The Art of (Not) Killing - Academic Paper

The Art of (Not) Killing

The act of killing is, for most, not an easy one and is nearly always misrepresented by those who have not had to take a person’s life. The band Carbon Leaf wrote in the song “The War was in Color” that “This black and white photo don’t capture the skin, /The shock of the shell, or the memory of smell,… /The war was in color” (Carbon Leaf). People who have not fought in wars often perceive very little of what actually happens to soldiers and what they go through while fighting. War, like killing in popular culture, if highly fantasized, if not romanticized. But in reality, war has multitudinous effects on those who participate in them. From seeing comrades and friends die to killing presumed enemies, war takes a physical and psychological toll on soldiers. Perhaps the most impactful aspect of war is when a solider takes another person’s life. The act of killing in war is extremely emotional, morally draining, and can cause psychological issues. Though the military prepares a soldier to kill and to fight in war, each soldier reacts differently to what he encounters in battle.

Many soldiers who participated in the Civil War found it impossible to take the life of another person. According to Dave Grossman’s work including his book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, many Civil War soldiers only pretended to fire their weapons at the enemy or would just continue to reload their weapons. Of the 25,574 muskets found after the Battle of Gettysburg, approximately 24,000 or 90% of them were still loaded. Twelve thousand of those muskets were loaded more than once, and half of those were loaded between eight and ten times. One musket was even found to be loaded 23 times. Grossman came to the conclusion that the majority of soldiers did not want to kill the people against whom they were fighting and actually did not even wish to fire in that direction.

This spectacular discovery does not just apply to the Civil War. Between 80 and 85% of soldiers in World War II were incapable of killing their fellow humans. Grossman, with much research, explored the reasoning behind these figures. Civil War soldiers were trained and drilled extensively so that they should have been able to fire at the enemy. Grossman concluded that there must have been extreme forces of moral will enacted in order for the soldiers to overcome all of their training not to kill the enemy. This indicates a “previously undiscovered psychological force…stronger than drill, peer pressure, even stronger than the self-preservation instinct” (Grossman 28). Though there is arduous and intensive training, soldiers may not always act as they did in training when actually thrown amid the crossfire.

The media do not help, either. From movies to books to political cartoons, popular culture fantasizes, if not romanticizes, the practice of killing others in war. “The point here is that there is as much disinformation and as little insight concerning the nature of killing coming from the media as from any other aspect of society” (Grossman 35). The movie Forrest Gump portrays no psychological repercussions although the title character fought in Vietnam. Tristan and Isolde, a movie about two star-crossed lovers, portrays killing in battle as swift and exhilarating and even as an honor. Other inaccurate portrayals of movie heroes include Indiana Jones (Indiana Jones series), James Bond (James Bond series), and John McClane (Die Hard series). In the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana wrenched a machine gun from his father and fired it repeatedly, killing several Nazis out of anger simply because his father called him “Junior.” Indiana then proceeded to step over the dead bodies without a single glance backward and continued on his mission. Saving Private Ryan is one of the only movies that accurately depicts the trials and tribulations of war, according to veterans who were interviewed for the documentary The Soldier’s Heart.

 Other common misconceptions lie in literature, as pointed out by Grossman. He concurs with the philosopher and psychologist Peter Marin that “‘Nowhere in the [psychiatric and psychological] literature is one allowed to glimpse what is actually occurring: the real horror of the war and its effect on those who fought it’” (37). The Soldier’s Heart also alludes to the idea that Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage is one of the only books that somehow allowed people to experience, if only slightly, the atmosphere and environment of war.

Political cartoons, however, do not necessarily portray a hero-figure, but are more commonly known for depicting the enemy. Dr. Sam Keen made a documentary called Faces of the Enemy, based on his book of the same title, in which he interviewed people who had various perspectives of war based on their personal experiences. Keen focuses on how the media and other propaganda “dehumanize the enemy” and make the enemy out to be what are considered vile creatures like snakes and rats, if not fantastical monsters. The point of this is to erect a barrier between Americans, who view themselves as the “heroes” of wars, and those they are fighting and vice-versa. This tactic of emotionally distancing oneself from what is perceived to be the enemy through the process of dehumanization is used in military. William Broyles, one of the people interviewed in Faces of the Enemy, was a lieutenant in the army and was a Vietnam veteran. He informed Keen during the interview that the enemy was referred to in derogatory terms and other vulgar expressions. This ideal is further supported in Grossman’s book.

The PBS documentary The Soldier’s Heart elaborates on military desensitizing tactics, stating that the military accustomed

Soldiers to the idea of killing by starting them off with drills and paper targets that don’t look like anything, and then ultimately transition to moving targets, pop-up targets and things that are shaped like humans, so that [the soldiers’] response is automatic. (The Soldier’s Heart)

Faces of the Enemy comments that America is supposed to be the “good guy” of the war; ergo, the good guy needs a villain to fight, which is often what justifies the portrayal of an enemy as a barbaric creature. One of Keen’s final comments in the documentary, however, is: “The world has become too dangerous to portray our enemies as monsters…Can we make ourselves heroes without making our enemies villains?”

Only after World War II was the topic of “nonfirers” in the military addressed and discussed. Prior to World War II, the subject was hardly, if ever, broached in the military. Grossman compares it to a silent conspiracy, something that nobody spoke of, but everybody knew was there. Grossman suggests that this “elephant in the room” has been ignored for thousands of years and is based on lies, forced forgetfulness, and distortion of the truth.

            Due to the issues with nonfirers in the army, the military altered its training to increase weaponry discharge. As a result, the number of soldiers who fired weapons drastically increased from World War II to the Korean and Vietnam wars. The military addressed the issue of soldiers not firing after Samuel Lyman Atwood “SLA” Marshall, a renowned combat historian, brought it to the attention of the military after extensive research of the subject. As a result of Marhsall’s observations and suggestions, the US Army, between World War II and the following combatant wars, implemented various training measures to “fix” the problem. The rate of firing in the Korean War was 55%, and the rate of firing in the Vietnam War was 90 to 95%. These methods are known as conditioning or programming and were instituted in a manner similar to the way Pavlov conditioned his dogs.

Once soldiers were more readily firing their weapons, how did they deal with the consequences of killing other humans? Many come home from war traumatized, if not mentally ill. Perhaps the most common aftereffect of killing in war is post-traumatic stress disorder, also known as PTSD. PTSD is frequently encountered through dreams in which soldiers relive their memories of war, specifically when they killed people. Soldiers also question themselves after the fact and wonder “‘How could I have done such a thing?’” and think about how the person or people they have killed probably had a family. William Broyles even went back to Vietnam to face his past and his personal demons. He met a woman there who had lost her husband, and Broyles told the woman that he might have killed her husband. She responded that “It was war,” and appeared desensitized to the subject. War is “a different mentality” (The Soldier’s Heart). Broyles was flabbergasted by her response, but it proves that war really is an entirely different environment.

Many experts on the subject, including Thomas Burke who is the Director of Mental Health Policy for the Department of Defense, have come to the conclusion that no soldier goes through the act of killing a person without a psychological change. In order to assist soldiers in coping with what they have done, the military will often bring in a chaplain to help veterans. Many veterans who spoke to the chaplain felt that they were no longer human and lost their faith in God. A large portion of the soldiers also lost their faith in the world and in themselves.

The military feels, collectively, that is important for veterans to talk about their experiences because they will not disappear or evaporate from their minds. Many things occur in combat, including memory loss and distortion. If veterans do not talk about their experiences, they can put themselves in the line of fire of their memories, such as envisioning grotesque horrors that did not actually occur. Statistics show that one fourth of police officers who escape a gunfight will remember something that did not actually occur. As expressed in The Soldier’s Heart, memory distortions can destroy soldiers’ lives and families, which is why it is extremely important, if not necessary, to discuss these memories.

            A similar situation occurred to William Broyles while in Vietnam. When instructed to cave in a tunnel, he “felt a presence” in the tunnel and repeatedly called out to it, in Vietnamese, to flee from the tunnel. Broyles detonated the explosives he placed inside the tunnel, and prayed that whoever was in the tunnel – if someone was even in it at all – escaped with his or her life. Broyles commented in Faces of the Enemy that he never found out and never actually knew if someone was even in the tunnel. But he did state that war plays games with a person’s head, and he is still haunted by that particular memory among others.

            War and the effects it has on soldiers, especially those who have killed others, are insurmountable. They bring not only grief and guilt, but memories with which the soldiers must live and often envision on a daily basis. Though soldiers are well-prepared physically, mentally, and emotionally, they will always come away from the experience different people. The rate of American soldiers firing and killing perceived enemies has increased drastically over the past one hundred or so years, rising from about fifteen percent during the Civil War to an astonishing 90 to 95 percent in the Vietnam War. Taking another person’s life has lasting effects that hardly anyone wishes to endure. Soldiers and veterans must go to bed every night knowing that they are the ones who took other humans’ lives, that they are the ones who are still living, that they are the ones who survived, and this sadly is a reality which many soldiers do not wish to have but with which they are forced to cope. They go to bed every night seeing the faces of those they killed. Though their acts may have been honorable and perhaps even necessary, nothing can truly erase the haunting memories and ghosts of their pasts.

Works Cited

Carbon Leaf. "The War Was in Color." 2006. CD.

Faces of the Enemy. Dir. Sam Keen. Quest Productions, 1987. Videocassette.

Grossman, Dave. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society.         

     New York, NY: Back Bay, 2009. Print.

The Soldier's Heart. Dir. Raney Aronson. PBS, 2005. Transcript.

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