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"Psychological
Effects of Combat"
A
Resistance to Killing
The
kind of psychiatric casualties usually identified with long-term
exposure to combat are notably reduced among medical personnel,
chaplains, officers, and soldiers on reconnaissance patrols
behind enemy lines. The key factor that is not present in
each of these situations is that, although they are in the
front lines and the enemy may attempt to kill them, they
have no direct responsibility to participate personally
in close-range killing activities. Even when there is equal
or even greater danger of dying, combat is much less stressful
if you do not have to kill.
The existence of a resistance to killing lies at the heart
of this dichotomy between killers and nonkillers. This is
an additional, final stressor that the combatant must face.
To truly understand the nature of this resistance of killing
we must first recognize that most participants in close
combat are literally "frightened out of their wits." Once
the bullets start flying, combatants stop thinking with
the forebrain, which is the part of the brain which makes
us human, and start thinking with the midbrain, or mammalian
brain, which is the primitive part of the brain that is
generally indistinguishable from that of an animal.
In
conflict situations this primitive, midbrain processing
can be observed in the existence of a powerful resistance
to killing one's own kind. During territorial and mating
battles, animals with antlers and horns slam together in
a relatively harmless head-to-head fashion, rattlesnakes
wrestle each other, and piranha fight their own kind with
flicks of the tail, but against any other species these
creatures unleash their horns, fangs, and teeth without
restraint. This is an essential survival mechanism that
prevents a species from destroying itself during territorial
and mating rituals.
One
major modern revelation in the field of military psychology
is the observation that this resistance to killing one's
own species is also a key factor in human combat. Brigadier
General S. L. A. Marshall first observed this during his
work as the official U.S. historian of the European Theater
of Operations in World War II. Based on his postcombat interviews,
Marshall concluded in his landmark book, Men Against
Fire, that only 15 to 20% of the individual riflemen
in World War II fired their weapons at an exposed enemy
soldier. Specialized weapons, such as a flame-thrower, usually
were fired. Crew-served weapons, such as a machine gun,
almost always were fired. And firing would increase greatly
if a nearby leader demanded that the soldier fire. But when
left to their own devices, the great majority of individual
combatants throughout history appear to have been unable
or unwilling to kill.
Marshall's findings have been somewhat controversial. Faced
with scholarly concern about a researcher's methodology
and conclusions, the scientific method involves replicating
the research. In Marshall's case, every available, parallel,
scholarly study validates his basic findings. Ardant du
Picq's surveys of French officers in the 1860s and his observations
on ancient battles, Keegan and Holmes' numerous accounts
of ineffectual firing throughout history, Richard Holmes'
assessment of Argentine firing rates in the Falklands War,
Paddy Griffith's data on the extraordinarily low killing
rate among Napoleonic and American Civil War regiments,
the British Army's laser reenactments of historical battles,
the FBI's studies of nonfiring rates among law enforcement
officers in the 1950s and 1960s, and countless other individual
and anecdotal observations all confirm Marshall's fundamental
conclusion that man is not, by nature, a killer.
The exception to this resistance can be observed in sociopaths
who, by definition, feel no empathy or remorse for their
fellow human beings. Pit bull dogs have been selectively
bred in order to ensure that they will perform the unnatural
act of killing another dog in battle. Similarly, human sociopaths
represent Swank and Marchand's 2% who did not become psychiatric
casualties after months of continuous combat, since they
were not disturbed by the requirement to kill. But sociopaths
would be a flawed tool that is impossible to control in
peacetime, and social dynamics make it very difficult for
humans to breed themselves for such a trait. However, humans
are very adept at finding mechanical means to overcome natural
limitations. Humans were born without the physical ability
to fly, so we found mechanisms that overcame this limitation
and enabled flight. Humans also were born without the psychological
ability to kill our fellow humans. So, throughout history,
we have devoted great effort to finding a way to overcome
this resistance. From a psychological perspective, the history
of warfare can be viewed as a series of successively more
effective tactical and mechanical mechanisms to enable or
force combatants to overcome their resistance to killing.
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Read
a different article:
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Encyclopedia
of Violence, Peace, and Conflict, Volume 3, p.159
©
1999 by Academic Press. All rights of reproduction in any
form reserved.
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