motive).
Relevance of Available Strategies: Means and Opportunity
Man taxes his ingenuity to be able to kill without running the risk of being killed.
Tactical and technological advantages increase the effectiveness of the combat strategies available to the soldier. Or, as one soldier put it, “You want to make damn sure you don’t get your own ass shot off while you are hosing the enemy.” This is what has always been achieved by gaining a tactical advantage through ambushes, flank attacks, and rear attacks. In modern warfare this is also achieved by firing through night sights and thermal- imagery devices at a technologically inferior enemy who does not have this capability. This kind of tactical and technological advantage provides the soldier with “means” and “opportunity,” thereby increasing the probability that he will kill the enemy.
An example of the influence of this process is outlined in the after-action reports describing the activities of Sergeant First Class Waldron in the section “Killing and Physical Distance.” Sergeant Waldron was a sniper, and in this case his killing was made possible by the fact that he was firing at night, at extremely long ranges, with a night-vision scope and a noise suppressor on his rifle. The result was an incredibly sterile kind of killing in which the killer was not at all endangered by his actions:
The first Viet Cong in the group was taken under fire… resulting in one Viet Cong killed. Immediately the other Viet Cong formed a huddle around the fallen body,
We have seen before that when the enemy is fleeing or has his back turned, he is far more likely to be killed. One reason for this is that in doing so he has provided both means and opportunity for his opponent to kill without endangering himself. Steve Banko achieved both means and opportunity when he was able to sneak up on and shoot a Vietcong soldier. “They didn’t know I existed,” said Banko, and that made it possible for him to muster his courage, and he “squeezed softly on the trigger.”
Relevance of the Victim and Payoff for the Killer: The Motive
After a soldier is confident that he is “able to kill without running the risk of being killed,” the next question that comes to mind is, Which enemy soldier should I shoot at? In Shalit’s model the question could be phrased: Is killing this individual relevant to the tactical situation, and will there be a payoff for doing so? In our analogy to the classical murder mystery, this is the motive for the killing.
The most obvious motive for killing in combat is the kill-or-be-killed circumstances of self-defense or the defense of one’s friends. We have observed this factor many times in the case studies observed thus far:
[He] was coming at me full gallop, his machete cocked high over his head…. All of a sudden there was a guy firing a pistol right at us… all of a sudden he turned his whole body and pointed his automatic weapon at me…. I knew… that he would start picking us off.
It is not very profound to observe that in choosing from a group of enemy targets to kill, a soldier is more likely to kill the one that represents the greatest gain to him and the greatest loss to the enemy. But if no particular soldier poses a specific threat by virtue of his actions, then the process of selecting the most high-value target can take more subtle forms.
One consistent tendency is to elect to shoot leaders and officers. We have already noted the marine sniper who told Truby, “You don’t like to hit ordinary troops, because they’re usually scared draftees or worse…. The guys to shoot are big brass.” Throughout military history the leaders and the flag bearers were selected as targets for enemy weapons, since these would represent the highest payoff in terms of the enemy’s loss. General James Gavin, the commander of the 82d Airborne Division in World War II, carried an M1 Garand rifle, then the standard American-infantry weapon of World War II. He advised young infantry officers not to carry any equipment that would make them stand out in the eyes of the enemy.
Oftentimes the criteria for deciding whom to kill are dictated by deciding who is manning the most dangerous weapon. In Steve Banko’s case he selected the Vietcong soldier who “was sitting closest to the machine gun, and he would die because of it.”
Every surrendering soldier instinctively knows that the first thing he should do is drop his weapon, but if he is smart he will also ditch his helmet. Holmes notes that “Brigadier Peter Young, in the second world war, had no more regret about shooting a helmeted German than he would about ‘banging a nail on the head.’ But somehow he could never bring himself to hit a bareheaded man.” It is because of this response to helmets that United Nations peacekeeping forces prefer to wear their traditional beret rather than a helmet, which might very well stop a bullet or save their lives in an artillery barrage.
Being able to identify your victim as a combatant is important to the rationalization that occurs after the kill. If a soldier kills a child, a woman, or anyone who does not represent a potential threat, then he has entered the realm of murder (as opposed to a legitimate, sanctioned combat kill), and the rationalization process becomes quite difficult. Even if he kills in self-defense, there is enormous resistance associated with killing an individual who is not normally associated with relevance or a payoff.
Bruce, a Ranger team leader in Vietnam, had several personal kills, but the one time that he could not bring himself to kill, even when he was directly ordered to do so, was when the target was a Vietcong soldier who was also a woman. Many other narratives and books from Vietnam cover in great detail the shock and horror associated with killing female Vietcong soldiers. And although fighting and killing women in combat is new to Americans and relatively uncommon throughout military history, it is not completely unprecedented. During the French Dahomey expedition in 1892, hardened French foreign legionnaires faced a bizarre army of female warriors, and Holmes notes that many of these tough veterans “experienced a few seconds’ hesitation about shooting or bayoneting a half- naked Amazon [and] their delay had fatal results.”
The presence of women and children can inhibit aggression in combat, but only if the women and children are not threatened. If they are present, if they become threatened, and if the combatant accepts responsibility for them, then the psychology of battle changes from one of carefully constrained ceremonial combat among males to the unconstrained ferocity of an animal who is defending its den.
Thus the presence of women and children can also increase violence on the battlefield. The Israelis have consistently refused to put women in combat since their experiences in 1948. I have been told by several Israeli officers that this is because in 1948 they experienced recurring incidences of uncontrolled violence among male Israeli soldiers who had their female combatants killed or injured in combat, and because the Arabs were extremely reluctant to surrender to women.
