On Killing

Killing at Hand-to-Hand-Combat Range

In modern battle, which is delivered with combatants so far apart, man has come to have a horror of man. He comes to hand-to-hand fighting only to defend his body or if forced to it.

— Ardant du Picq

Battle Studies

Hand-to-Hand-Combat Range

At hand-to-hand-combat range the instinctive resistance to killing becomes strongest. While some who have studied the subject claim that man is the only higher-order species that does not have an instinctive resistance to killing his own species, its existence is recognized by almost any high-level karate practitioner.

An obvious method of killing an opponent involves a crushing blow to the throat. In movie combat we often see one individual grab another by the throat and attempt to choke him. And Hollywood heroes give the enemy a good old punch in the jaw. In both instances a blow to the throat (with the hand held in various prescribed shapes) would be a vastly superior form of disabling or killing the foe, yet it is not a natural act; it is a repellent one.

The single most effective and mechanically easiest way to inflict significant damage on a human being with one’s hand is to punch a thumb through his eye and on into the brain, subsequently stirring the intruding digit around inside the skull, cocking it off toward the side, and forcefully pulling the eye and other matter out with the thumb.

One karate instructor trains his high-level students in this killing technique by having them practice punching their thumbs into oranges held or taped over the eye socket of an opponent. As we will observe when we study the process by which the U.S. Army raised its firing rates from 15 to 20 percent in World War II to 90 to 95 percent in Vietnam, this procedure of precisely rehearsing and mimicking a killing action is an excellent way of ensuring that the individual is capable of performing the act in combat.

In the case of the orange held over the victim’s eye, the process is made even more realistic by having the victim scream, twitch, and jerk as the killer punches his thumb to the hilt into the orange and then rips it back out. Few individuals can walk away from their first such rehearsal without being badly shaken and disturbed by the action they have just mimicked. The fact that they are overcoming some form of natural resistance is obvious.

Tracy Arnold, an actress in the X-rated (for violence) movie Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, passed out twice during the filming of a scene in which her character was portrayed stabbing a man in the eye with a rat-tailed comb. This is a professional actress. She can portray killing, lying, and sex on the screen with relative ease, but even the pretense of stabbing someone in the eye seems to have touched a resistance so powerful and deep-seated that her body and emotions — the tools of the professional actress — literally refused to cooperate. In fact, I cannot find any references to anyone in the history of human combat having ever used this simple technique. Indeed, it is almost too painful to think of it.

Man has a tremendous resistance to killing effectively with his bare hands. When man first picked up a club or a rock and killed his fellow man, he gained more than mechanical energy and mechanical leverage. He also gained psychological energy and psychological leverage that was every bit as necessary in the killing process. In some distant part of man’s past he acquired this ability. Two major religious works, the Bible and the Torah, both speak of partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and one of its first uses was Cain’s overcoming his instinctive resistance in order to kill his brother, Abel. He probably did so not with his bare hands, but with an application of mechanical and psychological leverage not available to any other creature on the face of the earth.[22]

CHAPTER SEVEN Killing at Sexual Range: “The Primal Aggression, the Release, and the Orgasmic Discharge”

One night as a young lieutenant on a long deployment to the Arctic, I sat in our little Officer/Senior NCO Club nursing a beer, while several old sergeants became quite drunk. One old Vietnam vet hit on a popular theme during the discussion and said, “F*** Jane Fonda.”

Another old sergeant vet who was sitting next to me was roused to respond by saying, “F*** Jane Fonda? Huh! Skull-f*** Jane Fonda! Pop an eyeball out and skull-f*** the bitch.”

This macabre concept of combining sex with death was so offensive that even the hardened veterans around the speaker were momentarily shocked. Yet the procreative act and the destructive act are inextricably interlinked. Much of the attraction to the killing process, and much of the resistance to close-in killing, revolves around the vicious side of ourselves that would pervert sex in such a manner that we can conceive of such things.

At a surface level, the link between sex and aggression is obvious and not so blatantly offensive. The most powerful stag, stallion, ram, male lion, or gorilla wins the harem; lesser or younger males remain only if they are subservient. Much has been made of the relationship between male sexuality and the power of motorcycles (1,200 cc of power throbbing between your legs) and muscle cars. The continuing popularity of magazines in which motorcycles and cars are displayed along with scantily clad women in provocative positions make this relationship clear.

This kind of sex-power linkage also exists in the gun world. A video recently advertised in gun magazines, Sexy Girls and Sexy Guns, taps this same vein. “You’ve got to see this tape to believe it,” says the ad. “14 outrageous sexy girls in string bikinis and high heels blasting away with the sexiest full auto machine guns ever produced.”

The psychological state that is satisfied by Sexy Girls and Sexy Guns is not widely shared among gun aficionados and is often viewed with considerable scorn. One editorial comment from a magazine that advertised these movies reveals a perceptive understanding of the nature of this kind of “full auto-eroticism and ‘Debbie Does the Paris Arms Show’ pap”:

You may have seen the rash of mindless “machine-gun videos” that dish out a bilgy froth of bikinis, boobs and burp guns — neither instruction nor entertainment, evidently marketed to exploit a rather narrow spectrum of psychoses which hopes to see pendulous mammillae caught in a closing breach. While these video bikinis might have satisfied the Freudian hostilities of a disturbed few, there has been a need for legitimate orientation- instruction machine gun videos for those who properly regard these weapons as indispensable tools of respectable trades.

— D. McLean

“Firestorm”

Yet, in reality, our Sexy Girls and Sexy Guns video is only a little removed from the not-so-subliminal message of virility implied in the familiar image of a barely clad woman clinging to James Bond as he coolly brandishes a pistol.[23]

Killing as Sex…

The linkage between sex and killing becomes unpleasantly apparent when we enter the realm of warfare.