Many societies have long recognized the existence of this twisted region in which battle, like sex, is a milestone in adolescent masculinity. Yet the sexual aspects of killing continue beyond the region in which both are thought to be rites of manhood and into the area in which killing becomes like sex and sex like killing.
A British paratrooper who served in the Falklands told Holmes that one particular attack was “the most exciting thing since getting my leg across.” One American soldier compared the killings at My Lai to the closely linked guilt and satisfaction that accompany masturbation.
The Israeli military psychologist Ben Shalit touched on this relationship when he described some of his observations of combat:
On my right was mounted a heavy machine gun. The gunner (normally the cook) was firing away with what I can only describe as a beatific smile on his face. He was exhilarated by the squeezing of the trigger, the hammering of the gun, and the flight of his tracers rushing out into the dark shore. It struck me then (and was confirmed by him and many others later) that squeezing the trigger — releasing a hail of bullets — gives enormous pleasure and satisfaction. These are the pleasures of combat, not in terms of the intellectual planning — of the tactical and strategic chess game — but of the primal aggression, the release, and the orgasmic discharge.
Shalit addresses this subject through symbolic language, but one Vietnam veteran was not nearly so subtle when he told Mark Baker that “a gun is power. To some people carrying a gun was like having a permanent hard-on. It was a pure sexual trip every time you got to pull the trigger.” Many men who have carried and fired a gun — especially a full automatic weapon — must confess in their hearts that the power and pleasure of explosively spewing a stream of bullets is akin to the emotions felt when explosively spewing a stream of semen.
One of the veterans I interviewed had six tours in Vietnam. He stated that ultimately he “had to get out of there” because he was becoming consumed by what was happening to him. “Killing can be like sex,” he told me, “and you can get carried away with it; it can consume you just like sex can.”
…And Sex as Killing
And just as the highly personal, close-up, one-on-one, intense experience of killing can be like sex, so can sex be like killing. Glenn Gray speaks of this relationship. “To be sure,” he says,
the sexual partner is not actually destroyed in the encounter, merely overthrown. And the psychological aftereffects of sexual lust are different from those of battle lusts. These differences, however, do not alter the fact that the passions have a common source and affect their victims in the same way while they are in their grip.
The concept of sex as a process of domination and defeat is closely related to the lust for rape and the trauma associated with the rape victim. Thrusting the sexual appendage (the penis) deep into the body of the victim can be perversely linked to thrusting the killing appendage (a bayonet or knife) deep into the body of the victim.
This process can be seen in pornographic movies in which the sexual act is twisted, such that the male ejaculates — or “shoots his wad” — into a female’s face. The grip of a firer on the pistol grip of a gun is much like the grip on an erect penis, and holding the penis in this fashion while ejaculating into the victim’s face is at some level an act of domination and symbolic destruction. The culmination of this intertwining of sex and death can be seen in snuff films, in which a victim is raped and then murdered on film.
The force of darkness and destruction within us is balanced with a force of light and love for our fellow man. These forces struggle and strive within the heart of each of us. To ignore one is to ignore the other. We cannot know the light if we do not acknowledge the dark. We cannot know life if we do not acknowledge death. The link between sex and war and the process of denial in both fields are well represented by Richard Heckler’s observation that “it is in the mythological marriage of Ares [the god of war] and Aphrodite [the god of sex] that Harmonia is born.”
SECTION IV
An Anatomy of Killing:
All Factors Considered
The starting point for the understanding of war is the understanding of human nature.
CHAPTER ONE
Dr. Stanley Milgram’s famous studies at Yale University on obedience and aggression found that in a controlled laboratory environment more than 65 percent of his subjects could be readily manipulated into inflicting a (seemingly) lethal electrical charge on a total stranger. The subjects sincerely believed that they were causing great physical pain, but despite their victim’s pitiful pleas for them to stop, 65 percent continued to obey orders, increase the voltage, and inflict the shocks until long after the screams stopped and there could be little doubt that their victim was dead.
Prior to beginning his experiments Milgram asked a group of psychiatrists and psychologists to predict how many of his subjects would use the maximum voltage on their victims. They estimated that a fraction of 1 percent of the subjects would do so. They, like most people, really didn’t have a clue — until Milgram taught us this lesson about ourselves.
Freud warned us to “never underestimate the power of the need to obey,” and this research by Milgram (which has since been replicated many times in half a dozen different countries) validates Freud’s intuitive understanding of human nature. Even when the trappings of authority are no more than a white lab coat and a clipboard, this is the kind of response that Milgram was able to elicit:
