On Killing

you see him participate in some act that emphasizes his humanity, such as urinating, eating, or smoking) it is much harder to kill him, and there is much less satisfaction associated with the kill, even if the victim represents a direct threat to you and your comrades at the time you kill him. The second point is that subsequent kills are always easier, and there is much more of a tendency to feel satisfaction or exhilaration after the second killing experience, and less tendency to feel remorse.

You don’t even have to personally kill to experience these response stages and the interaction between the exhilaration and remorse stages. Sol, a veteran of naval combat in World War II, told of his exhilaration when he saw his ship shelling a Japanese-held island. Later, when he saw the charred and mangled Japanese bodies, he felt remorse and guilt, and for the rest of his life he has been trying to rationalize and accept the pleasure he felt. Sol, like thousands of others I have spoken to, was profoundly relieved to realize that his deepest, darkest secrets were no different than those of other soldiers with similar experiences.

One veteran’s letter to the editor in response to Jack Thompson’s article “Combat Addiction” reveals the desperate need for an understanding of these processes:

[Jack Thompson’s] insight has always astounded me, but this piece was really out of the ordinary…. What was really right on target was the combat addiction part. For quite a long time I thought I was insane off and on.

Just a simple understanding of the universality of these emotions helped one man understand that he wasn’t really crazy, that he was just experiencing a common human reaction to an uncommon situation. Again, that is the objective of this study: no judgment, no condemnation, just the remarkable power of understanding.

SECTION VII Killing in Vietnam: What Have We Done to Our Soldiers?

With the frost of his breath wreathing his face, the new president proclaimed, “Now the trumpet summons us… to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle…. against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.”

Exactly twelve yeas later, in January 1973, an agreement signed in Paris would end U.S. military efforts in Vietnam. The trumpet would be silent, the mood sullen. American fighting men would depart with the war unwon. The United States of America would no longer be willing to pay any price.

— Dave Palmer

Summons of the Trumpet

What happened in Vietnam? Why do between 400,000 and 1.5 million Vietnam vets suffer from PTSD as a result of that tragic war?[39] Just what have we done to our soldiers?

CHAPTER ONE Desensitization and Conditioning in Vietnam: Overcoming the Resistance to Killing

“Nobody Understood”: An Incident in a VFW Hall

As I conducted interviews for this study in a VFW hall in Florida in the summer of 1989, a Vietnam vet named Roger started talking about his experiences over a beer. It was still early in the afternoon, but down the bar an older woman already began to attack him. “You got no right to snivel about your little pish-ant war. World War Two was a real war. Were you even alive then? Huh? I lost a brother in World War Two.”

We tried to ignore her; she was only a local character. But finally Roger had enough. He looked at her and calmly, coldly, said: “Have you ever had to kill anyone?”

“Well no!” she answered belligerently.

“Then what right have you got to tell me anything?”

There was a long, painful silence throughout the VFW hall, as would occur in a home where a guest had just witnessed an embarrassing family argument.

Then I asked quietly, “Roger, when you got pushed just now, you came back with the fact that you had to kill in Vietnam. Was that the worst of it for you?”

“Yah,” he said. “That’s half of it.”

I waited for a very long time, but he didn’t go on. He only stared into his beer. Finally I had to ask, “What was the other half?”

“The other half was that when we got home, nobody understood.”

What Happened over There, and What Happened over Here

As discussed earlier, there is a profound resistance to killing one’s fellow man. In World War II, 75 to 80 percent of riflemen did not fire their weapons at an exposed enemy, even to save their lives and the lives of their friends. In previous wars nonfiring rates were similar.

In Vietnam the nonfiring rate was close to 5 percent.

The ability to increase this firing rate, though, comes with a hidden cost. Severe psychological trauma becomes a distinct possibility when psychological safeguards of such magnitude are overridden. Psychological conditioning was applied en masse to a body of soldiers, who, in previous wars, were shown to be unwilling or unable to engage in killing activities. When these soldiers, already inwardly shaken by their inner killing experiences, returned to be condemned and attacked by their own nation, the result was often further psychological trauma and long-term psychic damage.

Overcoming the Resistance to Killing: The Problem

But for the infantry, the problem of persuading soldiers to kill is now a major one…. That an infantry company in World War II could wreak such havoc with only about one seventh of the soldiers willing to use their weapons is a testimony to the lethal effects of modern firepower, but once armies realized what was actually going on, they at once set about to raise the average.

Soldiers had to be taught, very specifically, to kill. “We are reluctant to admit that essentially war is the