When Is A Conspiracy Not a Conspiracy?

Are Human Beings Killers?

One of the persistent pictures that we have of ourselves comes from the phenomenon of war. We tend to believe that in wars “brave fighting men” and women (by the way) patriotically and emotionlessly kill their fellow beings for any cause that demands it. When we’re not waving a flag about this—when we’re not consumed with patriotic feelings or anger at “the enemy”—we look at war more objectively. And most of the time, we look at it with sadness, because it presents us with a murderous humanity. A war-focused history gives us the impression, even the conviction, that beneath a thin veneer of moral heroism and civility, we’re all killers.

             But is this true?

             Of course, the picture we have of ourselves as killers has been promoted in most war films (including the horribly violent ‘Saving Private Ryan’) and “officialized” in such books as Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation (is it a conflict of interest to interview people from your book on your evening news show, or are we just being picky here?). Indeed, most of us have our picture of humans at war from the entertainment industry. But the facts of war are different from what is presented in films—very different.

             Up front, we want to be clear that we’re not saying that there isn’t bravery during wars; quite the contrary, there is exceptional valor. What we’re saying is that a close look at the history of warfare reveals two surprising facts: (a) that soldiers do not kill each other the way we see on war films and (b) that valor comes as much from those who do not kill as those who do.

             In one of the most influential war books ever written, Men Against Fire, U. S. Army Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall points out that the face-to-face killing rate of most wars, especially World War II, never got above twenty per cent (at one point, he allows the most aggressive military companies to have gotten to twenty-five per cent). To quote Lt. Col. (ret.) Dave Grossman’s Pulitzer-Prize nominated book On Killing, Marshall’s “unexpected discovery was that, of every hundred men along the line of fire during the period of an encounter, an average of only 15 to 20 ‘would take any part with their weapons.’ This was consistently true ‘whether the action was spread over a day, or two days or three.’” (p. 3)

             In other words, only 15 to 20 men out of 100 (or 150 to 200 our of 1000) would fire a gun at “the enemy.” And as Alfie Kohn notes in The Brighter Side of Human Nature (pp. 49-50), this statistic remained constant even if the men were “battle-hardened,” that is, even if they’d been in three or four battles. And these were not men who were afraid of being killed; they faced danger courageously. Rather— and we confess that it took us some time to absorb what has to be one of the biggest open secrets in history—only 1 or 2 of 10 men in battle would shoot at another human being.

             Was S. L. A. Marshall some sort of shoddy or casual observer, or could his observations be wrong?

             Again, Dave Grossman: “Marshall was a U. S. Army historian in the Pacific theater during World War II and later became the official U. S. historian of the European theater of operations. [He would go on to be a general in the Korean War.] He had a team of historians working for him, and they based their findings on individual and mass interviews with thousands of soldiers in more than four hundred infantry companies, in Europe and in the Pacific, immediately after they had been in close combat with German or Japanese troops. The results were consistently the same: only 15 to 20 percent of the American riflemen in combat during World War II would fire at the enemy. Those who did not fire did not run or hide (in many cases they were willing to risk great danger to rescue comrades, get ammunition, or run messages), but they simply would not fire their weapons at the enemy, even when faced with repeated waves of banzai [Japanese] charges.” (pp. 3-4)

             That in the entire history of warfare only a very few humans could be induced to kill other humans is a fact known to military historians—though not generally known to the public. To extensively quote Dave Grossman:

             “Professor Arthur Nock at Harvard was fond of saying that wars between the Greek city-states ‘were only slightly more dangerous than American football.’ And Ardant du Picq points out [in a classic 19th-century work entitled Battle Studies] that in all his years of conquest, Alexander the Great lost only seven hundred men to the sword. His enemy lost many, many more, but almost all of this occurred after the battle (which appears to have been an almost bloodless pushing match), when enemy soldiers had turned their backs and begun to run [and so Alexander’s men couldn’t see their faces]. Carl von Clausewitz [1780-1831, the famous Prussian general and author of On War,] makes the same point when he notes that the vast majority of combat losses historically occurred in the pursuit after one side or the other had won the battle. (p. 13)

             “Sometimes the fire was completely harmless, as Benjamin McIntyre observed in his firsthand account of a totally bloodless nighttime firefight at Vicksburg in 1863. ... Lieutenant George Roupell encountered this same phenomenon while commanding a British platoon in World War I. He stated that the only way he could stop his men from firing into the air was to draw his sword and walk down the trench, ‘beating the men on the backside and, as I got their attention, telling them to fire low.’ (pp. 9-12)

             [Even among pilots, that most “removed” of soldiers], “USAF research concerning aggressive killing behavior determined that 1 percent of their fighter pilots in World War II did nearly 40 percent of the air-to-air killing, and the majority of USAF World War II pilots never even tried to shoot anyone down.” (p. 184)

             Most of this refusal to kill is hidden from the public, and in its place, we usually see what combat veteran Jack Thompson calls “Combat Addiction.” That is, the efficiently killing soldier we see in movies or on television comes mostly from that tiny percentage of men who become addicted to violence.

             Thompson writes: “Combat Addiction ... is caused when, during a firefight, the body releases a large amount of adrenaline into your system and you get what is referred to as a ‘combat high.’ This combat high is like an injection of morphine—you float around, laughing, joking, having a great time, totally oblivious to the dangers around you. The experience is very intense if you live to tell about it. Problems arise when you begin to want another fix of combat, and another, and another and before you know it, you’re hooked. As with heroin or cocaine addiction, combat addiction will surely get you killed. And like any addict, you get desperate and will do anything to get your fix.” (Grossman, p. 234)

             Along with combat-addicted soldiers are those who kill from combat stress and for revenge (someone who saw a buddy killed in battle and wants to kill in response). So, what the public sees on television or in films as the “killing machine” is either a combat addict, a revenge killer, or a victim of combat stress. And this kind of killer—taken from one of these three categories—represents only 2 percent of those who kill, that is, 2 percent of the 15-20 percent.

            Let’s be clear about our numbers. Only 150 to 200 soldiers in 1000 will fire a weapon at an enemy at all (and that number includes those who fire once and don’t fire again or who fire randomly in the direction of “the enemy”). Of that 200 (and that’s the maximum), combat addicts combined with revenge killers combined with combat stress victims represent 4 men. That’s 4 men in 1000 who will kill in the brutal ways that we’ve seen in the entertainment media.

            How about the other 196 men (out of the 1000) who do fire? How do they feel if they kill someone? In general, the results of war trauma are devastating, and Dave Grossman devotes an entire chapter of On Killing to “The Nature of Psychiatric Casualties: The Psychological Price of War.” No soldier—as society learned painfully in a famous World War II study (Grossman, pp. 43-44) and from Vietnam veterans—simply returns from war. Even those who refuse to discuss what they’ve been through, as Sandra Bloom shows in Creating Sanctuary (pp. 64-69), pass their wounds down to later generations with ever more destructive results.

             But when they actually kill someone—well, we’ll let them tell it:

             “An Israeli paratrooper [armed with an Uzi] came face to face with a huge Jordanian during the capture of the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967. ‘We looked at each other for half a second [the Israeli later reported] and I knew that it was up to me, personally, to kill him, there was no one else there. The whole thing must have lasted less than a second, but it’s printed on my mind like a slow motion movie. ... There was so much blood ... I vomited, until the rest of the boys came up.’” (Grossman, p. 115)

             “A U.S. Special Forces (Green Beret) officer described his revulsion during a personal kill while reacting to an ambush in Vietnam: ‘I took two of the men and went around the flank ... to outflank them and take them out. Well, I got around to the side and pointed my M16 at them and this person turned around and just stared, and I froze, ‘cause 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.’” (Grossman, p. 115)

             “Author and World War II Marine veteran William Manchester vividly described the same psychological responses to his own close-range kill: ‘I was utterly terrified—petrified—but I knew there had to be a Japanese sniper in a small fishing shack near the shore. ... And there was nobody else to go ... and so I ran towards the shack and broke in .... There was a door which meant there was another room and the sniper was in that—and I just broke that down. I was just absolutely gripped by the fear that this man would expect me and would shoot me. But as it turned out he was in a sniper harness and he couldn’t turn around fast enough. He was entangled in the harness so I shot him with a .45 and I felt remorse and shame. I can remember 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.’” (Grossman, pp. 115-116)

             “‘I charged the VC (Viet Cong), firing my M16. He fell at my feet. He was still alive but would soon die. I reached down and took the pistol from his hand. I can still see those eyes, looking at me in hate ... Later I walked over to take another look at the VC I had shot. He was still alive and looking at me with those eyes. The flies were beginning to get all over him. I put a blanket over him and rubbed water from my canteen onto his lips. That hard stare started to leave his eyes. He wanted to talk but was too far gone. I lit a cigarette, took a few puffs, and put it to his lips. He could barely puff. We each had a few drags and that hard look had left his eyes before he died.’” (Grossman, pp. 116-117)

             Suddenly, humans look less like brutal killers and more like beings struggling with the phenomenon of war. They seem more trapped in this horror than at home in it, and the traumas from it scar their lives. And we need to remind ourselves that none of the soldiers had any say in starting the wars. Even those who kill intentionally didn’t set out to be killers. Rather, they ended up in wars begun—especially in modern times—by those who do not fight.

             So, when we look at war’s history rather than war’s propaganda, we see a different nature from the one portrayed in war films. And we see responses that suggest that we humans may not be as murderous as the entertainment industry makes us out to be.