On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (17 page)

What these units (or at least their leaders) must understand is that actual skewering almost
never
happens; but the powerful human revulsion to the threat of such activity, when a soldier is confronted with superior posturing represented by a willingness or at least a KILLING AT E D G E D - W E A P O N S R A N G E 127

reputation for participation in close-range killing, has a devastating effect upon the enemy's morale.

Back Stabbing and the Chase Instinct

Combat at close quarters does not exist. At close quarters occurs the ancient carnage when one force strikes the other in the back.

— Ardant du Picq

Battle Studies

It is when the bayonet charge has forced one side's soldiers to turn their backs and flee that the killing truly begins, and at some visceral level the soldier intuitively understands this and is very, very frightened when he has to turn his back to the enemy. Griffith dwells on this fear of retreating: "Perhaps this fear of retreat [in the face of the enemy] was linked to a horror of turning one's back on the threat. . . . A type of reverse ostrich syndrome may have applied, whereby the danger was bearable only while the men continued to watch it." And in his superb study of the American Civil War, Griffith also notes many instances in which the most effective firing and killing occurred when the enemy had begun to flee the field.

I believe that there are two factors in play in this increased killing of an enemy whose back is turned, and of the resultant fear of turning one's back to the enemy. The first factor is the concept of a chase instinct. A lifetime of working with and training dogs has taught me that the worst thing you can ever do is run from an animal. I have never yet met a dog I could not face down or at least incapacitate with a kick as it charged, but I have always known both instinctively and rationally that if I were to turn and run I should be in great danger. There is a chase instinct in most animals that will cause even a well-trained and nonaggressive dog to instinctively chase and pull down anything that runs. As long as your back is turned you are in danger. In the same way, there appears to be a chase instinct in man that permits him to kill a fleeing enemy.

T h e second factor that enables killing from behind is a process in which close proximity on the physical distance spectrum can 128

KILLING AND PHYSICAL D I S T A N C E

be negated when the face cannot be seen. The essence of the whole physical distance spectrum may simply revolve around the degree to which the killer can see the face of the victim. There appears to be a kind of intuitive understanding of this process in our cultural image of back shooting and back stabbing as cowardly acts, and it seems that soldiers intuitively understand that when they turn their backs, they are more apt to be killed by the enemy.

This same enabling process explains why Nazi, Communist, and gangland executions are traditionally conducted with a bullet in the back of the head, and why individuals being executed by hanging or firing squad are blindfolded or hooded. And we know from Miron and Goldstein's 1979 research that the risk of death for a kidnap victim is much greater if the victim is hooded. In each of these instances the presence of the hood or blindfold ensures that the execution is completed and serves to protect the mental health of the executioners. Not having to look at the face of the victim provides a form of psychological distance that enables the execution party and assists in their subsequent denial and the rationalization and acceptance of having killed a fellow human being.

The eyes are the window of the soul, and if one does not have to look into the eyes when killing, it is much easier to deny the humanity of the victim. The eyes bulging out "like prawns" and blood shooting out of the mouth are not seen. The victim remains faceless, and one never needs to know one's victim as a person.

And the price most killers have to pay for a close-range kill — the memory of the "face terrible, twisted in pain and hate, yes such hate" — this price need never be paid if we can simply avoid looking at our victim's face.

In combat the impact of back stabbing and the chase instinct can be observed in casualty rates, which increase significantly after the enemy forces have turned their backs and begun to flee.

Clausewitz and du Picq both expound at length on the fact that the vast majority of casualties in historical battles were inflicted upon the losing side during the pursuit that followed the victory.

In this vein Ardant du Picq holds out the example of Alexander KILLING AT EDGED-WEAPONS RANGE 129

the Great, whose forces, during all his years of warfare, lost fewer than seven hundred men "to the sword." They suffered so few casualties simply because they never lost a battle and therefore only had to endure the very, very minor casualties inflicted by reluctant combatants in close combat and never had to suffer the very significant losses associated with being pursued by a victorious enemy.

Knife Range

As we bring the physical distance spectrum down to its culmination point we must recognize that killing with a knife is significantly more difficult than killing with the bayonet affixed to the end of a rifle. Many knife kills appear to be of the commando nature, in which someone slips up on a victim and kills him from behind.

These kills, like all kills from behind, are less traumatic than a kill from the front, since the face and all its messages and contortions are not seen. But what is felt are the bucking and shuddering of the victim's body and the warm sticky blood gushing out, and what is heard is the the final breath hissing out.

The U.S. Army, along with armies in many other nations, trains its Rangers and Green Berets to execute a knife kill from the rear by plunging the knife through the lower back and into the kidney.

Such a blow is so remarkably painful that its effect is to completely paralyze the victim as he quickly dies, resulting in an extremely silent kill.

This kidney strike is contrary to the natural inclination of most soldiers, who — if they have thought about the matter at all —

would prefer to slit the throat while holding a hand over the victim's mouth. This option, though psychologically and culturally more desirable (it is a slashing rather than a thrusting blow), has far less potential for silence, since an improperly slit throat is capable of making considerable noise and holding a hand over someone's mouth is not always an easy thing to do. The victim also has a capacity to bite, and a marine gunnery sergeant who is the USMC's proponent agent for hand-to-hand-combat tells me that several individuals have told him of cutting their own hand while trying 130

KILLING AND PHYSICAL D I S T A N C E

to cut the enemy's throat in the dark. But here again we see the natural preference for a slashing blow over a more effective thrusting or penetrating blow.

Holmes tells us that the French in World War II preferred knives and daggers for close-in work, but Keegan's findings of the singular absence of such wounds would indicate that few of these knives were ever used. Indeed, narratives of incidents in which individuals used a knife in modern combat are extremely rare, and knife kills other than the silencing of sentries from behind are almost unheard of.

The one personal narrative of a knife kill that I have been able to obtain as a result of my interviews is from a man who had been an infantryman in the Pacific during World War II. He had many personal kills that he was willing to discuss, but it was his one kill with a knife that caused him to have nightmares long after the war was over. An enemy soldier had slipped into his foxhole one night, and during the process of a hand-to-hand struggle he pinned down the smaller Japanese soldier and slit his throat. The horror associated with pinning the man down and feeling him struggle and watching him bleed to death is something that he can barely tolerate to this very day.

Chapter Six

Killing at Hand-to-Hand-Combat Range

In modern battle, which is delivered with combatants so far apart, man has come to have a horror of man. He comes to hand-to-hand fighting only to defend his body or if forced to it.

— Ardant du Picq

Battle Studies

Hand-to-Hand-Combat Range

At hand-to-hand-combat range the instinctive resistance to killing becomes strongest. While some who have studied the subject claim that man is the only higher-order species that does not have an instinctive resistance to killing his own species, its existence is recognized by almost any high-level karate practitioner.

An obvious method of killing an opponent involves a crushing blow to the throat. In movie combat we often see one individual grab another by the throat and attempt to choke him. And Hollywood heroes give the enemy a good old punch in the jaw. In both instances a blow to the throat (with the hand held in various prescribed shapes) would be a vastly superior form of disabling or killing the foe, yet it is not a natural act; it is a repellent one.

The single most effective and mechanically easiest way to inflict significant damage on a human being with one's hand is to punch a thumb through his eye and on into the brain, subsequently 132

KILLING AND PHYSICAL D I S T A N C E

stirring the intruding digit around inside the skull, cocking it off toward the side, and forcefully pulling the eye and other matter out with the thumb.

O n e karate instructor trains his high-level students in this killing technique by having them practice punching their thumbs into oranges held or taped over the eye socket of an opponent. As we will observe when we study the process by which the U.S. Army raised its firing rates from 15 to 20 percent in World War II to 90 to 95 percent in Vietnam, this procedure of precisely rehearsing and mimicking a killing action is an excellent way of ensuring that the individual is capable of performing the act in combat.

In the case of the orange held over the victim's eye, the process is made even more realistic by having the victim scream, twitch, and jerk as the killer punches his thumb to the hilt into the orange and then rips it back out. Few individuals can walk away from their first such rehearsal without being badly shaken and disturbed by the action they have just mimicked. The fact that they are overcoming some form of natural resistance is obvious.

Tracy Arnold, an actress in the X-rated (for violence) movie
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer,
passed out twice during the filming of a scene in which her character was portrayed stabbing a man in the eye with a rat-tailed comb. This is a professional actress.

She can portray killing, lying, and sex on the screen with relative ease, but even the pretense of stabbing someone in the eye seems to have touched a resistance so powerful and deep-seated that her body and emotions — the tools of the professional actress — literally refused to cooperate. In fact, I cannot find any references to anyone in the history of human combat having ever used this simple technique. Indeed, it is almost too painful to think of it.

Man has a tremendous resistance to killing effectively with his bare hands. When man first picked up a club or a rock and killed his fellow man, he gained more than mechanical energy and m e -

chanical leverage. He also gained psychological energy and psychological leverage that was every bit as necessary in the killing process.

In some distant part of man's past he acquired this ability. T w o major religious works, the Bible and the Torah, both speak of KILLING AT H A N D - T O - H A N D C O M B A T R A N G E 133

partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and one of its first uses was Cain's overcoming his instinctive resistance in order to kill his brother, Abel. He probably did so not with his bare hands, but with an application of mechanical and psychological leverage not available to any other creature on the face of the earth.9

Chapter Seven

Killing at Sexual Range: ' 'The Primal Aggression,
the Release, and the Orgasmic Discharge"

One night as a young lieutenant on a long deployment to the Arctic, I sat in our little Officer/Senior NCO Club nursing a beer, while several old sergeants became quite drunk. One old Vietnam vet hit on a popular theme during the discussion and said, "F

Jane Fonda."

Another old sergeant vet who was sitting next to me was roused to respond by saying, "F Jane Fonda? Huh! Skull-f Jane Fonda! Pop an eyeball out and skull-f- the bitch."

This macabre concept of combining sex with death was so offensive that even the hardened veterans around the speaker were momentarily shocked. Yet the procreative act and the destructive act are inextricably interlinked. Much of the attraction to the killing process, and much of the resistance to close-in killing, revolves around the vicious side of ourselves that would pervert sex in such a manner that we
can
conceive of such things.

At a surface level, the link between sex and aggression is obvious and not so blatantly offensive. The most powerful stag, stallion, ram, male lion, or gorilla wins the harem; lesser or younger males remain only if they are subservient. Much has been made of the relationship between male sexuality and the power of motorcycles KILLING AT SEXUAL R A N G E

135

(1,200 cc of power throbbing between your legs) and muscle cars.

The continuing popularity of magazines in which motorcycles and cars are displayed along with scantily clad women in provocative positions make this relationship clear.

This kind of sex-power linkage also exists in the gun world.

A video recently advertised in gun magazines,
Sexy Girls and Sexy
Guns,
taps this same vein. "You've got to see this tape to believe it," says the ad. "14 outrageous sexy girls in string bikinis and high heels blasting away with the sexiest full auto machine guns ever produced."

The psychological state that is satisfied by
Sexy Girls and Sexy
Guns
is not widely shared among gun aficionados and is often viewed with considerable scorn. O n e editorial comment from a magazine that advertised these movies reveals a perceptive understanding of the nature of this kind of "full auto-eroticism and

'Debbie Does the Paris Arms Show' pap":

You may have seen the rash of mindless "machine-gun videos"

that dish out a bilgy froth of bikinis, boobs and burp guns — neither instruction nor entertainment, evidently marketed to exploit a rather narrow spectrum of psychoses which hopes to see pendulous mammillae caught in a closing breach. While these video bikinis might have satisfied the Freudian hostilities of a disturbed few, there has been a need for legitimate orientation-instruction machine gun videos for those who properly regard these weapons as indispensable tools of respectable trades.

— D. McLean

"Firestorm"

Yet, in reality, our
Sexy Girls and Sexy Guns
video is only a little removed from the not-so-subliminal message of virility implied in the familiar image of a barely clad woman clinging to James Bond as he coolly brandishes a pistol.'0

Killing as Sex
. . .

T h e linkage between sex and killing becomes unpleasantly apparent when we enter the realm of warfare. Many societies have long 136 K I L L I N G AND PHYSICAL D I S T A N C E

recognized the existence of this twisted region in which battle, like sex, is a milestone in adolescent masculinity. Yet the sexual aspects of killing continue beyond the region in which both are thought to be rites of manhood and into the area in which killing becomes like sex and sex like killing.

A British paratrooper w h o served in the Falklands told Holmes that one particular attack was "the most exciting thing since getting my leg across." O n e American soldier compared the killings at My Lai to the closely linked guilt and satisfaction that accompany masturbation.

T h e Israeli military psychologist Ben Shalit touched on this relationship when he described some of his observations of combat: On my right was mounted a heavy machine gun. The gunner (normally the cook) was firing away with what I can only describe as a beatific smile on his face. He was exhilarated by the squeezing of the trigger, the hammering of the gun, and the flight of his tracers rushing out into the dark shore. It struck me then (and was confirmed by him and many others later) that squeezing the trigger — releasing a hail of bullets — gives enormous pleasure and satisfaction. These are the pleasures of combat, not in terms of the intellectual planning — of the tactical and strategic chess game — but of the primal aggression, the release, and the or-gasmic discharge.

Shalit addresses this subject through symbolic language, but one Vietnam veteran was not nearly so subtle when he told Mark Baker that "a gun is power. To some people carrying a gun was like having a permanent hard-on. It was a pure sexual trip every time you got to pull the trigger." Many men w h o have carried and fired a gun — especially a full automatic weapon — must confess in their hearts that the power and pleasure of explosively spewing a stream of bullets is akin to the emotions felt when explosively spewing a stream of semen.

O n e of the veterans I interviewed had six tours in Vietnam. He stated that ultimately he "had to get out of there" because he was becoming consumed by what was happening to him. "Killing can KILLING AT SEXUAL R A N G E 137

be like sex," he told me, "and you can get carried away with it; it can consume you just like sex can."

. . .
And Sex as Killing

And just as the highly personal, close-up, one-on-one, intense experience of killing can be like sex, so can sex be like killing.

Glenn Gray speaks of this relationship. " T o be sure," he says, the sexual partner is not actually destroyed in the encounter, merely overthrown. And the psychological aftereffects of sexual lust are different from those of battle lusts. These differences, however, do not alter the fact that the passions have a common source and affect their victims in the same way while they are in their grip.

T h e concept of sex as a process of domination and defeat is closely related to the lust for rape and the trauma associated with the rape victim. Thrusting the sexual appendage (the penis) deep into the body of the victim can be perversely linked to thrusting the killing appendage (a bayonet or knife) deep into the body of the victim.

This process can be seen in pornographic movies in which the sexual act is twisted, such that the male ejaculates — or "shoots his wad" — into a female's face. The grip of a firer on the pistol grip of a gun is much like the grip on an erect penis, and holding the penis in this fashion while ejaculating into the victim's face is at some level an act of domination and symbolic destruction. The culmination of this intertwining of sex and death can be seen in snuff films, in which a victim is raped and then murdered on film.

T h e force of darkness and destruction within us is balanced with a force of light and love for our fellow man. These forces struggle and strive within the heart of each of us. To ignore one is to ignore the other. We cannot k n o w the light if we do not acknowledge the dark. We cannot know life if we do not acknowledge death. The link between sex and war and the process of denial in both fields are well represented by Richard Heckler's observation that "it is in the mythological marriage of Ares [the god of war] and Aphrodite [the god of sex] that Harmonia is b o r n . "

S E C T I O N I V

An Anatomy of Killing:

All Factors Considered

The starting point for the understanding of war is the understanding of human nature.

— S. L. A. Marshall

Men Against Fire