From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Wed May 22 2002 - 15:48:25 MDT
On 22 May 2002, James Rogers wrote:
> When they discovered that only around 4% of soldiers were actually
> effective in combat and that no more than a quarter were even
> psychologically and mentally fit for combat, they restructured [...]
I'm going to repeat the plug for a good book illustrating the issue: "On
Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill" by Lt. Col. Dave
Grossman
http://www.aracnet.com/~lwc123/onkilling.html
What makes soldiers kill--or not--animates this intriguing survey by a
psychologist and former U.S. Army officer. Col. Grossman reveals that only
a fraction of soldiers kill during warfare (and feel revulsion when they
do); the rest (about 85 percent in World War II) resist by missing the
target or refusing to fire.
With an eye to the military command's imperative of overcoming that innate
resistance, Col. Grossman quotes numerous anecdotes that exemplify the
phenomenon and studies that examine it.
With such knowledge, the military has implemented training that gets
firing rates up to 90 percent of soldiers [as we saw in Vietnam], but the
psychic cost of blazing away for real is heavy. Individually, a killer
goes through thrill-remorse-rationalization stages; socially, the killer
needs reassurance and if it is not received, will suffer post-traumatic
stress syndrome, characteristic of Vietnam veterans.
Col. Grossman concludes his findings of "enabling factors" in killing by
identifying them at work in the rampant violence afflicting American
society. This is a book that requires some steely fortitude to finish, but
once done, On Killing delivers insights on human nature that are both
gratifying and repelling.
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