On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by Dave Grossman Page B
Authors: Dave Grossman
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overcome the paradox of evacuation syndrome. These concepts, which have proved themselves quite effective since World War I, involve (1) treatment of the psychiatric casualty as far forward on the battlefield as possible — that is, in the closest possible proximity to the battlefield, often still inside enemy artillery range — and (2) constant communication to the casualty by leadership and medical personnel of their expectancy that he will be rejoining his comrades in the front line as soon as possible. These two factors permit the psychiatric casualty to get the much-needed rest that is the only current cure for his problem, while not giving a message to still-healthy comrades that psychiatric casualty is a ticket off of the battlefield.
Limited chemical treatments have been used in recent years to assist in the recovery process. According to Watson, "the so-called truth drugs have also been used near the front line to 'abreact'
soldiers who are shell-shocked." Such drugs have reportedly been used with some success by the Israelis to induce psychiatric casualties to "talk through the circumstances leading to their reaction, an activity which appears to prevent their fears being 'bottled up'
and so causing some other, long-term syndrome."
But the use of chemicals in combat may not be quite so benign in the future. Gabriel, a retired intelligence officer and consultant to both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, provides a chilling note on the future of the treatment and prevention of combat psychiatric casualties. He believes that the armed forces of both the West and the East are searching for a chemical answer to this problem. Gabriel warns that the perfection of a "nondepleting neurotrop" to be given to soldiers prior to battle would result in
"armies of sociopaths."
Gabriel concludes from his research that "one can but marvel at the inventiveness of the human psyche in its efforts to escape its surrounding horror." Similarly, we must marvel at the 50 KILLING AND COMBAT TRAUMA
inventiveness of modern armies and nations in their efforts to ensure that they get full value from their soldiers. And we cannot help but come away with an image of war as one of the most horrifying and traumatic acts a human being can participate in. War is an environment that will psychologically debilitate 98 percent of all who participate in it for any length of time. And the 2 percent who are not driven insane by war appear to have already been insane — aggressive psychopaths — before coming to the battlefield.
Chapter Two
The Reign of Fear
If I had time and anything like your ability to study war, I think I should concentrate almost entirely on the "actualities of war" —
the effects of tiredness, hunger, fear, lack of sleep, weather. . . .
The principles of strategy and tactics, and the logistics of war are really absurdly simple: it is the actualities that make war so complicated and so difficult, and are usually so neglected by historians.
— Field Marshal Lord Wavell, in a letter to Liddell Hart What goes on in the mind of a soldier in combat? What are the emotional reactions and underlying processes that cause the vast majority of those who survive sustained combat to ultimately slip into insanity?
Let us use a model as a framework for the understanding and study of psychiatric casualty causation, a metaphorical model representing and integrating the factors of fear, exhaustion, guilt and horror, hate, fortitude, and killing. Each of these factors will be examined and then integrated into the overall model to present a detailed understanding of the combat soldier's psychological and physiological state.
T h e first of these factors is Fear.
52 KILLING AND COMBAT TRAUMA
Research and the Reign of Fear
A variety of past investigators came up with an overly simplistic — yet widely accepted — explanation for psychiatric casualties when they declared that the cause of most trauma in war is the fear of
Limited chemical treatments have been used in recent years to assist in the recovery process. According to Watson, "the so-called truth drugs have also been used near the front line to 'abreact'
soldiers who are shell-shocked." Such drugs have reportedly been used with some success by the Israelis to induce psychiatric casualties to "talk through the circumstances leading to their reaction, an activity which appears to prevent their fears being 'bottled up'
and so causing some other, long-term syndrome."
But the use of chemicals in combat may not be quite so benign in the future. Gabriel, a retired intelligence officer and consultant to both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, provides a chilling note on the future of the treatment and prevention of combat psychiatric casualties. He believes that the armed forces of both the West and the East are searching for a chemical answer to this problem. Gabriel warns that the perfection of a "nondepleting neurotrop" to be given to soldiers prior to battle would result in
"armies of sociopaths."
Gabriel concludes from his research that "one can but marvel at the inventiveness of the human psyche in its efforts to escape its surrounding horror." Similarly, we must marvel at the 50 KILLING AND COMBAT TRAUMA
inventiveness of modern armies and nations in their efforts to ensure that they get full value from their soldiers. And we cannot help but come away with an image of war as one of the most horrifying and traumatic acts a human being can participate in. War is an environment that will psychologically debilitate 98 percent of all who participate in it for any length of time. And the 2 percent who are not driven insane by war appear to have already been insane — aggressive psychopaths — before coming to the battlefield.
Chapter Two
The Reign of Fear
If I had time and anything like your ability to study war, I think I should concentrate almost entirely on the "actualities of war" —
the effects of tiredness, hunger, fear, lack of sleep, weather. . . .
The principles of strategy and tactics, and the logistics of war are really absurdly simple: it is the actualities that make war so complicated and so difficult, and are usually so neglected by historians.
— Field Marshal Lord Wavell, in a letter to Liddell Hart What goes on in the mind of a soldier in combat? What are the emotional reactions and underlying processes that cause the vast majority of those who survive sustained combat to ultimately slip into insanity?
Let us use a model as a framework for the understanding and study of psychiatric casualty causation, a metaphorical model representing and integrating the factors of fear, exhaustion, guilt and horror, hate, fortitude, and killing. Each of these factors will be examined and then integrated into the overall model to present a detailed understanding of the combat soldier's psychological and physiological state.
T h e first of these factors is Fear.
52 KILLING AND COMBAT TRAUMA
Research and the Reign of Fear
A variety of past investigators came up with an overly simplistic — yet widely accepted — explanation for psychiatric casualties when they declared that the cause of most trauma in war is the fear of
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