On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (13 page)

Chapter Six

The Well of Fortitude

Stay with me, God. The night is dark.

The night is cold: my little spark

of courage dies. The night is long;

be with me, God, and make me strong.

—Junius, Vietnam veteran

Many authorities speak and write of emotional stamina on the batllefield as a finite resource. I have termed this the Well of Fortitude. Faced with the soldier's encounters with horror, guilt, fear, exhaustion, and hate, each man draws steadily from his own private reservoir of inner strength and fortitude until finally the well runs dry. And then he becomes just another statistic. I believe that this metaphor of the well is an excellent one for understanding why at least 98 percent of all soldiers in close combat will ultimately become psychiatric casualties.

Fortitude and Individuals

George Keenan tells us that "heroism, the Caucasian mountaineers say, is endurance for one moment more." In the trenches of World War I Lord Moran learned that courage "is not a chance gift of nature like aptitude . . . it is willpower that can be spent — and when it is used up — men are finished. 'Natural courage' does 84 KILLING AND C O M B A T T R A U M A

exist; but it is really fearlessness . . . as opposed to the courage of control."

In sustained combat this process of emotional bankruptcy is seen in 98 percent of all soldiers w h o survive physically. Lord Moran presented the case of Sergeant Taylor, who "was wounded and came back unchanged; he seemed proof against the accidents of his life, he stood in the Company like a rock; men were swept up to him and eddied round him for a little time and ebbed away again, but he remained." He finally suffered a near miss from an artillery shell. W h e n Sergeant Taylor went to the well he found it to be empty, and this indomitable rock shattered: completely and catastrophically.

Fortitude and Depression

Holmes has gathered a list of the symptoms of men suffering from combat exhaustion. For these individuals the demands of combat have caused too great a drain on their o w n personal stocks of fortitude, resulting in conditions such as

a general slowing down of mental processes and apathy, as far as they were concerned the situation was one of absolute hopelessness. . . . The influence and reassurance of understanding officers and NCOs failed to arouse these soldiers from their hopelessness. . . . The soldier was slow-witted. . . . Memory defects became so extreme that he could not be counted on to relay a verbal order. . . . He could then best be described as one leading a vegetative existence. . . . He remained almost constantly in or near his slit trench, and during acute actions took no part, trembling constantly.

This is a vivid description of severe depression. Exhaustion, m e m -

ory defects, apathy, hopelessness, and all the rest of these are precise descriptions of clinical depression that can be taken straight from the
DSM-III-R.
This is why "fortitude," rather than "courage,"

is the proper word to describe what is occurring here. It is not just a reaction to fear, but rather a reaction to a host of stressors that suck the will and life out of a man and leave him clinically depressed. The opposite of courage is cowardice, but the opposite of fortitude is exhaustion. W h e n the soldier's well is dry, his very THE WELL OF FORTITUDE 85

soul is dry, and, in Lord Moran's words, "he had gazed upon the face of death too long until exhaustion had dried him up making him so much tinder, which a chance spark of fear might set alight."

Fortitude from Other Men's Wells, and Replenishment
Through Victory

A brave captain is as a root, out of which, as branches, the courage of his soldiers doth spring.

— Sir Philip Sidney

One key characteristic of a great military leader is an ability to draw from the tremendous depths of fortitude within his own well, and in doing so he is fortifying his own men by permitting them to draw from his well. Many writers have recorded this process as being at work in the combat situations they observed.

Lord Moran noted that "a few men had the stuff of leadership in them, they were like rafts to which all the rest of humanity clung for support and hope."

Victory and success in battle also replenish individual and collective wells. Moran tells us that if a soldier is always using up his capital he may from time to time add to it. "There is," says Moran,

"a paying in as well as a paying out." He gives as an example General Alexander, who took command of the British forces in North Africa in World War II. When Alexander took command, the men often did not bother to salute an officer, but after their victory of El Alamein all that came to an end, and their self-respect came back. Moran concluded that "achievement is a sharp tonic to morale. . . . But in the main, time is against the soldier."

Fortitude and Units

Depletion of the finite resource of fortitude can be seen in entire units as well as individuals. The fortitude of a unit is no more than the aggregate of the fortitude of its members. And when the individuals are drained to a dry husk, the whole is nothing more than an aggregate of exhausted men.

In Normandy during World War II Field Marshal Montgomery had two classes of divisions. Some were veterans of North Africa, 86

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and others were green units, without previous combat experience.

Montgomery initially tended to rely on his veteran units (particularly during the disastrous Operation Goodwood), but these units performed poorly, while his green units performed well. In this instance, failing to understand the influence of emotional exhaustion and the Well of Fortitude had a significant negative impact on the Allied effort in World War II.

In the same way,
all
of the aspects of combat trauma impact profoundly upon the individual's contribution to the battlefield and upon the contribution of that aggregate of individuals that we call military units. If we understand these concepts we begin to master the full spectrum of the responses of men in combat. If we ignore them we do so to the detriment of the individual, and to the detriment of that aggregate of individuals that we call our society, our nation, our way of life, and our world. Lord Moran concluded that such ignorance of the ultimate cost of depleting the Well of Fortitude of England's youth in World War I caused that nation "to dissipate like a spend thrift not only the lives but the moral heritage of the youth of England."

Chapter Seven

The Burden of Killing

Alfred de Vigny went to the heart of the military experience when he observed that the soldier is both victim and executioner. Not only does he run the risk of being killed and wounded himself, but he also kills and wounds others.

—John Keegan and Richard Holmes

Soldiers

The resistance to the close-range killing of one's own species is so great that it is often sufficient to overcome the cumulative influences of the instinct for self-protection, the coercive forces of leadership, the expectancy of peers, and the obligation to preserve the lives of comrades.

The soldier in combat is trapped within this tragic Catch-22.

If he overcomes his resistance to killing and kills an enemy soldier in close combat, he will be forever burdened with blood guilt, and if he elects not to kill, then the blood guilt of his fallen comrades and the shame of his profession, nation, and cause lie upon him. He is damned if he does, and damned if he doesn't.

To Kill, and the Guilt Thereof

William Manchester, author and U.S. Marine veteran of World War II, felt remorse and shame after his close-range personal killing 88

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of a Japanese soldier. "I can remember," he wrote, "whispering foolishly, 'I'm sorry' and then just throwing up . . . I threw up all over myself. It was a betrayal of what I'd been taught since a child." Other combat veterans tell of the emotional responses associated with a close-range kill that echo Manchester's horror.

T h e media's depiction of violence tries to tell us that m e n can easily throw off the moral inhibitions of a lifetime — and whatever other instinctive restraint exists — and kill casually and guiltlessly in combat. T h e men w h o have killed, and w h o will talk about it, tell a different tale. A few of these quotes, which are drawn from Keegan and Holmes, can be found elsewhere in this study, but here they represent the distilled essence of the soldier's emotional response to killing:

Killing is the wont thing that one man can do to another man . . .

it's the last thing that should happen anywhere.

— Israeli lieutenant

I reproached myself as a destroyer. An indescribable uneasiness came over me, I felt almost like a criminal.

— Napoleonic-era British soldier

This was the first time I had killed anybody and when things quieted down I went and looked at a German I knew I had shot.

I remember thinking that he looked old enough to have a family and I felt very sorry.

— British World War I veteran after his first kill It didn't hit me all that much then, but when I think of it now — I slaughtered those people. I murdered them.

— German World War II veteran

And I froze, 'cos it was a boy, I would say between the ages of twelve and fourteen. When he turned at me and looked, all of a sudden he turned his whole body and pointed his automatic weapon at me, I just opened up, fired the whole twenty rounds right at the kid, and he just laid there. I dropped my weapon and cried.

— U.S. Special Forces officer and Vietnam veteran T H E B U R D E N O F KILLING

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I fired again and somehow got him in the head. There was so much blood . . . I vomited, until the rest of the boys came up.

— Israeli Six-Day War veteran

So this new Peugeot comes towards us, and we shoot. And there was a family there — three children. And I cried, but I couldn't take the chance. . . . Children, father, mother. All the family was killed, but we couldn't take the chance.

— Israeli Lebanon Incursion veteran

The magnitude of the trauma associated with killing became particularly apparent to me in an interview with Paul, a V F W post commander and sergeant of the 101st Airborne at Bastogne in World War II. He talked freely about his experiences and about comrades who had been killed, but when I asked him about his own kills he stated that usually you couldn't be sure who it was that did the killing. Then tears welled up in Paul's eyes, and after a long pause he said, "But the one time I was sure . . . " and then his sentence was stopped by a little sob, and pain racked the face of this old gentleman. "It still hurts, after all these years?" I asked in wonder. "Yes," he said, "after all these years." And he would not speak of it again.

T h e next day he told me, " Y o u know, Captain, the questions you're asking, you must be very careful not to hurt anyone with these questions. N o t me, you know, I can take it, but some of these young guys are still hurting very badly. These guys don't need to be hurt anymore." These memories were the scabs of terrible, hidden wounds in the minds of these kind and gentle men.

Not to Kill, and the Guilt Thereof

With very few exceptions, everyone associated with killing in combat reaps a bitter harvest of guilt.

The Soldier's Guilt . . .

Numerous studies have concluded that men in combat are usually motivated to fight
not
by ideology or hate or fear, but by group pressures and processes involving (1) regard for their comrades, 90 KILLING AND C O M B A T T R A U M A

(2) respect for their leaders, (3) concern for their o w n reputation with both, and (4) an urge to contribute to the success of the group.5

Repeatedly we see combat veterans describe the powerful bonds that men forge in combat as stronger than those of husband and wife. J o h n Early, a Vietnam veteran and an ex—Rhodesian mercenary, described it to Dyer this way:

This is going to sound really strange, but there's a love relationship that is nurtured in combat because the man next to you — you're depending on him for the most important thing you have, your life, and if he lets you down you're either maimed or killed. If you make a mistake the same thing happens to him, so the bond of trust has to be extremely close, and I'd say this bond is stronger than almost anything, with the exception of parent and child. It's a hell of a lot stronger than man and wife — your life is in his hands, you trust that person with the most valuable thing you have.

This bonding is so intense that it is fear of failing these comrades that preoccupies most combatants. Countless sociological and psychological studies, the personal narratives of numerous veterans, and the interviews I have conducted clearly indicate the strength of the soldier's concern for failing his buddies. T h e guilt and trauma associated with failing to fully support men w h o are bonded with friendship and camaraderie on this magnitude is profoundly intense.

Yet every soldier and every leader feels this guilt to one degree or another. For those w h o k n o w that they have not fired while their friends died around them, the guilt is traumatic.

. . .
And the Leader's Guilt

T h e responsibilities of a combat leader represent a remarkable paradox. To be truly good at what he does, he must love his m e n and be bonded to them with powerful links of mutual responsibility and affection. And then he must ultimately be willing to give the orders that may kill them.

To a significant degree, the social barrier between officer and enlisted man, and between sergeant and private, exists to enable the superior to send his men into mortal danger and to shield him T H E B U R D E N O F KILLING

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from the inevitable guilt associated with their deaths. For even the best leaders make some mistakes that will weigh forever upon their consciences. Just as any good coach can analyze his conduct of even a winning game and see where he could have done better, so does every good combat leader think, at some level, that if he had just done something different these men — these men he loved like sons and brothers — might not have died.

It is extraordinarily difficult to get these leaders to reminisce along these lines:

Now tactically I had done everything the way it was supposed to be done, but we lost some soldiers. There was no other way. We could not go around that field; we had to go across it. So did I make a mistake? I don't know. Would I have done it differently

[another time]? I don't think I would have, because that's the way I was trained. Did we lose less soldiers by my doing it that way?

That's a question that'll never be answered.

— Major Robert Ooley, Vietnam veteran

quoted in Gwynne Dyer,
War

This is a deadly, dangerous line of thought for leaders, and the honors and decorations that are traditionally heaped upon military leaders at all levels are vitally important for their mental health in the years that follow. These decorations, medals, mentions in dispatches, and other forms of recognition represent a powerful affirmation from the leader's society, telling him that he did well, he did the right thing, and no one blames him for the lives lost in doing his duty.

Denial and the Burden of Killing

Balancing the obligation to kill with the resulting toll of guilt forms a significant cause of psychiatric casualties on the battlefield.

Philosopher-psychologist Peter Marin speaks of the soldier's lesson in responsibility and guilt. What the soldier knows as a result of war is that "the dead remain dead, the maimed are forever maimed, and there is no way to deny one's responsibility or culpability, for those mistakes are written, forever and as if in fire, in others' flesh."

92 K I L L I N G AND C O M B A T T R A U M A Ultimately there may be no way to deny one's responsibility or culpability for mistakes written "forever and as if in fire, in others' flesh," but combat is a great furnace fed by the small flickering flames of attempts at denial. T h e burden of killing is so great that most men try not to admit that they have killed. They deny it to others, and they try to deny it to themselves. Dinter quotes a hardened veteran who, upon being asked about killing, stated emphatically that

Most of the killing you do in modern war is impersonal. A thing few people realize is that you hardly ever see a German. Very few men — even in the infantry — actually have the experience of aiming a weapon at a German and seeing the man fall.

Even the language of m e n at war is full of denial of the enormity of what they have done. Most soldiers do not "kill," instead the enemy was knocked over, wasted, greased, taken out, and mopped up. T h e enemy is hosed, zapped, probed, and fired on. T h e enemy's humanity is denied, and he becomes a strange beast called a Kraut, Jap, R e b , Yank, dink, slant, or slope. Even the weapons of war receive benign names — Puff the Magic Dragon, Walleye, T O W , Fat Boy, and Thin Man — and the killing weapon of the individual soldier becomes a piece or a hog, and a bullet becomes a round.

O u r enemies do the same thing. Matt Brennan tells of Con, a Vietnamese scout assigned to his platoon. This individual had been a loyal Viet Cong until a North Vietnamese squad made a mistake and killed his wife and children. Now he loved to run ahead of the Americans, hunting for [North Vietnamese soldiers]. . . . He called the Communists gooks, just as we did, and one night I asked him why.

"Con, do you think it's right to call the VC gooks and dinks?"

He shrugged. "It makes no difference to me. Everything has a name. Do you think the Americans are the only ones who do that? . . . My company in the jungle . . . called you Big Hairy Monkeys. We kill monkeys, and" — he hesitated for an instant— "we eat them."

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T h e dead soldier takes his misery with him, but the man w h o killed him must forever live and die with him. The lesson becomes increasingly clear: Killing is what war is all about, and killing in combat, by its very nature, causes deep wounds of pain and guilt.

The language of war helps us to deny what war is really about, and in doing so it makes war more palatable.