excellent example of such a kill: “They didn’t know I existed… but I sure as hell saw them…. This is one f***ed up way to die, I thought as I squeezed softly on the trigger.”
Such a kill is by no means considered an atrocity, but it is also distinctly different from a noble kill and potentially harder for the killer to rationalize and deal with. Until this century such ambush kills were extremely rare in combat, and many civilizations partially protected themselves and their consciences and mental health by declaring such forms of warfare dishonorable.
One of the things that made Vietnam particularly traumatic was that due to the nature of guerrilla warfare, soldiers were often placed in situations in which the line between combatant and noncombatant was blurred:
For the tense, battle-primed GIs ordered to seal off the village, the often subtle nuances and indicators used by interrogators to identify VC from civilian, combatant from non-combatant, were a luxury they felt they could not afford. The decision, VC or not VC, often had to be reached in a split second and was compounded by the language barrier. The consequences of any ambiguity sometimes proved fatal to Vietnamese villagers. In Ben Suc, one unit of American soldiers, crouching near a road leading out of the village, were on the lookout for VC. A Vietnamese man approached their position on a bicycle. He wore black pajamas, the peasant outfit adopted by the VC. As he rode 20 yards past the point where he first came into view, a machine gun crackled some 30 yards in front of him. The man tumbled dead into a muddy ditch.
One soldier grimly commented: “That’s a VC for you. He’s a VC all right. That’s what they wear. He was leaving town. He had to have some reason.”
Maj Charles Malloy added: “What’re you going to do when you spot a guy in black pajamas? Wait for him to get out his automatic weapon and start shooting? I’m telling you I’m not.”
The soldiers never found out whether the Vietnamese was VC or not. Such was the perplexity of a war in which the enemy was not a foreign force but lived and fought among the people.
As we read the words of these men, we can place ourselves in their shoes and understand what they are saying. They were men trained to kill in a tense situation; they had no real need to justify their actions. So why did they try so hard? “That’s a VC for you. He’s a VC all right. That’s what they wear. He was leaving town. He had to have some reason.” It may be that what we are hearing here is someone trying desperately to justify his actions to himself. He has been placed in a situation in which he has been forced to take these kinds of actions, maybe even make these kinds of mistakes, and he
Sometimes it was even more difficult. For example, consider the situation that this U.S. Army helicopter pilot found himself in in Vietnam:
Off to our left we could see a couple of downed Hueys [helicopters] inside the paddy. Strangely, just as I reached the center of the hub I noticed an old lady, standing almost dead center of the hub, casually planting rice. Still zigzagging, I looked back over my shoulder at her trying to figure out what she was doing there — was she crazy or just determined not to let the war interfere with her schedule? Glancing again at the burning Hueys it dawned on me what she was doing out there and I turned back.
“Shoot that old woman, Hall,” I yelled, but Hall [the door gunner], who had been busy on his own side of the chopper had not seen her before and looked at me as if I had gone crazy, so we passed her without firing and I zigzagged around the paddies, dodging sniper fire, while I filled Hall in.
“She has a 360 degree view over the trees around the villages, Hall,” I yelled. “The machine gunners are watching her and when she sees Hueys coming, she faces them and they concentrate their fire over the spot. That’s why so many are down around here — she’s a goddamned weathervane for them. Shoot her!”
Hall gave me a thumbs up and I turned to make another pass, but Jerry and Paul [in another helicopter] had caught on to her also and had put her down. For some reason, as I again passed our burning Hueys, I could not feel anything but relief at the old woman’s death.
Was the woman being forced to do what she was doing? Was she truly a Vietcong sympathizer, or a victim? Were Vietcong weapons being held on her or her family?
And would anyone have done any differently than these pilots under the circumstances? Possibly. But possibly they would not have lived to tell about it if they had done differently. Certainly no one will ever prosecute these men, and most certainly they will have to live with these kinds of doubts for the rest of their lives.
Sometimes the trauma associated with these gray-area killings in modern combat can be tremendous:
Look, I don’t like to kill people, but I’ve killed Arabs [note the unconscious dehumanizing of the enemy]. Maybe I’ll tell you a story. A car came towards us, in the middle of the [Lebanese] war, without a white flag. Five minutes before another car had come, and there were four Palestinians with RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] in it — killed three of my friends. So this new Peugeot comes towards us, and we shoot. And there was a family there — three children. And I cried, but I couldn’t take the chance. It’s a real problem…. Children, father, mother. All the family was killed, but we couldn’t take the chance.
Once again, we see killing in modern warfare, in an age of guerrillas and terrorists, as increasingly moving from black and white to shades of gray. And as we continue down the atrocity spectrum, we will see a steady fade to black.
Dark Areas: Slaying the Ignoble Enemy
The close-range murder of prisoners and civilians during war is a demonstrably counterproductive action. Executing enemy prisoners stiffens the will of the enemy and makes him less likely to surrender. Yet in the heat of battle, it happens quite often.
Several of the Vietnam veterans I interviewed said, without detailed explanation, that they “never took prisoners.” Often in school and training situations when it is impractical to take prisoners during operations behind enemy lines, there is an unspoken agreement that the prisoners have to be “taken care of.”
But in the heat of battle it is not really all that simple. In order to fight at close range one must deny the humanity of one’s enemy. Surrender requires the opposite — that one recognize and take pity on the humanity of the enemy. A surrender in the heat of battle requires a complete, and very difficult, emotional turnaround by both parties. The enemy who opts to posture or fight and then dies in battle becomes a noble enemy. But if at the last minute he tries to surrender he runs a great risk of being killed immediately.
Holmes writes at length on this process:
Surrendering during battle is difficult. Charles Carrington suggested, “No soldier can claim a right to ‘quarter’ if he fights to the extremity.” T. P. Marks saw seven German machine-gunners shot. “They were defenseless, but they have chosen to make themselves so. We did not ask them to abandon their guns. They only did so when they saw that those who were not mown down were getting closer to them and the boot was now on the other foot.”
Ernst Junger agreed that the defender had no moral right to surrender in these circumstances: “the defending force, after driving their bullets into the attacking one at five paces’ distance, must take the consequences. A man cannot change his feelings again during the last rush with a veil of blood before his eyes. He does not want to take prisoners but to kill.”
