On killing

by Unknown

  The psychological, psychiatric, medical, counseling, and social work communities must understand the impact of combat kills on the soldier and must attempt to further understand and reinforce the rationalization and acceptance process outlined in this book.

  In their 1988 research on PTSD Stellman and Stellman, both chemists by training, were the first to conduct a large-scale correlation study on the relationship between combat experience and PTSD. They reported that the "great majority" of veterans turning to mental-health services were not asked about their combat experiences, let alone their personal kills.

  Last, we must attempt to understand the basic act of killing, not just in war, but throughout our society.

  A Personal Note

  "Who the f- are the two guys up here with the machine gun?"

  I asked, slinking back over the edge of the cliff.

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  "That's gotta be Charlie, you asshole . . . Blow their ass up and run. . . ."

  They didn't know I existed. Low underbrush shielded the edge of the cliff from their view, but I sure as hell saw them. My body started to shake and spasm as I rested my elbow on the hard laterite.

  I sighted down the barrel and put the front sight under one guy's chest. He was sitting closest to the machine gun, and he would die because of it.

  This is one f ed up way to die, I thought as I squeezed softly on the trigger.

  The explosion of the round roared like a cannon in my ear. My target flattened out, and for an instant I couldn't tell if he ducked or had been hit. The doubts disappeared when I saw his foot quiver and his body shudder 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.

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  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.

  S E C T I O N V I I I

  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.

  "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 " e x -

  cludes simple assaults."1

  The aggravated assault rate indicates the incidence of Americans trying to kill one another, and it is going up at an astounding rate.

  T w o major factors serve as tourniquets that suppress the bleeding

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

  A V I R U S OF VIOLENCE

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  that would occur if the number of murders increased at the same rate as aggravated assaults. First is the steady increase in the presum-ably 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 industrial-ized 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, para-medics, 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 b
etween 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?

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  Like Alice, we are running as fast as we can to stay where we are. America's huge imprisonment rate and desperate application of medical progress are technological tourniquets to stop us from bleeding to death in an orgy of violence. But they do so by dealing with the symptoms of the problem rather than the root cause.

  The Cause of the Problem: Taking the Safety Catch off of a Nation

  We know, as surely as we know that we are alive, that the whole human race is dancing on the edge of the grave. . . .

  The easiest and worst mistake we could make would be to blame our present dilemma on the mere technology of war. . . . It is our attitudes toward war and our uses for it that really demand our attention.

  — Gwynne Dyer

  War

  What is the root cause of this epidemic of violence in our society?

  An application of the lessons of combat killing may have much to teach us about the constraint and control of peacetime violence.

  Are the same processes the military used so effectively to enable killing in our adolescent, draftee soldiers in Vietnam being indiscriminately applied to the civilian population of this nation?

  The three major psychological processes at work in enabling violence are classical conditioning (a la Pavlov's dog), operant conditioning (a la B. F. Skinner's rats), and the observation and imitation of vicarious role models in social learning.

  In a kind of reverse Clockwork Orange classical conditioning process, adolescents in movie theaters across the nation, and watching television at home, are seeing the detailed, horrible suffering and killing of human beings, and they are learning to associate this killing and suffering with entertainment, pleasure, their favorite soft drink, their favorite candy bar, and the close, intimate contact of their date.

  Operant conditioning firing ranges with pop-up targets and immediate feedback, just like those used to train soldiers in modern A VIRUS OF VIOLENCE 303

  armies, are found in the interactive video games that our children play today. But whereas the adolescent Vietnam vet had stimulus discriminators built in to ensure that he only fired under authority, the adolescents who play these video games have no such safeguard built into their conditioning.

  And, finally, social learning is being used as children learn to observe and imitate a whole new realm of dynamic vicarious role models, such as Jason and Freddy of endless Friday the 13 th and Nightmare on Elm Street sequels, along with a host of other horrendous, sadistic murderers. Even the more classic heroes, such as the archetypal law-abiding police detective, is today portrayed as a murderous, unstable vigilante who operates outside the law.

  There are more factors involved. This is a complex, interactive process that includes all the factors that enable killing in combat.

  Gang leaders and gang members demand violent, even killing, activity and create diffusion of individual responsibility; and gang affiliation, loosening family and religious ties, racism, class differences, and the availability of weapons provide forms of real and emotional distance between the killer and the victim. If we look again at our model for killing-enabling factors and apply it to civilian killing, we can see the way in which all of these factors interact to enable violence in America.

  All of these factors are important. Drugs, gangs, poverty, racism, and guns are all vital ingredients in a process that has resulted in skyrocketing violence rates in our society. But drugs have always been a problem, just as drugs (alcohol, and so on) have always been present in combat. Gangs have always been present, just as combat has always taken place in organized units. Poverty and racism have always been a part of our society (often much more so than today), just as propaganda, class divisions, and racism have always been manipulated in combat. And guns have always been present in American society, just as they have always been present in American wars.

  In the 1950s and 1960s students brought knives to high school, whereas today they bring .22s. But those .22s were pretty much always present at home. And while there is new weapons technology 304

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  available, fifteen minutes with a hacksaw will make a pistol out of any double-barrel shotgun, a pistol every bit as effective in close combat as any weapon in the world today — this was true one hundred years ago, and it is true today.2

  The thing we need to ask ourselves is not, Where did the guns come from? They came from home, where they have always been available, or they may have been bought in the street thanks to the drug culture — which deals in illegal weapons as readily as it deals in illegal drugs. But the question we need to ask is, What makes today's children bring those guns to school when their parents did not? And the answer to that question may be that the important ingredient, the vital, new, different ingredient in killing in modern combat and in killing in modern American society, is the systematic process of defeating the normal individual's age-old, psychological inhibition against violent, harmful activity toward one's own species. Are we taking the safety catch off of a nation, just as surely and easily as we would take the safety catch off of a gun, and with the same results?

  Between 1985 and 1991 the homicide rate for males fifteen to nineteen increased 154 percent. Despite the continued application of an ever-increasing quantity and quality of medical technology, homicide is the number-two cause of death among males ages fifteen to nineteen. Among black males it is number one. The AP wire article reporting this data had a headline announcing,

  "Homicide Rate Wiping Out Whole Generation of Teens." For once the press was not exaggerating.

  In Vietnam a systematic process of desensitization, conditioning, and training increased the individual firing rate from a World War II baseline of 15 to 20 percent to an all-time high of up to 95

  percent. Today a similar process of systematic desensitization, conditioning, and vicarious learning is unleashing an epidemic, a virus of violence in America.

  The same tools that more than quadrupled the firing rate in Vietnam are now in widespread use among our civilian population.

  Military personnel are just beginning to understand and accept what they have been doing to themselves and their men. If we

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  have reservations about the military's use of these mechanisms to ensure the survival and success of our soldiers in combat, then how much more so should we be concerned about the indiscriminate application of the same processes on our nation's children?

  Chapter Two

  Desensitization and Pavlov's Dog at the Movies I yelled "kill, kill" 'til I was hoarse. We yelled it as we engaged in bayonet and hand-to-hand combat drills. And then we sang about it as we marched. "I want to be an airborne ranger . . . I want to kill the Viet Cong." I had stopped hunting when I was sixteen. I had wounded a squirrel. It looked up at me with its big, soft brown eyes as I put it out of its misery. I cleaned my gun and have never taken it out since. In 1969 I was drafted and very uncertain about the war. I had nothing against the Viet Cong. But by the end of Basic Training, I was ready to kill them.

  —Jack, Vietnam veteran

  Classical Conditioning in the Military

  O n e of the most remarkable revelations in Watson's book War on the Mind is his report of conditioning
techniques used by the U.S.

  government to train assassins. In 1975 Dr. Narut, a U.S. Navy psychiatrist with the rank of commander, told Watson about techniques he was developing for the U.S. government in which classical conditioning and social learning methodology were being used to permit military assassins to overcome their resistance to killing. T h e method used, according to Narut, was to expose the subjects to "symbolic modeling" involving "films specially designed to show people being killed or injured in violent ways.

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  By being acclimatized through these films, the men were supposed to eventually become able to disassociate their emotions from such a situation."

  Narut went on to say, " T h e men were taught to shoot but also given a special type o f ' C l o c k w o r k Orange' training to quell any qualms they may have about killing. M e n are shown a series of gruesome films, which get progressively more horrific. T h e trainee is forced to watch by having his head bolted in a clamp so he cannot turn away, and a special device keeps his eyelids open."

  In psychological terms, this step-by-step reduction of a resistance is a form of classical (Pavlovian) conditioning called systematic desensitization.

  In Clockwork Orange such conditioning was used to develop an aversion to violence by administering a drug that caused revulsion while the violent films were shown, until the revulsion became associated with acts of violence. In Commander Narut's real-world training the nausea-creating drugs were left out, and those who were able to overcome their natural revulsion were rewarded, thereby obtaining the opposite effect of that depicted in Stanley Kubrick's movie. The U.S. government denies Commander Narut's claims, but Watson claims that he was able to obtain some outside corroboration from an individual w h o stated that C o m -