On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society Read Online Free PDF Page B

warned that "it is to no purpose, it is even against one's better interest, to turn away from the consideration of the affair because the horror of its elements excites repugnance." Bruno Bettelheim, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, argues that the root of our failure to deal with violence lies in our refusal to face up to it. We deny our fascination with the "dark beauty of violence," and we condemn aggression and repress it rather than look at it squarely and try to understand and control it.
    And, finally, if in my focus on the pain of the killers I do not sufficiently address the suffering of their victims, let me apologize now. "The guy pulling the trigger," wrote Allen Cole and Chris Bunch, "never suffers as much as the person on the receiving end." It is the existence of the victim's pain and loss, echoing forever in the soul of the killer, that is at the heart of his pain.
    Leo Frankowski tells us that "cultures all develop blind spots, things that they don't even think about because they know the truth about them." The veterans quoted in this study have had their faces rubbed in this cultural blind spot. We are truly, as one veteran put it to me, "virgins studying sex," but they can teach us what they have learned at such a dear price. My objective is xxxii I N T R O D U C T I O N
    of their comrades, and my admiration and affection for them and their brothers are very real. John Masefield's poem "A Consecration" serves as a better dedication than any I could write. The exception to this admiration is, of course, addressed in the section
    "Killing and Atrocities."
    If in my absence of euphemisms and my effort to clearly and clinically speak of "killers" and "victims," if in these things the reader senses moral judgment or disapproval of the individuals involved, let me flatly and categorically deny it.
    Generations of Americans have endured great physical and psychological trauma and horror in order to give us our freedoms.
    Men such as those quoted in this study followed Washington, stood shoulder to shoulder with Crockett and Travis at the Alamo, righted the great wrong of slavery, and stopped the murderous evil of Hitler. They answered their nation's call and heeded not the cost. As a soldier for my entire adult life, I take pride in having maintained in some small way the standard of sacrifice and dedication represented by these men. And I would not harm them or besmirch their memory and honor. Douglas MacArthur said it well: "However horrible the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and give his life for his country, is the noblest development of mankind."
    The soldiers whose narratives form the heart and soul of this work understood the essence of war. They are heroes as great as any found in the Iliad, yet the words that you will read here, their own words, destroy the myth of warriors and war as heroic. The soldier understands that there are times when all others have failed, and that then he must "pay the butcher's bill" and fight, suffer, and die to undo the errors of the politicians and to fulfill the "will of the people."
    "The soldier above all other people," said MacArthur, "prays for peace, for they must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war." There is wisdom in the words of these soldiers.
    There is wisdom in these tales of a "handful of ashes, a mouthful of mould. Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold." There is wisdom here, and we would do well INTRODUCTION xxxiii
    to listen.
    Just as I do not wish to condemn those who have killed in lawful combat, nor do I wish to judge the many soldiers who chose not to kill. There are many such soldiers; indeed I will provide evidence that in many historical circumstances these nonfirers represented the majority of those on the firing line. As a soldier who may have stood beside them I cannot help but be dismayed at their failure to support their cause, their nation, and their fellows; but as