NVA tactic of breaking into such small units that there was no effective way to go after them.
All of this comes as an introduction to Bray’s magazine article in which he tells of the time when he didn’t ask for orders. Instead he landed his little two-seater helicopter and, at great danger to himself and his copilot, captured a solitary NVA soldier, rather than executing him, and subsequently brought the prisoner home sitting in his copilot’s lap.
Here again we see an article that appears to represent a deeply felt request for understanding by the reader. The average reader probably sees no need to justify these kills, but the killer does. The point here is that it is this one incident of which Bray is — I think justifiably — proud. And it is this incident that he wanted to tell in a national forum. His message can be seen over and over in these personal narratives about Vietnam: “Look, we did our job and we did it well, and it needed doing even though we didn’t like it; but sometimes we just had to go above and beyond what was expected of us in order to avoid the killing.” And maybe by writing and publishing this article he is telling us that “this time, the time when I didn’t have to kill anybody, this is the time that I want to tell you about. This is the time that I want to be remembered for.”
Sometimes the rationalization can manifest itself in dreams. Ray, a veteran of close combat in the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, told me of a recurring dream in which he would talk with the young Panamanian soldier he had killed in close combat. “Why did you kill me?” asked the soldier each time. And in his dreams Ray would attempt to explain to his victim, but in reality he was explaining and rationalizing the act of killing to himself: “Well, if you were in my place, wouldn’t you have done the same?… It was either you or us.” And over the last few years, as Ray worked through the rationalization process in his dreams, the soldier and his questions have gone away.
Here we have seen some aspects of how rationalization and acceptance works, but we need to remember that these are just some aspects of a lifelong process. If the process fails it will result in post-traumatic stress disorder. The failure of the rationalization and acceptance process in Vietnam, and its subsequent impact upon our nation, will be looked at in “Killing in Vietnam,” the next section of this book.
CHAPTER TWO
An Application: Murder-Suicides and Aggression Responses
An understanding of the killing response stages permits understanding of individual responses to violence outside of combat. For instance, we may now be able to understand some of the psychology behind murder- suicides. A murderer, particularly an individual who kills several victims in a spree of violent passion, may very well be fixated in the exhilaration stage of killing. But once there is a lull, and the murderer has a chance to dwell on what he has done, the revulsion stage sets in with such intensity that suicide is a very common response.
These responses can even occur when aggression intrudes into our day-to-day peacetime lives. They are far more intense when one kills in close combat, but just a fistfight can bring them up. Richard Heckler, a psychologist and a high-level master of the martial art of aikido, experienced the full range of response stages in a fight with a group of teenagers who attacked him in his driveway:
When I turned my back someone shot out of the back seat, grabbed my arm, and spun me around. A bolt of adrenalin surged through me and without a moment’s hesitation I backhanded him in the face.
I was suddenly released from all restraints. I’d been assaulted physically, it was now my right to unleash the fury I felt from the beginning. As the driver came towards me I pushed his grab aside and pinned him by the throat against the car…. The kid I hit was stumbling around holding his face. I was in full-bloom righteous indignation by this point. Having given myself total permission to set justice in order I turned to settle matters with the kid under my grip.
What I saw stopped me in horror. He looked at me in total and absolute fear. His eyes were glazed in terror; his body shook violently. A searing pain spread through my chest and heart. I suddenly lost my stomach for revenge… seeing that boy’s terror as I held his throat made me understand what Nietzsche meant when he wrote… “Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared.”
First we see the actual, initial blow being struck reflexively without thinking: “without a moment’s hesitation I backhanded him in the face.” Then the exhilaration and euphoria stage occurs: “I was suddenly released from all restraints…. it was now my right to unleash the fury I felt.” And suddenly the revulsion stage sets in: “What I saw stopped me in horror…. A searing pain spread through my chest and heart.”
This process might even help to explain the responses of nations to killing in warfare. After the Gulf War, President Bush was the most popular president in recent American history. America was in the euphoria stage as it had its parades and congratulated itself on its performance. Then came a kind of moral hangover very much like the revulsion stage, which was just in time for President Bush to lose the election. Could this be pushing the model too far? Perhaps, but the same thing happened to Churchill after World War II, and it almost happened to Truman in 1948. Truman was lucky enough to have his election three years after the war was over, which may have been sufficient time for the nation to begin the rationalization and acceptance stage. This may indeed be stretching the model too far, but perhaps it will give future politicians something to think about when they consider going to war.
“I Thought I Was Insane”: Interaction Between Exhilaration and Remorse
When I talk to veterans’ groups about the killing response stages their reactions are always remarkable. Any good speaker or teacher recognizes when he has struck a chord in his audience, but the response of veterans to the killing response stage — particularly to the interaction between the exhilaration and the remorse stages — is the most powerful I have ever experienced.
One of the things that appears to occur among men in combat is that they feel the high of the exhilaration stage, and then when the remorse stage sets in they believe that there must be something “wrong” or “sick” about them to have enjoyed it so intensely. The common response is something like: “My God, I just killed a man and I enjoyed it. What is wrong with me?”
If the demands from authority and the threatening enemy are intense enough to overcome a soldier’s resistance, it is only understandable that he feel some sense of satisfaction. He has hit his target, he has saved his friends, and he has saved his own life. He has resolved the conflict successfully. He won. He is alive! But a good portion of the subsequent remorse and guilt appears to be a horrified response to this perfectly natural and common feeling of exhilaration.
Again, I should emphasize that not all combatants go through all stages. Eric, a USMC veteran, described how these stages occurred in his combat experiences. His first kill in Vietnam was an enemy soldier whom he had just seen urinating along the trail. When this soldier subsequently moved toward him, Eric shot him. “It didn’t feel good,” he said. “It didn’t feel good at all.” There was no discernible exhilaration, or even any satisfaction. But later, when he killed enemy soldiers who were “coming over the wire” in a firefight, he felt what he called “satisfaction, a satisfaction of anger.”
Eric’s case brings out two points. The first is that when you have cause to identify with your victim (that is,
