On Killing

before he died.

I was so transfixed by his death throes that I never fired a shot at the other guy, who escaped into the thick brush to the south. I jumped over the cliff and ran to reach the dying man, not sure if I wanted to help him or finish him. Something made me have to see him, what he looked like, how he died.

I knelt beside him as his life leaked into the dusty earth. My one shot had hit him in the left chest and ripped through his back. The rest of the patrol was scrambling up the cliff and shouting, but the only sound I heard was the soft bubbling of the dead man’s blood as it soaked into the dirt. His eyes were open, and his face was still young. He looked terribly peaceful. His war was over and mine had just begun.

The steady stream of blood from his wound made a widening circle of darkness beneath him, and I felt my innocence deserting me as his life deserted him. I’d come all the way to Vietnam now. I didn’t know if I’d ever get out. I still don’t.

As the rest of the platoon reached the plateau, I found a bush on the flank of the campfire and retched violently.

— Steve Banko

“Green Grunt Finds Innocence Lost”

Looking back on this narrative from the perspective of this point in the book, I find that there are many factors to be considered. Our newfound science of killology permits us to identify such key processes as the need to be ordered to kill (demands of authority and diffusion of responsibility), the picking out of the enemy soldier who was closest to the machine gun (target attractiveness and assisting in the rationalization process by picking the greater potential threat of two individuals who represented no immediate threat), and the emotional response of violent revulsion to the act of killing.

But what sticks in my mind is the phrase: “I didn’t know if I’d ever get out. I still don’t.” Those words haunt me.

This is no Ramboesque machismo; this is the actual emotional response of a young American soldier to one of the most horrifying events of his life. As he writes this to a national forum of understanding and sympathetic Vietnam veterans, he and many like him can be free to say that they were sickened by killing — and their writing and its publication become a vital catharsis. I believe that as these veterans write such narratives, they do not mean to say that the war was wrong or that they regret what they did, but that they simply want to be understood.

Understood not as mindless killers, and not as sniveling whiners, but as men. Men who went to do the incomprehensibly difficult job their nation sent them to do and did it proudly, did it well, and all too often did it thanklessly.

As I interviewed veterans during this study, the soldier, the psychologist, and the human being in me were always touched by this desperate, unspoken need for understanding and affirmation. Understanding that they did no more and no less than their nation and their society asked them to do; no more and no less than 200 years of American veterans had honorably done. And affirmation that they were good human beings.

Over and over again I have said, and before I go on to the final section, “Killing in America,” I want to say again, I am honored that you have shared this with me. You did all that anyone could ask you to have done, and I am truly proud to have known you. And I hope that I can use your words to help people understand.

SECTION VIII Killing in America: What Are We Doing to Our Children?

CHAPTER ONE A Virus of Violence

How simple it now seems for our ancestors to have stood outside their caves guarding against the fang and claw of predators. The evil that we must stand vigilant against is like a virus, starting from deep inside us, eating its way out until we’re devoured by and become its madness.

— Richard Heckler

In Search of the Warrior Spirit

The Magnitude of the Problem

If we examine the chart showing the relationship between murder, aggravated assault, and imprisonment in America since 1957, we see something that should astound us.

^{The Relationship Between Aggravated Assault, Murder, and Imprisonment Rates in America Since 1957}

“Aggravated assault” is defined in the Statistical Abstract (from which this data was gathered) as “assault with intent to kill or for the purpose of inflicting severe bodily injury by shooting, cutting, stabbing, maiming, poisoning, scalding, or by the use of acids, explosives, or other means.” We are also informed that this “excludes simple assaults.”[48]

The aggravated assault rate indicates the incidence of Americans trying to kill one another, and it is going up at an astounding rate. Two major factors serve as tourniquets that suppress the bleeding that would occur if the number of murders increased at the same rate as aggravated assaults. First is the steady increase in the presumably violent percentage of our population that we imprison. The prison population in America has quadrupled since 1975 (from just over two hundred thousand to slightly more than eight hundred thousand in 1992: nearly a million Americans in jail!). Professor John J. Dilulio of Princeton states unequivocally that “dozens of credible empirical analyses… leave no doubt that the increased use of prisons averted millions of serious crimes.” If not for our tremendous imprisonment rate (the highest of any major industrialized nation in the world), the aggravated assault rate and the murder rate would both be even higher.

The other major factor that limits the success of these attempts at killing is the continued progress in medical technology and methodology. Professor James Q. Wilson of UCLA estimates that if the quality of medical care (especially trauma and emergency care) were the same as it was in 1957, today’s murder rate would be three times higher. Helicopter medevacs, 911 operators, paramedics, and trauma centers are but a few of the technological and methodological innovations that save lives at ever-increasing rates. This more rapid and effective response, evacuation, and treatment of victims is the decisive factor in preventing the murder rate from being many times higher than it is now.

It is also interesting to note the dip in aggravated assault rates between 1980 and 1983. Some observers believed this was due to the maturing of the baby-boom generation and the overall aging of America and that violent crime would continue to decrease in succeeding years. However, this did not happen, and, in retrospect, although the aging of our society should cause a decrease in violence, a major factor may have been the sharp increase in the imprisonment rate during that period.

But demographers predict that our aging society will again become more youthful as the children of the baby boom have their own teenagers. And just how much longer can America afford to imprison larger and larger percentages of its population? And how much longer can advances in medical technology continue to keep up with advances in the aggravated assault rate?