Book Review - On Killing: The Psychological Costs of Learning to Kill in War and Society

On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill In War and Society is written by a soldier, and it shows. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman is a military psychologist, not a scientist, and as a scientist I found it incredibly frustrating to read this book - almost none of his assertions are sourced or cited in full. Additionally, Grossman's admiration for his fellow soldiers is made manifest throughout the book. Although he makes a good case that these soldiers deserve, if not admiration, at least compassion, his frequent, brook-no-argument assertions that most soldiers are "brave", "noble" people committing a "necessary evil" can be grating to those of a more pacifist bent.

In other words, it was not easy going slogging through this book. However, none of this means that Grossman doesn't have some incredibly thought-provoking things to say.

This book was written to explain a startling fact: throughout most of military history, up until the end of World War II, the vast majority of soldiers (between 75 and 95%) have refused to kill. Brigadier S.L.A. Marshall, who studied this phenomenon during World War II, found that no more than 20% of soldiers would "take any part with their weapons". These results can be found throughout time and across cultures, from Alexander the Great who lost only 700 men in years of fighting, to tribesmen in New Guinea who remove the arrows from their feathers before going off to war, to the soldiers at Rosebud Creek in 1876 who fired 252 rounds for each Native American they hit.

The Battle of Gettysburg is considered one of America's bloodiest battles, but as Grossman shows, it could have been a great deal bloodier. Averages and estimates suggest that during Napoleonic and Civil War times, an entire regiment, firing from a range of thirty yards, would hit only one or two men a minute. Let's break down the numbers:

- a regiment contains between 200 and 1,000 men
- a soldier operating at peak efficiency could get off 1-5 shots per minute
- during training, these soldiers were 25% accurate at 225 yards, 40% accurate at 150 yards, and 60% accurate at 70 yards

Taking the most modest of these estimates - a 200 man regiment shooting once per minute with 25% accuracy - you would expect to see about 50 hits, more than 25 times that which was generally observed. As one officer observed, "It seems strange that a company of men can fire volley after volley at a like number of men at not over a distance of fifteen steps and not cause a single casualty. Yet such was the facts in this instance."

What was happening? Soldiers were resorting to a number of options, anything that meant that they didn't have to kill. Some fell back to support positions. A few faked injury or ran away. Many fired into the air. In Civil War times, conscience-stricken soldiers also had the option of pretending to fire - that is, loading up their muskets, mimicking the movements of a firing soldier next to them, and pretending to recoil. These soldiers would then be carrying loaded weapons or would have loaded their weapons multiple times.

When the fighting at Gettysburg was over, 27,574 muskets were found on the battlefield. Over 90% were loaded. Given that loading a weapon took roughly twenty times as long as firing it, the chances of these muskets representing mostly soldiers cut down just as they intended to shoot are slim. But then how do you explain the 12,000 multiply-loaded weapons, with 6,000 of them loaded with 3-10 rounds apiece?

Clearly there is among soldiers (as among most people) a deeply ingrained resistance to killing ones fellow human beings. Grossman devotes most of his book to discussing the ways in which this resistance can be overcome and the consequences to a soldier's psyche when that happens. In doing the former, Grossman is not being terribly original - I found the discussions of emotional and physical distance from the victim, obedience to authority and group absolution of responsibility, taught me nothing new, although someone with little knowledge of these topics might find them pretty fascinating (they are fascinating topics).

Where Grossman really shines is in his discussions of psychiatric casualties. He theorizes that psychiatric trauma is due primarily not to incredibly high levels of physical stress and constant fear, but to the moral strain of overcoming one's instinctive revulsion towards killing. The idea that psychiatric casualties - henceforth abbreviated PCs - are due to fear of death is pretty intuitive. That was a major reason for the German bombing of Allied cities, and the Allies' bombing of German civilians. The war was already causing incredible numbers of PCs (there were more allied PCs than soldiers killed by enemy fire during WWI) and it was thought that civilians would be much less prepared to deal with the horrors of war. The bombers expected massive numbers of PCs among civilians... and got pretty much none.

Why? Could it be that, as rough as things were for civilians in a besieged city, the one thing they were not forced to do was kill? Anecdotal evidence bears this out - when prisons are bombed, psychological trauma is observed only in guards, not prisoners. Both groups are endangered, but only one holds the moral responsibility for the lives of others. A look at military patrols also finds few PCs. Soldiers on patrol in enemy territory are in incredibly dangerous positions. But patrols are given orders not to engage the enemy under almost any circumstances - they are not required to kill, and therefore their level of psychological trauma is low.

Grossman makes a convincing argument. He then goes on to discuss how modern militaries, recognizing this issue, have worked to overcome soldiers' natural resistance to killing and have subsequently increased firing rates. Whereas in WWII, only 15-20% of infantry fired their rifles, 50% of soldiers in Korea did so and almost 90% of soldiers did so in Vietnam. Grossman credits this rise to the American military's campaign of desensitization to violence, dehumanization of the enemy, and above all, their use of classical and operant conditioning techniques. One of the most important changes was in the targets used in target practice. No more stationary white circles collected at the end of the session! Explains Grossman:

"In behavioral terms, the man shape popping up in the soldier's field of fire is the 'conditioned stimulus', the immediate engaging of the target is the 'target behavior'. 'Positive reinforcement' is given in the form of immediate feedback when the target drops if it is hit... these hits are then exchanged for marksmanship badges which have some form of privilege or reward association with them (praise, public recognition, three-day passes)"

A trainer for the Israeli Defense Forces describes his tactics:

"I changed the standard firing targets to full-size, anatomically correct figures because no Syrian runs around with a big white square on his chest with numbers on it. I put clothes on these targets and polyurethane heads. I cut up a cabbage and poured catsup into it and put it back together. I said, 'When you look through that scope, I want you to see a head blowing up.'"

Grossman spends an entire section detailing the plight of the Vietnam veteran, trained in these methods and killing at a rate unparalleled in human history. The human revulsion for killing is not conditioned away in these men, merely suppressed. Previous generations of returning soldiers came home to monuments, to parades, to individuals and society as a whole assuring them that what they'd done was right and necessary. Even then, veterans still battled with their guilt. Vietnam veterans came home to cries of "Murderer!" and "Babykiller!" For Vietnam veterans, there was no hiding from what they'd done. Their fellow citizens echoed what their own consciences already told them - that they'd done something terribly, terribly wrong.

Is it any wonder that as many as 1.5 million veterans - more than half of those who served in Vietnam - suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? Is it any wonder that so many Vietnam veterans are divorced, addicted to drugs, homeless?

Let me step away from the Vietnam veterans for a moment, because as sad as their story is, that's not the take-home message I got from this book. For me, the most insightful section was the section on war crimes, what Grossman labels "atrocity". Now, Grossman doesn't actually say anything that interesting, although he does provide a pretty thorough "spectrum of atrocity" and a list of reasons why soldiers and societies might resort to atrocity. But as I read this section, in the context of Grossman's previous arguments, I found myself wondering:

If you accept that human beings have an intense, instinctive resistance to killing others of their own species, and if you devote months of training to overcoming that resistance, to systematically breaking down those barriers and applying stress and authority in all the right places, to destroying that part of a human that screams out that killing is wrong - what is to stop a soldier when he faces a surrendered enemy, a civilian, a child? You've already told him not to listen to his conscience. You've already trained him to ignore any feelings of empathy. You've trained him to kill, and that's what he's going to do.

*

There are several sections of this book I've glossed over. Grossman has a tendency to address too much, too shallowly. The last section, on violence in modern American society, points to the role of videogames in conditioning children to commit violence and the role of television and movies in desensitization. Grossman does not assert that this is the main cause of the rise in violence in modern society, but he astutely points out that it could play a role. There is apparently much evidence linking violent television to violent behavior. I say apparently, because Grossman source any of it, but presumably the APA did actually say in 1993 that "there is absolutely no doubt that higher levels of viewing violence on television are correlated with increased acceptance of aggressive attitudes and increased aggressive behavior". Of course, correlation does not equal causation, but in a book of this quality, one would not expect Grossman to really address the issue.

I think I've run out of things to say about this book. I do think that one of the best things about it, though, is the quotes that Grossman collects from the veterans he talks to (he borrows some from other sources too), so I'll end this review by copying some of them for you:

"I was just absolutely gripped by the fear that this man would expect me and would shoot me. But as it turned out he was in a sniper harness and couldn't turn around fast enough. He was entangled in the harness so I shout him with a .45... I can remember whispering foolishly 'I'm sorry' and then just throwing up... I threw up all over myself. It was a betrayal of what I'd been taught since a child."

"We saw the children and the women with their babies and then I heard the poouff - the flame had broken through the thatched roof and there was a yellow-brown smoke column going up into the air. It didn't hit me all that much then, but when I think of it now - I slaughtered those people. I murdered them."

"And I froze, 'cos it was a boy, I would say between the ages of twelve and fourteen. When he turned at me and looked, all of a sudden he turned his whole body and pointed his automatic weapon at me, I just opened up, fired the whole twenty rounds right at the kid, and he just laid there. I dropped my weapon and cried."

"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 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... children, father, mother. All the family was killed, but we couldn't take the chance."