On Killing by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a Review

The psychological consequences of overcoming our resistance to killing

One of my Marines sent me this book.

I’m not sure what exactly sparked his interest in it and why he sent it to me, but it is likely the fact that I read books and he knows that. It can be frustrating to read a book and learn so many things and have nobody to share it with. And very few people read books, much less read the books that you happen to read. Even after starting a book club, almost nobody ever reads the actual book and they just disappear.

Knowing that frustration, whenever someone sends me a book or enthusiastically suggests one, I usually read it. In retrospect, this is one I would have chosen to read on my own if I knew what it contained.

The overall summary is this: There is an innate human resistance to killing other humans. In war, we have multiple points of evidence that show warriors are resistant to the act of killing in that the firing rates tend to be as low as 15–20%, even when their lives and the lives of their comrades are at stake. To get over this resistance, we have developed training processes which have increased the firing rate and thus the killing rate up to as much as 95% as seen in Vietnam. The effect that this has had on our war fighters is to put them at increased risk for trauma reactions, especially if social support systems are not in place which provide de-escalation processes as they return to society and moral context within which to understand their actions.

Many people will read that summary and take it at face value. Some will not. But here is the thing about reading books that is so valuable: The author of a good book like this provides a few hundred pages of different points of evidence to support this claim. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, an experienced military man and trained psychologist, does that incredibly well. It’s as if he presents some evidence, questions his own ideas, and answers possible critiques of his findings with further evidence to support his ideas.

Now that is not to say that everything he puts forth is 100% accurate, but at the very least, no honest person can walk away from something like this unchanged. The process is just as important as the result.

Once the thesis is established, and the evidence is presented, he wraps up the book with a discussion of what effects conditioning is having on our children through media and video game exposure to violence. Essentially, movies like Deadpool and Natural Born Killers are likely not something to allow your kids to watch. And again, the evidence he presents is tough to look away from.

That’s what I call the gist of the book overall, and I’ll now point out a few things he discusses that I found fascinating.

Getting Bombed Isn’t so Bad

Well, yeah, it is. But here’s the strange thing that was observed during the British and American bombings of Germany which killed thousands of civilians.

“…the incidence of psychiatric casualties among these individuals was very similar to that of peacetime. There were no incidents of mass psychiatric casualties. The Rand Corporation study of the psychological impact of air raids, published in 1949, found that there was only a very slight increase in the ‘more or less long-term’ psychological disorders as compared with peacetime rates. And those that did appear seemed to ‘occur primarily among already predisposed persons.’

Grossman discusses, at length, how keeping your opponent at length decreases the resistance to killing him or her as well as the psychiatric trauma caused on both ends of that attack. The difference between thrusting a knife into someone’s guts as compared to dropping bombs on unseen “targets” is a vastly different psychiatric experience for both the giver and the receiver. He does a nice job of comparing several forms of killing throughout history which emphasize distance from the target, decrease the resistance to killing and the negative psychiatric effects of it.

The idea that you can bomb people into submission was wrong. What actually happened is that it strengthened their will to fight. What was more terrifying than bombing was the threat of close combat: seeing the face of human beings that want to kill you, up close, was more effective than bombs dropping from unnamed and faceless planes.

“The potential of close-up, inescapable, interpersonal hatred and aggression is more effective and has greater impact on the morale of the soldier than the presence of inescapable impersonal death and destruction.” [emphasis in the original]

Not all Nazis are Psychopaths

This is something Grossman wrote that I actually took exception to:

“Nazi Germany placed a remarkable concentration of aggressive psychopaths in charge of these camps, and the lives of these victims were completely dominated by the personalities of these terrifyingly brutal individuals.”

I immediately thought of a book I read a couple years ago called Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning. It details some incredibly brutal atrocities committed by men who were in any other situation completely normal. These were not psychopaths who were picked out and put in place in order to commit psychopathic atrocities. They were regular guys put in situations that pressured them to do what they would otherwise be revolted by.

It’s important not to assume that all the people who commit crimes and atrocities are that different from you and I. We have to understand the processes that lead normal people to do these things, see ourselves in them, and recognize that we are just as susceptible to those processes. That’s how we avoid getting caught up in them.

It’s not that long ago that otherwise kind and intelligent people were starting to identify scapegoat people based on vaccine status and talked about denying them basic medical care because of that. Some of you reading this now did exactly that. That’s how it starts.

We Failed Our Vietnam Vets

Returning home from both of my deployments to Afghanistan, we had several things going for us: I arrived and left with the same group of men, I had a cool-off period on the way back that allowed us at least a week or two of exercise, good food, and relaxation, and complete strangers were waiting for us at airports to thank us for our service.

Compare that to what Grossman describes of our Vietnam veterans and I’m embarrassed for what we did to them.

Not only did we perfect our conditioning of our warfighters to fire and kill at rates never seen before, but we did the exact opposite of what I experienced on the way back from fighting a war my nation asked me to fight.

Men with a 95% fire rate and a kill rate never before seen in war were often replaced one at a time, man by man, putting new guys in units with total strangers, and sending men home alone. One day you were in a jungle killing and in fear for your life, and three days later you’re having trouble getting a cab, getting spit on at airports, and ashamed of yourself for doing a thing that in the past demanded respect. Not to mention many of them did not volunteer but were drafted.

The formula for war trauma is this: the closer to combat and your enemy you are, the higher the incidence of risk for long term trauma. The social context for how you are received by your society can help to relieve and contextualize that trauma, reducing the incidence. We did the exact opposite of everything we should have done.

The common trope of the crazy Vietnam veteran is not just a trope, but a result of a reality inflicted upon teenagers by their own nation which I hope we will and have learned from.

Conclusion

Last night my wife and I were watching a movie about a CIA agent and it goes through part of his training. It included a virtual reality like shooting exercise where he was in a room with a life-like pistol and given realistic people to shoot at while avoiding innocent civilians. Because of what I read in Grossman’s book, I saw it in such a different light.

It wasn’t just a neat and technologically cool training tool. It was operant conditioning that helped a human overcome the natural resistance to killing another human being. Some of the accounts of killing Grossman provides are descriptions of a person killing several enemies in war without thinking. It was like they often say: the training took over and I didn’t think about anything, I just did it. That’s on purpose.

If we don’t train people to automatically assess a threat and eliminate it, if they get a chance to think about it, their resistance to killing, even at risk of their own lives, can keep them from pulling the trigger and endanger the lives of our enforcers at home and abroad.

What we need to make sure of is that even though this type of training is crucial for us to enforce law and win wars, we understand its effects on those trained, our entire societies, and create ways to re-incorporate them into non-violent societies and keep it away from our children.