Fw: [wvns] trained to kill
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From: "Ken Freeland"
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Sent: Tuesday, December 21, 2004 6:35 PM
Subject: FW: [wvns] Chris Floyd: Generation Gap
80 to 85 percent of the greatest generation never fired their
weapons at an exposed enemy in combat, military psychologist Lt.
Colonel Dave Grossman reports in Christianity Today. Many times they
had the chance, but could not bring themselves to do it.
http://www.sptimes.ru/archive/times/991/opinion/o_13196.htm
Generation Gap
By Chris Floyd
America calls its soldiers who fought in World War II "the greatest
generation." They are hymned by Hollywood, celebrated by publishers
and politicians, hailed at every turn. And for their troubled
descendants, whose military misadventures stretch from My Lai to Abu
Ghraib, the clean-limbed victors of the "last good war" do indeed
shine out like heroes from a lost golden age.
Yet despite the vast tonnage of celluloid and printer's ink devoted
to their praise, what is perhaps the truest, highest measure of
their worth has been almost universally neglected. And what is this
hidden glory, which does more honor to the people of the United
States than every single military action ordered by their corruption-
riddled leaders during the past 50 years? It's the fact that in the
midst of history's most vicious, all-devouring, inhuman war, only
about 15 percent of American soldiers on the battlefield actually
tried to kill anyone.
In-depth studies by the U.S. Army after the war showed that between
80 to 85 percent of the greatest generation never fired their
weapons at an exposed enemy in combat, military psychologist Lt.
Colonel Dave Grossman reports in Christianity Today. Many times they
had the chance, but could not bring themselves to do it. They either
withheld their fire altogether or else shot into the air, to the
side, anywhere but at the fellow human beings - their blood kin in
biology, mind and mortality - facing them across the line. This
reticence is even more remarkable given the incessant demonization
of the enemy by the top brass, especially in the Pacific, where the
Japanese - soldiers and civilians - were routinely portrayed by
military propaganda as simian, sub-human creatures fit only for
extermination.
Yet even with official license given to the most virulent prejudice,
even with the sanction of a just cause (self-defense against
aggression), even with the incitements of mortal fear, of grief and
anger over slain comrades, even with all the moral chaos endemic to
warfare, American soldiers killed only with the greatest reluctance,
in the direst extremity. These were not "warriors," bloodthirsty
automatons with stripped-down brains and cauterized souls, slavering
in Pavlovian fury at the bell-clap of command. No, they were real
men, willing, as Grossman notes, to stand up for a cause, even die
for it, but not willing, in the end, to transgress the natural law
(implanted by God or evolution, take your pick) that says: Do not
kill your own kind - and every person of every race and nation is
your own kind.
You would think that this apotheosis of human transcendence,
achieved, in the best democratic fashion, by ordinary conscripts -
farmboys and dock workers, factory hands, bank clerks, guitar
players, teachers, cab drivers, hobos, card sharks, college men -
would have been inscribed on plates of gold and fixed to the walls
of the Capitol for all time, a blazon of national greatness. Just
think of it: Soldiers who hated to kill, who went out of their way
to avoid killing or even firing their weapons, who held on to their
essential humanity in the face of the severest provocations - and
yet still won battle after battle, marching to victory in history's
greatest war.
But far from celebrating this example of genuine glory, the military
brass were horrified at the low "firing rates" and anemic "kill
ratios" of American soldiery. They immediately set about trying to
break the next generation of recruits of their natural resistance to
slaughtering their own kind. Incorporating the latest techniques for
psychological manipulation, new training programs were designed to
brutalize the mind and habituate soldiers to the idea of killing
automatically, by reflex, without the intervention of any of
those "inefficient" scruples displayed by their illustrious
predecessors.
And it worked. The dehumanization process led to a steady rise in
firing rates for U.S. soldiers during subsequent conflicts. In the
Korean War, 55 percent were ready to pump hot lead into enemy flesh.
And by the time the greatest generation's own children took the
field, in Vietnam, the willingness to slaughter was almost total: 95
percent of combat troops there fired with the intent to kill.
Today, in the quagmire of occupied Iraq, the brutalizing beat goes
on. "Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, it's like it pounds in my brain,"
a U.S. soldier told the Los Angeles Times last month. Another
shrugged at the sight of freshly killed bodies. "It doesn't bother
me at all," he said. "I'm a warrior." Said a third: "We talk about
killing all the time. I never used to be this way ... but it's like
I can't stop. I'm worried what I'll be like when I get home." A few
military officials are beginning to worry too, noting the high rates
of suicide, mental damage and emotional torment among combat
veterans.
But the warlords of the White House - notorious battlefield shirkers
who prefer to do their killing by remote control - have little
regard for the cannon fodder they churn through in their quest for
dominance and loot. "Training's intent is to re-create battle, to
make it an automatic behavior among soldiers," says Colonel Thomas
Burke, Pentagon director of mental health policy. Any efforts to
mitigate the moral schizophrenia induced by this training would
undermine "effectiveness in battle," he adds.
Yet strangely enough, this "warrior ethos" has singularly failed to
produce the kind of lasting victories won by those 15-percenters of
yore. Could it be that the systematic degradation of natural
morality and common human feeling - especially in the service of
dubious ends - is not actually the best way to achieve national
greatness?
Annotations
Enemy Contact. Kill 'em, kill 'em
Los Angeles Times, July 18, 2004
Trained to Kill
Christianity Today, Aug. 10, 1998
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posted by carol wolman @ 8:16 PM
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