Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing
The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Back Bay, 1995)
Despite an unbroken tradition of violence and war, man is not by nature a killer.
The Dilemma of the Discarded Weapon:
Author of the Civil War Collector's Encyclopedia F. A. Lord tells us that after the Battle of
Gettysburg, 27,574 muskets were recovered from the battlefield. Of these, nearly 90 percent (twentyfour thousand) were loaded. Twelve thousand of these loaded muskets were found to be loaded more
than once, and six thousand of the multiply loaded weapons had from three to ten rounds loaded in the
barrel. One weapon had been loaded twenty-three times. Why, then, were there so many loaded weapons
available on the battlefield, and why did at least twelve thousand soldiers mislead their weapons in
combat?
A loaded weapon was a precious commodity on the black powder battlefield. During the standup, face-to-face, short-range battles of this era a weapon should have been loaded for only a fraction of
the time in battle. More than 95 percent of the time was spent in loading the weapon, and less than 5
percent in firing it. If most soldiers were desperately attempting to kill as quickly and efficiently as they
could, then 95 percent should have been shot with an empty weapon in their hand, and any loaded,
cocked, and primed weapon available dropped on the battlefield would have been snatched up from
wounded or dead comrades and fired. …
The obvious conclusion is that most soldiers were not trying to kill the enemy. Most of them
appear to have not even wanted to fire in the enemy's general direction. As Marshall observed, most
soldiers seem to have an inner resistance to firing their weapon in combat. …
There was not any "isolation and dispersion of the modern battlefield" to hide nonparticipants
during a volley fire. Their every action was obvious to those comrades who stood shoulder to shoulder
with them. If a man truly was not able or willing to fire, the only way he could disguise his lack of
participation was to load his weapon (tear cartridge, pour powder, set bullet, ram it home, prime, cock),
bring it to his shoulder, and then not actually fire, possibly even mimicking the recoil of his weapon
when some one nearby fired. …
Some may argue that these multiple loads were simply mistake and that these weapons were
discarded because they were misloaded. But if in the fog of war, despite all the endless hours of training,
you do accidentally double-load a musket, you shoot it anyway, and the first load simply pushes out the
second load. Some may have been mistakes, and some may have been caused by bad powder, but I
believe that the only possible explanation for the vast majority of these incidents is the same factor that
prevented 80 to 85 percent of World War II soldiers from firing at the enemy.
The Demands of Authority:
Dr. Stanley Milgram’s famous studies at Yale University on obedience and aggression found that
in a controlled laboratory environment more than 65 percent of his subjects could be readily manipulated into inflicting a (seemingly) lethal electrical charge on a total stranger. The subjects sincerely
believed that they were causing great physical pain, but despite their victim's pitiful pleas for them to
stop, 65 percent continued to obey orders, increase the voltage, and inflict the shocks until long after the
screams stopped and there could be little doubt that their victim was dead. …
I observed a mature and initially 'poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within
20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching a point of
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nervous collapse. . . . At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered: "Oh God, let's stop
it." And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter and obeyed to the end.
In Milgram’s experiments the demands of authority were represented by an individual with a
clipboard and a white lab coat. This authority figure stood immediately behind the individual who was '
inflicting shocks and' directed that he increase the voltage each time the victim answered a question
incorrectly. When the authority figure was not personally present but called over a phone, the number of
subjects who were willing to inflict the maximum shock dropped sharply. This process can be
generalized to combat circumstances and "operationalized" into a number of subfactors: proximity of the
authority figure, respect for the authority figure, intensity of the authority figure's demands, and the
authority figure's legitimacy.
Marshall noted many specific World War II incidents in which almost all soldiers would fire
their weapons while their leaders observed and encouraged them in a combat situation, but when the
leaders left, the firing rate immediately dropped to 15 to 20 percent.
Leaders with legitimate, societally sanctioned authority have greater influence on their soldiers;
and legitimate, lawful demands are more likely to be obeyed than illegal or unanticipated demands.
Gang leaders and mercenary commanders have to carefully work around their shortcomings in this area,
but military officers (with their trappings of power and the legitimate authority of their nation behind
them) have tremendous potential to cause their soldiers to overcome individual resistance and reluctance
in combat.
If your propaganda machine can convince your soldiers that their opponents are not really human
but are "inferior forms of life," then their natural resistance to killing their own species will be reduced.
Often the enemy's humanity is denied by 'referring to him as a "gook," "Kraut," or "Nip." In Vietnam
this process was assisted by the "body count" mentality, in which we referred to and thought of the
enemy as numbers.
The greatest master of this in recent times may have been Adolf Hitler, with his myth of the
Aryan master race: the Ubermensch, whose duty was to cleanse the world of the Untermensch.
The adolescent soldier against whom such propaganda is directed is desperately trying to
rationalize what he is being forced to do, and he is therefore predisposed to believe this nonsense. Once
he begins to herd people like cattle and then to slaughter them like cattle, he very quickly begins to think
of them as cattle - or, if you will, Untermensch.
Conditioning:
When, people become angry, or frightened, they stop thinking with their forebrain (the mind of a
human being) and start thinking with their midbrain (which is indistinguishable from the mind of an
animal). They are literally ((scared out of their wits." The only thing that has any hope of influencing
the midbrain is also the only thing that influences a dog: classical and operant conditioning.
That is what is used when training firemen and airline pilots to react to emergency situations:
precise replication of the stimulus that they will face (in a flame house or a flight simulator) and then
extensive shaping of the desired response to that stimulus. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response,
stimulus-response. In the crisis, when these individuals are scared out of their wits, they react properly
and they save lives.
This is done with anyone who will face an emergency situation, from children doing a fire drill in school
to pilots in a simulator. … We do not tell schoolchildren what they should do in case of a fire, we
condition them; and when they are frightened, they do the right thing. Through the media we are also
conditioning children to kill; and when they are frightened or' angry, the conditioning kicks in.
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World War II-era training was conducted on a grassy firing range (a known-distance, or RD,
range), on which the soldier shot at a bull's-eye target. After he fired a series of shots the target was I
checked, and he-was then given feedback that told him where he hit.
Modern training uses what are essentially B. F. Skinner's operant conditioning techniques to
develop a firing behavior in the soldier. This training comes as close to simulating actual combat
conditions as possible. The soldier stands in a foxhole with full combat equipment, and man-shaped
targets pop up briefly in front of him. These are the eliciting stimuli that prompt the target behavior of
shooting. If the target is hit, it immediately drops, thus providing immediate feedback. Positive
reinforcement is given when these hits are exchanged for marksmanship badges, which usually have
some form of privilege or reward (praise, recognition, three day passes, and so on) associated with them.
Traditional marksmanship training has been transformed into a combat simulator. Watson states that
soldiers who have conducted this kind of simulator training" often report, after they have met a real life
emergency, that they just carried out the correct drill and completed it before they realized that they
were not in the simulator."
The Psychological Cost of War: The Soldier’s Guilt:
The killing-enabling factors provide a powerful set of tools to bypass or overcome the soldier's
resistance to killing. But as we will see in the section "Killing in Vietnam," the higher the resistance
bypassed, the higher the trauma that must be overcome in the subsequent rationalization process. Killing
comes with a price, and al societies must learn that their soldiers will have to spend the rest of their lives
living with what they have done.
Richard Gabriel tells us that "in every war in which American soldiers have fought in this
century, the chances of becoming a psychiatric casualty - of being debilitated for some period of time as
a consequence of the stresses of military life - were greater than the chances of being killed by enemy
fire."
Swank and Marchand’s much-cited World War II study determined that after sixty days of
continuous combat, 98 percent of all surviving soldiers will have become psychiatric casualties of one
kind or another.
Nonkillers are frequently exposed to the same brutal conditions as killers, conditions that cause
fear, but they do not become psychiatric casualties. In most circumstances in which nonkillers are faced
with the threat of death and injury in war, the instances of psychiatric casualties are notably absent.
Even the field of psychology seems to be ill prepared to address the guilt caused by war and the
attendant moral issues. Peter Marin condemns the "inadequacy" of our psychological terminology in
describing the magnitude and reality of the "pain of human conscience." As a society, he says, we seem
unable to deal with moral pain or guilt. Instead it is treated as a neurosis or a pathology, "something to
escape rather than something to learn from, a disease rather than - as it may well be for the vets - an
appropriate if painful response to the past." Marin goes on to note the same thing that I have in my
studies, and that is that Veterans Administration psychologists are seldom willing to deal with problems
of guilt; indeed, they often do not even raise the issue of what, the soldier did in war. Instead they
simply, as one VA psychologist put it to Marin, "treat the vet's difficulties as problems in adjustment."
Killing in Vietnam: What Have We Done to Our Soldiers?
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? Just what have we done to our soldiers?
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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. …
The killing is always traumatic. But when you have to kill women and children, or when you
have to kill men in their homes, in front of their wives an children, and when you have to do it not from
twenty thousand feet but up close where you can watch them die, the horror appears to transcend
description or understanding.
Much of the war in Vietnam was conducted against an insurgent force. Against men, women,
and children who were often defendng their own homes and who were dressed in civilian clothing. This
resulted in a deterioration of traditional conventions and an increase in civilian casualties, atrocities, and
resultant trauma. Neither the ideological reasons for the war, nor the target population, was the same as
that associated with previous wars.
The standard methods of on-the-scene rationalization fail when the enemy's child comes out to
mourn over her father's body or when the enemy is a child throwing a hand grenade.
What is PTSD and How Does PTSD Relate to Killing?
Estimates of the number of Vietnam veterans suffering from PTSD range from the Disabled
American Veterans figure of 500,000 to Harris and Associates 1980 estimate of 1.5 million, or
somewhere between 18 and 54 percent of the 2.8 million military personnel who served in Vietnam.
In 1988, a major study by Jeanne and Steven Stellman at Columbia University examined the
relationship between PTSD manifestations and a soldier's involvement in the killing process. This study
of 6,810 randomly selected veterans is the first in which combat levels have been quantified. Stellman
and Stellman found that the victims of PTSD are almost solely veterans who participated in highintensity combat situations. These veterans suffer far higher incidence of divorce, marital problems,
tranquilizer use, alcoholism, joblessness, heart disease, high blood pressure, and ulcers. As far as PTSD
symptoms are concerned, soldiers who were in noncombat situations in Vietnam were found to be
statistically indistinguishable from those who spent their entire enlistment in the United States. …
Statistics on the horrible number of suicides among Vietnam vets, on the tragic number of
homeless who are Vietnam vets, on divorce rates, drug-use rates, and so on, give evidence that
something has occurred that is significantly, startlingly different from that occurring after World War II
or any other war our nation has ever encountered.
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