychologically and culturally more desirable (it is a slashing rather than a thrusting blow), has far less potential for silence, since an improperly slit throat is capable of making considerable noise and holding a hand over someone’s mouth is not always an easy thing to do. The victim also has a capacity to bite, and a marine gunnery sergeant who is the USMC’s proponent agent for hand-to-hand-combat tells me that several individuals have told him of cutting their own hand while trying to cut the enemy’s throat in the dark. But here again we see the natural preference for a slashing blow over a more effective thrusting or penetrating blow.
Holmes tells us that the French in World War II preferred knives and daggers for close-in work, but Keegan’s findings of the singular absence of such wounds would indicate that few of these knives were ever used. Indeed, narratives of incidents in which individuals used a knife in modern combat are extremely rare, and knife kills other than the silencing of sentries from behind are almost unheard of.
The one personal narrative of a knife kill that I have been able to obtain as a result of my interviews is from a man who had been an infantryman in the Pacific during World War II. He had many personal kills that he was willing to discuss, but it was his one kill with a knife that caused him to have nightmares long after the war was over. An enemy soldier had slipped into his foxhole one night, and during the process of a hand-to-hand struggle he pinned down the smaller Japanese soldier and slit his throat. The horror associated with pinning the man down and feeling him struggle and watching him bleed to death is something that he can barely tolerate to this very day.
CHAPTER SIX
