On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (32 page)

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at the top of the trauma scale there probably isn't much value in trying to distinguish between shades of black.

The truck driver also arrived alone, but although his job was the same as a World War II truck driver, the environment in which he had to do it had changed. There was no rear area for him, you could never really let your guard down, even when you were off duty, and convoys were one long hell of fear from ambushes and mines. It was like living in the Battle of the Bulge all the time. Convoys into base camps were often like some kind of "Relief of Bastogne," and his truck was always armored and sandbagged in a way that a World War II truck driver would probably never even have considered doing. Fortunately, he never did have to shoot at anybody, but that was always a possibility, and he kept his weapon handy and loaded all the time, and plenty of people were shooting in his general direction on several occasions. Our Vietnam-era truck driver might rate low on the trauma scale, slightly higher than his counterpart in World War II, but not unmanageably so.

Our two Vietnam veterans departed the war the way they had arrived: alone. They departed with a mixture of joy at having survived and shame at having left their buddies behind. Instead of returning to parades, they found antiwar marches. Instead of luxury hotels, they were sent to locked and guarded military bases where they were processed back to civilian life in a few days. Instead of movies about the veteran, his struggles, and his vulnerable emotional state upon reentry into civilian life, the media prepared the American people by calling the returning veterans "depraved fiends" and "psychopathic killers," and beautiful young movie stars led the accusing chant of a nation that echoed through the veteran's soul: "Baby killers . . . murderers . . . butchers . . ."

They were rejected by girlfriends, spit on, and accused by strangers and finally dared not even admit to close friends that they were veterans. They did not show up for Memorial Day parades (which had gone out of style), they did not join the VFW or the American Legion, and they did not participate in any reunions or get-togethers with old comrades. They denied their experiences and buried their pain and grieving beneath a shell.

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Some Vietnam vets had families and communities that could insulate them from this, but the vast majority had only to turn on the TV to find themselves being attacked. Even the most average of Vietnam vets endured an absolutely unprecedented degree of societal condemnation. On our social-support scale, our two Vietnam veterans rated at the "condemn" end of the scale.

Remember the multiplicative, amplifying relationship between trauma and social support. For our truck driver the interaction between his limited combat trauma in Vietnam and the societal condemnation that he endured afterward resulted in a total experience that might very well have been more conducive to posttraumatic stress than that experienced by a veteran of close combat in World War II. For our infantry veteran of Vietnam the magnitude of the total trauma experienced is beyond description.

The diffusion of responsibility that happens in combat is a two-way street. It absolves a killer of a part of his guilt, diffusing it to the leaders who gave the order and the truck driver who brought the ammo and hauled back the bodies, but it does so by giving a piece of the killer's guilt to others, and those others must then deal with it just as surely as must the killer. If these "accessories"

to killing in combat are accused and condemned, then their slice of the trauma, guilt, and responsibility is amplified, and it will reverberate in their souls as shock and horror.

The Vietnam vet, the average vet who did no killing, is suffering an agony of guilt and torment created by society's condemnation.

During and immediately after Vietnam our society judged and condemned millions of returning veterans as accessories to murder.

At one level many, even most, of these horrified, confused veterans accepted society's media-driven, kangaroo-court conviction as justice and locked themselves in prisons of the worst kind, prisons in their mind. A prison whose name was PTSD.

I have known these men, both our two "hypothetical" World War II vets and our two Vietnam vets. They are not hypothetical at all. They are real. Their pain is real. Societies that ask men to fight on their behalf should be aware of what the consequences and what the price of their actions may so easily be.

Chapter Four

The Limits of Human Endurance and the

Lessons of Vietnam

PTSD and Vietnam: A Nexus of Impact upon Society
For the Vietnam infantryman in the example in the last chapter, the condemnation upon his return amplified the horror of his combat experiences to result in a staggering degree of horror. By the very nature of its unique historical causation, the existence of any significant number of individuals in such a condition is unprecedented in the history of Western civilization.

Although this model only crudely reflects what has happened, it begins to represent the relevant forces.8 Statistics on the horrible number of suicides among Vietnam vets, on the tragic number of homeless who are Vietnam vets, on divorce rates, drug-use rates, and so on, give evidence that something has occurred that is significantly, startlingly different from that occurring after World War II or any other war our nation has ever encountered.9

There is a nexus of events and causation linking the death of enemy soldiers and the spittle of war protesters with a pattern of suicide, homelessness, mental illness, and divorce that will ripple through the United States for generations to come.

The 1978 President's Commission on Mental Health tells us that approximately 2.8 million Americans served in Southeast Asia, T H E LIMITS O F H U M A N E N D U R A N C E

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and almost 1 million of them saw active combat service or were exposed to hostile, life-threatening situations. If we accept the Veterans Administration's conservative figures of 15 percent incidence of PTSD among Vietnam veterans, then more than 400,000

individuals in the United States suffer from P T S D . Other figures place this number as high as 1.5 million veterans suffering from PTSD as a result of the Vietnam War. Whatever their numbers, there are undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of them, they are four times more likely to be divorced or separated (and those not divorced are significantly more likely to have a troubled marriage), they represent a large proportion of America's homeless population, and as the years go by they are increasingly more likely to c o m -

mit suicide.

Thus, the long-term legacy of the Vietnam War upon American society is not just hundreds of thousands of troubled veterans, it is also hundreds of thousands of troubled marriages impacting women, children, and future generations. For we know that children of broken families are more likely to be physically and sexually abused, and that children of divorce are more likely to become divorced as adults, and that victims of child abuse are more likely to become child-abusing adults. And this is only one facet of the price this nation will pay for those personal kills in the jungles of Vietnam.

It may indeed be necessary to engage in a war, but we must begin to understand the potential long-term price of such endeavors.

The Legacy and the Lesson

Man did not weave the web of life: he is merely a strand in it.

Whatever he does to the web he does to himself.

— Ted Perry (Writing as "Chief Seattle") We may have enhanced the killing ability of the average soldier through training (that is, conditioning), but at what price? T h e ultimate cost of our body counts in Vietnam has been, and continues to be, much more than dollars and lives. We can, and have, conditioned soldiers to kill — they are eager and willing and trust our judgment. But in doing so we have not made them capable 292

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of handling the moral and social burdens of these acts, and we have a moral responsibility to consider the long-term effects of our commands. Moral direction and philosophical guidance, based on a firm understanding of the processes involved, must come with the combat training and deployment of our soldiers.

At the national strategic level, a recognition of the potential social cost of modern warfare has been obtained at a terrible price, and a form of moral and philosophical guidance gained from this experience can be found in the Weinberger doctrine — named after Caspar Weinberger, secretary of defense for President Reagan.

This doctrine represents an initial attempt to form the kind of moral direction and philosophical guidance that can be built upon the lessons of Vietnam. The Weinberger doctrine states that:

• "The United States should not commit forces to combat unless our vital interests are at stake."

• "We must commit them in sufficient numbers and with sufficient support to win."

• "We must have clearly defined political and military objectives."

• "We must never again commit forces to a war we do not intend to win."

• "Before the United States commits forces abroad, the U.S. government should have some reasonable assurance of the support of the American people and their elected representatives in the Congress. . . . U.S. troops cannot be asked to fight a battle with the Congress at home while attempting to win a war overseas.

Nor will the American people sit by and watch U.S. troops committed as expendable pawns on some grand diplomatic chessboard."

• "Finally, the commitment of U.S. troops should be as a last resort."

A Quest for Further Understanding

The Weinberger doctrine represents, in part, the recognition that a nation that sends men out to kill must understand the price that it may have to ultimately pay for these seemingly isolated deeds in distant lands. If this doctrine and the spirit in which it is intended THE LIMITS OF HUMAN ENDURANCE 293

prevails, it may prevent a recurrence of the Vietnam experience.

But this is just the beginning of a basis for understanding the potentially devastating social costs of modern war at other levels.

Commanders, families, and society need to understand the soldier's desperate need for recognition and acceptance, his vulnerability, and his desperate need to be constantly reassured that what he (or she) did was right and necessary, and the terrible social costs of failing to provide for these needs with the traditional acts of affirmation and acceptance. It is to our national shame that it has taken us almost twenty years to recognize and fulfill these needs with the Vietnam War Memorial and the veterans' parades that have allowed our veterans to "wipe a little spit off their hearts."

The military also must understand the need for unit integrity during and after combat. We are beginning to do so with the army's new personnel system (which assigns and replaces whole units instead of single individuals in combat), and we must continue to do so; and like the British, who took their soldiers home from the Falklands by long, slow sea voyage, we must understand the need for cooldown periods, parades, and unit integrity during the vulnerable period of returning from war. During the 1991 Gulf War it appears that we generally got these things right, but we must make sure that we always do so in the future.

The psychological, psychiatric, medical, counseling, and social work communities must understand the impact of combat kills on the soldier and must attempt to further understand and reinforce the rationalization and acceptance process outlined in this book.

In their 1988 research on PTSD Stellman and Stellman, both chemists by training, were the first to conduct a large-scale correlation study on the relationship between combat experience and PTSD. They reported that the "great majority" of veterans turning to mental-health services were not asked about their combat experiences, let alone their personal kills.

Last, we must attempt to understand the basic act of killing, not just in war, but throughout our society.

A Personal Note

"Who the f- are the two guys up here with the machine gun?"

I asked, slinking back over the edge of the cliff.

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"That's gotta be Charlie, you asshole . . . Blow their ass up and run. . . ."

They didn't know I existed. Low underbrush shielded the edge of the cliff from their view, but I sure as hell saw them. My body started to shake and spasm as I rested my elbow on the hard laterite.

I sighted down the barrel and put the front sight under one guy's chest. He was sitting closest to the machine gun, and he would die because of it.

This is one f ed up way to die, I thought as I squeezed softly on the trigger.

The explosion of the round roared like a cannon in my ear. My target flattened out, and for an instant I couldn't tell if he ducked or had been hit. The doubts disappeared when I saw his foot quiver and his body shudder before he died.

I was so transfixed by his death throes that I never fired a shot at the other guy, who escaped into the thick brush to the south.

I jumped over the cliff and ran to reach the dying man, not sure if I wanted to help him or finish him. Something made me have to see him, what he looked like, how he died.

I knelt beside him as his life leaked into the dusty earth. My one shot had hit him in the left chest and ripped through his back.

The rest of the patrol was scrambling up the cliff and shouting, but the only sound I heard was the soft bubbling of the dead man's blood as it soaked into the dirt. His eyes were open, and his face was still young. He looked terribly peaceful. His war was over and mine had just begun.

The steady stream of blood from his wound made a widening circle of darkness beneath him, and I felt my innocence deserting me as his life deserted him. I'd come all the way to Vietnam now.

I didn't know if I'd ever get out. I still don't.

As the rest of the platoon reached the plateau, I found a bush on the flank of the campfire and retched violently.

— Steve Banko

"Green Grunt Finds Innocence Lost"

Looking back on this narrative from the perspective of this point in the book, I find that there are many factors to be considered.

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Our newfound science of killology permits us to identify such key processes as the need to be ordered to kill (demands of authority and diffusion of responsibility), the picking out of the enemy soldier who was closest to the machine gun (target attractiveness and assisting in the rationalization process by picking the greater potential threat of two individuals who represented no immediate threat), and the emotional response of violent revulsion to the act of killing.

But what sticks in my mind is the phrase: "I didn't know if I'd ever get out. I still don't." Those words haunt me.

This is no Ramboesque machismo; this is the actual emotional response of a young American soldier to one of the most horrifying events of his life. As he writes this to a national forum of understanding and sympathetic Vietnam veterans, he and many like him can be free to say that they were sickened by killing — and their writing and its publication become a vital catharsis. I believe that as these veterans write such narratives, they do not mean to say that the war was wrong or that they regret what they did, but that they simply want to be understood.

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

As I interviewed veterans during this study, the soldier, the psychologist, and the human being in me were always touched by this desperate, unspoken need for understanding and affirmation.

Understanding that they did no more and no less than their nation and their society asked them to do; no more and no less than 200

years of American veterans had honorably done. And affirmation that they were good human beings.

Over and over again I have said, and before I go on to the final section, "Killing in America," I want to say again, I am honored that you have shared this with me. You did all that anyone could ask you to have done, and I am truly proud to have known you.

And I hope that I can use your words to help people understand.

S E C T I O N V I I I

Killing in America:

What Are We Doing to Our Children?