On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (11 page)

Many observers feel that the lower incidence of psychiatric casualties among officers is due to their greater sense of responsibility or the fact that they are highly visible, with greater social stigma associated with breakdown. Undoubtedly the officer has a greater understanding than his men of what is going on and his place and importance in it. And officers get more recognition and psychological support from military institutions, such as uniforms, awards, and decorations.

These factors are probably all part of the equation, but the officer also has a far smaller burden of individual responsibility for killing T H E R E I G N OF FEAR 65

on the battlefield. T h e key difference is that he doesn't have to do it personally.

A Fresh Look at the Reign of Fear

It
would appear that, at least in the realm of psychiatric casualty causation, fear does
not
reign supreme on the battlefield. T h e effect of fear should never be underestimated, but it is clearly not the only, or even the major, factor responsible for psychiatric casualties on the battlefield.

The deaths, destruction, and fear experienced by those w h o survived months of bombing in England and Germany did not produce anywhere near the psychological breakdown suffered by soldiers in combat. The Rand Corporation studies outlined earlier make it clear that just as the distance involved helped the pilots and bombardiers to partially deny that they were personally killing thousands of innocent civilians, so too did the circumstances and distances involved buffer civilian and P O W bombing victims, sailors, and patrols behind enemy lines from the Wind of Hate (which we will examine shortly) and permit them to successfully deny that anyone was personally trying to kill them. They simply didn't take it personally. Indeed, one might think that the civilians' and the P O W s ' inability to fight back would be a source of stress, but just the opposite appears to be true: most bomber crews and artillery crews would eventually sustain psychiatric casualties, while the noncombatants they attacked generally did not.

During World War II, bomber crews generally had the highest casualty rates of any combatants among the Allied forces. In the British Bomber Command, out of every one hundred men only twenty-four survived. Such figures, faced day after day without respite, appear to have been sufficient to result in the tremendous psychiatric casualty rates suffered by these crews. This fear was intermingled with a comparatively small quantity of horror and some burden of responsibility — one Vietnam-era bomber pilot claimed it was the killing of civilians, even at a distance, that eventually drove him to drink and troubled him the most in subsequent years. But fear may have been the predominant psychological enemy in this particular circumstance. The point is that 66

K I L L I N G AND C O M B A T T R A U M A

fear is only one of many factors, and it seldom, if ever, is the sole cause of psychiatric casualties.

The magnitude of the exhaustion and the horror suffered by combat veterans and victims of strategic bombing is generally comparable. The stress factors that soldiers experienced and bombing victims
did not
were the two-edged responsibility of (1) being expected to kill (the irreconcilable balancing of to kill and not to kill) and (2) the stress of looking their potential killers in the face (the Wind of Hate).

Chapter Three

The Weight of Exhaustion

The first quality of a soldier is constancy in enduring fatigue and hardship. Courage is only the second. Poverty, privation and want are the school of the good soldier.

— Napoleon

Exhaustion as Inoculation in Training

The impact of true physical exhaustion is impossible to communicate to those who have not experienced it. I remember sitting in the mud in a state of exhaustion, picking up small frogs from the surrounding swamp, swallowing them one by one, and rinsing them down with water from my canteen. I had not eaten or slept for five days. We were beginning week eight of the eight-week U.S. Army Ranger school, and my peers and I had endured this kind of physical deprivation for seven weeks. At this point swallowing live frogs seemed a very reasonable course of action. And although we were handpicked officers and sergeants in the finest possible condition upon beginning the course, by this time most of us had lost well over twenty pounds of body tissue.

Sunken cheeked and hollow eyed, we were in a state of total starvation-enhanced exhaustion that caused many of us to have repeated hallucinations. These were incredibly vivid dreams that we would experience while wide-awake. To those who 68

KILLING AND C O M B A T T R A U M A

experienced them, these hallucinations (which were usually about food) seemed to be real. We carried forty-pound rucksacks over the mountains of Georgia and Tennessee and through the swamps of Florida on endless tactical operations while constantly being assessed on our leadership ability. The mind teetered on the brink of madness, and anyone could drop out at any time simply by failing to perform or asking to quit. Only pride and determination kept us going. For weeks after graduation many of us awoke in panic and disorientation in the middle of the night.

Elite soldiers from all over the world participate in this remarkably effective initiation rite, and fewer than half pass. It is probably the only school in the U.S. Army about which there is no stigma for having failed. "At least," they say, "you had the guts to try."

And the graduates of this school — and, to varying degrees, the U.S. Navy SEAL and Underwater Demolitions School, the U.S.

Army Special Forces (Green Berets) and Airborne (paratrooper) courses, and U.S. Marine boot camp — are respected by soldiers around the world as individuals who can be trusted to maintain their cool in stressful situations.

T h e point of such remarkable exercises in self-flagellation is to introduce the combat leader to an intense degree of stress and thereby inoculate him against psychological trauma. United States Army lieutenant colonel Bob Harris explained h o w Ranger school had done this for him before going to Vietnam: It is worth noting that my experiences as a platoon leader convinced me absolutely of the value of Ranger training. While I didn't have occasion to use all of the techniques and skills I was taught, I did use many. More important was the knowledge I had gained of myself in Fort Benning, and in the north Georgia mountains and in the Florida swamps; the understanding that limits are mostly in the mind and can be overcome; the knowledge that I could keep going and be an effective leader in spite of fear, fatigue, and hunger.

Exhaustion in Combat

Even as we consider the sunken-eyed, frog-eating, emaciated, and exhausted soldier of Ranger school, we must understand that the T H E W E I G H T O F E X H A U S T I O N

69

combat exhaustion associated with
months
of
continuous
combat is something even worse, something that few soldiers have experienced outside of World War I, World War II, Korea, and some circumstances in Vietnam. Douglas MacArthur said of the soldier that "he plods and groans, sweats and toils, he growls and curses, and at the end he dies." T h e American soldier-cartoonist Bill Mauldin understood the mind-numbing fatigue of World War II combat and communicated it in his famous Willie and Joe cartoons.

"There are millions," wrote Mauldin, " w h o have done a great and hard j o b , but there are only a few hundred thousand w h o have lived through misery, suffering and death for endless 168-hour weeks."

Psychologist F. C. Bartlett emphasized the psychological impact of physical exhaustion in combat. "In war," he wrote, "there is perhaps no general condition which is more likely to produce a large crop of nervous and mental disorders than a state of prolonged and great fatigue." T h e four factors of (1) physiological arousal caused by the stress of existing in what is commonly understood as a continual fight-or-flight-arousal condition, (2) cumulative loss of sleep, (3) the reduction in caloric intake, and (4) the toll of the elements — such as rain, cold, heat, and dark of night — assaulting the soldier all combine to form the "state of prolonged and great fatigue" that is the Weight of Exhaustion. Let us briefly review these factors.

Physiological Exhaustion

And then a shell lands behind us, and another over to the side, and by this time we're scurrying and the sarge and I and another guy wind up behind a wall. The sergeant said it was an .88 and then he said, "S and s some more."

I asked him if he was hit and he sort of smiled and said no, he had just pissed his pants. He always pissed them, he said, just when things started and then he was okay. He wasn't making any apologies either, and then I realized something wasn't quite right with me, either. There was something warm down there and it seemed to be running down my leg. I felt, and it wasn't blood. It was piss.

70 KILLING AND C O M B A T T R A U M A

I told the sarge, I said, "Sarge, I've pissed too," or something like that and he grinned and said, "Welcome to the war."

— World War II veteran

quoted in Barry Broadfoot,
Six Year War, 1939-1945

To understand the intensity of the body's physiological response to the stress of combat we must understand the mobilization of resources caused by the body's sympathetic nervous system, and then we must understand the impact of the body's parasympathetic backlash response.

The sympathetic nervous system mobilizes and directs the body's energy resources for action. T h e parasympathetic system is responsible for the body's digestive and recuperative processes.

Usually these two systems sustain a general balance between their demands upon the body's resources, but during extremely stressful circumstances the fight-or-flight response kicks in and the sympathetic nervous system mobilizes
all
available energy for survival. In combat this very often results in nonessential activities such as digestion, bladder control, and sphincter control being completely shut down. This process is so intense that soldiers very often suffer stress diarrhea, and it is not at all uncommon for them to urinate and defecate in their pants as the body literally "blows its ballast" in an attempt to provide all the energy resources required to ensure its survival.

A soldier must pay a physiological price for an energizing process this intense. The price that the body pays is an equally powerful backlash when the neglected demands of the parasympathetic system return. This parasympathetic backlash occurs as soon as the danger and the excitement is over, and it takes the form of an incredibly powerful weariness and sleepiness on the part of the soldier.

Napoleon stated that the moment of greatest danger was the instant immediately after victory, and in saying so he demonstrated a remarkable understanding of h o w soldiers become physiologically and psychologically incapacitated by the parasympathetic backlash that occurs as soon as the m o m e n t u m of the attack has halted and the soldier briefly believes himself to be safe. During this period of vulnerability a counterattack by fresh troops can have an effect T H E W E I G H T O F E X H A U S T I O N

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completely out of proportion to the number of troops attacking.

It is basically for this reason that the maintenance of fresh reserves has always been essential in combat, with battles often revolving around which side can hold out and deploy their reserves last.

Clausewitz cautioned that these reserves should always be maintained out of sight of the battle. These same basic psychophysiologi-cal principles explain why successful military leaders have historically maintained the momentum of a successful attack. Pursuing and maintaining contact with a defeated enemy are vital in order to completely destroy the enemy (the vast majority of the killing in historical battles occurred during the pursuit when the enemy had turned his back), but it is also valuable to maintain contact with the enemy as long as possible in order to delay that inevitable pause in the battle that will result in the culmination point during which pursuing forces will slip into parasympathetic backlash and become vulnerable to a counterattack. Again, an unblown reserve ready to complete this pursuit is of great value in ensuring that this most destructive phase of the battle is effectively executed.

In continuous combat the soldier roller-coasters through seemingly endless surges of adrenaline and subsequent backlashes, and the body's natural, useful, and appropriate response to danger ultimately becomes extremely counterproductive. Unable to flee, and unable to overcome the danger through a brief burst of fighting, posturing, or submission, the bodies of modern soldiers quickly exhaust their capacity to energize and they slide into a state of profound physical and emotional exhaustion of such a magnitude and dimension that it appears to be almost impossible to communicate it to those who have not experienced it. A soldier in this state will inevitably collapse from nervous exhaustion — the body simply will burn out.

Lack of Sleep

I have already mentioned the hallucinations and zombielike states commonly experienced due to lack of sleep in intensive training, such as in the U.S. Army Ranger school. In combat it is often far worse. Holmes's research indicates that tremendous periods of sleep loss are the norm in combat. In one study it was determined that of American soldiers in Italy in 1944, 31 percent averaged
72

KILLING AND C O M B A T T R A U M A

fewer than four hours' sleep a night, and another 54 percent averaged fewer than six. Those individuals with the lower amounts of sleep were most likely to have come from the frontline units, which is also where the highest incidence of psychological casualties occurred.

Lack of Food

Lack of nourishment resulting from bad, cold food, and a loss of appetite caused by fatigue, can have a singularly devastating impact on combat effectiveness. "I would say without hesitation," wrote the British general Bernard Fergusson, "that lack of food constitutes the single biggest assault upon morale. . . . Apart from its purely chemical effects upon the body, it has woeful effects upon the mind."

In numerous historical incidents lack of food was believed to have been the single most important military factor. The Army Historical Series volume on logistics affirms that "lack of food probably more than any other factor forced the end of resistance on Bataan" early in World War II, and the Germans at Stalingrad were "literally starving at the time of their capitulation."

Impact of the Elements

Soldiering, by its very nature, involves facing the forces of nature as well as the forces of the foe. Limited to those few amenities that they can carry on their backs
after
room has been made for the equipment of their profession, most soldiers are more or less at the mercy of the elements. Thus endless cold, rain, heat, and suffering become the soldier's lot.

Lord Moran believed that "armies wilt when exposed to the elements." For him the worst was "the harsh violence of winter,"

which can "find a flaw even in picked men." And the constant torment of the rain led Henri Barbusse to write that "dampness rusts men like rifles, more slowly but more deeply."

Another potential enemy of the soldier is the sensory deprivation of darkness, which can conspire with the cold and the rain to produce a degree of misery such as the protected shall never know. For Simon Murry, a French veteran of Algeria, coldness was "enemy number one." For him, "the misery of crawling into T H E W E I G H T O F E X H A U S T I O N

73

a sleeping-bag which is wet and sodden in total blackness on top
of
a mountain with the rain pissing down" was misery "without parallel."

Heat, too, can exhaust and kill; and rats, lice, mosquitoes, and other living elements of nature take their turns at exacting both a physical and a psychological toll upon the soldier, but the most deadly of all these natural enemies that the soldier must face is probably disease. In every American war up until World War II more soldiers died from disease than from enemy action.

And so we see that lack of sleep, lack of food, the impact of the elements, and emotional exhaustion caused by constant fight-or-flight-response activation all conspire to contribute to the soldier's exhaustion. This is a burden that, if not capable of causing psychiatric casualties in and of itself, needs to be taken into consideration as being capable of predisposing the soldier's psyche toward seeking escape from the deprivations that surround him.