On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society

“The simple fact is that when faced with a living, breathing opponent instead of a target, a significant majority of the soldiers revert to a posturing mode in which they fire over their enemy’s heads.”

Comparing the killing potential of weaponry and actual kills in the American Civil War, Grossman highlights the innate inhibition toward killing a member of one’s own species. He notes that fight or flight are not the only response options and adds posturing and submission. The majority of humans choose posturing over killing.

“The process of some men electing to load and provide support for those who are willing to shoot at the enemy appears to have been the norm rather than the exception.”

After reviewing historical sources and considering the capability of weaponry, Grossman concludes that, at least since the Civil War and through World War II, most soldiers did not want to kill and found other tasks to avoid killing. This innate inhibition, when overcome with The Impact of Training and Conditioning for Violence, will lead to psychological trauma.

“Looking another human being in the eye, making an independent decision to kill him, and watching as he dies due to your action combine to form one of the most basic, important, primal, and potentially traumatic occurrences of war.”

Grossman is here emphasizing the difficulty of killing another human being, especially at close range. The Psychological and Emotional Effects of Killing another human are therefore enormous and long-lasting.

“Some psychiatric casualties have always been associated with war, but it was only in the twentieth century that our physical and logistical capability to sustain combat outstripped our psychological capacity to endure it.”

Describing the extraordinary physical and psychological strain of combat on the soldier, Grossman notes that 98% of soldiers break down psychologically after a sustained period. Psychological casualties outnumber physical ones. The military treats and rests these soldiers near the battlefield before returning them to battle to prevent all from claiming this status.

“World War I and World War II pilots, in relatively slow-moving aircraft, could see enemy pilots, and thus large numbers of them failed to fight aggressively. Modern pilots, fighting an enemy seen only on a radar screen, have no such problems.”

Physical distance makes killing easier. When a soldier cannot see the human to be killed, the natural inhibition against killing is lessened and the event is less traumatic. There is an element of deniability.

“[T]he combat soldier appears to feel a deep sense of responsibility and accountability for what he sees around him. It is as though every enemy dead is a human being he has killed, and every friendly dead is a comrade for whom he is responsible.”

Since soldiers are combatants, they feel personally responsible for the deaths in battle. Whether soldiers refused to kill or killed, they feel guilt. Unable to separate their actions from the consequences in front of their eyes, soldiers are worn down with a sense of horror.

“The potential of close-up, inescapable, interpersonal hatred and aggression is more effective and has greater impact on the morale of the soldier than the presence of inescapable, impersonal death and destruction.”

Directly facing hatred and aggression from another human being is highly stressful and a cause of psychological trauma. People would rather be bombed from the sky than confront an individual with enough hatred of them to torture and kill them. This is another reason why close-range combat is so traumatizing, as soldiers directly face those trying to kill them.

“The soldier in combat is trapped within this tragic Catch-22. If he overcomes his resistance to killing and kills an enemy soldier in close combat, he will be forever burdened with blood guilt, and if he elects not to kill, then the blood guilt of his fallen comrades and the shame of his profession, nation, and cause lie upon him.”

The combat soldier is placed into an impossible position. Whether they kill or not, they cannot avoid psychological trauma and guilt. For this reason, Grossman later emphasizes The Importance of Societal Support for Combat Veterans.

“From a distance, I can deny your humanity; and from a distance, I cannot hear your screams.”

The aversion to killing, as well as the intensity of the psychological and emotional effects, decreases the greater the physical distance between the killer and victim. When soldiers use radar and night goggles and cannot see their victims, it is easier to kill. Close-range killings prevent soldiers from denying the humanity of their victims.

“If a soldier goes up and looks at his kill […] the trauma grows even worse, since some of the psychological buffer created by a midrange kill disappears upon seeing the victim at close range.”

Grossman notes that soldiers who kill from midrange, where they can engage the enemy with rifles but cannot see or hear the victim when hit, nonetheless experience guilt and remorse. The killing is real to them and the humanity of the victim undeniable. If the soldier inspects the body after, which is common, the psychological trauma is as intense as a in close-range kill.

“Soldiers who would bravely face a hail of bullets will consistently flee before a determined individual with cold steel in his hands.”

There is a strong resistance to penetrating another human being with a bayonet or knife, but an even greater dread of being bayoneted or knifed. One side typically flees to avoid this outcome, which Grossman describes as an “intimate brutality.” Modern training techniques do not overcome this aversion.

“The linkage between sex and killing becomes unpleasantly apparent when we enter the realm of warfare.”

Grossman maintains that the procreative and destructive acts are connected. Soldiers have reported a feeling of satisfaction similar to masturbation after killing. In war, rape is used as a weapon of domination, with penetration into the body of the woman akin to the penetration of a knife or bayonet. These forces of destruction lurk within humans and struggle with the forces of love and survival.

“Among men who are bonded together so intensely, there is a powerful process of peer pressure in which the individual cares so deeply about his comrades and what they think about him that he would rather die than let them down.”

The bonds formed among soldiers in combat units, especially small groups, enable killing and sometimes atrocities. Individuals do things in groups that they would not do individually. Such groups provide anonymity and, therefore, less responsibility. They also ensure that group members are accountable to one another.

“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.”

Political and military leaders sometimes create emotional distance between soldiers and targeted “enemies.” Emotional distance, which can include racism or cultural distance, acts similarly to physical distance and overrides the inhibition against killing a member of one’s own species. Once such killings take place in the form of atrocities, there is no going back to those who have crossed this line and, thus, they cling to the ideology.

“The social class structure that exists in the military provides a denial mechanism that makes it possible for leaders to order their men to their deaths.”

This emotional distance is encouraged by military norms that separate officers from enlisted soldiers. Grossman reports that few officers opened up to him about remorse and guilt, and he focuses mainly on the soldiers who kill. However, he recounts one story about an officer’s suicide after forcing his men to fight to the death, even though the few survivors were rescued.

“What these individuals represent […] is the capacity for the levelheaded participation in combat that we as a society glorify and that Hollywood would have us believe that all soldiers possess.”

Two percent of soldiers who experience sustained combat do not suffer from PTSD or have any negative psychological effects from killing. Grossman strongly denies the idea that these soldiers are psychopathic killers. Most in this group are good citizens who have no remorse because they are killing for a legitimate reason.

“Killing comes with a price, and societies must learn that their soldiers will have to spend the rest of their lives living with what they have done.”

Grossman is here reminding readers that The Psychological and Emotional Effects of Killing are brutal and lifelong. For this reason, he argues that The Importance of Societal Support for Combat Veterans needs to be recognized.

“In the same way, every soldier who refuses to kill in combat, secretly or openly, represents the latent potential for nobility in mankind. And yet it is a paradoxically dangerous potential if the forces of freedom and humanity must face those whose unrestrained killing is empowered by atrocities.”

Comparing those who opted for execution rather than participating in atrocities to those who refuse to kill, Grossman commends the goodness inherent in these actions. However, in acknowledging the presence of evil, Grossman acknowledges the reality that, at times, people must kill or face destruction. In such situations, those individuals who can kill for legitimate reasons without remorse become critical to success. Society must support the other 98% for whom it is a psychological trauma to kill.

“But a good portion of the subsequent remorse and guilt appears to be a horrified response to this perfectly natural and common feeling of exhilaration.”

Grossman seeks to expose the natural reactions to killing to help soldiers cope with them. It is normal to feel a sense of euphoria after hitting a target. Remorse comes next, and many soldiers, who think they are monsters for having felt euphoric, feel guilty for having had what is actually a normal response.

“What happened in Vietnam is the moral equivalent of giving a soldier a local anesthetic for a gunshot wound and then sending him back into combat.”

Grossman chronicles the many ways that the psychological needs and well-being of soldiers in Vietnam were ignored. Here, he is referring to the use of tranquilizers to help soldiers cope with the stress of war. At best, such drugs delay psychological trauma, and, at worst, they increase the intensity of the trauma.

“Understood not as mindless killers, and not as sniveling whiners, but as men. Men who went to do the incomprehensibly difficult job their nation sent them to do and did it proudly, did it well, and all too often did it thanklessly.”

Grossman emphasizes the lifelong pain associated with combat and killing via the telling of one soldier’s story. He is outraged at the treatment Vietnam veterans received upon returning home and characterizes soldiers favorably here to emphasize The Importance of Societal Support for Combat Veterans.

“[T]he vital, new, different ingredient in killing in modern combat and in killing in modern American society, is the systematic process of defeating the normal individual’s age-old, psychological inhibition against violent, harmful activity toward one’s own species.”

Grossman argues here that the same type of classical and operant conditioning used to increase the ratio of fire on the battlefield is now being done to American children and adolescents via violent movies and video games. In the military, there are safeguards with this conditioning, as killing can only be done on command. There are no such safeguards in society at large.

“And thus, at the malleable age of seventeen and eighteen, the age at which armies have traditionally begun to indoctrinate the soldier into the business of killing, American youth, systematically desensitized from childhood, takes another step in the indoctrination into the cult of violence.”

Grossman argues that young people are classically conditioned to kill when they watch gruesome movies that condone killing and associate the viewing with pleasurable activities, such as eating treats and dating. Violent video games provide the same type of operant conditioning that soldiers receive when they shoot at human-looking targets. Problematically, there are no safeguards in civilian society like there are in the military.