psychology of war resource

PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR RESOURCE | 1


Psychology of War Resource 2009-2010: A WORLD DIVIDED

Table of Contents

Preface ..............................................................................................................................................4 I. The Beast Within ..........................................................................................................................6

Objectives ..................................................................................................................................... 6 Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 6 How Primitive Are Our Brains? .................................................................................................... 7

War among Humankind’s Ancestors .......................................................................................... 9 Differences in Aggression between Males and Females ............................................................. 11 The Mental Mechanics of Aggression ....................................................................................... 14

Limits on the Beast ...................................................................................................................... 16 Put Down the Marshmallow or You May Kill Again ................................................................ 16 The Innate Capacity for Peace .................................................................................................. 18

Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 19 II. Taking Sides ...............................................................................................................................20

Objectives ................................................................................................................................... 20 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 20 “Minor differences” ..................................................................................................................... 21

Shibboleths: From the Old Testament to No Smoking ............................................................ 21 Identification Mechanism ........................................................................................................ 22

Who I Am Is Not You ................................................................................................................ 26 Group Formation Through Conflict ........................................................................................ 26 Enemies and Scapegoats ........................................................................................................... 27 The Stanford Prison Experiment .............................................................................................. 27 Collective Psychology ............................................................................................................... 29

The Purpose-Driven Strife .......................................................................................................... 30 Family at Arms ......................................................................................................................... 31 Euphoria and War Addiction ................................................................................................... 32 The Simple Life........................................................................................................................ 34 War as Fantasy ......................................................................................................................... 36

“If I look at the mass I will never act.” ......................................................................................... 38 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 40

III. A Soldier’s Story ........................................................................................................................42 Objectives ................................................................................................................................... 42 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 42 A Soldier’s Conscience ................................................................................................................ 43

Non-Firers Throughout History .............................................................................................. 44 Civil War Muskets ................................................................................................................... 44

A Soldier’s Fear ........................................................................................................................... 45 The War Inside: Psychiatric Casualties ..................................................................................... 47 The Weight of It ...................................................................................................................... 48

A Soldier’s Distance .................................................................................................................... 49


Physical Distance and the Use of Lethal Force .......................................................................... 50 Authority and Obedience ......................................................................................................... 53 At One with the Crowd ........................................................................................................... 55 The Language of Combat (Shhh… don’t say “people.”) ........................................................... 56 Vengeance and Moral Distance ................................................................................................ 57 The Stress Mechanism ............................................................................................................. 59 Conscience at a Distance .......................................................................................................... 60

Soldier 2.0 ................................................................................................................................... 60 The Child Soldier .................................................................................................................... 60 The Soldier Who Wants to Die ................................................................................................ 61 The Soldier as Peacekeeper ....................................................................................................... 63

Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 64 IV. After War ..................................................................................................................................66

Objectives ................................................................................................................................... 66 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 66 Kansas Isn’t Kansas Anymore ...................................................................................................... 66

Battlemind ............................................................................................................................... 67 The New Normal ........................................................................................................................ 69

War Zone Stress Reactions ....................................................................................................... 69 Excessive Anger and Adrenaline Addiction ............................................................................... 70 Guilt ........................................................................................................................................ 71 Depression and Traumatic Grief .............................................................................................. 71 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder ................................................................................................ 72 Physical Wounds ...................................................................................................................... 73

Treating the Mentally Maimed ................................................................................................... 74 Keeping Cost in Mind ................................................................................................................. 75 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 75

Works Consulted ............................................................................................................................77 About the Author ............................................................................................................................78 About the Editors ............................................................................................................................78

by

Jon Kern Columbia School of the Arts ‘07

University of Chicago ’98-‘02

edited by Daniel Berdichevsky

Harvard University M.P.P. ‘05 Stanford University M.A. & B.A. ‘02

Dedicated to those who lives have been touched by war and to those who live only in memory.

DemiDec and The World Scholar’s Cup are registered trademarks of the DemiDec Corporation.


Preface “War! Good God, y’all. What is it good for?” In 1969,

soul singer Edwin Starr wailed those words to a world very much in conflict. Mr. Starr’s own reply: “Absolutely

nothing! (Say it again now.)” Criticism of war is almost universal; even the highest-ranking military commanders

acknowledge it to be a “last option.” If nobody likes wars, why do we keep fighting them?

If you look at human history, you will notice war is all the rage. Wars have been fought on every continent and in every century—and we have the written records of events to prove it. In 1976, anthropologist Ashley Montagu detailed evidence of 14,500 wars over the last 5,600 years. That’s 2.6 wars per year. Corroborating Montagu’s research, Charles Burke stated in his 1975 book, Aggression in Man, that there have been only 268 years of peace during the last 3,400 years of civilization. Among the oldest professions in the world, then, is soldier.1

War is found on bookshelves as well as battlefields. It is at the center of Western civilization’s first great work of literature, Homer’s The Iliad, written sometime between the 9th and 7th centuries B.C.E. In the 6th century B.C.E., Chinese general Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War, a thirteen chapter tome on warfare that army officers and business school graduates still cite today.2

The frequency and popularity of war have led people to wonder if it is inevitable. In his novel Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy answers yes: “War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”i It is man’s destiny, he says, to wage war.

Some scholars believe humanity has a “propensity for warfare.”ii For them, war grows out of something deep within human nature. Perhaps some gene in our DNA drives us to fight, inflaming disagreements and mobilizing people to unite and inflict aggression on one another.

The problem with human nature is that you cannot see it. You can observe and compare human behavior, but can only make guesses or craft theories about whether war is actually natural. What may seem natural to one person might feel artificial to another.

This Resource will examine the psychology of both aggression and war. Keep in mind that these two concepts are not the same. Human aggression can occur on an individual level, but wars are immense, society-wide undertakings. They involve complex strategies, mass recruitment, and months if not years of preparation and fighting. War is an act of sustained aggression. In order to be capable of it, people must receive training and work toward specific goals.

1 Think Saving Private Ooogg. 2 Sadly, no artist has written The War of Art, a how-to guide that teaches self-defense using brushstrokes.


Over the next several chapters, we will consider the human species as well as human individuals. Observing humanity as a whole will help us understand the factors that make violent conflict so common and widespread. Examining individuals will show us what it takes to become a soldier and what toll warfare takes on the individual.

More than some other fields, psychology engages in a constant dialogue with other disciplines. This resource borrows from anthropology, sociology, zoology, neuroscience, and genetics—all informing us, in their own ways, why we fight and what enables us to endure war.

The psychology of war tells us, in part, what it means to be human. No other animal on the planet has invented positive things like the internet, subsistence farming, or the vibrating massage chair.3 Yet for all the progress humanity has made, we still find ourselves facing off in military conflict. We still perpetrate barbaric acts such as genocides and mass murders.

Why have we been unable to escape war despite our material advancement and the collective wisdom of our history and cultures? This is a troubling question for those who expect progress to lead to peace.

War often divides the world not only into factions but into a black-and-white mentality. We take sides, and we shout at each other from across the divide, refusing to acknowledge the many shades of gray that lie between “us” and “the enemy.” The truth is that war is complex. War’s many roles: participant, spectator, survivor, and victim, among others, reveal aspects of the human character that will likely both thrill and horrify you.

War may or may not be good for absolutely nothing, but studying its psychology is certainly good for at least one thing: to help you understand why war happens in the first place—and what it does to the warriors.

Jon Kern

3 It is possible some dolphin invented a massage chair that fell to the bottom of the ocean.


I. The Beast Within Like bald lighting, his shaved head shot forward, crushing

into Materazzi’s chest and knocking him to the grass. With that head butt, Zinedine Zidane, one of soccer’s greatest stars, ended his international career. The packed stadium watching

the 2006 World Cup fell silent.4

It was the final match, tied 1 to 1 late in the game. France’s best player was being thrown out for a red card penalty, and no one knew why he had done it. We had seen Materazzi talking with Zidane beforehand, but what could anyone say that would make you want to smash your head into their chest? France ultimately lost the World Cup to Italy in a shootout, the great Zidane watching from the sidelines.

Sometimes people snap. Usually, the situation is not as public, nor the timing as crucial, as it was with Zidane. Judging by television outbursts alone, though, it is not terribly unusual.

We commonly say of people under these circumstances, “he lost control.” This statement implies that we need to control ourselves most of the time—that some beast thunders inside us, rattling the cage of our better judgment. If we aren’t careful, if we don’t keep control, the beast runs loose.

Is a person simultaneously a walking zoo animal and a zookeeper? Read on to learn what experts say.

Objectives

By the time you complete this chapter, you should be able to answer the following questions.

Is aggression the product of biology or cultural rules?

Can violent impulses be controlled?

Are wars an inevitable part of human existence?

Introduction

Life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” No, that is not Professor Snape; it is the audacious pessimism of 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes. In his classic work, Leviathan, Hobbes proposed that human beings are not inherently good, that we live in conditions of constant conflict, and that only a strong central authority that rules using fear and power can keep society civil.

Hobbes might seem extraordinarily negative, but he did live through a time of tremendous violence and upheaval. Before Leviathan came out, Hobbes witnessed two civil wars in England, the execution of King Charles I, and a period of dictatorship under military leader Oliver Crowell.5 England had become a country where Catholics fought Protestants. In turn, Protestants were pitted against each other. Those who wanted to become more like Catholics fought those who wanted to distance

4 The only butting we’ve had at the World Scholar’s Cup involved a rogue umbrella. 5 Nothing helps create a cynic like really bad government.


themselves further from the Catholic Church. Strict Protestants picked fights with others who didn’t dress plainly enough. So when Hobbes described human existence as “the war of every man against every man,” he was speaking from firsthand experience.

The French social philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often presented in contrast to Hobbes. Rousseau theorized that “natural man” was a different creature than the people of his own place and time.6 He felt human beings, without the conditions of developed society, would not have the urge for murder and violence. He believed in the idea of the “noble savage”—asserting that “primitive” people who lived off the land would care less about property and have fewer reasons to fight. 7

Ironically, the leaders of the undeniably violent French Revolution were devout readers of Rousseau. The idea of the peaceful savage, carefree and unconcerned by taxes, motivated them as they organized France’s poor, overtaxed peasants into armies. The same men who dubbed Rousseau a national hero and buried him in Paris’s famous Panthéon later sharpened the guillotine to lop the heads off deposed aristocrats. To them, savages seemed noble—and therefore nobles seemed savage.

To find out who was more right, Hobbes or Rousseau, we turn to the sciences. The answer lies hidden in field research on primates, our closest genetic relatives. It is buried in the fragmentary records of early human beings, going back 5,000, 10,000, and even 100,000 years to the first hunter-gatherer clans. It lies at the forefront of genetics and neuroscience.

If Rousseau is right, and hostility a function of social conditions, then 19th-century Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz may have been right when he called war “a continuation of policy by other means.”iii Perhaps war is just a negotiating tactic, one of many rational options for resolving conflicts. But if Hobbes is correct, and the drive to war is an innate human quality, then Clausewitz will have to eat his hat. We would not be able to consider war “a continuation of policy.” We would have to call it the activation of a violent mindset that is ordinarily kept dormant.

So, from 17th-century England, 18th-century France, and 19th-century Prussia, we take you, naturally, to 21st-century Africa—to meet the chimpanzee.

How Primitive Are Our Brains?

They came screaming through the forest, eight black bolts flashing before the eyes of their target, their teeth bared in snarls, their powerful fists, capable of doing more damage than a professional boxer, ready to land blows. The target cried out, failing to gather any support from those around him. Alone, he raised his muscular arms to shield his face. One of his attackers swooped in low and yanked his feet out from under him. Another rushed in, landing several punishing hits. Still held down, he took painful shots from seven attackers. The lone female danced around the fight,

6 That is, 18th-century France. He died in 1778, just a decade before … [ominous horror movie music] … 7 Today, “savage” and “primitive” are offensive words, but Rousseau meant “noble savage” as a compliment.

THOMAS HOBBES Human nature is to create a constant

state of war; life is “poor, nasty, brutish, and short”

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU People are inherently good “noble

savages”; violence arises out of social conditions


hooting and howling.

The carnage was over quickly. Afterwards, the raiding party of eight chimpanzees raced back to their territory. Left behind was a beaten and broken chimp named Godi. He was never seen again.

We have just traveled back to 1974, when researchers witnessed the first ever recorded chimpanzee murder.8 Before then, the common notion was that chimpanzees operated like Rousseau’s noble savage. They lived in peaceful groups, caring for their young, with only a few struggles over food. To pass the time, they would serenely groom each other in the shadows of the forest canopy.

So it was assumed—until a primatologist working with renowned zoologist Jane Goodall observed the gang attack on Godi. Goodall was the first zoologist to study chimpanzees in their natural habitat, starting in 1960 in the Gombe area of Tanzania. For 14 years, no one on her research team observed any sign of chimps killing each other.9

After that day in 1974, Goodall and her team were left wondering: why would a group of chimps kill another chimp? One team member, Dr. Richard Wrangham, recounted their observations in a book he co-authored, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Wrangham described how the chimp gang systematically attacked individual males from their rival group. By1977, all the rival males were murdered. The violent chimp gang had won.

Strangely, the gang did not stand to gain much from its attacks. Food was abundant in the Gombe. In fact, the researchers had been giving bananas to both groups.11 The gang’s tribe did gain a few females from the losing tribe. However, new mates were more an extra benefit than a necessity. The gang’s tribe had plenty of its own females, and there was no pressing need to reproduce in greater numbers.12 The gang’s tribe also did not need more territory.

So much for the noble chimpanzee. The gang members were not only violent, but they also were not trying to win any sort of resource for their tribe. What they sought, and won, was status. They proved their dominance in that area of the Gombe. With the rival males gone and the rival females assimilated into their own tribe, they were now the sole chimp superpower.

Few animals are known to kill members of their own species for status, although many animals fight for status within their own groups. Rams smash their horns together, giraffes swing their necks like whips, and dogs bark and tug at the leash in your hand when they see another dog. Few animals, though, use lethal force when battling for status. Usually, status fights have built-in safety measures, courtesy of evolution. Giraffes, for example, have extra hard heads formed by calcium deposits.

Chimpanzees lack an inborn physical defense against attacks from rival tribes. They are helpless against their rivals’ superior numbers and merciless, organized assaults. In this chimpanzee behavior,

8 While researchers have observed chimp murder, the first chimp murder mystery novel remains undiscovered. 9 These chimps must have been as silent and swift as ninjas. 10 With the exception, possibly, of sponges and sea cucumbers. 11 I used to hang bananas from my ceiling. It made for convenient snacking. – Daniel 12 The Chimp’s Guide to Women is a pretty worthless book.

Life at the Top

Having status is attractive to all animals.10 Higher status means more food and more mating, and a greater sense of control over your life. It also means having others rely on you. High status has its benefits, but comes with a lot of pressure to defend your position.


an example of same-species killing, Wrangham and Peterson saw a similarity to certain human behaviors, from street gangs and mob hits to massacres, genocide, and war.

Now chew on this: genetically, we are more closely related to chimps than chimps are to gorillas. That is part of why primatologists like Wrangham view chimpanzee behavior as a living look into the origins of human behavior. We and chimps might have inherited our capacity for violence from our most recent common ancestor.

The discovery of chimp murders shocked the primatologist community. It suggested the kinds of behavior we associate with crimes, atrocities, and war have roots in evolution. If early humans were like chimps, then society did not create war as Rousseau believed. Rather, war lived within us long before we built complex societies. Score one for Hobbes.

Observing chimps gives us only limited insight into human nature, though. However close our genomes are to theirs, we are not chimps, and chimps are not humans. For more information on early humans, we must turn to the things they left behind.

War among Humankind’s Ancestors

According to fossil records, the first homo sapiens (modern humans) appeared around 50,000 years ago. Our ancestor Australopithecus13 separated from the rest of the ancestral primates between 5 and 6 million years ago. So, when it comes to the grand history of time itself—about 13.5 billion years—humanity’s total existence accounts for about a split second.

Humans between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago were hunter-gatherers; they hunted and gathered food.14 They had no farms or supermarkets to visit. Recent data suggests humans gathered more than they hunted, mainly because gathering was safer and produced a higher yield of edible treats.15

According to archeological records, civilization did not take shape until 6,000 years ago, around the same time humans began living in larger social groups. They built homes and grew food on farms, watched over livestock, fashioned themselves clothing, and wrote things down. Early societies were led by a single authority such as a chief, a king, or a council of elders. They were a part of the period of human development known as the Neolithic Revolution, between 12,000 to 4,000 years ago.

Time for a speedy calculation: human society (loosely) as we know it has existed for only about 12% of human history. Cave villages and rudimentary tools were around earlier, but the organized sort of society we would recognize as civilization is just a baby, only six thousand years of age. Something else existed six thousand years ago, too: violence.

There is clear evidence of warfare and other conflict during the rise of civilization. Australian Aboriginal rock art dating back 6,000 years depicts figures in large groups, as many as 111, 16 hurling spears and shooting arrows at each other. Evidence of warfare also exists in the fossil record. 13 a.k.a. the extreme beta version of humanity 14 Hunting and gathering can be surprisingly effective in my backpack. 15 Mmm, roots and bugs. 16 What a pleasantly specific number.

Debate it!

Resolved: That the Goodall team’s observations in 1974 prove that the capacity for violence in humans is inborn.

According to fossil records, the first homo sapiens

appeared 50,000 years ago.


Skeletons have been found with wounds only weapons can make. Some even have arrow tips still lodged inside their bones.

Mass graves have been found in Germany and southern France. The grave at Talheim, Germany predates the ‘official’ start of civilization: it is 7,000 years old. Inside lie the remains of 18 adults and 16 children, their skulls bearing marks and wounds from six different axes. A 4,000 year old mass grave in Roaix, France, holds more than 100 bodies. The remains show evidence of arrow wounds. These are the vicious attacks of Neolithic farming societies.

The evidence of warfare among older hunter-gatherers is far slimmer. No mass graves from that period have been uncovered. Rock art older than 10,000 years rarely features human figures, let alone figures engaged in combat. Still, archaeology scholar Lawrence H. Keeley claims prehistoric hunter-gathers were also warriors. In his book, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, he cites evidence of hunter-gatherer tribes going on attack raids to steal food and supplies. Keeley also points to pre-Neolithic skeletons that show signs of violent death. Whether or not organized warfare existed among hunter-gatherers, he says, killing and ritual murder are in evidence.

Luckily, we have good old-fashioned academic conflict to keep things interesting. In his book, Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace, anthropologist Douglas Fry stands in complete opposition to Keeley. He refutes the claim that hunter-gathers engaged in war. He points to a lack of solid archeological evidence and suggests warfare is only about as old as geographically stable communities—those that stay in one place. Fry also refutes the idea that humanity is naturally warlike today, since most people are not engaged in warfare. He suggests our assumption that we are warlike drives us to be so.17 If we change our way of thinking, we may decrease the incidence of war.

Keeley and Fry have more in common than either party recognizes. 18 As Fry points out, the raiding and ritual murder that Keeley cites is not equivalent to warfare. It is not organized aggression sustained for a long period of time, and there is no evidence of returned violence. Hunter-gatherer raids seem similar to the chimpanzee gang attacks, except that they are focused on gaining specific resources, not merely eliminating competitors.

Keeley wins a point, too. While Fry says there is no direct proof of war among ancient hunter-gatherers, he concedes humanity has a violent legacy. Even in his examples of “peaceful” tribes, he describes murder, revenge killings, executions, and feuds. The bloodshed never rises to actual warfare: the systematic clash of soldiers. But, systematic or not, these examples do prove that our early ancestors did not fit the model of Rousseau’s noble savage.

The lack of warfare among hunter-gatherers is likely due to their “high degree of personal autonomy.” iv They were social, but independent; they may have fought each other as individuals, but probably not in large groups. Hunter-gatherer societies were largely unstructured with individuals

17 In that case, thanks for the wars, Hobbes. 18 For example, both Keeley and Fry mention Australian Aborigines; Keeley talks about how violent they are, while Fry describes how they successfully avoid war through “judicial fights, duels, and the punishment or execution of wrongdoers.” These are two professors who see the same shade of blue as two different colors.

Directed Research Area: The Neolithic Revolution

What were Neolithic civilizations like? What methods did people develop in order to survive? What spurred on the technological progress that led to cities, farming, written history, and the arts? Start your research at http://nchs.ucla.edu/NH100-preview.pdf.


widely dispersed. Lacking social organization, they were unlikely to organize themselves for the purpose of war. Hunter-gatherers were also nomads, meaning that they were geographically quite mobile. When conflict arose, they could simply move, reducing their motivation to fight.

The reasons we engage in warfare go beyond individual psychology; they are a function of group dynamics. Still, it takes certain aspects of our psychology and personalities to make us want to fight in the first place.19 Whether we are warmongers or peacemakers, we want to know: what is the human potential for violence, how does it get activated, and how we can manage it?

Differences in Aggression between Males and Females

Remember how male chimpanzees were the ones killing their rivals? It fits with a trend you may have noticed developing. Many of the topics we have covered concern stereotypically “guy stuff”: sports, gangs, and war itself.20 If, during our discussion of hunter-gatherers, you were thinking the hunters probably did more fighting than the gatherers, you are right.

Wars are mostly fought by men and have been throughout recorded history. This fact leads us to ask a question central to psychology: nature or nurture? Does genetics, culture, or some combination of the two result in the high ratio of male to female warriors?

Whatever the reason, there is little doubt that, on the whole, men behave more aggressively than women.21 Violent crime statistics worldwide confirm this fact. In New Zealand, researchers followed about 1000 individuals from age 3 to 21 in a longitudinal study.22 They found that males were 2.4 times more likely than females to be involved in antisocial behavior—a way of acting that is inconsiderate or harmful to others. According to the United States Department of Justice, between 1976 and 2005, men were 8 times likelier than women to commit a homicide.

The United States Department of Justice also found the rate of female offender homicides remained fairly stable in the thirty year period. This implies there may be biological or societal factors at work, which prevent women from acting as violently as men, regardless of the overall violent crime rate.

There are also significant differences in the way women go about committing murder. In the United States Department of Justice report, women who committed murder were more likely to kill someone they knew than a stranger. They were unlikely to be involved in gang violence. Women were also more likely than men to use covert weapons such as poison, rather than a blade. These data points suggest that women’s patterns of violent behavior are quite different from those typical of

19 Case in point: you cannot make a bunch of sea cucumbers wage war. 20 Please note the word “stereotypically”; many women like sports, enjoy war movies, and can throw a mean punch. 21 On behalf of all men, I sincerely apologize. We can get dumb. 22 Not the study of geographic coordinates, as it may sound, but rather a study in which researchers observe a group of individuals over a long period of time.

Debate it!

Resolved: The world would be more peaceful if women ran more governments.


warfare. Wars involve organized groups employing overtly violent weapons against strangers. Based on this data, we may conjecture that women are less prone to waging war than men.

In addition, it is often socially unacceptable for women to engage in warfare. Even today, female soldiers are often blocked from combat roles.23

Even if women are less liable—or less permitted—than men to wage war, they are not necessarily less capable of fighting. History is peppered with examples of famous female soldiers, like 12th-century Samurai Tomoe Gozen and 15th-century French military leader Joan of Arc. Women have also led countries and empires during wartime, including 18th-century Russian empress Catherine the Great, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (in office 1969-1974), and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Margaret Thatcher (in office 1979-1990). That men are likelier than women to kill does not mean men are tougher or stronger than women.

Not all our primate relatives are violent. The bonobo is a type of primate that closely resembles a chimpanzee.24 In fact, researchers did not even identify bonobos until the 20th century, having assumed, based on the primates’ appearance, that they were just smaller chimpanzees.

Bonobos and chimpanzees are more closely genetically related than chimpanzees are to humans. However, their behavior could not be more different from one another. Bonobos behave peacefully. The chimpanzees in the Gombe attacked each other even when food was abundant. Bonobos do not resort to violence even when food is scarce; rather, they share the available food. Bonobo communication is soft and birdlike,25 and when males within a group confront one another, they do so without much physical contact. As Wrangham and Peterson summarize in Demonic Males, “male bonobos just don’t seem to care quite so much about being the boss.”v

Primatologists do not know exactly why bonobos are less aggressive than chimpanzees. However, evidence shows that, in bonobo social groups, males and females are codominant—they share power. Male chimpanzees are always in charge, asserting power and hoarding resources through intimidation

23 According to one researcher, objections to having women on the front lines sometimes come from male soldiers—and not always for the reasons you might think. It seems male soldiers can exhibit extreme aggressive behavior after seeing a female comrade wounded, and some are concerned that their instinct to protect female colleagues might distract them from the mission at hand. 24 Their name is very fun to say, and hard to say five times fast. 25 You can hear bonobo calls on YouTube. Search for “The Human Bonobo Project” and click on the first link.

Homicide Type by Gender, 1976-2005 Male Female All homicides 88.8% 11.2% Victim/offender Relationship

Intimate 65.5% 34.5% Family 70.8% 29.2% Circumstance Gang related 98.3% 1.7% Argument 85.6% 14.4% Weapon Gun 91.3% 8.7% Arson 79.1% 20.9% Poison 63.5% 36.5%


and threats. In bonobo communities, the highest ranking females have equal power to the highest ranking males. A low status male respects a high status female.

Actually, female bonobos may have more power than their male counterparts. Female bonobos are responsible for settling conflicts between groups. One female representative from each party will greet the other through displays of affection and resolve the dispute. Additionally, the status of male bonobos relies at least partially on the strength of his alliances with females. A male is more likely to have power if his mother is alive, because she can organize other females to support him. By forming peaceful social networks, female bonobos diffuse tension between groups—and their ability to work together is more important than any individual power a male bonobo might possess.

Comparing chimpanzees with bonobos shows how two closely related species can behave very differently. Genetic data suggests that bonobos and chimpanzees diverged between 1.5 and 3 million years ago, and, because they resided in different environments, they evolved differently. It is possible that greater access to food in the bonobo territories encouraged a more peaceful society. Though today’s chimpanzees compete for power as well as resources, their aggressive behavior could have begun due to resource scarcity and later evolved to include dominance.

Not all animal species with female dominance are peaceful. In spotted hyena populations, females are more aggressive than males. Unlike bonobos or chimpanzees, with their social networks, hyenas live in small family groups called packs and hunt as individuals rather than sharing resources. They are not particularly social or friendly, even with their own families; hyena cubs are born biting. They attack each other even in their dens (shelters), sometimes fatally. One cause of this aggression is resources; when food is scarce, it is to the advantage of a pack to kill off its young.26

Female hyenas hunt for food, and they also scavenge the remains of dying or dead animals. Young hyenas (kids) drink their mother’s milk, which means mother hyenas must hunt and eat more to produce enough milk. This means keeping up their strength in order to hunt and scavenge. Female hyenas are famous for having very masculine appearances. Even the ancient Greeks noted hyena males and females look more similar than the males and females of other species. Animal biologists believe this physical similarity results from high levels of testosterone in female hyenas. Testosterone is a hormone, a chemical produced by the body, usually found in greater quantities in males.

26 Aren’t you glad you are not a hyena?

Why Oh Y?

The science of genetics is on the rise, but is just beginning to discover connections between certain traits and genes. It is possible that a gene or series of genes on the Y chromosome primes men to be more aggressive that women.

The U.S. Marines (a.k.a. the Jarhead Clan) have made a concerted effort to recruit

female warriors.


Testosterone is found in very high levels in female hyenas, even in fetuses. Some zoologists believe that testosterone causes female hyenas to perform traditionally male functions such as hunting and to be more aggressive than females of other species. The idea that hormones contribute to behavior is hardly exclusive to the spotted hyena. Researchers across many species turn to hormones to help explain gender differences.

Across a variety of animal species, including humans, we find that females and males consistently exhibit different behaviors. Some researchers believe that the concentration of certain hormones and other chemical substances in our bodies may determine how aggressive we are. While both men and women are capable of aggression, there seems to be something about the Y chromosome that increases the chance of hostility in men.

The Mental Mechanics of Aggression

Fundamentally, human beings are just highly complicated machines. We are made up of various organ systems that work together to keep us functioning, and the ways in which those systems act and interact can affect what we do.

It can be difficult to evaluate the effects of biology on behavior because environmental factors, including society, are also at work. We must consider all possible factors, both biological and environmental, to determine the cause of a given behavior.27 While research has shown that more testosterone increases aggressive behavior in animals, the evidence of testosterone’s effect on humans is inconclusive. Two things that complicate research on human aggression are the way in which the brain processes emotion and the way in which scientists classify aggression.

Smack dab in the middle of your brain is a series of structures called the limbic system. Its general purpose is to process emotions and to make us act based on them. Because of the limbic system, you know to run from danger and take pleasure from a piece of chocolate cake. The limbic system also allows us to feel anger and rage, a fact confirmed in experiments on cats. Researchers Allan Siegel and Jeff Victoroff were able to cause a cat to act aggressively by sending an electrical impulse to a specific part of its limbic system. They found they could turn violent conduct on and off like a light switch.

When the limbic system receives a stimulus it sees as a threat, it signals the rest of the brain and body to react. Whether that reaction is aggressive depends on the particulars of our unique limbic system. Aggression that is premeditated (planned) also calls on other parts of the brain that control rational behavior. Our brain, then, reacts differently to an unexpected threat than to an expected one. Different parts of the limbic system are at work.

27 Remember nature and nurture? They tend to get in the way of nice, easy psychological conclusions.


Scientists call these two types of aggressive behavior defensive aggression and predatory aggression, or reactive aggression and instrumental aggression. British researchers Ian Craig and Kelly Halton summed up the difference between them thusly: “one results from the lack and the other from excess of emotional sensitivity.” Someone who is defensively aggressive can be said to lack emotional sensitivity. He is impulsive—acting without first thinking. As a result, the target of his aggression may not be the same as its cause. For instance, if someone shoves you, but you do not see who did it and respond by shoving someone else, you are acting impulsively; you are not being emotionally sensitive to the situation. In this sense, defensive aggression can be called unstable and broad—often seemingly out of the aggressor’s control and lacking a specific or ‘proper’ target. When we display defensive aggression, our hearts beat faster and our muscles tense up, preparing us to fight.28

People’s moods also depend in part on chemicals called neurotransmitters. Siegel found that two particular neurotransmitters, dopamine and norepinephrine, increase our potential for aggression.29 Both occur naturally in our brains, but foreign substances can also make us act more or less aggressive. For instance, high levels of opioid drugs, such as certain painkillers, inhibit aggression.

When the brain receives the impulse for aggression, two things proceed: that aggressive impulse is expressed within the brain, telling us we are feeling aggressive, and then we decide whether or not we are going to act. Unlike Siegel and Victoroff’s cats, humans do not always respond impulsively to an aggressive impulse. One cannot simply press a button and make a person lose his temper.

Neither can one produce an aggressive response in humans simply by adding testosterone. Testosterone may contribute to aggression in some way, but it likely works in tandem with many other factors. It does not automatically make you angry, instruct you to act on an aggressive impulse, or plan a violent act. How, then, do we account for the crime data we discussed earlier, which made it clear that men—with higher testosterone levels—are more likely to commit violent acts? How can we explain the unusually aggressive behavior of female hyenas? The jury is still out on testosterone’s exact role.

Evidence from Holland and South Africa suggests testosterone may make people more sensitive to aggressive impulses. Men and women given extra testosterone were more likely to perceive facial expressions as angry. They were more likely to see other people as aggressive—whether or not they actually are.30 It seems testosterone creates interference between the thinking and feeling parts of the brain, making it harder to act rationally in an emotional situation.

When researchers increased the testosterone levels of a group of healthy young women to male levels, the women had trouble recognizing others’ emotions, including fear, disgust, and especially anger.

28 Some would say that the American invasion of Iraq after 9-11 was an example of defensive aggression. 29 They are also necessary to produce the feeling of love. 30 You are also more likely to go bald.

The Scientific Frontier

Much of the research cited here is recent. Scientists such as Craig, Siegel, and Victoroff publish new discoveries every day.


Together, these findings suggest that testosterone elevate a person’s perceptions of a threat while lowering his or her ability to make accurate judgments about the nature of that threat. Even if the threat is real—like someone approaching us with an angry face—testosterone may prevent us from correctly assessing the degree of anger or recognizing if the person has gone from angry to scared.

If people with higher testosterone levels are more likely to perceive threats, one would think we could also prove them more likely to engage in conflict. However, it is not so easy to prove this cause-and-effect scenario in humans, most likely because there are other body chemicals working along with testosterone. For example, experiments that have shown testosterone to be a direct cause of aggressive behavior have required a second condition: a lack of the chemical cortisol.

Cortisol is a hormone the body produces under conditions of stress or anxiety.31 It helps the body cope with adverse conditions. Mix high testosterone with low cortisol levels, and you have a recipe for violent outbursts. A study of boys in a delinquency program found boys were more likely to act aggressively if their testosterone were increased—but only if they had low cortisol levels. If a boy had higher cortisol levels, the increased testosterone did not make him more likely to behave violently.

Therefore, it seems cortisol is able to diminish the effects of testosterone.32 When cortisol is present in medium to high levels, extra testosterone does not produce extra aggression. When cortisol is lacking, extra testosterone increases aggressive behavior. We can extend this conclusion to mean that, among people with high testosterone levels, those whose bodies have a lower-than-usual response to stress—producing less cortisol—may be likelier to act violently. If their bodies are not responding normally to stressful situations, they might also be more fearless or reckless than their peers. This could make them more likely to start or continue a fight when others would back off.

The blueprint for our bodies, including our limbic system, neurotransmitters, and hormones, is found in our DNA. Therefore, how we respond to emotions has roots in our genetic code. Genes we inherit from our parents can affect how we feel and behave. One of the most notable genetic findings related to aggression involves a gene that leads to the production of the brain enzyme monoamine oxidase A (MAOA). High levels of MAOA have been found to reduce aggressive behavior.

The interaction between social, chemical, and genetic factors makes it difficult to assign responsibility for violent behavior to any one of them. Frustrating as this complexity may be, there is also a wonderful fact at its center. Because there are few absolutes where human behavior is concerned, practically every person has a chance to redeem himself from the negative effects his genes, body chemistry, and social circumstances might create.

Limits on the Beast

The good news about aggression is that it can be, and is often, controlled. Unlike the chimpanzees or hyenas we have discussed, human beings possess the ability to suppress their aggressive impulses and maintain peaceful societies. It all depends on how much willpower we have.

Put Down the Marshmallow or You May Kill Again

Could you resist a bowl of free candy? What if a researcher offered you this deal: eat one marshmallow now, or wait fifteen minutes and have two marshmallows instead of one? And what if

31 If you find yourself freaking out before an exam, your body is probably busy producing high levels of cortisol. 32 Like dumping water on a fire. Sssssss.


this researcher proceeded to leave the room—and left you alone with a plate stacked high with more marshmallows than your stomach could hold?33

Researchers have actually conducted such an experiment, beginning at Stanford University in the 1960s. Developed by psychology professor Walter Mischel, it tests willpower and, specifically, how well a person can delay gratification. It turns out many people cannot control themselves for long. Many subjects chose to eat the single marshmallow immediately, or would simply begin devouring the entire pile. It is hard to blame them, though. The test subjects were only four years old.

In the following years, Mischel found that the children who could delay impulse gratification at four grew up to score better on tests, get better jobs, and have fewer problems with drugs and crime. The study proved willpower can have a great impact on our ability to thrive in society. Everyone has aggressive or harmful impulses at times, but it is largely to our advantage to control them.

Research conducted since Mischel’s study has supported his results. A 2009 study found children who ate candy daily at age ten were much more likely to be arrested for a violent crime before age 34. The researchers theorized that “giving children sweets and chocolate regularly may stop them learning how to wait to obtain something they want.”vi

When children who do not learn patience grow up, they are more likely to do or take what they want through violent means. There is an indirect linkage between candy consumption and violence. Candy does not cause aggression, but children allowed to eat candy seem to have less willpower—that is, to lack self-control—as adults.

The willpower you have at age four may predict your success in life, but willpower can also be learned. You can train yourself to improve your ability to delay gratification.34 The key to self-control is being able to focus your attention strategically—to adjust how you frame, or perceive, an object, situation, or environment. Mischel coached some of his subjects on willpower—for example, by having them imagine the marshmallows were something less appealing. By framing the marshmallows that way, the subjects could sometimes prevent themselves from indulging in them.

In later studies, Mischel proved that context affected aggression. In the early 1990s, he examined a number of different social situations at an American summer camp. He found that campers were selectively aggressive. A camper who would lash out at his counselors would not necessarily attack his roommates. One who picked on fellow campers might be respectful to his counselors.

Mischel found that aggression follows if-then patterns. There does not seem to be one recipe for aggressive behavior; where, when, and how a person expresses aggression depends on his unique psychology and context. If Daniel has a problem with authority, he will be aggressive to his counselors. But if his parents are visiting him at camp, then he may not act aggressive in front of them. If Rita wants to build up her self-confidence, then she will pick on other kids. But if there are counselors present, then she might not do so. We can surmise from Mischel’s findings that, in a battle, a person’s aggressiveness would likely increase significantly.

33 Jackpot! 34 Supplies: table, plate, marshmallows, and assistant with stun gun. Do not try this at home.

Children who show self-control at four are more likely to score better on tests, get higher paying jobs,

and avoid drugs and crime as they get older.


The Innate Capacity for Peace

Despite the frequency of war in human history, it would be oversimplifying to say humans are generally warlike. For every sector of a society that prizes warfare, there is another that works to maintain peace. Whole cultures exist, like the Paliyan people of South India, which deem aggression unacceptable. The 3,000 Paliyan alive today live mainly in towns, although their lifestyle is closer to that of hunter-gatherers. Fighting is rare among them. Anthropologist Peter Gardner reported only 20 conflicts, which he called “episodes of disrespect,” in a four-and-a-half month observation of one band of Paliyan gatherers.vii With very few exceptions, the Paliyan practice strict nonviolence.

There is no reason to think the Paliyan lack aggressive impulses. They just use communication and self-restraint to control themselves. As Mischel’s research demonstrated, the ability to control aggression is as common to people as aggression itself. Though some of us naturally have more willpower, we can all cultivate it. Whether we learn to control our aggression depends on our societies and our experiences.

Many of us live in societies where the violent aspect of human nature tends to receive more attention than the peaceful aspect. Perhaps this is because stories about conflict and struggle are more exciting. There are many war movies, but few peace movies. According to Fry, whom we discussed in the section on warfare in early humans, cultural beliefs bias how we perceive ourselves. If we believe humans are naturally warlike, we are more likely to perceive ourselves as aggressive—whether or not we truly are.35 We can only conjecture about the effects of such perceptions on our actions, but it is possible believing humans are warlike becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy; believing we are designed for war, we end up starting wars.

Fry disagrees with Keeley on the origins of war, but they agree on a fundamental point: the majority of human experience is peaceful and cooperative.36 Most of the time, we behave civilly. We have dinner with our families. We do our chores and go to school or work. Yet war seems to rule on the grand scale of recorded history; wars have been fought on every continent in nearly every year of recorded time. Though periods of peace receive less space in history books, they tend to occur more frequently, and in more places, at any given minute of any given day.

Aggression is likely inherent to human beings, as it is to other animals. Our brains are designed to experience aggressive impulses, and to send those impulses to other parts of our bodies. After all, aggression is useful; it allows us to defend and assert ourselves. Even Fry, who makes the case for peace, admits “certain types of aggression and associated behaviors, but not warfare, were favored by natural selection.”viii Aggressive humans may have been better at hunting, and at intimidating others in order to gain resources. Those behaviors would have helped aggressive humans survive and reproduce, so it makes sense aggression would survive in the human population to the present day.

But humans also need cooperation in order to survive and thrive. Maintaining peaceful relations within a family or community, and cultivating peaceful relationships with nearby communities, keeps people safe and allows them to make progress. Thus, the elements of our psychology that promote harmony can be considered just as natural as those that make us aggressive.

35 According to WNYC, in the 1980s only 1 in 3 people said war was inevitable. Today, the percentage is much higher. Though not a scientific measure, these results do show that attitudes about human nature and war can and do change. 36 Peaceful and cooperative doesn’t mean serene or happy. Living in peacetime has stresses and annoyances all its own.

Debate it!

Resolved: That media displays of violence encourage people to behave violently.


Conclusion

Humans have been aggressive creatures since our early ancestors first roamed the Earth; this means aggression is a natural impulse, but it can be controlled. No doubt, Zidane played soccer aggressively every single game. Only once, however, did he attack another player. That head butt does not prove that Zidane was an uncontrollably violent person; it was just a poor decision.

When governments decide to wage war, they are channeling the human capacity for aggression to suit their agendas. They are not being impulsively violent, since war requires rational planning and some level of public approval. In essence, we have as much capacity to be peaceful as to be aggressive. Whether we choose to wage war or keep peace depends on the values and power structures in our societies. If we value peace, we will structure our society around it. If our government perceives a threat or an opportunity to gain through warfare, it may go to war. 37

Some key points to remember from this section:

Chimpanzees, humans’ closest living genetic relatives, exhibit male dominance and deadly hostility. Bonobos, who are similar to chimpanzees, are more peaceful.

In nearly all societies, men are more likely to commit acts of crime or violence than women.

The first evidence of war-like aggression and killing between human beings dates to the Neolithic period and the founding of the first towns and settled communities.

A region in the brain called the limbic system controls emotional responses like anger, fear, and joy, and causes behavior by regulating brain chemicals called neurotransmitters.

Testosterone has been linked to aggressive behavior, especially combined with low cortisol. Genetic factors can also influence a person’s chances of acting aggressively.

Willpower affects people’s likelihood of behaving aggressively.

Though warfare is common in history, the majority of human experience has been peaceful.

37 The really confusing situations are when governments claim they are going to war in order to maintain peace.


II. Taking Sides Why do we play sports on teams? Solo sports like gymnastics

and diving captivate us at the Olympics, but it is soccer,38 basketball, and other team sports that captivate the world on a

grand scale. They give players a group identity—Manchester United or the Lakers39—and fans the chance to be a part of it. Just listen to the chanting at a soccer stadium to confirm that

taking sides gets people excited. Group identification is part of what makes us human.

Objectives


Why do people form and join groups and defend those groups?

How does being a part of a group change the way an individual thinks?

Introduction

In the early 1990s, in the country now known as Bosnia and Herzegovina, near the Adriatic Sea in Europe, group identity was a dangerous issue.ix In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Bosnia was in search of a new identity. The country to which Bosnia belonged, Yugoslavia, was experiencing what we now call Balkanization: a violent breakup along ethnic lines.

The Croat ethnic group called for independence and self-rule. The Serb ethnic group aimed to join with another part of Yugoslavia, Serbia, and create a larger country based on Serbian identity.

Bosniaks, a third, mostly Muslim ethnic group, supported the Croats.

As tensions mounted, each ethnic group tried to set itself apart from the others. Bosniaks began using more Islamic expressions, while Serbs, according to one war reporter, began “dusting off words from the fifteenth century,” reviving old vocabulary to make their speech more ethnic.x Where once there was one language called Serbo-Croatian, now there were three: Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian.

Between 1992 and 1995, these divisions erupted into the Bosnian War, centered in the capital city of Sarajevo. Practically the entire city became a war zone, with battles occurring on the street, in backyards, and along riverbanks. When it was over, over a hundred thousand people were dead and 1.8 million had lost their homes. 66% of those dead and wounded, including 83% of the civilian victims, were Bosniaks, against whom the Serb armies were particularly prejudiced.

Soldiers were not the only ones wreaking violence on the region; many neighbors and friends became enemies and killers overnight. The Bosnian War is one of the many ugly chapters in human history. Ethnic tensions had led to ethnic war. Group identities had fractured a country and cost many lives.

38 I am sorry, I still say “soccer.” I can’t help it. 39 When the Clippers win a game, which is admittedly a rare event, I don’t say, “They won!” I say, “We won! – Daniel


“Minor differences”

The 20th-century Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud wondered why people who have much in common often separate themselves into distinct groups. Freud called this tendency in human beings the narcissism of minor difference.xi Recent findings suggest the greatest genetic difference between two human beings is around 1%, meaning that in strict genetic terms, we are all alike—yet we are drawn to distinguish ourselves from other people.

Freud did not consider the narcissism of minor difference dangerous. He focused on its benefits. He pointed out that group orientation helps people bond and societies cooperate. However, the other side of group identity is dislike of other groups. It is easier for a group to come together when its members have common rivals—when “us” and “them” are clearly defined.xii Think of it this way: it is often easier for us to define who we are not rather than who we are. 41

Freud saw the human tendency to exclude others as a safe way for us to express our desire for conflict. The problem is that dislike for others can lead to harmful and even devastating conflicts, such as the Bosnian War. The more intense the dislike, the more potential there is for warfare.

The narcissism of minor difference illustrates the two sides of warfare, one being cooperation between members of a group and the other being aggression towards an excluded, disliked group. War would never occur without the hatred of others, but neither would it occur without the fellowship of soldiers.

Shibboleths: From the Old Testament to No Smoking

Language is one of the key mechanisms in reinforcing the narcissism of minor difference. Listen to the various social groups at school. Groups not only share the same activities, they share the same slang, jargon, and inside jokes. Think of phrases like “gnarly,” “OMG,” “phat,” “algorithm,” or “flutist,” and they conjure up an image of the kind of people who would use them.42 And it’s unlikely you get an image of someone using all those words in the same sentence.

As with the Bosnian Muslims who took to using more Islamic expressions or the Croats who dusted off their 15th Century dictionaries, people use words to signal and reinforce their membership in a group. This includes groups they already know they belong to.

As tensions rose prior to the Bosnian War, “the Serbs, Muslims, and Croats each began to distort their own tongue to accommodate the myth of separateness.”xiii In the absence of difference, they sought to create some through language. To emphasize their individual ethnic identities, these groups created shibboleths for themselves.

Any word, expression, or indicator of a specific culture or group is a shibboleth. 40 For example, there may be more kinship among flutists than among all the members of an orchestra. You define yourself as a flutist because that is the minor difference separating you from other rows, and, let’s face it, it would look silly if you blew into a violin. Each member of the group in turn defines his membership this way. If one flutist would look silly blowing into a violin, imagine the whole row. 41 Don’t try this on college applications, however, listing all the groups you don’t belong to. 42 Likely it’s an image of someone old pretending to be young.

The Narcissism of Minor Difference is Freud’s theory that humans tend to emphasize

what makes them different from each other, even when they have much in common.40 Applied to groups, it allows one group to feel a sense of

common identity against another group.


The word shibboleth comes from the Old Testament of the Bible. The Book of Judges tells a story of war between the Gileadites and the Ephraimites. After the Gildeadites won, they stationed soldiers to capture any Ephraimites fleeing across the Jordan River. But the Gildeadites and Ephraimites had mixed in their effort to leave the battlefield, and these two warring rivals were so identical in appearance and even in speech no one knew how to tell them apart.

The Gileadite sentries had to figure out some way to determine who was one of them and who was an enemy. While the Ephraimites spoke their same language, they did have an accent. They could not pronounce the sh sound. So the guards at the river asked each person who came their way to pronounce shibboleth, which in the Hebrew of the time meant the part of a plant containing grain. If someone couldn’t pronounce the sh, he or she was slaughtered on the spot.

According to the Bible, over forty thousand Ephraimites were killed, all for the lack of a sh.

These markers of difference are frequently triggers for aggression. During the Bosnian War, No Smoking, a local Sarajevo rock band, played a song that included the lyric delija, a Serbian word for “cool dude.”xiv A gang of off-duty Croat policemen identified the use of Serbian, and, for that alone, they attacked the band on stage.

Something as small as a shibboleth can suspend the normal rules of human behavior and friendship. Psychologically, we seek these signs to tell us where we fit and others don’t. In hostile times, they can lead to grave consequences.

Identification Mechanism

Small actions and casual statements do much to establish our identities within groups. It may seem absurd, and certainly it is terrifying, to think how you pronounce a word could cost you your life. We use such indicators, however, on a daily basis.

Think of how you talk with your friends. Think of all the concepts, ideas, phrases, slang, topics, gossip, and people you need to know to fit in. How strange would it be to meet someone who didn’t know what the Internet was? What if your father couldn’t remember your brother’s name? Wouldn’t you suspect something is wrong with him?

Our daily lives are composed of streams of information. From these streams, we fish out certain bits, and from these bits of information, we can deduce much about who we are and who others are to us. If you are a Los Angeles Clippers fan and you meet someone who also claims she is a Clippers fan, you expect her to know who plays on the team. If you run into someone who is in the school play with you, you expect to see him at rehearsal.

Debate it!

Resolved: That education should focus on making people more similar.

Directed Research Area: Treatment of Muslims in the United States after 9-11

In the wake of the September 11, 2001 bombings, many Americans grew suspicious of Muslims and Arab-Americans, especially in public places. In your research, ask the following questions:

Did the United States government take any actions following 9-11 to affect public attitudes toward Muslims?

Were there any incidents of violence against Muslims in the United States in the aftermath of 9-11?

What is “racial profiling”? As a team, discuss whether it is ever appropriate.

You may want to begin your research at: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-12-12-arab-americans-cover_x.htm


At the same time, if you see someone at school whom you’ve never seen before, you might be suspicious. If he’s young, perhaps he is a new student. But if he’s older and doesn’t seem to have a reason to be there, you might come to more apprehensive conclusions.

This process of finding a reason for being there is a key aspect of human psychology. As in the film High School Musical, we figure out what groups are around us (jocks, nerds, fashionistas, goths, etc.), what groups we want to be a part of, and what groups we are a part of (this includes family). We also notice who is different and who doesn’t fit. Depending on how included you are, you have different feelings about the people in a group.43

Psychologists Paul Shaw and Yuma Wong call this process the identification mechanism. They assert that this ability to identify with others who belong to the same group has an evolutionary benefit. It was biologically formed over the thousands of years of human development to ensure we aid our family’s survival, seek protection with friends, and recognize foreign threats. According to their theory, your reaction to the suspicious stranger at school is in part directed by the deeper structures of your brain. The same is true for your camaraderie with your Scholar’s Cup teammates.

Shaw and Wong use the example of xenophobia to explain how ordinary behavior is a manifestation of rooted psychology. Studies of infants show their fear of strangers is “governed by built-in preparedness.”xv Their level of fear increases when 1) the stranger stares, 2) the stranger moves suddenly or comes closer, and 3) the interaction happens in an unfamiliar setting or context.44

These three stranger behaviors conform to how predators act in the wild. The implication is that our innate fear of these behaviors is an evolutionary reaction to danger signs that a predator is near.

We can control these reactions, just like we can control whether we take a marshmallow when no one is looking, but the underlying desires or emotional reactions still exist.

Looking at the table reproduced from Shaw and Wong’s book The Genetic Seeds of Warfare (on the following page), you see the different factors acting on an individual’s psyche. How we think is organized by the world itself—the options provided to us and the experiences available for us—and how we perceive the world—how we react to those options and feel those experiences.

Like the infrastructure of a city shapes your understanding of it, there are mental infrastructures that help shape your understanding of the world. The various mental infrastructures of life usually work without you even noticing them. You travel down roads of choice, over familiar bridges connecting one action to another, never thinking about the ideas and questions not even on your mental map.

Surface structures are the general pool of information that constantly surrounds us, from pop culture like advertisements and song lyrics to the political and economic theories talked about in the news.

Societal infrastructure is how communities and groups are organized, from the different forms of national government (democracy, dictatorship, etc.) to the different social groups at school.

Cognitive infrastructure refers to the sets of ideas people use to process information, from moral and religious codes to assumptions and instinctive beliefs.

43 That’s why your parents can embarrass you, but your friends’ parents can make you laugh and embarrass your friends. 44 Doctors would be much less scary if they were treating you at home.


Neural infrastructure is the design of the human brain, such as how the limbic system is designed to make people experience emotion. While the basic neural structures are consistent from person to person, genetics, conditioning, and life experiences can create differences in how these structures work in different individuals.

These structures, which affect decision making, range on a scale from “overt” to “covert”. Overt structures are visible ones that organize society, such as how the economy or government works or who is in charge in certain social settings. Covert structures lie deeper in the brain, such as the rules and moral codes that inform behavior or the formation of neural pathways and the set of hormones released by the hypothalamus.

Cultural and social forces can be internalized so that what we experience in the world becomes a part of us, and our internal structures provide guidance in how we organize systems of law and governance. How we perceive the world is dynamic process with all the various forces affecting our perception also affecting each other. For example, when we internal a rule, we can even affect the physical structures of the brain. Thus, a distinction we perceive through the narcissism of minor difference may become a quality we viscerally feel as foreign to ourselves. The use of a word not in our language can be made to intuitively trigger a response of rage.

That feeling of foreignness is stronger than just the mere awareness of difference. It comes in the form of identifying with or not with, in deciding what is ‘us’ vs. ‘them,’ ‘I’ vs. ‘the other’.

Such feelings can have profound effects, as in the Bosnian War. How they come about, according to Shaw and Wong, is a result of three mental processes: reification, heuristics, and emotions.

Reification is the process by which abstract, general concepts become concrete to us. Through reification we are “capable of sorting vast quantities of unorganized, piecemeal perceptions and stimuli into categories.”xvi We take our experiences of fellowship or commonality and elevate these experiences and give them meaning. When we hear that someone is also a big fan of Star Wars, we receive this as important information. We recognize in this fact a whole set of assumptions.

Reification can also help us transfer our feelings for an element of a group to the group as a whole (e.g. I like Yao Ming so I’m a fan of the Houston Rockets) or our attachment to a place into something symbolic of that place (e.g. I’m from China so I’m a Yao Ming fan).

Once gingerbread hearts45 have been reified, they no longer are just cookies. They are totems of your heritage, symbols of your family. To fight for gingerbread hearts is to fight for your mother, father, grandmother, sisters, brothers, and everything you hold dear.

45 My family baked lots of gingerbread hearts. Yours probably didn’t, because they don’t taste very good.


Heuristics are “mental rules of thumb for valuation and decision making.”46 These rules can be gained from experience or passed down from others. xvii Through heuristics we are able to place value and make judgments about the concepts we reify and the shibboleths we hear. When we meet that fellow Stars Wars fan, we know we can trust her to understand our Wookiee call.

Heuristics help “reduce uncertainty and ambiguity which the mind must otherwise confront.”xviii They are generalizations that may not fit a given situation, but help us cope with a changing world.

Heuristics is perhaps a fancy way of saying assumptions. However, more than the average assumption, a heuristic rule is an element of a person’s identity. These are the judgments that help you to decide whom to trust, whom to hang out with, whom to love. On the opposite side, if your heuristics have “attached negative meanings” to certain markers, “they help identify groups considered dangerous.”xix

Emotions have been implied in both our analysis of reification and of heuristics. How we feel—a product of chemical reactions in our brains and bodies that occur fractions of a second before we have time to think about our feelings—plays a crucial role in the decisions we make. Emotional reactions “directly enhance the effectiveness of the identification mechanism by providing emotively charged motivation for action.”xx

This does not mean emotions are solely impulse. They can become ingrained in our minds by the very processes of reification and heuristics. In essence, these three work together, reinforcing a total perception of the world and the individuals who inhabit it.

Studies show that scenes of a person’s home or family, or words associated with strong memories, produce a greater emotional response than neutral images. This helps explain how private attachments can be carried to larger and larger groups—how love of family precedes and leads to love of country.

Without these emotions or attachments you get a failed conflict. A declaration of division—such as when my school handed out gold and blue t-shirts at random and declared a competition between students wearing gold and students wearing blue—is not enough to motivate group formation. There must be genuine feeling.47

Shaw and Wong’s identification mechanism is critical to grasping how small disputes can symbolize large conflicts and how persistent violence can be traced to individual stories. For wars to occur, massive numbers of people must be made into singular forces opposing one another. A dispute between one Serb and one Croat, or a family of Serbs and a family of Bosnian Muslims, can spin ever wider until whole communities are changing their languages and joining up against their foes. The psychological process of identification is how armies get and keep their soldiers on the front lines. 46 Heuristics can be stereotypes. Just because we use these “rules of thumb” doesn’t mean they’re accurate or appropriate. 47 Setting up a competition between girls and guys is much more effective, because these two communities already feel different and separate.

Directed Research Area: The Hogwarts and Harvard House Systems

Colleges and universities often try to foster school spirit in different ways. Some, including Harvard and Hogwarts, divide students into different Houses.

How and when are students assigned to different Houses at Harvard and Hogwarts?

Do the different Houses at each school have different characteristics? If so, in what ways?

In what ways do Houses at Hogwarts “go to war”?

As a team, discuss whether it is a good idea to separate students into rival groups in schools or universities. Would you design things differently?


Who I Am Is Not You

I was riding the subway to meet a friend. The car wasn’t very crowded. An older African-American woman in a purple coat sat on the bench opposite me. A few seats away a young Hispanic woman with hoop earrings and leather boots listened to her iPod. Down at the other end of my bench a fellow wearer of glasses had his freckled head buried in a book.

A large family boarded the subway near City Hall. Three generations, at least. Brothers and sisters fighting for attention. An older couple smiled at their redheaded grandchildren. Any New Yorker could tell these were tourists. They treated the subway poles like toys and stared at the maps.

The family overtook the car like hot wind when you crack the door to an air-conditioned room. They flooded it with their own conversation. “Are we going the right way?” “We’re going to Times Sq.” “I think so.” “See here…” “Let’s get off.” “This goes to 42nd St.” “Is this the red line?” “Oh, Times Sq. is 42nd St.” “Everyone stay!”

At 34th St., the family exited, still yelling at each other. The normal New York quiet returned.

I looked up and my smile met the smile of the African-American woman in her purple coat. We shared a knowing moment. The family reminded each of us that we were New Yorkers and they were not.

That African-American woman and I might not normally notice how we share a city. But when we encountered the tourists together, we could recognize, for a brief time, all that we had in common.

Every person belongs to many communities. Our family. Our home town. Our ethnicity. Often times, we take our membership for granted. When someone not in our group comes along, however, the contrast reminds us who we are and where we can belong.

Group Formation Through Conflict

Conflict can serve as a sort of glue. In World War II, for example, the United States and the Soviet Union became allies. Old enemies join forces when they confront new common enemies. Once they had won the war, they went back to being adversaries, competing for 50 years in the Cold War.

Relationships formed because of a common enemy are termed antagonistic cooperation.48 However, they are difficult to maintain. The threat to group unity is victory. Once the common enemy is defeated, the unifying bond that formed the group is lost.

48 When super-villains work together to defeat a mutual enemy, such as when the Sandman and Venom joined forces in Spider-Man 3, you get a case of antagonist antagonistic cooperation

The Anti-Crowd

Have you ever noticed how much people like to complain to their friends? “Venting,” they call it. Our annoyances and aggravations are as much a part of who we are as the things that give us joy. Being able to share the negative points of our days prevents our frustrations from festering inside.

Every person belongs to many communities.

Aliens

Have you ever noticed how much people like to complain to their friends? “Venting,” they call it. Our annoyances and aggravations are as much a part of who we are as the things that give us joy. Being able to share the hard points of our days prevents our frustrations from festering inside.


In his classic novel 1984, George Orwell imagines a state, Oceania, which uses the constant threat of war with its neighbors to unify its population and control its citizens. By keeping the country always at war, the government maintains its power and can impose strict rules on its citizens.49

The philosopher George Sorel saw class warfare as a means to unify and mobilize the working class—in his view, poor people could use rich people as their common enemy.

Enemies and Scapegoats

Because rivalries can help bring people together, groups “may actually search for enemies with the deliberate purpose or unwitting result of maintaining unity and cohesion.”xxi This is especially true, as Coser notes, for rigidly structured groups such as sports teams or political advocacy associations. These groups have obvious marks of membership (such as logos and mascots) and clear objectives.

Groups in search of structure will also “search for enemies” to create unity and cohesion, as the ethnic groups in Bosnia did after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Outside conflict or competition may not even be originally present when the clamor for conflict begins. “All that is necessary is for the members to perceive or to be made to perceive an outside threat in order to ‘pull themselves together,’” as Coser states.xxii

In situations of unity-forming conflict, the enemy in question can be seen as a scapegoat.50 A scapegoat is any target of blame or hostility that allows negative emotions like fear, shame, and rage to be directed at someone outside a given group.

Freud viewed the phenomena of scapegoats a natural extension of the narcissism of minor difference. He described how scapegoats “have rendered most useful services” by being the target of ill will. Without scapegoats, members of a group might turn on one another.

When a sports team is doing badly, fans often focus on one player or on the coach as the scapegoat. They call for the player to be traded or for the coach to be fired.

The presence of a scapegoat—and the seductiveness of finding one—attracts hostile behavior and sentiment. What is acceptable behavior toward ‘the other’ differs from what is acceptable to ‘us.’ Once one has an enemy in sight, the conventional rules seem to melt away.

This can happen surprisingly easily. Thanks to one famous experiment, we can see how easily people can go from antagonistic feelings to antagonistic actions.

The Stanford Prison Experiment

In the summer of 1971, Stanford professor of psychology Philip Zimbardo carried out one of the most audacious social experiments ever allowed at a university. The results were so disturbing that what was planned as a two-week long study had to be ended after just six days.

49 Some critics accused the Bush Administration in the United States of using the vague War on Terror for its own political benefit—for example, to help it win the 2004 Presidential Election. 50 The term comes from an ancient practice for the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. The original scapegoat was an actual goat, who was sacrificed in a ceremony to purge the sins of an entire village.

The Language of the Enemy

Labeling a person or a group “the enemy” can have a powerful effect. The word creates an immediate critical judgment. It is worth paying attention to how this word is used around you. It may reveal emotions and tensions you hadn’t noticed before.


Zimbardo wanted to see the effect being in prison had on people. Earlier that summer he had taught a class on “The Psychology of Imprisonment.” For this purpose he devised the Stanford Prison Experiment, or S.P.E., to see how normal, average folks would respond to the stress of being in prison. He would take volunteer test subjects, randomly split half into guards and half into prisoners, and put them in a fake prison built in the basement of Stanford’s Psychology Department.51

To complete their roles, volunteers were costumed. Prisoners were put in identical looking uniforms and chained at the ankles. Guards were given khaki shirts and pants and sunglasses so no one could see their eyes. Prisoners were blindfolded and had bags put over their heads. Guards were handed wooden batons with which to keep order and punish the prisoners.

Everyone involved knew this was not real. It was just a simulation. Yet it became frighteningly authentic. The local police helped arrest the prisoners in front of their friends and neighbors. They were fingerprinted. They lost their names and were referred to by numbers only. Once at the “prison,” they were stripped naked and doused with a germ-killing spray.

All this effort was designed to breed a genuine sense of humiliation and powerlessness, a feeling only intensified by the fact the prisoners had done nothing wrong. They had no guilt to explain their punishment to themselves.

The research staff had put procedures in place to protect the prisoners. Guards were instructed to inflict no pain and not act abusively or violently. At the same time, they were told to dominate and dehumanize the prisoners. During a videotaped orientation, Zimbardo told the guards their job was to take away the prisoners’ sense of individuality, to strip them of their sense that they were people. He wanted the prisoners, for clinical reasons, to feel totally powerless.

The guards took to their roles. With their sunglasses on, they stripped prisoners with zeal, shouted at them, and ordered them about.52 They harassed anyone who mouthed back. They obnoxiously pushed the force of their authority in the face of the prisoners and expected to be obeyed.

By the morning of the second day of the experiment the prisoners were rebelling. They had barricaded themselves in their cell and were taunting the guards. The guards called in reinforcements and were able to quiet the rebellion. They put the main organizers in solitary confinement. They offered the best behaved prisoners extra food, more comfortable living conditions, and better treatment. This had the effect of splitting up the prisoners.

Less than 36 hours in, the first prisoner snapped. He began to scream and cry uncontrollably. But he was told he was not allowed to quit. His nervous breakdown only worsened. Eventually, by the end of the second day, he was allowed to leave. Prisoner #8612 would later say, “I felt totally helpless.”

51 The prison has since been replaced by a Thai take-out cafe there. 52 Being able to look someone in the eye is an important way to connect with him or her.


On the fourth day, prisoner #819 asked to leave to see a doctor. Zimbardo agreed. On their own, the guards trotted the rest of the prisoners into the hallway and organized them to chant in unison “Prisoner #819 did a bad thing.”53xxiii Upon hearing this chant, #819 changed his mind. He wanted to stay and prove he could be a good prisoner. Not until Zimbardo reminded #819 of his actual name could he break from the psycho-drama of the simulation.

In very little time, the “prisoners” and the “guards” had formed new identities based on what group they belonged to. The prisoners had become obedient wrecks, either conforming with great willingness or disintegrating into puddles of hopelessness.

The researchers—yes, research was still happening—found that the guards had divided into three types. A third were “tough but fair”, following the rules to the letter. A third became “good guys”, doing small favors for prisoners and not punishing them. The final third, however, truly took to the power of their roles. Typified by one guard nicknamed “John Wayne,” they displayed a reckless, cowboy-like attitude toward the prisoners’ health and well-being. They were “hostile, arbitrary, and inventive in their forms of prisoner humiliation.” xxiv

Guards did not fight or argue with each other, despite their different attitudes. They showed up consistently on time and never excused themselves from the experiment. Prisoners, however, became isolated and withdrawn from each other. At one point, given the chance to get a fellow prisoner out of solitary confinement by giving up their own blankets, many simply chose to keep their blankets.

By the fifth or sixth day, the researchers discovered guards were growing increasingly cruel. At night, when they thought no one was watching, they were heaping on the prisoners even more vicious and degrading treatment. Eventually, a visiting researcher saw what the experiment had become and called for Zimbardo to call it to an end. This outside voice woke up his conscience and he did so immediately.

In an interview with one of the “guards” two months later, the man expressed shock at how he had behaved toward the prisoners. Away from the simulation, he had become “dismayed” by his own cruelty. He said, however, that “while I was doing it I didn’t feel any regret. I didn’t feel any guilt.”xxv

Collective Psychology

The Stanford Prison Experiment created a context that permitted the young men put in charge to violate their own moral codes. One could try to excuse them on the grounds that the whole experiment was a performance. But even if the guards thought they were acting, they displayed a willingness to do to real harm. They could see they were upsetting the prisoners, yet they continued.

Worse, as they witnessed the harm they were causing, the guards actually became more aggressive. Zimbardo saw this as deindividuated aggression. Because they were working as a group, the guards became liberated from personal responsibility. For the same reason, when a firing squad is used to execute someone, more than one person fires at the same time—that way, no one person feels responsible for the death.

The psychologist Donald Dutton writes of “personality factors” common to populations that commit genocide and people who commit torture.xxvi In those circumstances, you often find approval

53 This seems like a rather benign criticism. The emotional reaction of #819 is a testament to the potency of conformity. The need to be a member-in-good-standing with your group can tap into a deep and painful nerve.


from leaders or other authority figures and a collective willingness to go along with the offending action. The thrill of power overwhelms the conscience when abuse is approved from above.

Not everyone needs to agree for there to be a sense of group approval. The people who disagree must only go along with what is happening. If they don’t stand against the offending behavior, they are in some way giving it social acceptance as long as the stay a part of that society.

Dutton cites “authoritarianism, strong in-group conformity, and out-group devaluation” as the factors that permit moral disengagement.xxvii This could well describe the guards of the prison experiment. In it, there was to be strict obedience to figures of authority and a clear chain of command (authoritarianism). The guards all followed the conventions of their group and supported one another (strong in-group conformity). And the guards humiliated the prisoners, stripping them of any sense of having rights and power on their own (out-group devaluation). 54

To generate conflict, a fundamental antagonism must be present. This antagonism can come about effortlessly out of nothing just by flipping a coin and saying “heads you’re a guard, tails you’re a prisoner.” But, to get individuals to act on this antagonism, incentives need to be provided. The strongest incentives are often group conformity and leadership approval.

Knowing who you are not is only a compelling motivation if it comes with a sense of identity of who are and what you should be doing. Otherwise, all you get is a fleeting moment on a subway where two people share a grin and then go back to being strangers.

The Purpose-Driven Strife

Conflict can often be its own reward. The idea of the scapegoat exemplifies how helpful a good fight, or even a good war, can be. After the end of the Gulf War in 1991, the New York Times recalled the collective positivity people felt during the war:

March 24, 1991 – When the war with Iraq ended on February 28, many Americans sighed with relief, and many with pride. For a precious few days, the euphoria stilled domestic disputes and indulged a national daydream about solving economic and social woes.xxviii

The war pushed aside other worries and created a unifying bond that brought Americans closer in their shared patriotism. Once the war was over, the goodwill predictably went away. As Samuel Kaplan, a professor of sociology at Swarthmore College, stated:

“America went to bed with a great victory and woke up with a victory that no longer seems so great and a world filled with problems that we basically aren’t able to do anything about.”xxix

Upon awakening from war, one finds the old animosities have not been healed. War is a temporary panacea, a euphoria of the moment—like falling in love. The fissures that exist in the domestic life of a country will stay sealed only so long as its sons and daughters are fighting in a foreign land.55

54 I doubt my high school wanted to create a situation like the Stanford Prison Experiment when they handed us Blue and Gold t-shirts. However, at least the prisoners and guards showed some real team spirit. Handing out costumes is not enough. A certain kind of collective psychology must be present to get individuals to behave as one. “Gold team member” is not a role with clear expectations or an associated set of conduct. “Prison guard” is. Also, while we were given t-shirts and separated into teams, we were not given specific instructions by any authority figures or any reasons to want to compete with the opposite team. In fact, many teachers would tell us they thought the Blue/Gold idea was silly. 55 And sometimes not even that long.


Yet even though the relief provide by a scapegoat does not last, the practice continues. To understand why wars occur, despite the awareness of the suffering and horror they create, we must understand war’s tremendous psychological appeal.

Family at Arms

In Jarhead, a memoir of life as a Marine sniper during the Gulf War, Anthony Swofford explains what first brought him into the Corps: “I joined the Marine Corps in part to impose domestic structure upon my life, to find a home.”xxx

One of the least talked about but perhaps most vital reasons for joining the military is the need for friends and companions. Loneliness is a universal experience.

The military connects people. It gives them a common uniform, language, and objective. As we have discussed, these are all important elements in creating unifying bonds.

More than most groups, militaries aim to recreate a family, albeit a family with a function like no other: to defend, kill, and die, if necessary. In a poetic monologue on the eve of battle, King Henry the 5th of Shakespeare’s play Henry V announces to his troops:

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.”xxxi

Members of militaries often refer to each other as blood relations. They are each other’s “brothers,” “sisters,” “sons,” and “daughters”.56

The sense of camaraderie and solidarity that is literally drilled into soldiers gives them a sense of self-worth. Even in groups that are unpleasant to be a part of, the S.P.E. prisoners, for example, the need to feel valuable is strong. When #819 was told he was “bad,” he had an immediate emotional need to prove his value, even at the detriment to his own health.

The desire to prove one’s worth, particularly for the sake of one’s friends, is one of the main causes people fight for when they fight in a war. Whether they joined because of a draft or for the soldier’s salary or because they were coerced into it, once they have shared the intimacy of battle they carry a new purpose: to defend their brothers and sisters in arms.

56 Of course, they don’t all say it in English.


In World War II, soldiers were given surveys asking them for what purpose did they fight. “Hatred of the enemy, personal and impersonal, was not a major element in combat motivation,” concluded the War Department's Information and Education Division.57 As Coser explains, after having read all the data, “Combat motivation was a compound of many elements, of which loyalties to the group of ‘buddies’ was apparently the most important.”xxxii

These collegial, supportive emotions even extend to civilian populations, despite their lack of organization and training. When under attack, ordinary citizens band together. Domestic disputes are stilled as a wave of harmony pulls everyone in.

Such a wave of good relations was seen during the Gulf War in Israel, which Iraq bombed in response to a United States led invasion. One Israeli interviewed on American television described the kindness brought about by foreign aggression:

Israelis have become so much more polite to each other. There is friendliness, ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ It is a wonderful feeling.xxxiii

Certainly, Israelis also felt terror and concern for their safety. But out of the sense of danger came a renewed sense of identity with their fellow Israelis, a stronger kinship.

Similarly, the Bosnian War, like many other ethnic conflicts, helped establish greater ties within the ethnicities in conflict. Even though many Serbs and Bosnian Muslims had grown up together, the violence between these groups naturally shifted their relationships. Former trusts were shattered as people found they could only count on those in their own ethnic group.

Wars are not started to make new friends and family. But they do make strangers into brothers, comrades, and buddies. People like Anthony Swofford join armies and end up in wars out of the basic human need to find a place they can call home.

Euphoria and War Addiction

“War often starts with a collective euphoria,” writes Chris Hedges, author of War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.xxxiv As the former war reporter witnessed firsthand, the build up to armed conflict is marked by pageantry, rallies for the troops, and fervent displays of support.

In fact, while anti-war songs may go down in history, pro-war songs often chart better when a war is just beginning. Recuperating from a leg wound suffered in Vietnam, Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler wrote “Ballad of the Green Berets” with author Robin Moore.58 The song topped the charts for five weeks in 1966, just as the Vietnam War was escalating. It was the number twenty-two song for the decade, meaning it was the one of the most played and purchased song in the entire 1960s.

Sadler performed the song on TV shows and his photo graced the album cover. With lyrics like “These are men, America’s best” and “Men who fight night and day,” the song clearly endorsed the war. It even ends with a dead green beret leaving a message for his newborn son to follow in his father’s footsteps. This was meant to highlight the pride individual green berets felt.

57 After World War II, the War Department of the United States became the Department of Defense. Why do you think it was renamed? 58 Type “Ballad of the Green Beret” into Google and you can find videos of Sadler singing the song.


War itself can be an exciting for those who confront its risks and dangers. Beyond the network of comrades, there is the pulsing buzz of being close to the edge of mortality, where your decisions matter because they can save or cost a life. The thrill-seeking aspect of war’s “psychological appeal,” is often treated like a nasty secret few want to admit.xxxv It can seem obscene to say that, despite its awfulness and misery and death and destruction, war can feel awesome.

LeShan tells the story of a woman who worked in the French Resistance against Nazis. Fifteen years after World War II ended, Gray met up with the woman, now just a civilian with a son and a husband. Sitting in her comfortable home, she told Gray: “You know I do not love war or want it to return. But at least it made me feel alive as I have not felt alive before or since.”xxxvi

In the musical King David, the young David is going through his most difficult battles of his life when his friend Jonathan reassures him. “This is your golden age,” Jonathan says, “In quieter times than these [you will recall] that you once had it all.” In other words, these days that seem so difficult will be the ones he someday longs for. Our hardest times often turn out to be our best.

The ordinariness of the everyday can be frustrating for some to stomach. The unique experiences of war can transcend that ordinariness. The individual psyche is subsumed by the energy that is conflict. Past confusions melt away. A current of exhilaration—a spike of adrenaline—jolts the brain.

War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning is largely a confession of Hedges’ attraction to war.59 Having reported on numerous conflicts, he can remember the faces of men and women who died. He can remember scarred bodies, people literally torn apart by war’s machinery. Yet, every time he left a war zone, it only took so long before he was itching to return. Looking at his choices and desires, Hedges concludes: “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”xxxvii He jumped into foreign conflicts and put his safety at risk to experience being alive as he could not experience it anywhere else.

Often, the narcotic of war is merged with actual narcotics. Ishmael Beah, who served three years in the state army during Sierra Leone’s civil war, tells of how he was given cocaine, “brown brown” (a mix of gunpowder and cocaine), and unknown white capsules to help him mentally get through combat raids. These chemicals were meant to enhance his aggression and deaden his conscience.

The effect of these drugs, both the war and the others, was to transform Beah and his fellow soldiers into violence-seeking addicts. Their appetite for ferocity and carnage could not be blunted. At one point, Beah’s lieutenant gave him and others in his company over to an organization focused on rehabilitating African soldiers. They were taken to a hospital where there were also ex-rebel fighters.

59 Book titles that are also sentences: yea or nay? Personally, I like them.

Lyrics from King David

This is the time for you. You have it all

You can do anything You're standing tall

This is your golden age You will recall

In quieter times than these That you once had it all

The Health of Soldiers

Much of the lifestyle of being a soldier can be very unhealthy. While they have to be in good physical condition, they are also under constant stress and some take chemical enhancers to improve focus. Air Force pilots are known to use stimulants to stay awake and alert on long flights. In World War II, cigarettes were included in soldiers’ government-prescribed rations as a means to calm nerves. Self-discipline is useful to maintaining healthy habits, but stress, which is harmful by itself, can also encourage indulgences and excesses which are not good for the body.


Soon, the two sides were clawing at one another, desperate for blood. By the time hospital officials broke up the fight, six people had been killed. Beah and his troops laughed. As Beah described it, “We needed the violence to cheer us after a while of boring travel.”xxxviii

Beah, like Hedges, was reflecting on his experiences to try to understand his own hunger and attitude. He had grown from a reluctant soldier into a creature hungry to experience brutality.

Solomon’s opponent-process theory accounts for this simultaneous push and pull of war’s exhilaration.60 The psychic pain and subsequent pleasure of negative behaviors show how different emotional experiences can exist. After time, however, the pain can get worn away by the pleasure until the mind is left with only a dull contentment at the horror it perceives.

Hedges eventually quit the life of a war correspondent.xxxix

The Simple Life

Conflict allows us to simplify our lives. It is the ease with which we can distinguish black from white versus the uncertainty when we must spot the difference between the colors “toffee” and “coffee”.61 The more colors and shades we try to see, the more complex our field of vision becomes.

The value of the narcissism of minor difference is it makes slight variations seem like big disagreements. How a ripple of difference can grow into a tsunami of violence is frightening. Certainly, Chris Hedges could tell you how gruesome it is to behold. However, if your name were Georges Sorel, such a tide of warlike emotion might seem as pretty as a picture of a tropical beach.

Georges Sorel was a Marxist French philosopher writing around the turn of the 20th century. In his Reflections on Violence, he advocated for a class war to animate the revolutionary spirit of working men and women. To Sorel, violence was instrumental and fundamental. He did not think people would be motivated to see their class interests without the vigor of direct conflict.62

Through “acts of violence,” the proletariat (or working class) and the bourgeoisie (or capital-holding class) would recognize their incompatibility. They would be forced, in Sorel’s view, to adopt the order and discipline found in armies and the solidarity found among brothers-in-arms.

As a follower of Karl Marx, Sorel believed the success of the bourgeoisie was necessary before the proletariat could take control of society. He felt both sides had grown “decadent” and that violence would lead to a transformative confrontation that would help everyone “recover their former energy.”63 The class struggle predicted by Marx was to be a galvanizing movement, a clear call to action that would give everyone a renewed sense of purpose. xl

60 It is after all a theory often used to explain addiction. 61 Before they were colors, toffee and coffee were simply foods. It was easier to tell them apart. 62 Sorel doesn’t sound like he’d be fun in gym class. He’d probably pick his kickball team by punching half the students and then playing with whoever didn’t hit him back. 63 Yeah, in their hospital beds.

Conflict can reduce the complexities of life to simple

antagonisms.

Debate it!

Resolved: That the use of violence to acquire power can never be seen as a legitimate.


Sorel talked a good game, but mostly he wanted workers to go on strike—that is, to unite and refuse to work until their demands were met. But he was also willing to sanction more than that. When Vladimir Lenin led an armed revolution in Russia in 1917, Sorel excused the slaughter, championing the moment as an emblem of his violent vision. The fascists of early 20th Century Europe looked to Sorel as a mentor, and he in turn defended their use of violence to achieve power.

When Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini echoed Sorel by saying “War alone brings all human energies to their highest tension and sets a seal of nobility on people who have the virtue to face it,” he was speaking of the bombs-and-guns kind of war.xli The fascists merely expanded on Sorel’s central idea that war could be a tool to forge in people a noble purpose.

Any materialist class goals, such as the redistribution of wealth or improvements in the workplace, were ultimately less interesting then the energizing call to fight. The fight itself became the thing to value. It, and only it, elevated the working class from the meanness of necessity to the poetry of ancient warriors. In Sorel’s idealized picture of conflict, “proletarian violence, carried on as a pure and simple manifestation of class struggle, appears thus as a fine and heroic thing.”xlii

“Pure and simple” were concepts that echoed throughout Reflections on Violence. Ambiguity and complexity were attitudes to fear because they could reduce the will to act.64 The ability of conflict to make stark contrasts and reinforce divisions can be prized in times of psychological confusion.

Shortly after the attacks on September 11th, President George W. Bush told the world, “You are either with us or against us.”xliii Once again, conflict, this time represented by the invasion of Afghanistan and the War on Terror, would serve to “mark the separation of classes.” The classes of President Bush’s world view, however, had the generalized moral tone of ‘good’ versus ‘evil.’

Conflict thus simplifies situations into basic binary choices: with or against, proletariat or bourgeoisie, us or them. By creating binary situations, you can promote binary options—either x or y—that limit the range of choice. Many studies have shown that people are often happier with fewer choices than with more choices.

The Stanford Prison Experiment worked this way. Prisoners may have been given seventeen rules, but really they were given only two choices: obey or don’t obey. To not obey led to punishment, thus reducing their incentive-based choices down to one.

Military organizations, as Sorel understood, also impose very rigid systems of authority on their members. In the military, you know who is in charge at all times. You are told where to sleep and when to wake up and how to dress. You have a code of conduct. You are given daily instructions on what to do and how to behave. Any disobedience is punishable. 64 Athletes (and coaches) commonly use conflict to motivate and energize themselves and their teams. Listen to NFL football players and they’ll often talk about how “no one believed in them” except their teammates and fans.

“You are either with us or against us.”

Easy Access to Information

One of the advantages of the present over the past is that we now have greater access to information. If we want to know why students are protesting in Iran, we can research the topic on the internet. We can even find conflicting opinions we must sort out. Before we even start our research, however, we have personal filters that inform us which information sources we trust and which ones we don’t. In a free society, the antagonisms we feel—the sides we pick and the conflicts that result—can manifest indirectly in how we select whom to listen to and whom to follow.


While some might bristle at such restrictive control, many flourish under the guidance of military order. They find the absence of complexity comforting. As Anthony Swofford put it: “loving the Corps is uncomplicated.” You do what you are told and, in return, it “always waits up for you.”xliv

No doubt simplicity has its advantages in war. Extra seconds lost in thought could prove hazardous when bullets are zipping overhead. But, while it may be a tactical necessity, such a mentality has psychological consequences.

“The structure of the military accustoms you to a world without ambiguity,” note psychologists Laurie Slone and Matthew Friedman, who counsel returning veterans and their families.xlv That lack of ambiguity is not only codified in the authoritarianism of military life, it can also manifest in the ideologies people employ in war. As Chris Hedges states, “In mythic war we fight absolutes.”xlvi Soldiers can take on the Bush outlook of “for” or “against.” The full spectrum of colors fades, raising the contrast to pure black and pure white.

Soldier Henry Metelmann explained what happens if the color contrast on a person’s metaphorical monitor goes on the fritz. Metelmann was a German fighting against the Russians in World War II. During a pause in a battle, two Russians appeared out of a foxhole. Metelmann went over to them and started a conversation, as if they were only taking a break between classes.

The Russians asked if they could retrieve some identification tags from three Russians soldiers that Metelmann had killed when he leapt into their foxhole. Metelmann agreed. The Russians found some photos on their comrades’ bodies. “We all three stood up and looked at the photos,” recounted Metelmann. Then the enemies shook hands, “one patted on my back,” and they parted ways.

Metelmann left the frontlines for over an hour and when he returned the Germans were victorious. Asking his fellow Germans, pleased with their triumph, Metelmann tried to find out what happened to the Russians he had spoken with. “Oh, they got killed,” he was told.

“I was sadder that they had to die in this mad confrontation than my own mates,” confessed Metelmann. His brief exchange with the Russians had the effect of shading them with new dimensions of color. They were human now. No longer could he see them in the blunt light of black and white. The burst of hues from a handshake, a few pleasant words in broken languages, and a pat on the back was enough to leave Metelmann haunted by the memory of these men. xlvii

Enemies can be simple. Friendship is complex.

War as Fantasy

Sorel, for all his praise of violence and foolish associations with fascists, never showed an awareness of what war is. In Reflections on Violence, he wrote

Everything in war is carried out without hatred and without the spirit of revenge; in war the vanquished are not killed; non-combatants are not made to bear the consequences of the disappointments which the armies may have experienced on the field of battle; force is then displayed according to its own nature.xlviii

This is a description of a war that has never existed.

What Sorel was probably describing was the war he wished people would fight. But this war without hatred or revenge, where people are “not killed” and non-combatants are treated justly, is a myth.

Sorel believed strongly in the power of myths, narratives that frame a fight or struggle as absolutely necessary and guaranteed to provide victory for the myth follower. To Sorel, myths are “not


descriptions of things but expressions of a will to act.”xlix They are idealized depictions of what should be, clung to by impassioned minds the way a stubborn puppy will not let go of a sock. “People who are living in a world of myths are secure from all refutation,” Sorel wrote.l

Frequently, at the start of a war there is a myth. Often, there are several, and they exist on all sides. Sometimes these myths are noble, and sometimes they are total falsehoods.

The myth for America and Britain in World War I was that it was “the war to end all wars.” History soon proved that untrue. The Vietnam War escalated in 1964 after it was reported that the North Vietnamese had attacked a U.S. destroyer ship in the Gulf of Tonkin, a report that has been widely discredited since.65 Even the Trojan War began with the myth that Helen had been abducted by the Trojans, when in fact she had run off with them to escape her husband.

Not all myths are insidious. The Declaration of Independence begins with the mythic line “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” as if the words need no explanation beyond saying them aloud. Yet few people (except maybe some women) would argue that the next phrase—“all men are created equal”—was anything less than the highest of human principles at the time.

People fight to make their myths into reality. That is the plain and awkward fact of it. We start wars over ownership of empty islands. We travel halfway across the world to fight in the grandiosely titled Operation Enduring Freedom, the official name of the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

How these myths are generated has only grown in sophistication. In October of 1990, during the build-up to the 1991 Gulf War, a young woman spoke before the U.S. Congress. Nurse Nayirah was a fifteen-year-old volunteer at a Kuwaiti hospital. With a clear voice, she spoke of atrocities committed by Iraqi soldiers. She told a shocked nation that she had witnessed Iraqis throw sick babies out of windows just to see them die.

The horrendous claim created a stir among Americans. At that moment, it was not yet clear if America would defend its ally Kuwait. The news that the country would be going after morally abominable thugs who wantonly murdered defenseless babies gave clarity to the war cause. Suddenly, people had an image of a wrong their soldiers could right.

Cut to more than a year later. The Gulf War had ended long ago, quick and victorious. The memory of that success had faded into nostalgia. That was when a human rights organization revealed that “Nurse” Nayirah was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. Her testimony had been coached by an expensive political public relations firm. The claim about Iraqi soldiers harming defenseless babies has never been verified.

65 A U.S. destroyer shot a North Vietnamese boat on August 2nd, 1964. On August 4th, two U.S. destroyers fired at targets they thought they spotted on radar. No wreckage or people were recovered, however. Even though that same day the captain of the destroyer told officials in Washington, D.C. that they likely fired at non-existent targets, a belief spread that the ship had been attacked. After a frenzy of outrage over this pseudo-Pearl Harbor, Congress and the President agreed to send more troops to Vietnam.


When an individual is stirred by a deep belief, we call it a myth. When a public relations firm trains a girl with a false identity to spread rumors, we call it propaganda. Information constructed and presented with the goal of influencing how people think and feel is propaganda.

A coordinated effort to boost morale for conflict is common to modern warfare. These are immense enterprises, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people to support an armed cause. The more enthusiasm for the war, the better. The military encouraged Barry Sadler to record “Ballad of a Green Beret” because it knew the value of encouraging people that the Vietnam War was a worthwhile fight.

The universality of myth as a tool of war does not mean that wars only happen because people were manipulated into imaging conflict. Fantasies need not be deceptive for them to alter how a person thinks.

At the opening of Jarhead, Swofford tells of how when he and his sniper platoon heard the United States may go to war against Iraq they watched nothing but war movies for three days: Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket. This was months before “Nurse” Nayirah, before Americans at home had been given much reason to care why the Gulf War should be fought.

The snipers simply were giddy and excited to think they could join these fictional characters as veterans of combat. It did not matter that the message of these films was that “war is inhumane and terrible.”li For Swofford, no stylized image of violence or dramatic reveal of military misconduct could possibly be anti-war. His myth glorified the warrior. He wanted to go to war. He wanted the carnivorous rush, the vivid waking hallucination of carnage. He wanted the “rush of battle”—the sense that every moment matters—that only soldiers ever truly experience.

Instead, he got the tedium of blistering Arabian heat and the privilege of cleaning portable toilets.

Ishmael Beah writes of similar movie nights: Commando, the first two Rambos. Only his were out in the middle of a forest in Sierra Leone as he fought a civil war. Sometimes he and his fellow troops would pause a movie to march off to a real battle. The soldiers would return “hours later after killing many people” and resume their movie as if actual war had been just an “intermission.”lii

For these days in the forest, Beah lived in a world of the purest kind of myth. He stayed hidden inside his fantasy, even as he made it a reality he did not want to see.

“If I look at the mass I will never act.”66

One of the results of large, collective enterprises is that their scale dwarfs most people’s imaginations. War movies focus on a few soldiers, who stand in for the many. When we hear just the numbers—8.5million soldiers in World War I, 100,000 to 110,000 people in the Bosnian War—our minds stumble over them. They lose meaning. Two—the number of Russian soldiers Henry Metelmann met in World War II—can seem more significant than 10.6 million, the total number of Soviet soldiers lost in that war.

66 This is a quote from Mother Teresa, a Catholic nun who devoted her life to the poor, hungry, and sick in India.

Debate it!

Resolved: That depictions of violence in movies encourages people to behave and react violently in their own lives.


Paul Slovic, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, explains the concept of psychic numbing. It is the “turning off of feeling” when overwhelmed by the enormity of a tragedy.liii It was first pointed out by Robert Lifton in his analysis of how rescue workers at Hiroshima managed to keep doing their jobs in the aftermath of the first atom bomb.

Slovic specializes in decision research. Working with others, he has documented in experiments how “statistical lives” fail to make the emotional impact that “identified lives” do.liv One experiment asked people to donate to a charity that helped impoverished Africans. If the researchers provided just the story of one impoverished seven-year-old girl, they received on average twice the donation as when they explained hunger only in terms of statistics.67

When the statistical approach was combined with the girl’s story, people still donated far less. The numbers so failed to move the test subjects’ sympathy that they actually reduced the emotional appeal of the girl’s story.

This might be the result of priming, which is when a piece of information unconsciously affects how a person will react. In a follow-up experiment to the charity case, researchers either asked subjects a question to prime them to respond emotionally (e.g. “Describe your feelings when you hear the word ‘baby’”) or a question to prime them to think analytically (e.g. “If an object travels at five feet per minute, then by your calculations how many feet will it travel in 360 seconds?”).lv Priming with a math calculation reduced donations in comparison to priming with a question about babies.

Numbers by themselves do not cause psychic numbing. Numbers greater than one do. A separate team of researchers in Israel asked people to donate to help one sick child or eight sick children. These questions were posed separately, so no one was asked to compare the needs of the eight to the needs of the one.68 Those asked to donate to one child gave on average twice as much as those asked to donate to eight.

Hearing a number greater than one apparently decreases the empathetic spirit of giving. Empathy is the ability to imagine what someone else is feeling. To learn more, these same researchers (Tehila Kogut and Ilana Ritov) repeated Slovic’s experiment, but added the story of a second child. Separately, each child’s story received the same average amount in donations. When the two stories were combined, offering the option of donating to both children, the average amount dropped. The needs of two impoverished children turned out to be less than the needs of one.

While these experiments looked at feeling versus thinking reactions in cases of charity, they hint at implications for the psychology of warfare. When leaders order soldiers to war, they likely cannot

67 Here are a few of the statistics given. “Food shortages in Malawi are affecting more than 3 million children. More than 11 million people in Ethiopia need assistance.” Here is the first line from the girl’s story, which also included a photo. “Rokia, a 7-year-old girl from Mali, Africa, is desperately poor and faces a threat of severe hunger or even starvation.” 68 These researchers, in another experiment, offered people a choice of donating to one child in a group of eight or donating to the remaining seven children. Given this situation, 69% of respondents chose the group. When having to make a specific choice between the needs of many and the needs of few, people do go with the many.

Numb to Numbers

Have you ever looked at a Google map and thought about all the people that must normally walk down those streets you see? As globalization allows us to look at humanity in larger contexts, we must remind ourselves that abstract, overhead ways of looking at the world, like statistics and GPS photography, actually do represent individuals much like ourselves.


imagine the vast numbers of the enemy as equaling actual human beings. The headcount of an army or the casualty figures returning home can reduce the strength of the identification mechanism

In democratic countries, where popular opinion can affect the decisions of those in power, how strongly the people identify with the military can shape the policies of conflict. To other soldiers, those sent off to war are sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. To others, these brave men and women can become a blur of numbers. The sheer mass of the military leaves each face—and each death—out of focus. For a better picture of what is really happening, you must make sure each person means something to you.

Conclusion

In the first chapter, we learned that nomadic hunter-gathers were less likely to engage in war than geographically stable communities. From this chapter, we can see that without tightly bonded large groups, hunter-gathers would have had neither the ability nor the motivation to start wars.

Because of the narcissism of minor difference, human beings draw ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ distinctions, forming connections and disconnections at the same time. Conflict can then amplify these connections and disconnections. Such conflict draws the in-group closer together. Had my high school administrators understood this, they could have turned Blue t-shirts against Gold t-shirts into an epic collision.69

There are several key points to remember from this discussion of mental behavior of groups.

The narcissism of minor difference is the tendency of groups of people to view themselves as different from others based on small distinctions.

Shibboleth is a use of language or a custom that indicates membership in a specific group.

Different structures act on how we perceive the world, which affects the choices we make.

People form personal identities in relation to their membership in a group.

People who are in conflict with each other will join together to work to defeat a common enemy. This is called antagonistic cooperation.

The object of conflict is usually a scapegoat, a target chosen for the ease with which it can be blamed for other people’s problems. This deflects responsibility from those within the group.

The Stanford Prison Experiment found that the social context of a situation could lead people to commit acts they normally would not consider appropriate.

The behavior of individuals within groups can be quite different than their behavior as separate individuals. Collective psychology has the power to transform how individuals think.

69 First, each t-shirt color would have needed a central myth. Perhaps the Blues could have been the children of parents who went to college, while the Golds could be the children of immigrants with no education. To harden each team’s hostility, rumors could be spread: how the Blues took all the best bagels during lunch period, how the Golds slapped chalk dust all over Blues’ leader’s grandmother. Upon hearing such news, a current of aggression would crackle in every Blue heart. A calculus book would be thrown in the common area, starting a brawl. No one would know who threw the book. Both sides would blame the other. A riot would follow. Now there would have been some pugnacious school spirit.


Conflict, including war, has the ability to give purpose and direction to people’s lives.

Soldiers find family structures within the military, developing extremely close emotional relationships with their brothers- and sisters-at-arms.

War can seem exciting to soldiers and to the people of nations in conflict. Some even become addicted to the exhilaration or to the nonstop news coverage.

War and conflict can simplify the complex relationships of life.

Wars generate powerful myths to help explain why such conflict occurs.

Propaganda is information constructed and presented with the goal of influencing how people think and feel. Propaganda is commonly employed to convince people to fight wars.

Human beings have difficulty feeling emotional attachments to statistics or numbers. Using them leads to psychic numbing, lowering the emotional response to the problems of others.

Priming occurs when the context of a situation activates or deactivates certain feelings.

There are many questions to consider and discuss.

How necessary is the narcissism of minor difference in creating individual identities?

Without scapegoats, how would people deal with the frustrations in their lives?

What does the Stanford Prison Experiment tell us about how people come to commit acts of atrocity or acts commonly considered moral repugnant?

Does the term “evil” have real meaning, given what you have learned of human behavior?

Do people feel more excitement at the thought of war then they are willing to admit?

Would people fight wars without propaganda?

How can we overcome the effects of psychic numbing that limit how much we feel for our soldiers and our enemies?


III. A Soldier’s Story The most famous soldier of World War I was a pacifist. After

a reckless, trouble-making childhood in Tennessee in which he saw a close friend get killed in a bar fight, Alvin York joined a

Christian church that preached nonviolence. When he was drafted in 1917 to fight in World War I, he applied to avoid

service on religious grounds. Denied, he was shipped off to Europe.

On October 8th, 1918—only a year later—Alvin York would become a legend. Behind enemy lines, half his platoon slaughtered, York personally shot dead more than twenty German soldiers. After each shot, he asked the Germans to surrender. Eventually, they did: over 90 troops handing themselves over to one Tennessean and his motley crew of seven, half of whom were wounded.

This chapter examines the process it takes to go from pacifist to killer. The United States military is fairly open about its training methods and its analysis of why such methods are necessary. Therefore, we will primarily discuss America’s soldiers.

Objectives


Are people natural killers, particularly in the heat of battle?

What psychological consequences do soldiers experience in war?

What factors affect how a soldier performs during combat?

Introduction

Alvin York’s success as a soldier testified to his sharp-shooting. Back in Tennessee, he had won local competitions for marksmanship and had been an avid hunter. Yet not all of his accomplishment can be taken as tribute to his physical ability. There is also a mental component to success in war.

To observe the will and mental resilience of a soldier, look no further than the Alvin York of World War II. Audie Murphy was 5 feet 5.5 inches tall. He was so short his height had to be expressed in decimals. When he first enlisted, he weighed 110 pounds.

Murphy originally tried to break the rules and join the U.S. Marines in 1942 at only 16. They had none of him. He tried the Air Force, and they too turned him down. The Navy took its turn to say no. His desire to fight finally led him to the Army, which looked the other way and accepted him.

Cut to France in January 1945. Murphy is now legitimately 18. He has earned promotions for valor and bravery, been given his own company, and even grown another inch. He and the 19 men left from his regiment of 128 are defending the Colmar Pocket, a strategically valuable section of France. The temperature is well below freezing (-10 degrees C or 14 degrees F). Two feet of snow pad the earth. An onslaught of German soldiers is rumbling Murphy’s way. With tanks. And artillery.

It was a scene from a movie. (It literally would become that, as Murphy starred as himself in a film about his war experiences, To Hell and Back, once he returned home.) Unfortunately for the Germans that day, Murphy was the star and they were the extras.


Murphy told his men to take hidden positions where they could fire at the Germans. He would fire off weapons at the front position until out of ammunition. Then, like Wolverine, he charged at the enemy. Jumping into a shot-up American tank, he used the tank’s machine gun to destroy a full squad of German soldiers. Oh, yeah, the tank itself was on fire. Sitting in this flaming death trap, just waiting to explode, Audie Murphy repelled six tanks and 250 infantrymen for nearly an hour all by himself.

Because of his daring and courage, the United States won a decisive victory. Murphy would gain the Medal of Honor. He went home with 28 U.S. medals, five from France, and one from Belgium.

Audie Murphy was a heroic soldier because of sheer force of will. He did what other soldiers could not. And not because of Hulk-like size or wizardly powers. Physical gifts are unnecessary. The mental strength, the exceptional psychology of those who spring to life when death is nearest: this is the quality that makes a soldier into the star of his own movie.

Soldiers like this are unique. One of the defining characteristics of heroes is they are rare. A teenager defeated the enemy by jumping into a burning tank! Beneath that story, though, is another, one that is only starting to be told.

A soldier’s story must confront the dark, troubling realities of war. People have been plucked from the middle of their lives—from friends, family, snooze alarms, and breakfast cereal dinners—to fight, to kill men (and sometimes women) whom they have never met. These realities present psychological battles as intense as any on the battlefield itself.

A Soldier’s Conscience

In World War II, only 15 to 20% of American soldiers reported actually firing at the enemy. The great majority were non-firers, men who went into combat but never used their weapon. That means at most one out of every five men was actually trying to kill the enemy.

This figure comes from S.L.A. Marshall, a U.S. Army Brigadier during World War II. An Army historian in the Pacific, he eventually became the official U.S. historian of the conflict in Europe.70 He and a team of historians interviewed thousands of soldiers in more than 400 infantry companies, often right after their encounters, spanning both European and the Pacific battlefields.

No one would expect soldiers to confess to refusing to shoot to kill. Heroic figures like Alvin York and Audie Murphy were celebrated for the number of lives they took. If anything, the public supported the warrior whose gun hurt the enemy the most.

The survey data shocked Marshall. Why were these men putting themselves at risk to die—from bombs, tanks, or the stray bullet—when so few of them were willing to fight? The answer: they were

70 The nice thing about being the Army’s official historian is that you do fewer push-ups.

In World War II, only 15 to 20 percent of American soldiers said they fired at the enemy.

Debate it!

Resolved: That soldiers who refuse to fire in war should be punished by the army.


there for their “buddies.” They were at war to support their friends. But they did not want to shoot their enemies. Marshall concluded:

“The average and healthy individual—the man who can endure the mental and physical stresses of combat—still has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance towards killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away.”lvi

From this conclusion, Marshall helped develop a training plan to increase a soldier’s willingness to kill. The plan worked. The rate of soldiers willing to shoot at the enemy would grow: up to 55% during the Korean War, only a few years after World War II, and up to 95% by the Vietnam War. How the U.S. Army reprogrammed its soldiers will be discussed later in this chapter. For now, let’s continue to examine what happens to the human mind when it stands “at the vital point”.

Non-Firers Throughout History

World War II was not the first documented case of soldiers refusing to take life. In the 1860s, a French soldier and military theorist named Charles Jean Jacques Joseph Ardant du Picq71 set about making his fellow soldiers fill out questionnaires. Ardant du Picq came across frequent stories of men firing in the air over their adversaries. Firing without the intent to kill seems to have been a common strategy.

In the Battle of Wissembourg in 1870, French riflemen in fortified positions fired 48,000 rounds against German troops advancing across an open field. The French hit 404 Germans, a rate of 119 rounds per hit. That is an improbably low rate for the rifle technology of the time. Ardant du Picq’s studies suggest “they used so much ammunition because they were firing over people’s heads.”72

In the battle at Rosebud Creek in 1876, American soldiers expelled 25,000 rounds for 99 causalities (dead or wounded) among the Native American warriors they faced. That’s 252 rounds per hit, even worse than the rate at Wissembourg. Either the U.S. soldiers were uniformly terrible shooters and the Native Americans faster than bullets, or the combatants were working to avoid inflicting death.

The strongest record of non-firers comes from the American Civil War.

Civil War Muskets

From July 1st to July 3rd, 1963, America marked its coming with the blood of its sons. The Battle of Gettysburg, fought in Pennsylvania, was pivotal in that it stopped the advancing army of the Confederate South. By the time the Confederate army finally retreated, nearly 8,000 Americans had been killed. Another 50,000 had been injured. Bodies lay in the summer heat as the war-stricken searched for the strength to retrieve them. A stretch of Pennsylvania turned into a graveyard.

71 Wow. 72 Getting shot at is scary. One point of shooting can be to scare off the enemy. Displays of aggression can be forms of theater intended to intimidate more than to harm. That’s why people scream in fights and why some warriors put battle paint on their faces. If you can scare your opponent away through display and posture, you can win without fighting.

What About Movies?

The idea that soldiers would purposefully not shoot at the enemy seems bizarre. After all, in every war movie the whole point is to shoot your enemy. You never see Han Solo refuse to fire. If soldiers in World War II and the U.S. Civil War were frequently aiming to miss, pretty much every movie about those wars has misled us. Grossman’s evidence presents a compelling case for exactly that.


After the battle, 27,574 muskets were collected out of the gore. Nearly 90% (roughly 24,000) were loaded. Half of the loaded muskets (roughly 12,000) had been loaded more than once. Half of these (roughly 6,000) had from three to ten separate rounds jammed in the barrel.73

Finding a loaded musket would not be surprising. A rifleman could easily die before having a chance to fire. To load a musket twice, however, made little sense. If you could not fire one bullet, you certainly could not fire three.

Loading the musket was when a rifleman was at his most vulnerable. Packing a bullet into the chamber meant standing still while you poured gunpowder down the barrel and then crammed the bullet deep down into it. This left you an easy, stationary target. If your musket was malfunctioning, there was no benefit to bothering with this perilous procedure.

To find some many loaded muskets was odd. More than 95% of the time with a Civil War era musket was spent in loading it. To fire, all one needed was a quick squeeze of the trigger. Many soldiers probably fell before they could raise their weapon. But it is also possible that, having loaded their weapon, some of the soldiers did not fire.

That is the conclusion of Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, a former psychology professor and professor of military science. Aside from his academic credentials, Lt. Col. Grossman was a soldier of twenty years in the United States Army. Grossman, noting that nearly a quarter of the muskets were triple loaded, hypothesizes that soldiers would feign shooting and reload their muskets to maintain their instructed formations. With commanders watching from afar and the “mutual surveillance” of one’s fellow soldiers, as Ardent du Picq called it, even if a soldier did not fire, he would still have to act as if he had.lvii This would include unnecessary reloading.

We cannot be certain how long soldiers at the Battle of Gettysburg held onto their muskets before firing or how many refused to fire. The American Civil War, however, lent itself to unique discouragements to killing. The identification mechanism for the soldiers was divided. Yes, they could see themselves as Union or Confederate, or cling to the identities of the states they served. But only a few years earlier their enemies had been their brothers and fellow patriots. Before the war, the men they were meant to kill had been as American as they were.

Many in the Union Army did not even want to fight. They had been drafted. Often the draft provoked intense criticism and public riots. Many only stuck around in the army because of the steady pay and food. Under such circumstances, a soldier’s motivation could easily decline.

Given the risk reloading posed, there must have been powerful, compelling reason for a soldier to reload his weapon, especially when it seemed unlikely he would fire it. That the reason would be to avoid killing is consistent with Marshall’s data, Mater’s stories, and Ardant du Picq’s questionnaires.

A Soldier’s Fear

73 One musket was loaded 23 times. The bullets were practically spilling out of that one.


In The Art of War, Sun Tzu cautions that “on the day they are ordered out to battle, your soldiers may weep.”lviii One of the most respected generals in China is announcing that before battle his men are crying. That hardly sounds like the roughest, toughest army in the world.

Fear is inherent to war. But the more a person fights, the less afraid he becomes. That’s the conclusion reached by Israeli military psychologist Ben Shalit. Shalit asked Israeli soldiers who had experienced combat what terrified them the most in war. He discovered a “low emphasis” on dying or getting injured and a “great emphasis” on “letting others down.” Anxiety over doing a good job was greater than anxiety over safety.

Shalit asked similar questions to a Swedish peacekeeping force that had yet to experience combat. Here, he was told that “death and injury” were the most frightening worries about going into battle. These different responses led Shalit to conclude that experiencing combat can actually decrease a person’s fear of death.lix

Sun Tzu drew the same conclusion twenty-six hundred years earlier. “Soldiers in desperate straits lose their sense of fear,” he states in The Art of War.lx When the “vital point” is a moment of attack or extreme threat, such as what Audie Murphy faced, anxieties can be replaced with aggressive clarity.

Yogendra Singh Yadav is an Indian soldier who fought against Pakistan in 1999. His company was sent on a mission to take out three Pakistani controlled bunkers high up on a cliff. Yadav volunteered to lead the charge. Alone, he climbed a 100 feet of ice to reach the bunkers. On the climb, he was shot three times but kept climbing. At the top of the cliff, he ran into a storm of bullets. Ignoring the danger, he threw a grenade to disable one of the bunkers. A second bunker started firing at Yadav, wounding him again. He charged this bunker too and, with his bare hands, eliminated the four armed men inside. The rest of his battalion was able to take the third bunker without him.

Soldiers like Yadav and Murphy were no different than those Sun Tzu saw crying before the coming battle. In a battle, concerns about injury are replaced with concerns that boost a person’s nerve. Soldiers think of who and what they are fighting for. They think of their cause or of their lost friends. They are absorbed in—and lifted by—the moment.

The same was true in the grisly United States Civil War. The veterans of battles like Gettysburg frequently rejoined the army voluntarily after their time in the army had expired. This was true even of those drafted into the army, who had not wanted to serve in the first place.lxi

Time and time again in wars, you find men willing to return to combat, although it means personal risk. In his memoir Goodbye, Darkness, William Manchester describes why he left a hospital bed to join his Marine company for the World War II campaign at Okinawa:

“It was an act of love. Those men on the line were my family, my home. They had never let me down at I couldn’t do it to them. I had to be with them, rather than let them die and me live with the knowledge that I might have saved them.”lxii

The fear for your own safety may not disappear completely. In war, however, it is overwhelmed by even stronger emotions. The affinities and sense of purpose in a military company has the power to push a single person to accomplish feats he would have previously felt were superhuman.


The War Inside: Psychiatric Casualties

While Audie Murphy was doing his best Wolverine impersonation, many other soldiers were mentally collapsing under the stress of combat. In World War II, American forces discharged 504,000 men as psychiatric casualties. A study in 1946 found that 98% of the men who survived a combat tour of sixty consecutive days developed psychiatric issues. The study also found that the remaining 2% had “aggressive psychopathic personalities.”lxiii

Sixty uninterrupted days of combat are a rare experience. But the 98% figure means that under such sustained war conditions nearly everyone will become a victim.

As the chart on the next page shows, mental exhaustion accumulates the longer a person is in combat. While at first a soldier’s performance improves as he learns more about the battlefield, the stress builds over time until most soldiers are no longer capable of holding together. The few soldiers that can withstand this stress are the ones prone to aggression. They are more likely to have the psychopathic characteristics of those who enjoy violence and lack sympathy or remorse for others.

The study has been supported by data from other wars. Israel has an exceptionally trained army in which both men and women are required to serve. The country also has been particularly open about the psychological issues faced by their soldiers. In the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 (also known as the Yom Kippur War or Ramadan War), which lasted only 20 days, almost a third of their reported casualties were for psychological reasons. In the 1982 Lebanon War, Israeli psychiatric casualties were twice the number who perished in the incursion of Lebanon that lasted a little over 3 months.lxiv

The typical psychiatric casualty has symptoms ranging from hysteria to depression. If the symptoms are severe enough, a soldier may be discharged or forced to recover under medical supervision.

There is little question that war is unusually horrific. Graphic human destruction, constant threat to life and safety, the focus on killing: all of this becomes ordinary to the soldier who fights. The ordinary insanity takes its toll on the mind.

The threat of physical harm turns out to be one of the least psychologically traumatic elements of war.

A study done by the Rand Corporation in 1949 found that people who experienced air raids had only a small increase in long-term psychological disorders.lxv The danger posed by planes dropping bombs from above did not produce much more

The Madness of War

Leaving a hospital, wounded and in pain, to put yourself in a situation where you have to fight seems crazy. It is hard to say, however, that any aspect of war is really very sane. After all, neither putting yourself at risk for death nor trying to harm and kill others are considered signs of a sound mind for a civilian. What is perceived as crazy about war often is the norm. How we judge behavior is guided by context. For a soldier, the incredible choices he will make can seem like the only possibilities available and the absolutely right ones at the time.


psychological trauma than life without air raids. (Of course, the rates of physical trauma were much higher.) The human mind can apparently adapt to the constant risk of losing one’s life.74

No, it is the taking of life that is much harder for the human mind to accept.

The Weight of It

In Goodbye, Darkness, Manchester begins his memoir with a harrowing account of “one of my worst recollections.” He describes the death of the first man he ever killed.

The victim was a Japanese soldier. Manchester burst upon him, a sniper in his hideout. The harness of the sniper’s rifle became tangled, preventing him from raising his arms in self-defense. Manchester missed with his first shot and hit him with his second. Even as the man died, Manchester kept firing. He stared at his victim. He wrote that, as he did, “A feeling of disgust and self-hatred clotted darkly in my throat.”

Left alone with the corpse, Manchester began to shake, tears pouring out. In a voice hoarse with fear, he found himself apologizing, saying “I’m sorry” again and again.lxvi

The guilt carried by a soldier who recognizes what he has done—the weight of it—is the heaviest psychological burden. That is why psychopathic personalities are best able to handle the sustained trauma of combat. Their disorders prevent them from fully feeling guilt or shame.

Grossman describes a conversation he had with a veteran of World War II, Paul, a man who had since grown older and built a life at home. “He talked freely about his experiences and about comrades who had been killed.” When Grossman asked Paul about those whom he had killed, the old man would reply that “usually you couldn’t be sure who it was that did the killing.”

But there was a moment with Paul when he held a long pause. From out of the well of his memories, he pulled up… something. Grossman could not be sure what. All Paul would say was, “But the one time I was sure…” before trailing off to dam up his tears.

“It still hurts, after all these years?” Grossman, himself a former soldier, asked in amazement.

“Yes,” Paul replied, “After all these years.”lxvii

Sun Tzu wrote of how a soldier’s day might begin with tears, but in the rush of battle the fear vanishes. He did not bother to include how the tears come back at night.75

What any soldier confronts “in the vital point” is known only to him. The evidence shows that in that moment an individual comes up against a mental resistance to the act. Perhaps this resistance causes him to fake firing. Or perhaps he overcomes this resistance and follows through on his job as a soldier. Either way, resistance to killing seems to be part of our cognitive infrastructure.

Defying this resistance seems to be a form of psychological violence inflicted on the self. It leaves soldiers with many of the most painful memories they carry from war.

74 This does not mean that threat of loss of life is an acceptable condition for people. It still causes tremendous stress, which is both physically and mentally harmful. What the Rand study found is that while the mind does bend in these conditions, it is not likely to break. 75 Granted, it’s The Art of War, not The Art of After War.

“I’m sorry.” - William

h


Freud viewed conscience as the fear that one’s actions would be so shameful as to make the conscience-stricken unlovable. The prohibition against killing is an imbedded feature of most psyches. To break this rule transgresses against something basic to the self. Manchester described his kill as “a betrayal of what I’d been taught as a child.”lxviii Self-control and concern for others help make the idea of killing another so abhorrent that even in war such responsibility can be more than a person can handle.

In the final chapter of Jarhead, Swofford touches on a moment when he could have shot two Iraqi soldiers but did not, due to orders. “I think that by taking my two kills the pompous captain handed me my life, some extra moments of living for myself or that I can offer others.”lxix In Swofford’s words, you hear why scores of soldiers through the centuries have chosen to be non-firers.

Manchester’s story shows that the fear of the harm you will do to others is not lost even in desperate straits. Because of the context of war, however, even with the fear of the destruction you create, you are still able to create that destruction. How is this context created?

A Soldier’s Distance

To go from a firing percentage among soldiers of 15 to 20% in World War II to 55% in the Korean War to 95% in the Vietnam War is a remarkable achievement. In fewer than 25 years, American soldiers became five to six times more likely to shoot at the enemy.

Neither the Korean War nor the Vietnam War was as popular as World War II. Neither war featured the dire consequences or vengeance motivation of Nazi Germany’s domination of Europe or Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet a far greater percentage of soldiers were ready to put human lives at risk.

Using his findings about non-firers, Marshall developed training methods to boost the firing rates of American soldiers. Clearly Marshall knew what he was doing. He had found that a number of factors can affect the willingness to attack and kill in war. Most of these relate to the concept of distance.

The most devastating weapons all work from great distances. The atomic bomb. Nuclear missiles. The longbow.76 Not only are the destructive abilities of bombs and missiles and even longbows significantly greater than guns and clubs and fists, they also offer psychological advantages that increase the likelihood a soldier will use them.

Look at the difference lethality of a sniper’s rifle and soldier’s gun. From January 7 to July 24 1969, U.S. Army snipers accounted for 1,245 confirmed kills in Vietnam with an average of 1.39 bullets used per victim. Without the use of such special weapons, it took an average of 50,000 rounds to kill one enemy soldier. That’s 1.39 bullets compared to 50,000 rounds of ammunition.

The myth of the sniper is that she needs only one bullet to do his job. The truth is that she needs one bullet and a unique mindset to accomplish her task. As Swofford, the former U.S. Marine sniper, explains, “The sniper requires thousands of bullets and thousands of hours of training per kill; he needs senior snipers… beside him at the rifle range.”lxx It is this training that allows his weapon to be so efficient. It is the person behind the gun—not the gun itself—that gets credited for the kill.

76 Okay, so the longbow doesn’t quite compare to an atom bomb.

Debate it!

Resolved: That if people were not taught as children that killing is wrong, they would have no problem with killing as adults.


A sniper never gets close enough to see his victim’s fear, smell the panic as it perspires down his face. He is far removed from the sensations of battle, staring down small figures through the powerful magnification of the rifle scope. His field of vision effectively shrinks down to just the thin crosshairs floating before his eye. Woe to the figure that ever aligns with those slight sight lines.

Turning a human being into a tiny dot lessens the weight of killing. The more a soldier can convince his mind that the people against whom he wars are not actually people, the better able he is to carry out his deadly work. When Alvin York took out a platoon of Germans, he described thinking of it as if he were back in Tennessee shooting turkeys.

If he can literally dehumanize his enemy, a soldier drastically increases his capacity to function as a killer. The same way children can reduce their desire for marshmallows by imagining they are something they do not want, a soldier can affect his behavior—control or release his impulses—by cognitively restructuring the enemy as something permissible to attack.

Cognitive restructuring is a phrase borrowed from the social psychologist Albert Bandura. This is not exactly the same as brainwashing. After all, the children still knew they were in a room with marshmallows, and soldiers still know that people stand at the other end of their weapons. The restructuring merely needs to affect perception just enough in the moment of choice.

Bandura writes, “The conversion of socialized people into dedicated combatants is achieved not by altering their personality structures, aggressive drives, or moral standards. Rather it is accomplished by cognitively restructuring the moral value of killing, so that it can be done free from self-censuring restraints.”lxxi This forms the psychological conditions that allow the soldier to push through the barrier of conscience and pull the trigger.

To be free of “restraints,” first you need to create some space.

Physical Distance and the Use of Lethal Force

Separating yourself from your enemy permits a greater use of aggressive actions. It is like the identification mechanism, but in reverse. By dividing communities on ethnic lines in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims gave themselves license to use violence against each other. By separating similar young men into guards and prisoners, Zimbardo created conditions for brutality and cruelty.

The simplest way to separate yourself from the enemy is get further away—to increase the physical distance.77

Look down from a tall building and the crowds of people walking by, the crowds you were once a part of, become

77 I admit this is not very profound.

Less Human than Human

Given the importance of distance to success in war, one can see the rhetorical value of offensive or derogatory speech. Racial, ethnic, or religious slurs and insults comparing the enemy to animals—such as dogs or insects—has psychological value. They break down the sense of shared humanity between those who face each other in battle.


unrecognizable. Look out a plane window and you can barely see people at all.

During an aerial bombing, the plane crew doesn’t have to think about the human beings on the ground. They are far removed from the physical sight of destruction. At most, they watch explosions pop on the ground like upside-down fireworks. When a sailor watches the green blips on a sonar screen, she can avoid confronting what those green blips represent.

In a tank, soldiers can look at television monitors that show the world outside. That way, they can stay near the controls that operate the tank. An Israeli tank gunner found that not having to look directly at the enemy improved his experience of combat: “I see someone running and I shoot at him, and he falls, and it all looks like something on TV. I don’t see people.”lxxii

The slightest degree of distance can ease a troubled psyche. Israeli research has found that the chance a kidnap victim will be killed goes up if he is hooded. A thin layer of fabric is enough to aide in thinking the victim is not one of you, or not even human. As Shalit expresses it, “The nearer or more similar the victim of aggression is, the more we can identify with him.”lxxiii Putting the victim on the other side of a piece of cloth or a camera lens can effectively push him farther away.78

At the maximum range, killing and destruction become easiest. This is the experience of the bomber crew or the soldiers who look at radar or sonar blips. At this range, only sophisticated technology can perceive the target.79

For some maximum range weapons, no one needs to be around to take responsibility for the harm they cause. Land and sea mines are set by explosive units. They then can be triggered by unsuspecting victims long after the people who left the mines are gone. In countries where mine warfare was common, ordinary people are injured by mines years later. For example, mines placed in the ground in Cambodia in the 1970s are still wounding farmers to this day.

A soldier does not need to be that far away to work at maximum range. The gunner in his tank was able to see that his targets were people—but because they were on a television screen, they were more like characters in a video game. Many devices can achieve a technological distance, regardless of the room between combatants. Grossman describes how looking through night-vision sights provides “a superb form of psychological distance by converting the target into an inhuman green blob.”lxxiv

The distance that a sniper normally works at is long range. Here, the shooter can see the target, can distinguish human forms, but is largely unable to perceive wounds or get a good look at a face.80 To hit a target from this range a specially designed weapon is always needed.81

78 On the other hand, screen images of people can also bring us closer together. Television, film, and the internet allow us to learn about and even talk to people all around the globe who in the past we might never have known existed. 79 Here’s a scary thought. This is likely the range at which nuclear weapons would be launched. 80 If you’ve played certain video games, you’ve probably seen what it’s like to shoot a target from long range. 81 America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have seen the rise of a new weapon: the improvised explosive device, or IED. IEDs are makeshift bombs, often constructed out of spare parts, that are left by the sides of roads or in populated areas. Often, they require a remote trigger to detonate. IEDs can work from great distances and can destroy vehicles, creating a useful gulf between the user and the victim.


Air-to-air combat takes place at long range. Pilots can see each other, but they can’t spot expressions A colonel in the U.S. Air Force described such combat as “very clinical, very clean, and not so personalized. You see an aircraft; you see a target on the ground—you’re not eyeball-to-eyeball with the sweat and the emotions of combat. I think it’s easier in that sense—you’re not so affected.”lxxv

Both mid-range distance and close range involve the use of guns. The distinction between the two is how much of the target’s emotions or pain can be perceived by the person firing. At mid-range, a soldier is unable to tell the extent of any wounds inflicted or hear the sounds and see the expressions of the target. At close range, a soldier can identify exactly what he has done.

Mid-range shooting usually offers the firer plausible deniability that what happened to a target was caused by him. “You shoot, you see a guy fall, and anyone could’ve been the one that hit him,” described a World War II veteran.lxxvi At this distance, a soldier is too far away to connect directly his specific choice with the collapse of a body or the cessation of a life. Grossman quotes a “Napoleonic-era British soldier” who wrote of killing a French counterpart: “An indescribable uneasiness came over me, I felt almost like a criminal.”lxxvii When someone does apprehend a kill from mid-range, he can be consciously aware to reproach himself, but he does not receive that automatic physical shock.

Compare that “uneasiness” to Manchester’s reaction after he saw his bullet tear through the Japanese sniper. His tears. His apology. When you have no distance, it becomes difficult to deny you are to blame for taking a life. Manchester is not alone in his reaction. A Green Beret told a story of stumbling into an ambush in Vietnam. He came across a boy “between the ages of twelve and fourteen” who spun around to reveal his weapon. Instinctively, the Green Beret “fired the whole twenty rounds at the kid.”lxxviii Once his gun was out of ammunition, he let it fall and began to cry.

When soldiers are close enough to look their targets in the eye, they cannot help but relate to them. This is when non-firers are made. In Italy during World War II, a group of American soldiers hopped into a ditch to escape from artillery fire. Once inside, they found themselves pressed against a group of German soldiers doing the exact same thing. “It was a feeling that this was not the time to be shooting one another,” one of the Americans later explained. “They were human beings, like us, they were just scared.”lxxix

Soldiers, even enemy soldiers, share a common experience. The sounds, the fears, the orders, the friendships, the losses: they are the same no matter how different the uniforms might look. When an experience like escaping from artillery fire is shared, momentary unity forms, built from antagonistic cooperation. The new antagonist is the war itself.

Because of the intimacy of such an attack, use of an edged weapon is given its own category of distance. Knife range consists of any attack with a sharp-edged weapon, such as a sword, knife, or bayonet. While sword play can look elegant on stage or screen, in the frenetic chaos of battle, such methods take on a brute, blind hacking. An Australian soldier serving in World War I described a bayonet attack as “just berserk slaughter.”lxxx These are wounds inflicted in such proximity that the victim’s blood can stain aggressor’s skin.


Such savagery is often avoided in modern warfare. Rarely have bayonet charges recorded causalities in the last 100 years of armed combat. If such a maneuver is even tried, the result is usually surrender before a cut is made. The revulsion to edged-weapon assaults appears instinctive. A German infantryman said that when he struck with his bayonet, “it turned around in your hand of itself.”lxxxi He would unconsciously turn his rifle into a club before using the knife on the front.

Physical Distance for Attacks

Range Features Examples Reaction

Maximum Target can be perceived only by technology

Radar, sonar, remote TV camera, land mines, IED

“I don’t see people.”

Long Target can be seen by naked, but need special weaponry

Sniper rifle, tank shot, rocket launcher blast, IED

“Doesn’t become so emotional, so personalized”

Mid Target visible but can’t see wounds or facial expressions

Rifle shot, machine gun fire “I felt almost like a criminal.”

Close Target’s face is visible, but a projectile weapon is still used

Pistol shot, machine gun fire “I dropped my weapon and cried.”

Knife Target is close enough to take out with an edged weapon

Bayonet thrust, knife stab, sword slash

“Just berserk slaughter.”

Hand-to-hand Target is close enough to touch Punch, eye gouge, strangulation “It is not a natural act.”

At knife range and hand-to-hand combat range, a soldier can feel his violence. The pressure and the fury ripple up the arms as the deed is done. There is little separating the killer from his act. He knows exactly what he has done, and the memory of that will stay with him forever.

Grossman says taking a life by hand-to-hand combat is “not a natural act.”lxxxii Yet, for centuries, much of war was this intimate. It is likely war has created far more psychiatric casualties than history has let us remember.

Authority and Obedience

The mind in the midst of battle is on a constant search to avoid responsibility. This does not mean a soldier will shirk his duty. Only that his mind does not want to feel responsible for doing it.

The very concept of duty connotes a specter of authority. One is required to fulfill the obligation of duty to satisfy the expectations of a superior or group. Just by using the word duty, the figure of authority is introduced.

The presence of an authority figure—a leader or a commanding officer—will dramatically increase the likelihood a soldier will try to kill another. Marshall noticed in World War II that when a leader was present and encouraging, all soldiers would fire their weapon, but once the leader left, the rate dropped back down to 15 to 20%. In a study down in 1973, students with no combat experience said “being fired upon” would get them to fire while Vietnam veterans cited “being told to fire” as the most critical factor.lxxxiii

“Never underestimate the need to obey,” counseled Freud.lxxxiv


That need turns out to be very strong, Yale psychology professor Stanley Milgrim discovered. Milgrim, a high school friend of Zimbardo, wanted to test if people would follow an order they believed would harm someone. He expected around 1% would remain obedient if they thought they were hurting someone.82

The Milgrim Experiment was first conducted in 1961. In it, a random volunteer was told he would be helping educate someone by giving the man—‘the learner’—electric shocks if the man incorrectly answered a question. The shocks were administered by pressing a button which connected to a wire attached to the man in a separate, unseen room. In truth, there were no electric shocks and ‘the learner’ was in on the experiment.

In the room with the volunteer—labeled ‘the teacher’—was another member of the research team. He would instruct the volunteer to send the electric shock. At first these shocks were of low voltage. As the learner got more questions incorrect, they rose in strength. Many of the volunteers would ask researcher in the room with them if they could stop giving the shocks. At points, the learner would bang on the wall, complaining of a heart conditioning, practically beginning the volunteer to stop following along.

Of the 40 volunteers, 65% (26) kept pressing the button until ‘the learner’ fell completely silent. Had he been knocked unconscious? Had he died? The volunteers had to have wondered. The final shock was supposed to be 450 volts, as powerful as a jolt from an electric eel. But only one volunteer refused to administer shocks over 300 volts. Despite the presumable agony of the unseen learner, people were willing to continue to hurt him as long as the researcher told them to do so.

Milgrim would repeat his experiment a number of times, inserting variations to discover new reactions. He found physical proximity to the learner affected the volunteer’s willingness to apply a shock. The closer the volunteer was, the less he would comply. When the volunteer had to grab and hold the learner’s arm on to an electrified plate, only 30% of the participants reached the final shock.

People, however, don’t obey just anyone’s commands, and neither do soldiers. Shalit reports that in a 1973 Israeli study, the primary factor in making sure soldiers had the will to fight was “identification with the direct commanding officer.”lxxxv Some desire to submit must be present.

Ideally, for the persons of authority, their influence is internalized by their followers. Otherwise, firing rates only go up when a person of authority is present. U.S. military training developed the role of the drill sergeant to instill the voice of authority into the personality of the soldier. Look at this sample from a drill sergeant’s speech:

From this time on, I will be your mother, your father, your sister, and your brother. I will be your best friend and your worst enemy. I will wake you up in the morning, and I will tuck you in at night.lxxxvi

In these few words, the drill sergeant touches upon the psychological appeal of the family-at-arms (“your mother, your father, your sister, and your brother “) and of the pure and simple way of life (“your best friend and your worst enemy”). The drill sergeant offers to become—no, he commands that he is—all the family a soldier will need and the only important relationship in his life.

82 Even an optimist like Stanley Milgrim can make pessimistic discoveries.

Debate it!

Resolved: That most people are afraid to challenge authority.


Once he has distilled all authority into his person, the drill sergeant can begin conditioning behavior. Conditioned behaviors are learned forms of conduct built from repeated training exercises.83 They teach the brain to react automatically to certain situations or stimuli. Like priming, this works at a level of thought pre-decision making.

Instead of soldiers feeling like they must choose to fire at the enemy, they merely react to the stimulus of seeing the enemy and fire automatically. The Green Beret in Vietnam who fired twenty rounds into one “kid” pulled his trigger the instant he saw a designated enemy holding a weapon. This was at least in part a reaction drilled into him by his training and conditioning.

At One with the Crowd

In chapter II, we looked at the many ways group dynamics can encourage aggressive behavior. It may come as no surprise that while only 15-20% of individual soldiers would fire in World War II, nearly 100% of crew-serviced weapons (such as machine guns or artillery cannons) shot at the enemy. In combat, there is a psychological advantage to working in a group. Teamwork can help people accept the duty of trying to kill. Ardent du Picq counseled that, unlike four brave strangers, a group of four men “knowing each other well, sure of their reliability and consequently of mutual aid, will attack resolutely.”lxxxvii

If a soldier can become one with the crowd, he can gain in courage and lose his own conscience. Paul, the old World War II veteran, told Grossman that in battle “usually you couldn’t be sure who it was that did the killing.” Not knowing with certainty whether you or one of your buddies wounded the enemy helped to ease Paul’s mind. Only when he was absolutely sure that a death had been at his trigger did the tears form.

As a single entity in a larger whole, all behaving as one, the soldier finds social support (accountability) for his actions while losing track of his own responsibility (anonymity). The combination of accountability to one’s friends and anonymity acts as an incubator for violent impulses. As with deindividuated aggression, the actors of the violence feel disconnected from their actions, increasing the severity and enthusiasm of their behavior.

In The Psychology of Crowds, 19th century psychologist Gustave Le Bon coined the term group mind to describe the deindividuated aggression of the crowd. Analyzing the behavior of revolutionary mobs in France, he noticed how anonymity and the communal fervor incited riots and carnage. “All crowding has an intensifying

83 If this resource were about the Psychology of Hairstylists, you would be reading a different definition of conditioning behavior.


effect,” explains Shalit. “The effect of the crowd seems to be much like a mirror, reflecting each individual’s behavior in those around him and intensifying the existing pattern of behavior.”lxxxviii

This mirror effect can be made more powerful the more bonded the crowd is and the more closely the crowd works together. Just as the guards in the S.P.E. found themselves acting in a manner they thought alien to themselves, a conscience-stricken soldier can find himself pulling the trigger when his individual psyche is woven into the group mind.

Lost within the crowd or directed by an authority figure, people can add emotional distance to their actions. They do not feel as guilty over choices that they do not consider their sole responsibility. The crowd or the leader allows people to assign motivations for their actions to someone else.

This diffusion of responsibility can liberate a soldier from internal self-censuring mechanisms, producing a deindividuated aggression effect. The decision to fire—to aim, to kill—is easier to make when it does not feel like a personal choice.

Even one extra person can weaken the resistance caused by individual responsibility. Snipers work in teams of two: one to spot and one to shoot. That way, the decision to kill is never made alone.

The sniper aligns his target in his sight while the spotter does the same. They work as one, although only half the pair has the gun. In the moment of hesitation, right before the squeeze of the trigger, the sniper can hear the spotter begin “his soft, religious chant: Fire, fire, fire.”lxxxix

The Language of Combat (Shhh… don’t say “people.”)

The military treats language as a serious part of any war effort. As the American offensive neared in the fall of 1990, soldiers stationed to fight in the Gulf War began to receive an extra $120 a month in combat pay. They were also told to improve how they talked. Swofford discloses that his platoon was given instructions that “the sentiments in our cadence must be patriotic and loyal to the Corps.”xc To raise morale, and to bind the fighting forces even closer together, the military wanted everyone to sound ready, able, and unified about their mission.

Words are tools that help frame our feelings and actions. By constructing and adjusting the assumptions that shape how we perceive the world, words can prime our brains for certain behaviors. Just through what we say, we can create emotional distance between ourselves and others.

The language we use to describe who we fight has a great impact on our willingness to attack them. Just take any sentence in this resource guide that uses the word “target,” and replace “target” with “person.” Now take that sentence and replace “person” with the name of your best friend. There are different emotional charges to shooting a “target” and shooting your best friend.84

Words are integral to the identification mechanism. They help a soldier frame a boat full of people as an enemy ship. When the ship is destroyed, the mind can sidestep thinking about the people inside.

Maximum range and long range weapons often get to fire at targets or planes or coordinates on a map. The right choice of words can create that same sense of distance.

84 At least, I’d hope so. Otherwise, you need to get yourself a new best friend.

Debate it!

Resolved: If people only used positive words to describe each other, human beings could prevent further wars and violence.


Throughout past wars, racial, ethnic, or religious slurs (which will not be printed here) have been used in replace of an enemy’s true name. They help to dehumanize the opponent. In mocking an enemy’s race, religion, ethnicity, and culture, a soldier stops looking at that enemy as an equal.

The most infamous incident of the Vietnam War was the My Lai Massacre. A unit of the United States Army killed hundreds of unnamed Vietnamese civilians, the majority of them women, children, and elderly. The slaughter was led by Lieutenant William Calley, one of the chief officers of a platoon. According to report, Lt. Calley said, “I want them dead,” indicating a large group of civilians rounded up by his troops.xci When his men did not know how to react, he proceeded to fire at the civilians himself. The soldiers then followed him in the carnage.

After the incident, Lt. Calley spoke of thinking of the Vietnamese, even non-combatants, as “I don’t know—pawns, blobs, pieces of flesh.”xcii Calley had genuine difficulty attaching the word people to his enemy. In his use of language, he could avoid the moral weight of taking another’s life because he refused to think in terms of human life.

In all my years in the army I was never taught that Communists were human beings. We never conceived of old people, men, women, children, babies.xciii

Calley reclassified his targets as less than human. That made it acceptable to treat them inhumanly.85

Vengeance and Moral Distance

When someone once asked how he could summon the bravery to take on a German battalion all by himself, Audie Murphy replied “They were killing my friends.”xciv

The response to protect or seek revenge—often they can be muddled together—is a powerful motivation to fight and to accept what is necessary in the heat of war. In his 1949 Studies in Social Psychology in World War II: The American Soldier, sociologist S.A. Stouffer’s reported that 44% of American soldiers in World War II said they’d “really like to kill a Japanese soldier” but only 6% said the same about Germans.xcv The attack on Pearl Harbor created resentment and hostility. Those feelings found outlet in the violence of war. Since Germany had not led a direct strike against America, they escaped the same fierce rage.86

If a soldier can envision the enemy’s guilt, see a reason why the enemy must be punished, he creates a moral distance, separating the enemy from the soldier’s concept of goodness. This can boost his readiness to take aggressive action. Vengeance for the death of friends, especially fellow soldiers, is often the extra trigger that pushes a soldier into combat mode.

On his first mission, Ishmael Beah prowled through a Sierra Leone swamp, an ache swelling in his head as tears slicked his cheeks. He gripped his gun for comfort, straining to pull his focus out of body and into the quiet of the approaching battle. Suddenly, there were explosions all around, bullets streaming through the green of the swamp like solid sunlight. Beah could only lay on his chest “unable to shoot.”

85 That he was in a position of authority also allowed My Lai to happen. Not every soldier in his unit likely shared hisdegree of hate, but many of them still went along and obeyed his order. Later, only Lt. Calley would be convicted of war crimes for My Lai. He served just three years of house arrest out of a life sentence. 86 The Holocaust was rumored, but not an established fact, during World War II.

Revenge for Pearl Harbor led 44% of U.S. soldiers in World War II to claim they wanted

to kill a Japanese soldier.


Then he saw an explosion toss his friend Josiah into the sky. Beah crawled through the swamp to reach him. He watched as the water in Josiah’s eyes “was replaced with blood that turned his brown eyes red.” This was when Beah stood up. His commanding officer yanked him back into the mud, away from the bullets, and yelled at him to shoot. Beah then spotted his friend Musa lying nearby, “too relaxed” and covered in blood. That was when he stood and shot his first man. A thirst for vengeance consumed him:

Every time I stopped shooting… and saw my two lifeless friends, I angrily pointed my gun into the swamp and killed more people.xcvi

When the enemy attacks (or when you attack the enemy), a moral distance appears, cognitively restructuring any resistance to using lethal force. The conscience’s revulsion at killing moves to the enemy who is trying to harm you. Framing yourself as the victim of someone else’s aggression frees up the mind to respond with violence.

The vengeance response can relate to an event in the far past or the immediate past. It can even be projected into the future, if a person imagines an attack will come.

The psychologists Sloane and Friedman repeatedly speak of how modern American soldiers are trained to be “aggressive, forceful, and ready to act in an environment where the focus is kill or be killed.”xcvii The point of this training is not to explain to soldiers the concept of self-defense. The repetition of this idea conditions soldiers to apply their inward disgust at killing to the enemy before applying it to themselves. If people think their enemy is willing to kill, then they become more willing to kill the enemy. We are less likely to grant mercy when we do not expect it in return.

The primary motivator to kill in war cannot be to protect oneself. If self-preservation were the main concern, more soldiers would run away or surrender. They would agree to move on and let the other party have what they want, as Douglas Fry suggests hunter-gathers did in the past. To get soldiers to act aggressively, they must want to hurt their enemy. In circumstances in which that desire is achieved—where the moral distance exists that makes killing acceptable to the conscience—soldiers are more likely to be able to call up the nerve necessary to carry out the deed.

During World War II, a Japanese officer tried to instill the thirst for vengeance in his men using a myth. Colonel Masonobu Tsuji wrote to the soldiers he commanded that “When you encounter the

“This time it’s personal.”

This quote became famous in the tagline to the movie Jaws: The Revenge (apparently, in the three previous Jaws films the shark was strictly professional when it came to eating people). However, the theme of vengeance awaking dormant abilities in a protagonist has long been around. In The Iliad, Achilles refuses to fight against Troy until his lover Patroclus is killed by the Trojan prince Hector. Peter Parker doesn’t use his spider powers until he loses his Uncle Ben. This may be a common theme in literature, film, and comic books, but it is also grounded in reality. People do respond differently to situations once they’ve become personal. A private connection to a tragedy can open up more powerful emotional reactions.

Directed Research Area: The Psychology of Mercenaries

In the past, mercenaries were soldiers who sold their services—and their loyalties—to the highest bidder. Today, the term usually refers to professional companies that provide soldiers-for-hire. The United States has used these sorts of mercenaries for its peacekeeping missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. What is the psychological experience like for a mercenary soldier? How different does it seem from that of a regular soldier? Did most mercenary soldiers begin their careers as soldiers in a regular army? Be sure to read the interview at: www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brainstorm/200901/ask-the-mercenary.


enemy after landing, think of yourself as an avenger come at last face to face with your father’s murdered. Here is the man whose death will lighten your heart of its burden of brooding anger.”xcviii The colonel wanted his troops to believe the American enemy had murdered their own fathers. This fabricated story would then get them to fight harder by fortifying their purpose in war and devaluing their opposition as father-murdering maniacs.

Vengeance widens the scope of conflict to an epic scale. No longer is a battle about just those fighting it. It now includes the memory of the lost and a noble self-righteousness.

The more a soldier sees himself acting not for his own needs but for the good of a noble cause, the more committed he is to the fight, and the less doubt and self-reflection he has about his own actions or their consequences. The soldier becomes just a small, solitary part, joined in an objectified struggle. Here, the cause itself acts like a crowd, the soldier losing his individual identity within the super-personal ‘noble cause.’ Becoming a mere representative of righteousness, he no longer fights for selfish reasons.87 He does not need to gain personally as his actions in the conflict are for the good of the cause itself. He may even go so far as to sacrifice himself for his cause.

Nobility and determination are not the only features of objectified struggle. Selfless and idealistic combatants are also more “radical and merciless” because their motivations go beyond just the individual’s needs.xcix The fear, the angst, the concern, these are felt by the individual soldier. Shed the individual and you can shed his conscience.

Moral distance can inflate the righteousness of a struggle. Soon, the conflict becomes more prized than the people fighting it. As humanity becomes forgotten, basic morality can often be lost.

The Stress Mechanism

Swofford reveals that basic sniper procedure requires taking a calming breath before firing. Relaxing helps you to focus and pull the trigger.

Introducing distance into the relationship between soldier and enemy has the same calming effect. As one nears a target, from maximum range to face-to-face hand-to-hand combat, his stress level rises. There is more fear. There is more sweat. And, likely, there is more cortisol.

Cortisol is the stress hormone we covered in chapter I. As studies have shown, low levels of cortisol combined with high levels of testosterone encourage aggressive behavior. If a soldier’s stress level decreases, while his

87 An objectified struggle not only makes an individual see himself as a representation, it also makes him see his enemy as one. Lt. Calley, for example, viewed the Vietnamese as representatives of Communism and not as human beings. 88 The event or reason used to justify a war is called a casus belli, which is Latin for occasion for war.

Debate it!

Resolved: That revenge is a worthwhile cause for war.88


adrenaline levels remain high (thus producing more testosterone), his body could achieve these neurochemical conditions.

The distancing techniques people use to become psychologically more comfortable with carrying out a lethal act could also make the brain more chemically suitable to pursuing aggressive impulses.89

Conscience at a Distance

Even at a distance, a resistance to killing persists.

Research done by the United States Air Force determined that 1% of its fighter pilots in World War II did nearly 40% of the air-to-air combat strikes and that a majority of its pilots never even tried to shoot anyone down. Even with physical distance between a soldier and the enemy, most soldiers would rather not carry the weight of it.

To counteract this imbedded opposition, the military has used myth and behavioral conditioning to create more psychological distance. Consider the U.S. Marines, with their unofficial slogan, “To be a Marine you must kill.”c A soldier joining the Marines must accept this mythology in advance.

Even after all the training, psychological conditioning, and technological buffers, there still are reports of soldiers who resist killing—such as a Marine sniper who said, “You don’t like to hit ordinary troops, because they’re usually scared draftees or worse… The guys to shoot are the big brass.”ci Empathy is still possible through the sniper rifle’s lens. A soldier may feel required to kill, yet would still rather target someone important enough to justify it.

As shown in the chart, whether a person tries to kill his enemy is a complex calculus based on distance, the diffusion of responsibility, and the value of the target. The decision depends on the interaction of all these factors in that long, haunting moment just before the target lives or dies.

Soldier 2.0

Warfare is an evolving process, and the warriors it demands change over time. Tank drivers, infantry and pilots have replaced knights and archers. We will examine three categories of modern soldiers.

The Child Soldier

Remember Josiah, the fallen friend of Ishmael Beah? Josiah was only 11, dragged into the army by government troops. A rocket propelled grenade (RPG) had launched Josiah’s small body onto a tree stump. His “painful piercing voice” sliced through the swamp, “screaming for his mother.” Following the wails, Beah tracked down his friend and crawled to his side. It was long past too late. Josiah the fallen soldier had his machine gun still clutched in his small, pre-adolescent hands.

During the three years Beah spent as a soldier in the state army, he celebrated his thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth birthdays. Nearly everyone he fought alongside was also a child.

89 Studies have yet to be done examining cortisol levels in soldiers as they experience combat.


The use of child soldiers is an unpleasant but common reality of war. The practice is not new. Ancient Sparta used children as young as seven in military campaigns, often as a form of early training. The British Navy used youths as cabin boys and ‘powder monkeys’ prepping cannons during the ocean battles of the 18th and 19th century. Children even assisted and fought during the American Revolution and the American Civil War.

Today, child soldiers are most common in Africa. They have constituted more than a quarter of the troops in at least nine conflicts in Africa over the last 20 years. But there have also been child soldiers in Latin American countries like Colombia and in Asian countries such as Sri Lanka or Nepal. In Burma, as known as Myanmar, tens of thousands of children have been recruited into military roles.

According to the magazine Foreign Policy, more than 70 military organizations in 19 countries around the world have recruited and used child soldiers between 2004 and 2007. These armies of coercion have no limits as to whom they’ll drag into war. Girls represent as much as 40% of some armed groups.90 Girl soldiers have fought in forty wars in the last two decades.

The quandary with child soldiers is that they are both victims, often abducted from their families or forced into service after watching everyone they know lost to conflict, and dangerous aggressors. A 14 year-old gunman was the first to kill a NATO troop in Afghanistan. The Taliban’s fighters include 8,000 children, according to 2009 estimates. These child soldiers, much like the boy shot by the Green Beret, are shown little mercy despite their youth.

Beah himself killed scores of people. “I felt pity for no one,” he confessed many years later. The war changed his joyful smile into a frightened sneer. He thought his “heart had frozen”.

How should we treat such soldiers, innocent-faced killers stolen from their childhood? Likely traumatized before they even see combat, these children often have no family outside of their military comrades. After going through a six-month rehabilitation center, Beah watched as a companion at the center had to be sent back to his army since none of his relatives would take the wild boy back.

Adolescents in search of their own identities need structure and support, perhaps even more than adults. The home they find as soldiers, even though they are also frequently abductees, is often the only group identification offered to them. If a child must kill to be cared for, she will likely kill.

What happens to children raised on violence and bloodshed as they grow older? After 9-11, many of the Taliban leaders of Afghanistan claimed they had served as child soldiers in Afghanistan’s struggle against the Soviet Union’s occupation during the 1980s. The world could be watching its future warlords take shape among today’s child soldiers.

The Soldier Who Wants to Die

In World War II, a select group of Japanese pilots volunteered to carry out a mission that promised certain death. The young men of the kamikaze (meaning “divine wind”) were well-educated individuals and accomplished airmen. They had families—mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, wives and lovers—and they had friends.

90 It’s a twisted sort of girl power these armies employ.

Debate it!

Resolved: That, on the battlefield, child soldiers should be regarded the same as any other armed combatant.


The first kamikaze attack occurred in November 1944, nearly three years after America joined the war. It was a sign of desperation—Japanese generals were increasingly afraid the enemy would achieve its objective, an invasion of their island homeland. Americans at war and back home were frightened and fascinated by these men who would use their own lives as weapons.

Such men were a small part of the Japanese army. Yet they became its most lasting icon. And, in many ways they were successful. In the Battle of Okinawa, fought on land, in the air, and at sea, some 2000 kamikaze slammed their explosive planes into more than 300 ships, killing over 5000 Americans in the most devastating naval battle in U.S. history.

For any war to begin, soldiers must be willing to risk their lives. The choice of self-sacrifice has likely been made by a few in combat since the time of clubs and arrows. Audie Murphy’s brazen assault, carried out with help from a flaming tank, certainly did not exhibit much concern for self-safety.

Yet to put one’s life at risk and to give one’s life away deliberately feel like two significantly different choices. Perhaps it is because the second choice suggests not only that a fighter does not fear death, but that he in fact relishes or desires it.

Such an enemy causes great anxiety for a soldier. The self-sacrificial enemy makes a soldier feel there is no escape from the weight of killing. A solider cannot scare off an enemy that wants to die. He cannot reach a truce based on mutual survival. He cannot share a brief moment of peace in the middle of battle. An enemy who chooses to die suggests that no peace is possible.

Analysis of self-sacrificial fighters has yielded surprising results. The anthropologist Scott Altran studied suicide terrorists, who use their own lives as instruments of destruction against others, often including civilians. The study found that “suicide terrorists have no appreciable psychopathology and are least as educated and economically well off as their surrounding populations.”cii These kinds of fighters are not mad devils, as people imagined the kamikaze, and their life circumstances are no worse—and frequently much better—than others in their communities. What motivates them to give up their own lives?

The Science study suggests suicide terrorists are motivated by the same circumstance and drives that affect normal soldiers. Though educated, they often come from countries suffering from underemployment—few decent jobs are available. On top of that, they most commonly come from a “youthful and relatively unattached population.”ciii These are idle people, looking for meaning. The bonding qualities of conflict are therefore appealing. These men (suicide terrorists are overwhelmingly male) find purpose in a grand ideological or territorial struggle. They meet charismatic trainers who provide them heuristics with which to order the world. They share with their fellow fighters the unifying bond that all are ready to give their lives to the cause.

The extremism of their (potential) actions creates a rallying point. As “minor differences” go, the active willingness to give up one’s life—to use one’s life as a weapon—is pretty significant. A pride is generated by being among the few to believe in carrying out such an action. Before any of them go out and perform a sacrificial operation, he makes a “formal social contract, usually in the form of a

Facing an enemy who uses his own life as a weapon causes great anxiety for a soldier.

The Effectiveness of Suicide Terrorism

The 1983 attack of Marines barracks in Beirut, Lebanon by the terror organization Hezbollah was the first modern suicide bombing. In part as a result, international peacekeepers abandoned Lebanon. Robert Pape of the University of Chicago found that, from 1980 to 2003, suicide attacks comprised only 3% of all terrorist events, yet accounted for 48% of all causalities. And this was without including the 9/11 attacks. However, the main objective of a terrorist assault is rarely to cause fatalities. It is usually to make a statement, create fear, or change a policy.


video testament,” a lasting demonstration of adherence to the group’s identity.civ He knows he will live on in the memory of his terrorist friends.

As these suicide terrorists train together, they become a substitute family unit. A group of 39 unmarried recruits to a Pakistani terrorist organization all reported they believed sacrificing themselves would protect their “family” in the future.cv The Science study concluded that “a critical factor determining suicide terrorism behavior is arguably loyalty to intimate cohorts of peers.”cvi Their family-at-arms is built around the idea of suicide terrorism, but they pursue the same psychological motives that pulled William Manchester from a hospital bed back to his company.

These are individuals caught up in an objectified struggle. They exhibit the merciless philosophy of the self-righteous. They see their fight in black and white; their ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ mentality satisfies a psychological need, granting them a sense of identity and high moral purpose.

While their killing is physically very close to their victims, they possess tremendous emotional distance, conditioned to hate those who they will attack. At the same time, they feel a powerful emotional connection to their leader, who arranges and orders them to carry out their deadly operations. The diffusion of responsibility is significant among suicide terrorists, both in obedience to authority and duty to the group.

The same psychological processes are at work in suicide terrorists as with any soldier. What makes their acts seem so heinous is not how they carry them out, but that they usually employ asymmetrical warfare. They do not go after military targets; they go after civilians. Their attacks are not designed to win on a battlefield. They are designed to traumatize civilians.

Wars no longer feature clear boundaries. Fighters can dress as supermarket shoppers. Violent assaults can happen at the airport. The suicide terrorist aims to turn the whole world into a war zone. The success of this mission depends on how the world responds to feeling threatened. If those targeted by the terrorists begin to live in fear, these brand new combatants have achieved the first of their goals.

The Soldier as Peacekeeper

A new role for soldiers has emerged in the last twenty-five years. Around the globe, they are being assigned as peacekeeping forces. Armed military personal are sent into foreign conflict zones to prevent fighting from occurring. Essentially, they serve as a sort of world police. But, unlike police, they lack investigative powers—and are sometimes ordered not to attack even when being shot at.

In the past, the restrictions on peacekeepers made them heavily armed non-combatants. In the Bosnian War, United Nations peacekeepers from the Netherlands watched as atrocities were committed against Bosnian Muslims. Instead of being able to intercede, the concern was that if they shot a Serbian fighter they would start an international incident.

Leaders Who Take No Risks

The people who plan suicide terrorism are rarely the same athose who carry out the attacks. These leaders are telling others to die while taking none of the risks. In 2008 in the Indian city of Mumbai, a small group of men organized by aPakistan-based terror organization went through the city bombing and slaughtering hundreds. The entire time these men were connected by phone to the planner of the attacksPakistan. The calls were intercepted by Indian authorities. Listening to them, you hear the leader tell his men to kill civilians and make sure not to get captured alive. His men obey without fuss. This violence was deindividuated aggression carried out at the orders of this leader hundredsmiles away. He was like a gamer controlling an avatar. A powerful bond must exist between the leader and his followers if they are to follow his voice to certain death.


The use of non-aggressive, security-oriented missions has only grown since then. The African Union, an organization of various African countries, has sent soldiers to guard refugee camps and to oversee transitions as dictatorial governments leave power. Because the African Union tries not to take sides, it does not employ its troops on behalf of any one state or rebel group. They can only be deployed to watch over those caught in the crossfire.

Neutrality is a central concept of peacekeeping forces. They must be in the war zone to serve and protect the lives of the non-combatants who live there. They need to, on some level, put those lives ahead of their own. Recent wars, however, have shown a need for hybrid armies that must keep the peace while also engaging in raids and aggressive missions to hunt the enemy. America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan call on troops to do both types of operations. However, many of the civilians being defended have difficulty seeing the American soldiers as neutral since they first arrived as invaders.

The soldiers assigned to this dual task must grapple with new psychological complexities. They must identify not only with their combat comrades, but with the residents whose land they occupy, whose culture, appearance, and practices are likely similar to those of the enemy. And to achieve the peacekeeping aspect, they also need the residents, who look at them as foreigners, to identify with them. Battlefield aggression and out-group hostility must be precariously and rigorously controlled, as the battlefield and out-group identification can shift daily. The self-censuring restrictions of these peacekeeping hybrid soldiers are an intricate set of rules that are still being written and rewritten.91

How a soldier is framed—neutral, selfless, heroic, greedy—greatly affects the success of any military campaign. If an army seems interested primarily in gain for its native country, it might not receive cooperation from the natives.92 At the same time, how a soldier sees himself affects how he conducts his mission. If he frames himself as neutral peacekeeper, working to earn the trust and respect of those he claims to protect, he stands a much better chance of turning these civilians into allies.

War’s psychological dynamics are changing as the role of armed conflict evolves in the 21st century.

Conclusion

War is a social context that provides psychological distance from violent acts. Yet, even in war, people face strong mental and emotional resistance to performing their responsibilities as soldiers, specifically the duty to kill the enemy. Soldiers exist in a state of internal conflict, pulled by their duty to the military, duty to their fellow soldier, duty to their conscience, and the will to survive.

In his introduction to On Killing, Lt. Col. Grossman captures the inherent irony in being both a soldier and a human being. Writing of non-firers, he expresses mixed emotions:

As a soldier who may have stood beside them I can’t help but be dismayed at their failure to support their cause, their nation, and their fellows; but as a human being who has understood some of the burden they have borne, and the sacrifice that they have made, I cannot help but be proud of them and the noble characteristic they represent in our species.cvii

The personal battle between the “soldier” and the “human being” can be as ferocious a conflict as any faced by those in the military. The traumatic memories of war are themselves combat wounds. In

91 The current buzzed about name in politics for this hybrid war/peacekeeping mission is “smart power.” 92 See: Avatar.


chapter 4, we look specifically at the psychic causalities created by war. Meanwhile, there are several key points to remember from this investigation of the psychology of soldiers at war.

Historically, many soldiers in wars—even World War II—did not fire their weapons.

The fear of letting one’s fellow soldiers down is the key motivation during war.

The longer soldiers are at war, the greater the chance they develop psychological problems.

The weight of killing another person can be a tremendous burden for a soldier.

To make the act of killing more psychologically acceptable, a soldier employs tactics that create distance—physical, emotional, cultural, or moral—between him and the victim.

Often in war, the language of soldiers allows them to dehumanize the enemy.

A desire for personal vengeance creates permission to kill.

Child soldiers, who have been used throughout history, show the effectiveness of behavioral conditioning, group mind, and dehumanization on young, developing minds.

A recent development in warfare is the rise of suicide terrorism, where individuals are willing to kill themselves to facilitate an attack, frequently against civilians.

The future of military combat is moving towards peacekeeping missions.


Is stepping into a battle while refusing to fire at the enemy an act of bravery or of foolishness?

Why are non-firers so rarely depicted in stories or movies if they are so common?

Is the pain of killing another person the result mainly of cultural learning?

Is it good to come up with ways to reduce the psychological trauma of going to war?

If all killing were done using remotely-operated robots or machines, would that increase or decrease the number of people killed?

At what age or at what level experience does a “child” soldier become an “adult” soldier?


IV. After War When Audie Murphy returned home to America, he was

greeted as a hero. He became a celebrity. A best-selling author. A movie star. To this day, his grave at Arlington National

Cemetery in Virginia is the second-most visited after President John F. Kennedy’s.

His first wife once said, “Audie has a beautiful smile. Unfortunately, he never smiles much.” In life, he became addicted to painkillers. He gambled like a fiend. He would tell reporters he could only sleep when he had a loaded pistol under his pillow. Audie Murphy may have been a hero, but he was also a veteran and a survivor. His story is a common one among those who have fought in wars.

Objectives


What are the psychological consequences soldiers face after war?

How do soldiers learn to cope with their war experiences?

What is post-traumatic stress disorder?

Introduction

To look at the psychology of war and not discuss the effects of combat that linger after the bombs and bullets have been put back in storage seems obscene. A soldier’s experiences are trunked up in his mind and carried home to be unpacked and repacked throughout the rest of his life. This is a heavy cargo of blurred faces, piercing noises, and friends lost to history’s violence.

The idea that returning home from war can be more difficult than war itself appears so often in literature about combat that it can seem like a cliché. Yet the psychological turmoil that faces those who have fought is undeniable. Nearly every soldier returning home will have psychological symptoms, according to psychologists Laurie Sloane and Matthew Friedman.93 The former psychology instructor and soldier Lt. Col. Grossman writes, “Within a few months of sustained combat, some symptoms of stress will develop in almost all participating soldiers.”cviii The severity of post-war psychological issues varies from individual to individual. But no soldier is left untouched.

Psychological distress is the legacy of war. The more openly we admit that, the better we as a society can assist returning soldiers in their recovery.

Kansas Isn’t Kansas Anymore

In the Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy travels from the black-and-white world of Kansas to the colorful land of Oz, she realizes she’s “not in Kansas anymore.” When she returns home at the end of the movie, however, she finds Kansas just as black and white as it was before.

93 Their statement of “nearly every” should make you recall the Swank and Marchand study.


Going to war is not like going to Oz.94 When a soldier returns from the front, he cannot expect his home to look and feel the same as it did before he left. Not only is war different from normal life, it makes normal life different from what it was. Kansas no longer feels like Kansas.

The friends and family of a soldier adapt to the long absence. In that time, relationships and people change. Added to the adjustments required by time and circumstance are the scars left by the experiences of wars, which may have altered the appearance and the psyche of the returning soldier.

Of the four myths described by Sloane and Friedman about returning from war, half relate to accepting change. Myth 1 is “My relationship with my partner and family will be the same when I get home from war.” Myth 2 is “My life will be the same as it was before I left for war.”95 After the upheaval of military service, returning to civilian life requires readjustment and renegotiation. cix

Often, a soldier has had no opportunity to reflect on his time in combat until leaving that time behind. Not until Ishmael Beah found himself at the Benin Home and began meeting with Esther did the emotions of his days as a soldier return to him.

Away from the hideous bloodshed of Sierra Leone’s civil war, the hardened interior of the warrior melted within the boys. Only then did they become conscious of the events they had lived through. “The fastened mantle of our war memories slowly began to open,” described Beah. Before then, he had suppressed the psychic pain of his experiences, dealing with them only within the unconscious, the area of the mind that can perceive and store information but not address it explicitly.

Beah’s unconscious transformed his memories into dreams of “faceless gunmen” and one dream “that involved lots of people stabbing and shooting one another, and I felt all their pain.” Within these dreams, his impressions of combat are clearly being expressed, even though he is not addressing actual circumstances. While he could not yet confront openly what he had done and witnessed as a child soldier, his brain still recorded the emotions and episodes that it had sensed. These stored up memories and feelings sink into the psyche of every soldier. For the ones who have seen direct combat or have even killed, the sensations re-imagined by the unconscious are even more intense.

Battlemind

The psychological needs of a war zone differ from the psychological needs once a soldier has returned to the community. A useful mindset in conflict area can become harmful in the context of peace. Obviously, a soldier does not want to treat friends and family as he would treat the enemy.

94 Notably, there are no munchkins. 95 Myths 3 and 4 are “All I need is the love and support of my family to get through any post-deployment difficulties” and “Every returning service member wants a large welcome home party.”

Debate it!

Resolved: Psychological counseling should be mandatory for all returning war veterans.


To make soldiers aware of this difference and to help them in their adjustment, the United States Army developed Battlemind training. Created under the guidance of Colonel Carl Castro at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Battlemind is an acronym, each letter standing for a something good on the battlefield that can be damaging at home.

The B in Battlemind is for buddies.96 As we’ve covered, the bonds developed under the conditions of conflict are uniquely strong. Returning soldiers can feel uncomfortable being away from the relationships on which they had relied. The tight-knit camaraderie of the military can lead to some withdrawing from friends and family who did not serve.

The A is for accountability. Individual soldiers are responsible for countless small details, from how their beds are made to how they speak in public, and if they fail to take care of these responsibilities a superior officer will hold them accountability. “Keep in mind that the strict chain of command necessary in the military is not the way most healthy families function,” caution Sloan and Friedman.cx This constant management of one’s activities can manifest as controlling behavior, demanding the same rigid discipline of partners and children.

The first T in Battlemind is for targeted aggression. The ideal in war is that aggression is only expressed at the enemy. While that may not always be the case, soldiers are certainly given outlet and directive to use aggression in a manner would rarely be consider appropriate away from combat.

The second T refers to tactical awareness. Soldiers are constantly on guard for attack, especially in contemporary wars where they are a target even when they are on their base or driving down a road. Bringing that mentality to relative safety of home-life can make one seem paranoid. Returning soldiers can feel “keyed up,” perpetually anxious and uneasy, searching out dangers where none exist.

L is for lethally armed. Soldiers carry guns more commonly and openly than is usually acceptable in a non-combat setting. Some soldiers97 become deeply attached to their gun. As Beah said, in a fight he gripped his gun for “comfort.” The association of gun with a source of comfort can remain imbedded in some soldiers. This is what happened to Audie Murphy. Guns always pose a potential risk, however, especially when people without proper training have access to them.

E is for emotional control. Whether the product of training or the unconscious suppression that happened with Ishmael Beah, emotions experienced during war are often held in check. Immediately after Manchester cried “I’m sorry,” he had to return to battle. There may be no opportunity for a soldier to deal with his emotions, as feelings are set aside for the sake of the next mission. Soldiers become so accustomed to not engaging their feelings that they forget how to express them, even where they would be safe to do so. Sloane and Friedman describe this as becoming “emotionally

96 Reading out these letters this way feels a little like Sesame Street for soldiers. 97 And, apparently, Gilbert Arenas.

U.S. Army Battlemind

B = Buddies (cohesion) vs. Withdrawal

A = Accountability vs. Controlling

T = Targeted vs. Inappropriate Aggression

T = Tactical Awareness vs. Hypervigilance

L = Lethally Armed vs. Locked and Loaded

E = Emotional Control vs. Detachment

M = Mission Operational Security vs. Secretiveness

I = Individual Responsibility vs. Guilt

N = Non-Defensive Driving (combat) vs. Aggressive Driving

D = Discipline and Ordering vs. Conflict


detached, numb, or uncaring.”cxi Battlemind training is intended to remind soldiers that once they are home they will need to open up to maintain their previous relationships and build new ones.

M stands for mission operational security, a jargon-y military way of saying soldiers should not reveal details about their assignments.98 If the wrong piece of information is leaked, it could put lives at risk. The need for secrecy is not as great outside the world of war strategies and battle tactics. A grocery list is not classified information. Much like reliance on buddies and emotional control, the pressure to keep things private can pull a soldier away from his social attachments at home.

The I is for individual responsibility, which is the internalized form of accountability. As much as they might try to avoid it, soldiers can’t often help but feel responsible for actions and events that happened during war. While this strengthens the bonds that unite armies, platoons, and friends, away from the war this can develop into crippling guilt over those lost or killed.

The N in Battlemind is for non-defensive driving, a method for driving in hostile environments. On civilian roads, the driver seems aggressive and inconsiderate.

Finally, D is for discipline. Similar to A for accountability, the focus on discipline is a reminder that the attitudes absorbed in the army may be too much for home life.

Battlemind is specifically intended for soldiers trained in the U.S. Armed Forces to aid them in readjusting to life away from war. Often, the prescriptions deal with issues brought on by the Army’s own training. It highlights the degree of transformation generated through military service. Even if a soldier never suffers from a severe psychological concern, he will still face mental and emotional challenges from having been a part of war.

The New Normal

In 2008, Sloane and Friedman released a book intended to educate and advise American soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan about potential psychological issues. In the middle of After the War Zone: A Practical Guide for Returning Troops and Their Families, they frankly tell soldiers to expect at least a few adjustment problems. “It would be abnormal if you didn’t experience some of the feelings and behaviors following what you have been through in the war zone.”cxii

What Sloane and Friedman are saying is that for war veterans mental distress is the new normal.

War Zone Stress Reactions

War zone stress reactions are also known as combat stress reactions or acute stress reactions. Previously, these physical and mental responses were believed to affect only those with direct combat experience. Today, however, even soldiers who never see a battle must face enemy hostility and the constant risk of explosives or suicide bombers. Even if no attack ever comes, soldiers who are stationed in the middle of a hostile population or who are confronting an insurgency must be ready for an attack at all times. When the battlefield can be anywhere, war zone stress is constant.

That stress can manifest as a variety of symptoms, including many of the behaviors covered under Battlemind. These are customary reactions, Sloane and Friedman suggest. Veterans need not worry about seeking medical help for them unless they persist for six to eight weeks. 98 If you want to sound like you’re in the U.S. Army, next time you tell your friends a secret, swear them all to “mission operational security.”


The physical consequences include restlessness and trouble sleeping, a loss of appetite, and headaches. Nightmares and reoccurring thoughts of war are very to be expected. Beah likely suffered through war zone reactions when he first came to Benin house.

Because the mind does not leave the battlefield as easily as the body, veterans often have difficulty concentrating the first few months they are back. Ordinary tasks, dull and monotonous to begin with, can seem pointless since they lack the charge of mortal danger.

The dark emotions of war—the anger and the sadness and the grief—pass through the mind, yet the soldier may want to cling to them, twisted mementos from his time away. Often a sense of isolation develops as the soldier feels out of place because his experiences have changed how he perceives things. “This may make you doubt yourself or mistrust others,” warn Sloane and Friedman.cxiii

Frankly, these are feelings that pass through many of us from time to time. For the returning soldier, they happen to all focus on the event of war and they happen to occur all at once. This combination can lead to nervousness or even panic that this condition will never change. Hopelessness follows.

Yet none of these reactions are unusual. While they may lead to inconsiderate behavior, they make sense. Nearly every soldier will live through war zone stress. The vast majority will recover.

Excessive Anger and Adrenaline Addiction

In war, all emotions are channeled through aggression. Grief becomes revenge. Frustration becomes rage. Love becomes fighting for your friends.

Even away from the war zone, the body and mind may remain conditioned to respond aggressively. Returning veterans can find themselves exploding at minor problems, uncertain how to control the storm of emotions thundering inside. The ordinary day-to-day of an average citizen does not offer the social accepted outlets for anger provided by combat. Soldiers must learn to manage their tempers, avoiding behavioral choices that may have helped save their lives on the battlefield.

Excessive anger can manifest as emotional outbursts or physical disputes. The wildness of these eruptions can scare friends and family, putting loved ones in danger. However, they also can feel energizing and justified, a flush of the sense of power sometimes found on the battlefield. They can even think they are above the old rules they lived by. As Swofford explains, “The problem with living through war is the false sense that after combat you are untouchable.”cxiv

While much of the military is monotonous waiting, the days in combat can provide a rush. Like Chris Hedges, there are soldiers that become addicted to the hyperawareness and heightened intensity of battle excitement. Back home, they chase after experiences that give them that old charge of adrenaline, perhaps never finding anything as sweet and satisfying as the war once was.

Anger masks other emotional issues. Until a soldier can overcome the boiling, seething energy of his anger, he can’t confront the buried feelings that make him so combustible.

Anger vs. Excessive Anger

Feeling angry is a natural and common part of being human. Like all emotions, we need to find healthy outlets of expressions for our anger. A build up of repressed emotion can in fact lead to excessive anger. What makes anger excessive is when it becomes a constant condition.


Guilt

Soldiers can become overwhelmed by remorse, especially if they’ve killed. Back home, they can feel they don’t deserve the benefits and beauty found when the world is at peace. Away from combat, the conscience can grow in volume from a low gut rumble to a motor-mouth scream.

The two most frequent forms of self-censure are survivor guilt and moral guilt. Survivor guilt is a sense of self-blame at having the good fortune to live when so many friends did not have such luck. Manchester’s expectation of survivor guilt is why he left his hospital to rejoin his company at Okinawa. He could not bear the thought he might “live with the knowledge that I might have saved them”.

Moral guilt is a sense that one’s actions have broken one’s personal code of ethics. It is a deep inborn sensation that one has trespassed against everything he had been “taught as a child.” During war, morality can have some wiggle room. If soldiers feel there is a purpose to their fight or that the other side struck first, they find the business of war more acceptable. The conscience can more easily excuse killing to uphold a principle or in defense of oneself or others. Still, the evidence shows that, for most people, the revulsion toward killing is difficult to overcome.

Sometimes a soldier can see specific choices he could have made differently. He can picture what he wished he done. By revisiting and rewriting the past, the veteran imagines friends he should have saved and enemies he should have avoided killing. Such revisions of memory are the result of hindsight bias. A soldier can become lost in them.

Depression and Traumatic Grief

For a soldier recovering from the turmoil of war, there are many kinds of sadness.

A prolonged, intense sadness is depression. To a psychologist, depression describes a specific set of symptoms. It changes how the body works and what chemicals the brain produces. Depression can limit appetite and reduce levels of neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and norepinephrine, that allow a person to experience pleasure. Someone depressed seems low energy and unable to enjoy life.

Depression is not an unusual condition. Studies indicate 17% of Americans will experience it at some point in their lives. Returning soldiers have to be monitored carefully since expected withdrawal and detachment behavior can seem like depression. The new normal can frequently be misdiagnosed as a problem situation, and it can even conceal when things have gone truly wrong.

Traumatic grief is another disturbing difficulty for returning soldiers. While grief is felt by nearly all who leave war with friends injured or dead, some forms of grief can grow excessive. With traumatic grief, the soldier focuses on a specific loss, clinging so tightly to the memory of the deceased he recreates his friend’s passing over and over again in his mind. Essentially, the trauma sufferer stops living in order to become a permanent griever.

Debate it!

Resolved: That criticism of a war should be limited in order to protect the soldiers who fought in it.


Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

One of the most serious and debilitating psychological conditions is post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. Defined as “a reaction to a psychologically traumatic event outside the range of normal experience”, it can afflict anyone who has gone through a trauma, not just soldiers.cxv About 7% of Americans will suffer from it in their lifetime. More will experience at least a few of its symptoms.99

There are three indicators for PTSD: re-experiencing symptoms, avoidance and a state of emotional numbness, and hyper actions or responses. For a confirmed diagnosis, a veteran must display one consistent re-experiencing episode, three signs of avoidant or numb behavior, and two markers of intense, hyper reactions. Likely every soldier returning from war will face some of these problems. Doctors only treat the condition as a potent case of PTSD when multiple symptoms occur together.

PTSD can take over a life. It is like a virus in a computer, degrading the memory, preventing the programming from functioning right. For a person with PTSD, some days she just cannot power up in the morning. She wants to move forward, work on the next project, when out of nowhere a flashback knifes through her mind, making her re-experience the trauma that spawned her condition.

Because of the flashbacks, nightmares, and memories, she can never really leave the war—its specific moments of carnage. She can still hear the final shouts of a fallen comrade or taste the debris kicked up by the explosion that just missed ripping her apart. It is like an awful war movie is playing inside your head—only you are the star of the movie. At any second, your mind might leap back into it.

As the traumatic memories take over, sufferers of PTSD withdraw from friends and family—and from themselves. Many feel that the walking cinema they have become is no longer deserving of friendship and love. This means she might push away attempts to help her. In chapter II, we looked at psychic numbing as a temporary response to information about tragic events. With PTSD, a person goes through a prolonged psychic numbing—an effort not to feel anything at all—as she tries to break away from painful feelings she cannot control.cxvi

While at the same time as this emotional shutdown is occurring, a veteran with PTSD will also feel “keyed up.” She will be hypervigilant, easily aroused to anger or aggressive outbursts, unable to fall asleep or feel comfortable, and hypersensitive to loud noises. Often, certain sounds or other sensory information can trigger flashbacks to the traumatic event. This leaves a person jittery. The brain itself gains an increased sensitivity for perceiving threats and feeling fear.

The positive news is that 60% of people with PTSD will recover with or without treatment.

Military organizations around the world have become more aware of this condition and more focused on helping its victims.

Of the Americans who fought in the Vietnam War, various studies suggest that anywhere from 500,000 to 1.5 million of them developed post-traumatic stress disorder. That amounts to 18-54% of those who

99 PTSD can also occur in people who have lived through a devastating accident, suffered through childhood violence, or survived a serious car crash.

Sixty percent of PTSD suffers will recover with or

without treatment.


served. The wide disparity in these numbers may be due to the lack of knowledge about the disorder at the time. Many people likely did not receive the proper diagnosis.100

Another reason for misdiagnosis results from how PTSD can work on the mind. Doctors consider there to be three classes of the condition: chronic PTSD, PTSD in remission (with occasional relapses), and delayed onset PTSD.

Chronic PTSD describes those who never recover. They can improve how well they function on daily basis, but the terror, flashbacks, numbness, and hyperactivity remain with them.

PTSD in remission describes those who do get better and resume normal functioning. However, like some forms of cancer, the condition stays with the mind, even after the symptoms are gone. A new traumatic event or even the wrong trigger sound—like a car engine backfiring—can recall dormant emotions and memories.

Delayed onset PTSD describes those who return home and at first have no problems with traumatic memories. Then, a few months or years later, a traumatic event or other trigger will pull up buried thoughts and feelings. As with PTSD in remission, these zombie memories abruptly attack the mind.

The sad reality is that almost no soldier will ever completely escape his or her war trauma.

Physical Wounds

The psychological pain of war can also be paired with tremendous physical injuries. Men and woman can lose limbs, become paralyzed, or have disfiguring scars. More and more veterans must learn to live with substantial changes to their body and appearance, the result of improved medical techniques that can save people from injuries that in the past were fatal.

Being a casualty does not cause greater psychological damage than the ordinary experiences of a soldier. Often, it’s the physical injuries suffered by friends that can lead to psychological issues (like guilt or traumatic grief), as they feel responsible for not doing enough to protect their buddies.

There are certain injuries which can directly cause behavioral problems. Traumatic brain injuries (TBI), which occur in 60 to 80% of blast victims, can affect mood and self-control.101 Like a concussion, no bruise may be visible as the wound occurs in the brain. But because of this unseen damage, a person can seem depressed or wildly aggressive. Only through specific medical tests can a soldier know if these symptoms are the result of TBI or psychological reactions to battle.

100 Because traumatic events also cause other problems, there is an 80% chance that someone with PTSD will also have at least one other psychological issue. This can confuse diagnoses. 101 Traumatic brain injuries are a recently classified injury that can easily go undetected. The result of shockwaves rippling through the brain, TBI are common now due both to the new techniques used by combatants in their war zones and because advances in helmets and armor have allowed people to survive blasts that in the past would have been fatal.


How we care for veterans, not just as individuals but as a society, can do much to heal their wounds, both of body and of mind.

Treating the Mentally Maimed

How a soldier recovers psychologically from war is a personal struggle, one never announced in newspaper headlines or recorded in history books. Often this struggle is a greater test of courage and resolve than any faced on the battlefield.

The name of any war is typically followed by two dates: one before the hyphen saying when the war began and one after the hyphen saying when war officially ended. That is one of the nicest features about wars. You know when they are over.

When a soldier must face the internal combat of psychological trauma, it is possible no date will follow the hyphen. Soldiers have watched their friends fall. They have felt the blast of hate in enemy fire. Worst of all, they have seen and caused the deaths of strangers, some of whom night have been innocents caught in the crossfire.

How can all that pain just be taken away? If it were to disappear, where would it go?

Even medical specialists offer no easy cures. Sloane and Friedman write that veterans must “learn to handle” the psychological pressures built up from war—and suggest that “you may need to learn to live with some of your guilty feelings”—but they never offer any plan for learning these things.cxvii

Sloane and Friedman do direct soldiers to seek help from a “chaplain, counselor, or therapist”. There is something to that. Like war itself, the struggle to overcome war cannot be undertaken alone.

When Ishmael Beah first arrived at Benin House, a 30 year-old nurse named Esther sought him out and asked him to tell her his story. No matter how gruesome his confession, Esther always replied, “None of these things are your fault.”

“I hated that line,” Beah admits.

Yet, over time, Esther’s willingness to listen allowed Beah to open up, to trust in something other than a gun. She accepted the role of sister when he needed a family—any family—to support him. Beah would only see Esther once more after leaving Benin Home, but the memory of her patience and understanding guided him through the nightmarish months that followed.

Community, which plays a key role in launching wars, turns out to be the best hope for salvation from the experience of fighting in them. Soldiers desperately need social groups to provide them with a sense of meaning and support.

The actions and choices made in war can work like grenades that have exploded inside the people who made them, filling them with psychic shrapnel. Our communities, however, can help carry the weight of this pain. The challenge for veterans is to not withdraw into their anger, grief, and guilt and cling to their psychic wounds. The challenge for society is to embrace and support them.

The Vietnam Backlash

U.S. soldiers back from Vietnam found themselves returning to a country at war with itself. People were clashing over civil rights. The war itself was so unpopular that those who had fought were even called baby killers by some war protesters. Grossman and others blame this hostility for the high number of psychic casualties from Vietnam.


Not every soldier will need this help. Few may ask for it.102

Keeping Cost in Mind

“What is the value of war?” The philosopher Cineas asked this of the Greek king Pyrrhus of Epirus, who ruled from 281 to 274 B.C.E. cxviii Pyrrhus was seized by the spirit of conquest. He wanted to capture Rome and Carthage, building an empire around the entire Mediterranean.

When told of a plan to invade Rome, Cineas, who worked for the king, asked what would be the use of this victory. Pyrrhus replied that he would possess the wealth of Italy.

Cineas inquired what the king would do next after taking Rome. Pyrrhus said he would then be in position to conquer Sicily, adding more to his wealth and dominion.

“And what would you do next, my king?” asked Cineas.

Pyrrhus explained that from a base in Sicily he would be able to seize Carthage and North Africa.

Cineas, again: “What would you do next, my king?”

Pyrrhus told Cineas that with such land and power he could dominate Macedonia and all of Greece.

One more time: “What would you do next, my king?”

Imagining he now ruled over all the Mediterranean, Pyrrhus told his philosopher, “Then we shall celebrate and relax in pleasant company, sharing the secrets of our thoughts with boon companions.”

Cineas looked at his king. “Then why go to war when we can take such pleasures right now?”

This apocryphal tale has been carried down through the centuries as a lesson to those who lust for war. What goal is worth the blood, the nightmares and the horror, the lingering suffering of war? Why and when should we break the peace if peace is our aim in the end? What cause justifies a leader sending men and women to a distant land to risk their lives?

Conclusion

War changes everyone and everything. That is part of its appeal. Go to war and you test your character. Stand and fight and you discover who you are. Return home someone new, someone stronger. Like any education, the lessons a soldier brings home will last her entire lifetime. Like any education, there will be some lessons she will wish she hadn’t learned.

A person’s experiences of war, even the most banal of them, likely will remain with her for the rest of her days. The triumphs and friendships will always inspire her. The traumas and lived nightmares will always haunt her. But people are resilient. They can and most often do find ways to live with their past. Often, it is the darkest lessons from which we learn the most wisdom.

102 Because of the culture of the military, which emphasizes discipline, strength, and self-reliance, many soldiers have a hard time asking for help. Added to that may be feelings of guilt that make a soldier feel he doesn’t deserve people’s care.


It is impossible to know for certain what conflicts and hostilities the future will bring. When we understand the cost of war—how deep the debt is in the simple number of human lives affected—we can form a more complete picture of what war can truly bring us.

There are some key points to recall from this review of psychological issues facing returning warriors:

Everyone returning from war can expect a period of readjustment. Their lives will have been altered, and they will have to get reacquainted with both the old and new at home.

The experience of combat and hostile fire will leave every soldier with stress symptoms.

People can try to suppress their emotional experiences, but cannot escape them.

Armed forces acknowledge that military service will transform the way a soldier thinks and behaves. That is why they create coping strategies such as Battlemind.

If war zone stress reactions, aggressive feelings, adrenaline addiction, guilt, depression, or grief continue past six months after returning from a war zone, treatment is recommended.

Soldiers can feel survivor guilt for having lived when their buddies did not.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a severe psychological condition in which an individual re-experiences a traumatic event, becoming withdrawn but also hyperactive.

Without treatment, 60% of PTSD suffers recover and return to a normal life routine.

Soldiers who suffer from war-related psychological conditions can find the strength of their symptoms diminish the more social support they receive.

Returning to normal levels of functioning is considered a cure.


Is the heroism of war worth the psychological sacrifice?

To what length should societies adapt to treat and care for the needs of returning veterans?

What must be gained from a war for the human cost to be worth the fight?

Do you think people are properly educated about the psychological costs of war?

“After War” is the name of this chapter. Could these words ever apply to society as a whole?


Works Consulted Atran, Scott. Genesis of Suicide Terrorism. Science 299: 1534-1539 March 7, 2003.

Beah, Ishamel. The Making, and Unmaking, of a Child Soldier. The New York Times January 14th, 2007.

Coser, Lewis. The Functions of Social Conflict (New York: The Free Press, 1956).

Craig, Ian W. The Importance of Stress and Genetic Variation in Human Aggression. BioEssays 29: 227-236 2007

Craig, Ian W. and Kelly E. Halton. Genetics of Human Aggressive Behavior. Human Genetics 126:101-113 June 9, 2009.

Dutton, Donald. The Psychology of Genocide, Massacres, and Extreme Violence (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007).

Ehrenreich. Barbara. Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997).

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005).

Fry, Douglas P. Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Gat, Azar. War in Human Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Gates, Scott and Simon Reich. Think Again: Child Soldiers. Foreign Policy. May 2009. [web exclusive]

Grossman, Lt. Col. Dave. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1996).

Hedges, Chris. War is a Force the Gives Us Meaning (New York: Anchor Books, 2003).

Keeley, Lawrence H. War Before Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

LeShan, Lawrence. The Psychology of War (New York: Helios Press, 2002).

"Mischel’s Marshmallows". RadioLab. Narr. by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. WNYC. 3/9/2009.

“New Normal?” RadioLab. Narr. by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. WNYC. 10/19/2009.

Orwell, George. 1984 (New York: Signet Classic, 1992).

Shaw, R. Paul and Yuma Wong. Genetic Seeds of Warfare: Evolution, Nationalism, and Patriotism (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989).

Siegel, Allen and Jeff Victoroff. Understanding Human Aggression: New Insights from Neuroscience. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 32: 209-215. 2009.

Sloane, Laurie B., PhD and Matthew J. Friedman, MD, PhD. After the War Zone: A Practical Guide for the Returning Troops and Their Families (Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo Press, 2008).

Sorel, Georges. Reflections on Violence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Sovic, Paul. “If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic Numbing and Genocide. Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 2, No. 2, April 2007, pp. 79-95.

Swofford, Anthony. Jarhead (New York: Scribner, 2003).

Terburg, David, Barak Morgan, and Jack van Honk. The Testosterone-Cortisol Ratio: A Hormonal Marker for Proneness to Social Aggression. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 32: 216-223. 2009.

Tzu, Sun. The Art of War (Minneapolis, MN: Filiquarian Publishing LLC, 2006)

Wahlund, Katarina and Marianne Kristiansson. Aggression, Psychopathy, and Brain Imaging—Review and Future Recommendations. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 32: 266-271. 2009.

Wrangham, Richard and Dale Peterson. Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996).


About the Author Jon Kern is a playwright living in Brooklyn, NY. He holds an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University’s School of the Arts and graduated with honors with a degree in sociology from the University of Chicago. He has written plays about the global financial crisis, the death penalty, Darfur, and infomercials. His theater work has been performed in New York, London, and Amsterdam. His sociology papers remain unproduced.

Even when he isn’t writing for the World Scholar’s Cup, he likely remains huddled over his laptop. When he manages to escape the gravitational force of his keyboard, he enjoys performing improv, visiting his local farmer’s market, and thinking appropriate thoughts while telling inappropriate jokes.

About the Editors Tania Asnes is a writer, editor, and archivist based in New York City. Like Jon, she has spent a great deal of time on the Columbia University campus, having earned her B.A. summa cum laude in English from Barnard College in 2005. Her primary interests include sustainable development, spirituality, preventive medicine, and desserts involving almond paste. Tania has been a member of the World Alpaca’s Cup since 2008 and couldn’t think of a cooler audience for whom to write and edit. She hopes that, next year, she will get an office outside of the alpaca pen at the New York City zoo.

Daniel Berdichevsky believes that all tasks expand to take up approximately 50% longer than the time allotted to them, including the editing of this resource. Also see:

The number of years Daniel took to graduate from Stanford and Harvard Universities.

The length of the Scholar’s Bowl at the 2009 World Finals in Singapore.

The number of minutes (yes, minutes) Daniel requires to beat an egg.

Daniel is pictured here at a shaved ice shop named Guppy House, celebrating a Clippers victory.

Ten years ago, Daniel had the chance to visit Kosovo and observe firsthand (guided by a local family) some of the damage from the ethnic conflicts of the 1990s. The visit ended with him and his friend Sasha hiding in the back seat of a very old Mercedes, being smuggled into Montenegro.

You can email Daniel at [email protected] or find him on Facebook.


i As quoted in Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich (Henry Holt and Company, 1997), p.117. ii From Genetic Seeds of Warfare, Paul Shaw and Yuma Wong (Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 2. iii As quoted in Ehrenreich, p.7. iv See Beyond War by Douglas Fry (Oxford University Press, 2007), p.97. v See Demonic Males by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996), p.211. vi See “A not-so-sweet future” from the News Centre at Cardiff University (Oct. 1, 2009): http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/news/articles/a-notsosweet-future.html vii See Fry, p.31. viii See Fry, p.109. ix See War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges (Anchor Books, 2002), p.32. x See Hedges, p.33. xi See Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud (W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), p. 108. xii See Freud, p. 108. xiii See Hedges, p.33. xiv See Hedges, p.34. xv See Shaw and Wong, p.78. xvi See Shaw and Wong, p.95. xvii See Shaw and Wong, p.97. xviii See Shaw and Wong, p.97. xix See Shaw and Wong, p.97. xx See Shaw and Wong, p.99. xxi See Coser, p.110. xxii See Coser, p.104. xxiii Watch the video of the prisoners chanting these words at: http://www.prisonexp.org/psychology/31 xxiv These descriptions of the three types of guards in the S.P.E. come from the Stanford Prison Experiment website: http://www.prisonexp.org/psychology/33 xxv Watch the “Post-Experimental Interview” video at: http://www.prisonexp.org/psychology/40 xxvi See Dutton, p.140. xxvii See Dutton, p.140. xxviii As quoted in The Psychology of War by Lawrence LeShan (Helios Press, 2002), p.96. xxix See LeShan, p.96. xxx See Jarhead by Anthony Swofford (Scribner, 2003), p.145. xxxi From Henry V by William Shakespeare, Act IV, Scene 3. xxxii See Coser, p.58. xxxiii See LeShan, p.75. xxxiv See Hedges, p.84. xxxv See LeShan, p.123. xxxvi As quoted in LeShan, p.78. xxxvii See Hedges, p.3. xxxviii See “The Making and Unmaking of Child Soldier” by Ishmael Beah (New York Times, January 14, 2007): http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/magazine/14soldier.t.html xxxix See Hedges, p.182. xl See Sorel, p.78. xli As quoted in LeShan, p.17. xlii See Sorel, p.85. xliii From address given by President George W. Bush as quoted in an article on CNN.com (November 6, 2001): http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/11/06/gen.attack.on.terror/ xliv See Swofford, p.145. xlv See After the War Zone by Laurie Sloane, PhD, and Matthew Friedman, PhD (Da Capo Press, 2008), p.77. xlvi See Hedges, p.22. xlvii The entire Henry Metelmanm story and quotes come from On Killing by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (Little, Brown and Company, 1996), p.158-159. xlviii See Sorel, p.106. xlix See Sorel, p.28, l See Sorel, p.29. li See Swofford, p.6. lii See Beah [from NYTimes.com]. liii See “If I look at the mass I will never act” by Paul Sovic (Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 2 No. 2, 2007), p.90. liv See Sovic, p.88. lv Sample questions as quoted in Sovic, p.89. lvi As quoted in Grossman, p.1. lvii As quoted in Grossman, p.23. lviii See chapter IX, maxim 28 from The Art of War by Sun Tzu (Filiquarian Publishing, LLC, 2006), p.54. lix Shalit’s different responses about what frightens soldiers is as quoted in Grossman, p.52-53. lx From chapter IX, maxim 24 in Tzu, p.53. lxi As quoted in LeShan, p.97. lxii As quoted in LeShan, p.97. lxiii As quoted in Grossman, p.44. lxiv Figures cited from Grossman, p.43. lxv From Grossman, p.56. lxvi Story from Manchester’s memoir as quoted in Hedges, p.174-175. lxvii Story as quoted in Grossman, p.89. lxviii Manchester as quoted in Grossman, p.88. lxix See Swofford, p.257. lxx See Swofford, p.123. lxxi As quoted in Dutton, p.109. lxxii As quoted in Grossman, p.170. lxxiii As quoted in Grossman, p.161. lxxiv See Grossman, p.169. lxxv As quoted in Grossman, p.110. lxxvi As quoted in Grossman, p.111. lxxvii As quoted in Grossman, p.112. lxxviii As quoted in Grossman from Soldiers by John Keegan and Richard Holmes, p.115. lxxix As quoted in Grossman, p.118. lxxx As quoted in Grossman, p.125. lxxxi As quoted in Grossman, p.123. lxxxii See Grossman, p.131. lxxxiii A study by Kranss, Kaplan, and Kranss referenced in Grossman, p.143. lxxxiv As quoted in Grossman, p.142. lxxxv As quoted in Grossman, p.144. lxxxvi As quoted in Grossman, p.318. lxxxvii As quoted in Grossman, p.151. lxxxviii Both observations by Shalit as quoted in Grossman, p.151-152. lxxxix See Swofford, p.135. xc See Swofford, p.98. xci As quoted in Grossman, p.145. xcii As quoted in LeShan, p.38. xciii As quoted in LeShan, p.38. xciv As quoted in Grossman, p.155. xcv As quoted in Grossman, p.162. xcvi For all quotes on this page related to Ishmael Beah’s story, see Beah’s article from The New York Times [from NYTimes.com]. xcvii See Sloane and Friedman, p.59. xcviii As quoted in Grossman, p.165. xcix See Coser, p.112. c See Swofford, p.247. ci As quoted in Grossman, p.174. cii See Genesis of Suicide Terrorism by Scott Altran, (Science 299), p.1535 ciii See Altran, p.1537. civ See Altran, p.1537. cv See Altran, p.1537. cvi See Altran, p.1537. cvii See Grossman, p.xxxiii cviii See Grossman, p.48. cix For a full description of each of the four myths, see Sloane and Friedman, p.41-47. cx See Sloane and Friedman, p.58. cxi See Sloane and Friedman, p.60. cxii See Sloane and Friedman, p.79. cxiii See Sloane and Friedman, p.73. cxiv See Swofford, p.83. cxv Quoting from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder in Grossman, p.282. cxvi In fact, Sloane and Friedman use the term “psychic numbing” to describe a symptom of PTSD, see Sloane and Friedman, p.154. cxvii See Sloane and Friedman, p.104-105. cxviii Retold from the description of the story in War in Human Civilization, Azar Gat (Oxford University Press, 2008), p.438.

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