by Unknown
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and the lives of victims of these camps were completely dominated by the personalities of these terrifyingly brutal individuals.
Dyer tells us that concentration camps were staffed, whenever possible, with "both male and female thugs and sadists." Unlike the victims of aerial bombing, the victims of these camps had to look their sadistic killers in the face and know that another human being denied their humanity and hated them enough to personally slaughter them, their families, and their race as though they were nothing more than animals.
During strategic bombing the pilots and bombardiers were protected by distance and could deny to themselves that they were attempting to kill any specific individual. In the same way, civilian bombing victims were protected by distance, and they could deny that anyone was personally trying to kill them. And among the P O W s w h o were subject to bombing (as we saw earlier) the bombs were not personal, and the guards were no threat to the P O W s as long as they played by the rules. But in the death camps it was starkly, horribly personal. Victims of this horror had to look the darkest, most loathsome depths of human hatred in the eye. There was no room for denial, and the only escape was more madness.
It is here, in this sordid account of man's inhumanity to man, that we see the flip side of the aversion to killing in combat.
N o t only does the average soldier's psyche resist killing and the obligation to kill, but he is equally horrified by the inescapable fact that someone hates him and denies his humanity enough to kill him.
T h e soldier's response to the overtly hostile actions of the enemy is usually one of profound shock, surprise, and outrage. Countless veterans echo novelist and Vietnam veteran Phillip Caputo's first reaction to enemy fire in Vietnam. " W h y does he want to kill me?" thought Caputo. "What did I ever do to him?"
O n e Vietnam-era pilot told me that he was largely undisturbed by the impersonal flak around him, but he was memorably disturbed when he once focused on one lone enemy soldier "standing casually next to his hooch [hut], carefully firing up at m e . " It was one of the rare times he had ever been able to distinguish an individual enemy soldier, and his immediate response was an 80
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indignant "What did I ever do to him?" Then came a hurt and angry "I do not like you Sam I Am, I do not like you one damned bit." And he then directed all the resources and assets of his aircraft to kill this one individual and "blow up his little hooch."
An Application: Attrition Versus Maneuver Warfare In the field of strategy and tactics the impact and influence of the Wind of Hate have been widely overlooked. Numerous tacticians and strategists advocate attrition warfare theories, in which the will of enemy forces is destroyed through the application of long-range artillery and bombing. The advocates of such theories persist in such beliefs even in the face of evidence, such as the post-World War II U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which, in the words of Paul Fussell, ascertained that "German military and industrial production seemed to increase —just like civilian determination not to surrender — the more bombs were dropped." Psychologically, aerial and artillery bombardments are effective, but only in the front lines when they are combined with the Wind of Hate, as manifested in the threat of the personal infantry attack that usually follows such bombardments.
This is why there were mass psychiatric casualties following World War I artillery bombardments, but World War II's mass bombings of cities were surprisingly counterproductive in breaking the enemy's will. Such bombardments without an accompanying close-range assault, or at least the threat of such an assault, are ineffective and may even serve no other purpose than to stiffen the will and resolve of the enemy!
Today a few pioneering authors such as William Lind and Robert Leonhard have focused their research and writings on the field of maneuver warfare, in which they attempt to refute the advocates of attrition warfare and understand the process of destroying the enemy's will to fight rather than his ability to fight. What maneuver warfare advocates have discovered is that over and over in history, civilians and soldiers have withstood the actuality of fear, horror, death, and destruction during artillery bombardments and aerial bombardments without losing their will to fight, while the mere THE WIND OF HATE
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threat of invasion and close-up interpersonal aggression has consistently turned whole populations into refugees fleeing in panic.
This is why putting unfriendly troop units in the enemy's rear is infinitely more important and effective than even the most comprehensive bombardments in his rear or attrition along his front. We saw this in the Korean War, in which, during the early years of the war, the rate of psychiatric casualties was almost seven times higher than the average rate for World War II. Only after the war settled down, lines stabilized, and the threat of having enemy in the rear areas decreased, did the average rate go down to slightly less than that of World War II. The potential of close-up, inescapable, interpersonal hatred and aggression is more effective and has greater impact on the morale of the soldier than the presence of inescapable, impersonal death and destruction.
Hate and Psychological Inoculation
Martin Seligman developed the concept of inoculation from stress from his famous studies of learning in dogs. He put dogs in a cage that had an electric shock pass through the floor at random intervals.
Initially the dogs would jump, yelp, and scratch pitifully in their attempts to escape the shocks, but after a time they would fall into a depressed, hopeless state of apathy and inactivity that Seligman termed "learned helplessness." After falling into a state of learned helplessness the dogs would not avoid the shocks even when provided with an obvious escape route.
Other dogs were given a means of escape after receiving some shocks but before falling into learned helplessness. These dogs learned that they could and would eventually escape from the shocks, and after only one such escape they became inoculated against learned helplessness. Even after long periods of random, inescapable shocks these inoculated dogs would escape when finally provided with a means to do so.
This is all a very interesting theoretical concept, but what is important to us is to understand that this process of inoculation is exactly what occurs in boot camps and in every other military school worthy of its name. When raw recruits are faced with seemingly 82 KILLING AND COMBAT TRAUMA
sadistic abuse and hardship (which they "escape" through weekend passes and, ultimately, graduation) they are — among many other things — being inoculated against the stresses of combat.
Combining an understanding of (a) those factors that cause combat trauma with (b) an understanding of the inoculation process permits us to understand that in most of these military schools the inoculation is specifically oriented toward hate.
The drill sergeant who screams into the face of a recruit is manifesting overt interpersonal hostility. Another effective means of inoculating a trainee against the Wind of Hate can be seen in U.S. Army and USMC pugil-stick training during boot camp or at the U.S. Military Academy and the British Airborne Brigade, where boxing matches are a traditional part of the training and initiation process. When in the face of all of this manufactured contempt and overt physical hostility the recruit overcomes the situation to graduate with honor and pride, he realizes at both conscious and unconscious levels that he can overcome such overt interpersonal hostility. He has become partially inoculated against hate.
I do not believe that military organizations have truly understood the nature of the Wind of Hate, or of the resultant need for this kind of inoculation. It is only since Seligman's research that we have really had the foundation for a clinical understanding of these processes. However, through thousands of years of institutional memory and the harshest kind of survival-of-the-fittest evolution, this kind of inoculation has manifested itself in the traditions of the finest and most aggressive fighting units of many nations. By understanding the role of hate on the battlefield, we now can finally and truly understa
nd the military value of what armies have done for so long and some of the processes by which they have enabled the soldier to physically and psychically survive on the battlefield.
Chapter Six
The Well of Fortitude
Stay with me, God. The night is dark.
The night is cold: my little spark
of courage dies. The night is long;
be with me, God, and make me strong.
—Junius, Vietnam veteran
Many authorities speak and write of emotional stamina on the batllefield as a finite resource. I have termed this the Well of Fortitude. Faced with the soldier's encounters with horror, guilt, fear, exhaustion, and hate, each man draws steadily from his own private reservoir of inner strength and fortitude until finally the well runs dry. And then he becomes just another statistic. I believe that this metaphor of the well is an excellent one for understanding why at least 98 percent of all soldiers in close combat will ultimately become psychiatric casualties.
Fortitude and Individuals
George Keenan tells us that "heroism, the Caucasian mountaineers say, is endurance for one moment more." In the trenches of World War I Lord Moran learned that courage "is not a chance gift of nature like aptitude . . . it is willpower that can be spent — and when it is used up — men are finished. 'Natural courage' does 84 KILLING AND C O M B A T T R A U M A
exist; but it is really fearlessness . . . as opposed to the courage of control."
In sustained combat this process of emotional bankruptcy is seen in 98 percent of all soldiers w h o survive physically. Lord Moran presented the case of Sergeant Taylor, who "was wounded and came back unchanged; he seemed proof against the accidents of his life, he stood in the Company like a rock; men were swept up to him and eddied round him for a little time and ebbed away again, but he remained." He finally suffered a near miss from an artillery shell. W h e n Sergeant Taylor went to the well he found it to be empty, and this indomitable rock shattered: completely and catastrophically.
Fortitude and Depression
Holmes has gathered a list of the symptoms of men suffering from combat exhaustion. For these individuals the demands of combat have caused too great a drain on their o w n personal stocks of fortitude, resulting in conditions such as
a general slowing down of mental processes and apathy, as far as they were concerned the situation was one of absolute hopelessness. . . . The influence and reassurance of understanding officers and NCOs failed to arouse these soldiers from their hopelessness. . . . The soldier was slow-witted. . . . Memory defects became so extreme that he could not be counted on to relay a verbal order. . . . He could then best be described as one leading a vegetative existence. . . . He remained almost constantly in or near his slit trench, and during acute actions took no part, trembling constantly.
This is a vivid description of severe depression. Exhaustion, m e m -
ory defects, apathy, hopelessness, and all the rest of these are precise descriptions of clinical depression that can be taken straight from the DSM-III-R. This is why "fortitude," rather than "courage,"
is the proper word to describe what is occurring here. It is not just a reaction to fear, but rather a reaction to a host of stressors that suck the will and life out of a man and leave him clinically depressed. The opposite of courage is cowardice, but the opposite of fortitude is exhaustion. W h e n the soldier's well is dry, his very THE WELL OF FORTITUDE 85
soul is dry, and, in Lord Moran's words, "he had gazed upon the face of death too long until exhaustion had dried him up making him so much tinder, which a chance spark of fear might set alight."
Fortitude from Other Men's Wells, and Replenishment Through Victory
A brave captain is as a root, out of which, as branches, the courage of his soldiers doth spring.
— Sir Philip Sidney
One key characteristic of a great military leader is an ability to draw from the tremendous depths of fortitude within his own well, and in doing so he is fortifying his own men by permitting them to draw from his well. Many writers have recorded this process as being at work in the combat situations they observed.
Lord Moran noted that "a few men had the stuff of leadership in them, they were like rafts to which all the rest of humanity clung for support and hope."
Victory and success in battle also replenish individual and collective wells. Moran tells us that if a soldier is always using up his capital he may from time to time add to it. "There is," says Moran,
"a paying in as well as a paying out." He gives as an example General Alexander, who took command of the British forces in North Africa in World War II. When Alexander took command, the men often did not bother to salute an officer, but after their victory of El Alamein all that came to an end, and their self-respect came back. Moran concluded that "achievement is a sharp tonic to morale. . . . But in the main, time is against the soldier."
Fortitude and Units
Depletion of the finite resource of fortitude can be seen in entire units as well as individuals. The fortitude of a unit is no more than the aggregate of the fortitude of its members. And when the individuals are drained to a dry husk, the whole is nothing more than an aggregate of exhausted men.
In Normandy during World War II Field Marshal Montgomery had two classes of divisions. Some were veterans of North Africa, 86
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and others were green units, without previous combat experience.
Montgomery initially tended to rely on his veteran units (particularly during the disastrous Operation Goodwood), but these units performed poorly, while his green units performed well. In this instance, failing to understand the influence of emotional exhaustion and the Well of Fortitude had a significant negative impact on the Allied effort in World War II.
In the same way, all of the aspects of combat trauma impact profoundly upon the individual's contribution to the battlefield and upon the contribution of that aggregate of individuals that we call military units. If we understand these concepts we begin to master the full spectrum of the responses of men in combat. If we ignore them we do so to the detriment of the individual, and to the detriment of that aggregate of individuals that we call our society, our nation, our way of life, and our world. Lord Moran concluded that such ignorance of the ultimate cost of depleting the Well of Fortitude of England's youth in World War I caused that nation "to dissipate like a spend thrift not only the lives but the moral heritage of the youth of England."
Chapter Seven
The Burden of Killing
Alfred de Vigny went to the heart of the military experience when he observed that the soldier is both victim and executioner. Not only does he run the risk of being killed and wounded himself, but he also kills and wounds others.
—John Keegan and Richard Holmes
Soldiers
The resistance to the close-range killing of one's own species is so great that it is often sufficient to overcome the cumulative influences of the instinct for self-protection, the coercive forces of leadership, the expectancy of peers, and the obligation to preserve the lives of comrades.
The soldier in combat is trapped within this tragic Catch-22.
If he overcomes his resistance to killing and kills an enemy soldier in close combat, he will be forever burdened with blood guilt, and if he elects not to kill, then the blood guilt of his fallen comrades and the shame of his profession, nation, and cause lie upon him. He is damned if he does, and damned if he doesn't.
To Kill, and the Guilt Thereof
William Manchester, author and U.S. Marine veteran of World War II, felt remorse and shame after his close-range personal killing 88
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of a Japanese soldier. "I can remember," he wrote, "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." Other combat veterans tell of the emotional responses associated with
a close-range kill that echo Manchester's horror.
T h e media's depiction of violence tries to tell us that m e n can easily throw off the moral inhibitions of a lifetime — and whatever other instinctive restraint exists — and kill casually and guiltlessly in combat. T h e men w h o have killed, and w h o will talk about it, tell a different tale. A few of these quotes, which are drawn from Keegan and Holmes, can be found elsewhere in this study, but here they represent the distilled essence of the soldier's emotional response to killing:
Killing is the wont thing that one man can do to another man . . .
it's the last thing that should happen anywhere.
— Israeli lieutenant
I reproached myself as a destroyer. An indescribable uneasiness came over me, I felt almost like a criminal.
— Napoleonic-era British soldier
This was the first time I had killed anybody and when things quieted down I went and looked at a German I knew I had shot.
I remember thinking that he looked old enough to have a family and I felt very sorry.
— British World War I veteran after his first kill It didn't hit me all that much then, but when I think of it now — I slaughtered those people. I murdered them.
— German World War II veteran
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.