The Toll of Detachment
This article discusses the tendency of American soldiers towards nonviolence, the army's campaign to nullify this, and the subsequent increase in mental disorders among soldiers.
It is an excerpt from the essay, War and the American Mind, written by Tobin Jacobrown in 2006.
In 1947, Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall published his extraordinary findings that, of American rifleman in the Second World War, about 85 percent had not fired at the enemy in combat. “Fear of killing, rather than fear of being killed was the most common cause of battle failure in the individual,” Marshall wrote in a volume he entitled Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War. “At the vital point, he becomes a conscientious objector.”
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman follows this study as well as others in On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society and finds that other accounts and examinations of kill rates from the American Civil war and the First World War came to similar conclusions, as well as studies of French Soldiers in 1860 and during the Napoleonic wars. How could it be that the vast majority of soldiers were failing to perform their foremost task, to kill enemy soldiers?
These findings were shocking, and no one took them to heart as much as the Army.
Dan Baum, a journalist for The New Yorker, follows the Army’s actions after Marshall published his findings. Within months the Army had produced a “Revised Program of Instruction,” for Army units, instructing them using Marshall’s own doctrines. Foremost among them was to detach the soldier from the idea that they might be killing another person. Marshall wrote it eloquently: “We need to free the rifleman’s mind with respect to the nature of targets.” His rhetoric foreshadows the new language of the army, delicately avoiding words that explicitly define killing people.
One strategy employed was to train soldiers in “massing fire” against riverbanks, trees, hills and anywhere else an enemy soldier might be hiding. “The average firer will have less resistance of firing on a house or tree than upon a human being,” Marshall wrote. These were only the beginning of new strategies to make the killing less real to the soldiers; and they worked.
Grossman follows the improvement by the American Army, stating that, by the Korean War, firing rates had increased from 15 to 45 percent; by the Vietnam War, the rate was up to 90 percent. The two great differences this caused were a rise in the kill rates of soldiers, and a rise in their rate of mental disorders. In wars today, the firing rate is near 100 percent, failure to fire by trained soldiers reduced to less than a percentage point. Detaching the soldier from the truth of his actions proved to be beneficial for the military’s effectiveness, but the Army refused to address what it may have been doing to hispsyche.
Refusing to acknowledge the problem
Baum quotes Colonel Harry Holloway, a retired Army psychiatrist who repeatedly argued against denying the psychological impact of killing, describing the precarious position of the Army. “As soon as we ask the question of how killing affects soldiers, we acknowledge we’re causing harm, and that raises the question of whether the good we’re accomplishing is worth the harm we’re causing,” says Holloway. This is distracting from the vitality of war in the opinion of the Army, Holloway adds that “if we get into this business of talking about killing people we’re going to pathologize an absolutely necessary experience.” Aside if indeed, war is an “absolutely necessary experience,” the ignorance of the mental effects on soldiers by the military begins to appear on the side of criminality when it has been shown over and over that this is truly the greatest cause of trauma among soldiers by the army's own studies.
“Shooting people has been harder for most soldiers to come to grips with that the death of a friend.” That is a quote cited by Baum from the Army’s own medical-corps textbook on combat trauma, War Psychiatry. The 500-page textbook goes even further to state that “casualties that the soldier inflicted himself on enemy soldiers were usually described as the most stressful events.” It likens this, the most psychologically stressful aspect of war, to “the aversion most mammals have to killing conspecifics (those of their own species).”
With this repeated acknowledgement of the killing of others as the greatest psychological detriment to soldiers, it would seem that this textbook would focus greatly on its treatment. In a chart of 20 “Combat Stress Factors,” in the same book, killing is not even mentioned. The chart covers everything from “loss of a buddy,” to “disrupted circadian rhythms,” yet nothing is offered on the stress caused by killing or its treatment. This glaring omission, despite the acknowledgement that stress from killing is possibly the greatest factor in the psychological detriments to soldiers, displays the failure of the Army to address its foremost problem. Like Holloway said, the Army’s “absolutely necessary experience,” would be questioned in any study of fundamental psychology of humans, which could be a threat to the acceptance of war everywhere.
“We are reluctant to admit that essentially war is the business of killing,” wrote Marshall, perhaps due to the fact that the American soldier “comes from a civilization in which aggression, connected with the taking of life, is prohibited and unacceptable.” There is a great discrepancy between the values of society and the values of war, and these two are incredibly difficult to reconcile. The military is only convoluting the matter with its tactics of disassociation, and doing greater harm to the psyches of the soldiers. As Grossman states: “To neglect violence is to indulge it” and the implication is that to do the right thing may be to do the hardest thing for a military superpower. Yet, now mental disorders in veterans are becoming epidemic, and there is no better time to reconsider America's policies on war.
The Iraq epidemic
A recent study by Army experts, quoted by Shankar Vedantam in The Washington Post, shows that in their first year back, more than one-third of soldiers returning from Iraq are seeking psychological help. Some experts are suggesting that this is still lower than the number of soldiers with psychological trauma.
Harvard psychologist Richard McNally recently stated that almost 90 percent of those ultimately diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder did not meet the criteria for that illness according to their original questionnaire. It seems that soldiers do not have a strong sense of what the future effect will be on their psychological states, yet when compared to the other study, it seems that they know something is wrong, nevertheless.
In an Army study cited by The New York Times in an article by Jeffrey Gettleman, more than one-half of the soldiers returning from Iraq who showed signs of psychological problems were not getting treatment, many because they did not want to be perceived as weak. If this information could be applied to the newest study as well, it suggests that twice as many soldiers have mental problems than are actually coming forward, meaning as much as two-thirds of those returning from Iraq. Adding the fact that the foremost symptoms include reclusive behavior and failure to convey emotions, and that, according to studies described in the New Scientist by Debora Mackenzie, often the most serious mental effects occur years later, the number of soldiers returned with psychological problems could be even higher.
As the executive director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, Paul Rieckhoff, is quoted by Jia-Rui Chong and Thomas H. Maugh in The Los Angeles Times, “Not everyone comes home with post-traumatic stress disorder, but no one comes home unchanged.”