Swank and Marchand’s World War II study noted the existence of 2 percent of combat soldiers who are predisposed to be “aggressive psychopaths” and apparently do not experience the normal resistance to killing and the resultant psychiatric casualties associated with extended periods of combat. But the negative connotations associated with the term “psychopath,” or its modern equivalent “sociopath,” are inappropriate here, since this behavior is a generally desirable one for soldiers in combat.
It would be absolutely incorrect to conclude that 2 percent of all veterans are psychopathic killers. Numerous studies indicate that combat veterans are no more inclined to violence than nonvets. A more accurate conclusion would be that there is 2 percent of the male population that, if pushed or if given a legitimate reason, will kill without regret or remorse. What these individuals represent — and this is a terribly important point that I must emphasize — is the capacity for the levelheaded participation in combat that we as a society glorify and that Hollywood would have us believe that all soldiers possess. In the course of interviewing veterans as a part of this study I have met several individuals who may fit within this 2 percent, and since returning from combat they have, without fail, proven themselves to be above-average contributors to the prosperity and welfare of our society.
Dyer draws from his own personal experiences as a soldier for understanding:
Aggression is certainly part of our genetic makeup, and necessarily so, but the normal human being’s quota of aggression will not cause him to kill acquaintances, let alone wage war against strangers from a different country. We live among millions of people who have killed fellow human beings with pitiless efficiency — machine- gunning them, using flame throwers on them, dropping explosive bombs on them from twenty thousand feet up — yet we do not fear these people.
The overwhelming majority of those who have killed, now or at any time in the past, have done so as soldiers in war, and we recognize that that has practically nothing to do with the kind of personal aggression that would endanger us as their fellow citizens.
Marshall’s World War II figure of a 15 to 20 percent firing rate does not necessarily contradict Swank and Marchand’s 2 percent figure, since many of these firers were under extreme empowering circumstances, and many may have been in a posturing mode and merely firing wildly or above the enemy’s heads. And later figures of 55 percent (Korea) and 90 to 95 percent (Vietnam) firing rates represent the actions of men empowered by increasingly more effective conditioning processes, but these figures also do not tell us how many were posturing.
Dyer’s World War II figure of 1 percent of U.S. Army Air Corps fighter pilots being responsible for 40 percent of all kills is also generally in keeping with the Swank and Marchand estimates. Erich Hartmann, the World War II German ace — unquestionably the greatest fighter pilot of all time, with 351 confirmed victories — claimed that 80 percent of his victims never knew he was in the same sky with them. This claim, if accurate, provides a remarkable insight into the nature of such a killer. Like the kills of most successful snipers and fighter pilots, the vast majority of the killing done by these men were what some would call simple ambushes and back shootings. No provocation, anger, or emotion empowered
Several senior U.S. Air Force officers have told me that when the U.S. Air Force tried to preselect fighter pilots after World War II, the only common denominator they could find among their World War II aces was that they had been involved in a lot of fights as children. Not bullies — for most true bullies avoid fights with anyone who is reasonably capable of fighting them — but fighters. If you can recapture or imagine the anger and indignity a child feels in a school-yard fight and magnify that into a way of life, then you can begin to understand these individuals and their capacity for violence.
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There is strong evidence that there exists a genetic predisposition for aggression. In all species the best hunter, the best fighter, the most aggressive male, survives to pass his biological predispositions on to his descendants. There are also environmental processes that can fully develop this predisposition toward aggression; when we combine this genetic predisposition with environmental development we get a killer. But there is another factor: the presence or absence of empathy for others. Again, there may be biological and environmental causes for this empathic process, but, whatever its origin, there is undoubtedly a division in humanity between those who can feel and understand the pain and suffering of others, and those who cannot. The presence of aggression, combined with the absence of empathy, results in sociopathy. The presence of aggression, combined with the presence of empathy, results in a completely different kind of individual from the sociopath.
One veteran I interviewed told me that he thought of most of the world as sheep: gentle, decent, kindly creatures who are essentially incapable of true aggression. In this veteran’s mind there is another human subspecies (of which he is a member) that is a kind of dog: faithful, vigilant creatures who are very much capable of aggression when circumstances require. But, according to his model, there are wolves (sociopaths) and packs of wild dogs (gangs and aggressive armies) abroad in the land, and the sheepdogs (the soldiers and policemen of the world) are environmentally and biologically predisposed to be the ones who confront these predators.
Some experts in the psychological and psychiatric community think that these men are simply sociopaths and that the above view of killers is romanticizing. But I believe that there is another category of human beings out there. We know about sociopaths because their condition is, by definition, a pathology or a psychological disorder. But the psychological community does not recognize this other category of human beings, these metaphoric sheepdogs, because their personality type does not represent pathology or disorder. Indeed, they are valuable and contributing members of our society, and it is only in time of war, or on police forces, that these characteristics can be observed.
I have met these men, these “sheepdogs,” over and over again as I interviewed veterans. They are men like one U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, a Vietnam veteran, who told me: “I learned early on in life that there are people out there who will hurt you if given the chance, and I have devoted my life to being prepared to face them.” These men are quite often armed and always vigilant. They would not misuse or misdirect their aggression any more <
CHAPTER SIX
A soldier who constantly reflected upon the knee-smashing, widow-making characteristics of his weapon, or who always thought of the enemy as a man exactly as himself, doing much the same task and subjected to exactly the same stresses and strains, would find it difficult to operate effectively in battle…. Without the creation of abstract images of the enemy, and without the depersonalization of the enemy during training, battle would become impossible to sustain. But if the abstract image is overdrawn or depersonalization is stretched into hatred, the restraints on human behavior in war are easily swept aside. If, on the other hand, men reflect too deeply upon the enemy’s common humanity, then they risk being unable to proceed with the task whose aims may be eminently just and legitimate. This conundrum lies, like a Gordian knot linking the diverse strands of hostility and affection, at the heart of the soldier’s relationship with the enemy.
