On Killing

Willis was alone when he was suddenly confronted with a single North Vietnamese soldier. He “vigorously shook his head” and initiated “a truce, cease-fire, gentleman’s agreement or a deal,” after which the enemy soldier “sank back into the darkness and Willis stumbled on.”

Again, at the beginning of the section “Killing and the Existence of Resistance,” Michael Kathman, a tunnel rat crawling alone in a Vietcong tunnel, was alone when he switched on the light and suddenly found “not more than 15 feet away… a [lone] Viet Cong eating a handful of rice…. After a moment, he put his pouch of rice on the floor of the tunnel beside him, turned his back to me and slowly started crawling away.” Kathman, in turn, switched off his flashlight and slipped away in the other direction.

And as you read these case studies note also the presence and influence of groups in most situations in which soldiers do elect to kill. The classic example is Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier of World War II. He won the Medal of Honor by single-handedly taking on a German infantry company. He fought alone, but when asked what motivated him to do this, he responded simply, “They were killing my friends.”

CHAPTER THREE Emotional Distance: “To Me They Were Less than Animals”

Increasing the distance between the [combatants] — whether by emphasizing their differences or by increasing the chain of responsibility between the aggressor and his victim allows for an increase in the degree of aggression.

— Ben Shalit

The Psychology of Conflict and Combat

Cracks in the Veil of Denial

One evening after giving a presentation on “The Price and Process of Killing” to a group of vets in New York, I was asked by a retired World War II veteran who had been in the audience if I could talk with him privately in the bar. After we were alone he said that there was something he had never told anyone about, something that, after hearing my presentation, he wanted to share with me.

He had been an army officer in the South Pacific, and one night the Japanese launched an infiltration attack on his position. During the attack a Japanese soldier charged him.

“I had my forty-five [-caliber pistol] in my hand,” he said, “and the point of his bayonet was no further than you are from me when I shot him. After everything had settled down I helped search his body, you know, for intelligence purposes, and I found a photograph.”

Then there was a long pause, and he continued. “It was a picture of his wife, and these two beautiful children. Ever since” — and here tears began to roll down his cheeks, although his voice remained firm and steady — “I’ve been haunted by the thought of these two beautiful children growing up without their father, because I murdered their daddy. I’m not a young man anymore, and soon I’ll have to answer to my Maker for what I have done.”[24]

A year later, in a pub in England, I told a Vietnam veteran who is currently a colonel in the U.S. Army about this incident. As I told him about the photographs he said, “Oh, no. Don’t tell me. There was an address on the back of the photo.”

“No,” I replied. “At least he never mentioned it if there was.”

Later in the evening I got back around to asking why he would have thought there was an address on the photos, and he told me that he had a similar experience in Vietnam, but his photos had addresses on the back of them. “And you know,” he said, as his eyes lost focus and he slipped into that haunted, thousand-yard stare I’ve seen in so many vets when their minds and emotions return to the battlefield, “I’ve always meant to send those photos back.”

Each of these men had attained the rank of colonel in the U.S. Army. Both are the distilled essence of all that is good and noble in their generation. And both of them have been haunted by simple photographs. But what those photographs represented was a crack in the veil of denial that makes war possible.

The Social Obstacles to Emotional Distance

The physical distance process has been addressed previously, but distance in war is not merely physical. There is also an emotional distance process that plays a vital part in overcoming the resistance to killing. Factors such as cultural distance, moral distance, social distance, and mechanical distance are just as effective as physical distance in permitting the killer to deny that he is killing a human being.

There was a popular and rather clever saying during the 1960s that asked, “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” This is not quite as ludicrous a concept as it may seem on the surface. There is a constant danger on the battlefield that, in periods of extended close combat, the combatants will get to know and acknowledge one another as individuals and subsequently may refuse to kill each other. This danger and the process by which it can occur is poignantly represented by Henry Metelmann’s account of his experiences as a German soldier on the Russian front during World War II.

There was a lull in the battle, during which Metelmann saw two Russians coming out of their foxhole,

and I walked over towards them… they introduced themselves… [and] offered me a cigarette and, as a non-smoker, I thought if they offer me a cigarette I’ll smoke it. But it was horrible stuff. I coughed and later on my mates said “You made a horrible impression, standing there with those two Russians and coughing your head off.” …I talked to them and said it was all right to come closer to the foxhole, because there were three dead Russian soldiers lying there, and I, to my shame, had killed them. They wanted to get the [dog tags] off them, and the paybooks…. I kind of helped them and we were all bending down and we found some photos in one of the paybooks and they showed them to me: we all three stood up and looked at the photos…. We shook hands again, and one patted on my back and they walked away.

Metelmann was called away to drive a half-track back to the field hospital. When he returned to the battlefield, over an hour later, he found that the Germans had overrun the Russian position. And although there were some of his friends killed, he found himself to be most concerned about what happened to “those two Russians.”

“Oh they got killed,” they said.

I said: “How did it happen?”

“Oh, they didn’t want to give in. Then we shouted at them to come out with their hands up and they did not, so one of us went over with a tank,” he said, “and really got them, and silenced them that way.” My feeling was very sad. I had met them on a very human basis, on a comradely basis. They called me comrade and at that moment, strange as it may seem, I was more sad that they had to die in this mad confrontation than my own mates and I still think sadly about it.

This identification with one’s victim is also reflected in the Stockholm syndrome. Most people know of the Stockholm syndrome as a process in which the victim of a hostage situation comes to identify with the hostage