On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by Dave Grossman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Unmaking Civilisation

Grossman’s thesis is that we should take better care of those whom we prepare for war. This was unexpected. My presumption had been that the book would be about the permanent psychological damage done to soldiers through their training and experience in combat and consequently pacifist. Instead the book makes what is primarily a political point: if a society makes men killers, it has a responsibility to provide the necessary therapy to undo the inevitable psychopathic consequences. While this point is difficult to disagree with, I suspect Grossman’s agenda is actually somewhat darker.

The American war in Vietnam, according to Grossman, had one undeniable success: it taught the American military how to train its members to accept and execute the act of killing as normal, responsible behaviour. The techniques which the military developed during that period added to the environment of growing media violence to which recruits had already been subjected. This directed indoctrination and diffuse influence created the perfect storm of what is effectively brainwashing. The effects are visible not only in the soldiers involved but also in the increasing level of gang violence and international terrorism, phenomena that depend on the same training techniques.

The maladies of combat for soldiers in Vietnam were, therefore, both more diverse and more intense than in previous wars. Despite the political and strategic incompetence of their leaders, these men did what they were meant to do, namely kill other human beings. Body count was not merely some arbitrary measure of success imposed by senior officers, it was an accurate expression of the function of a soldier. So, for example, while something less than 20% of front-line troops in World War II ever fired their weapons at the enemy (even at the risk of their own lives), upwards of 95% did so in Vietnam. A great triumph, one supposes, for the Training Command.

It is difficult to train men (Grossman’s data are all from men) to kill efficiently and consistently. The inhibitions to murder seem to be not just culturally generated but also genetic in most people. Breaking those inhibitions demands traumatic psychological and sociological adaptation as anyone who has seen films like Oliver Stone’s Platoon or Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket will have already guessed. Effectively, recruits are taught to hate, to mistrust everything around them except direct orders, and to exclude moral considerations from consciousness. They are trained as psychopaths.

And yet they are expected to ‘reintegrate’ into society as if their psychological rewiring were an incidental event in their lives. This it is clearly not the case given the levels of suicide, mental illness, and criminality among soldiers who have been in combat. The experience of being the object of murderous aggression by an enemy is understandably agonising. But it is the training for this experience which creates more or less permanent damage.

Grossman makes the case that historically soldiers were subject to ritual purification before they re-entered civilian life. He suggests a modernised version of this for today’s soldiers. The paradox of course is that the effectiveness of military training is such that any therapeutic purification would have to be equally intense. The expense of such a de-programming effort would be immense. So it’s a political non-starter. In the meantime, society undermines its own well-being by purposely creating maladaptive human beings.

Postscript: Another GR reader alerted me to the latest on Grossman. He is indeed much darker than he appears in this book. Apparently he has gone completely over to the idea of a ‘warrior culture’ among the police as well as the military, making society even more violent than it already is: https://newrepublic.com/article/14167...

Additional postscript on the individuality of the gross statistics: https://www.thedickinsonpress.com/obi...

Postscript 30/11/20: https://www.abc.net.au/religion/ned-d...

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