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Entry: On Killing

Digitus, Finger & Co. has a book review about On Killing

Grossman, a former Ranger, paratrooper, and West Point instructor in psychology, begins by iterating little known fact outside military circles: that since the beginning of time, soldiers have been extremely resistant to kill their fellow man in battle. While on its surface this may seem to cleary exhibit the truth of the oxymoron “military intelligence”, it is actually a more astonishing fact than it appears, given popular conceptions of military training and discipline, and the generally ghastly statistics associated with war itself.

Citing interviews with soldiers conducted by the military immediately after WWII, Grossman explains that of the men who were ordered to shoot directly at and kill the enemy (e.g., infantrymen), only 15-20% actually obeyed that order. Distance also played a factor. The farther one was both physically and psychologically from the enemy (like artillery) the easier it was to kill them; the closer one was (like choking someone to death), the infinitely greater the resistance. This aversion to kill one’s fellow man was so great among those not already psychopathic, that many soldiers went to unbelievable lengths to avoid it. They might not fire at all, they might fire in the direction of the enemy with no intent to kill (i.e., above their heads, which is a form of “animal posturing”), and in some cases, they would even kill themselves.

Personally, I’m a Lord-of-the-Flies-kind-of-guy. That is, I am of the opinion that left to their own devices and lacking ethical mores reinforced by the surrounding society, human beings will gladly kill each another. This seems to be a pretty obvious truth, and one that was reiterated over and over in literature classes from high school through college. So then, it goes without saying that the information Grossman was providing genuinely shocked me. And as it turns out, it also shocked the military establishment of the late 1940s. Since (as many a comedic pundit have noted) the whole point of the military is to kill people and to break things, an army can’t very well expect to win a war if only a fraction of its front-line combat soldiers are actually doing what they are expressly there to do. And while the civilian psychologists of the day didn’t give much credence to these findings, the military did, and as a result they began to change their training methods.