On “On Killing” by Dave Grossman *****

I first heard of this text when Russia first invaded Ukraine and drafted a number of young men to serve in the army, pushing them to the front lines apparently with little training. The skeptical author of the article noted how it takes training not just to kill but even to be able to kill—and the author noted this text.

This book was amazing, insofar as it opened up a world of information about the U.S. military and about military service in general that I simply did not know. Through World War II, the author notes, only about 20 percent of combat soldiers even managed to shoot their guns at a person. Many simply didn't shoot, or if they shot, they would shoot into the sky or something like that. People don't want to kill people. It is disturbing. Huge numbers of rounds were expended to kill a single person, suggesting deliberate missing. How does the military get beyond that? By Korea, the number of combat soldiers actually shooting at the enemy had risen to 55 percent, and by Vietnam it was 90 to 95 percent. The key? Proper conditioning.

Grossman notes how the military has managed to do this, through, for example, exercises wherein people's first instincts kick in in battle—and those instincts become to kill. You practice shooting at the enemy, almost without thought. Target practice, for one.

Another key is to separate the soldiers from the enemy. There's a sliding scale, wherein the more distant one is from the enemy, the less disturbing it is to the soldier to kill. (Interestingly, even those whose lives are at stake find it somewhat less disturbing, because it's less personal, more like a natural disaster, something that can't be helped, or blamed on an individual person.) Place two soldiers in close proximity, however, Grossman notes, and they'll often just leave each other alone—they see the other person as a person. There are many such anecdotes he offers. (There is conditioning for this as well, though, such as training to kill people by using models with oranges for heads.) By contrast, a bomber often feels little for the people he kills—the people are never seen. Move in to snipers, then bayonets (almost never used anymore because they do require such close proximity), to swords and knives, and finally hands: each lowers the effective kill rate and raises the amount of anxiety a person feels in killing.

The problem with conditioning, however, getting people to kill even when they can see the enemy, is that it still doesn't deal with the psychological toll it takes on an individual after the deeds are done. If a community supports the soldier, and if the soldier is part of a unit wherein there is support (and peer pressure and commands as well), the soldier will be more able to handle the fallout (by essentially rationalizing the actions, as not entirely belonging to the self rather than a community), but such was not the case with the Vietnam War, where soldiers were with their units for only short periods rather than long ones and where the war was unpopular at home. The trauma for such veterans was unfathomably worse, as such.

Grossman closes with a study of how our video games and television have anesthetized our youths to violence and made killing easier. There are many people who will disagree with this, and no study, as even Grossman admits, can absolutely show the connection, because there are too many variables involved. However, there is a close corollary to the availability of such things and the rise in violence in society, suggesting that this is more than just a coincidence. As school shootings and mass shootings proliferate, I can't help but think part of the reason this is possible isn't just the availability of guns but also the fact that watching such things really has made younger generations more callous to this sort of thing.