COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Service: General
THE SCIENCE OF CREATING KILLERS
Vicki Haddock, SanFrancisco Gate
August 13, 2006
What exactly does it take to kill someone? Here's how 21-year-old WestTexas Army Pvt. Steven Green described shooting a man who refused to
stop
at an Iraqi checkpoint: "It was like nothing. Over here, killing people
is
like squashing an ant. I mean, you kill somebody, and it's like, 'All
right, let's go get some pizza,' " he told the military newspaper Stars
&
Stripes.
"I mean, I thought killing somebody would be this life-changing
experience.
And then I did it, and I was like, 'All right, whatever.' "
[Podcast: Vicki Haddock and John Koopman on Killing 101.]
In February, the soldier's comments struck embedded correspondent
Andrew
Tilghman as unremarkable, a reflection of the fact that he and Green
were
immersed in the treacherous hellhole of Mahmoudiya, at the edge of what
GIs
have dubbed the Triangle of Death. Green's statements didn't even make
it
into the Stars & Stripes article, which ran earlier this year.
It was only recently -- when the honorably discharged soldier appeared
in
federal court pleading not guilty to the rape of a 14-year-old Iraqi
girl
and the cold-blooded murder of her family -- that Tilghman recalled the
quotes with a newfound chill.
The reality is that the brains of human beings -- unless they fall
within
the demographic sliver we call psychopaths -- are hardwired not to kill
other humans. Like rattlesnakes that fatally bite other species but
fight
fellow rattlers by wrestling them, humans overwhelmingly recoil from
homicide. That's usually a good thing, because it prevents society from
disintegrating into bloodthirsty anarchy.
But it poses an occupational hazard to some -- particularly soldiers,
police officers, spies and victims of savage crimes. All of them may
face
situations in which hesitating to kill is the surest way to get killed.
That's why military training camps, police academies and even some
self-defense pros are constantly searching for more effective methods
of
suppressing the human revulsion to taking human life -- virtually
rewiring
the brain to react first in certain situations with an automatic
response
to kill.
Target practice on hollowed cabbages filled with ketchup to mimic the
way a
bullet rips open a human head. Marching to chants of "kill, kill,
kill."
Video game simulations that reward points for every successful "shot."
These are among hundreds of techniques that experts say can recondition
the
human brain.
What that reconditioning requires, and the psychological toll it
ultimately
takes on the killers, make up the taboo scientific inquiry sometimes
known
as "killology." To outsiders, the subject is distasteful, even
repellant.
To practitioners, it is simply a fact of life -- and death.
"Once the bullets start flying, most combatants stop thinking with the
forebrain (that portion of the brain that makes us human) and start
thinking with the midbrain (the primitive portion of our brain, which
is
indistinguishable from that of an animal)," writes retired Lt. Col.
Dave
Grossman, a former U.S. Army ranger and West Point professor of
military
science who coined the term, on his Web site killology.com. "In
conflict
situations, this primitive, midbrain processing can be observed in the
existence of a powerful resistance to killing one's own kind. ... This
is
an essential survival mechanism that prevents a species from destroying
itself during territorial and mating rituals."
The only thing that has any hope of silencing the midbrain, he argues,
is
what influenced Pavlov's dogs: conditioning.
The need for new drills became apparent once researchers noted that a
majority who had been trained in other ways to kill, surreptitiously
refused to do it.
In World War II, when U.S. soldiers got a clear shot at the enemy, only
about 1 in 5 actually fired, according to sensational and controversial
research by Army historian Brig. Gen. S.L.A. Marshall. It wasn't that
they
were cowards: On the contrary, they performed other perilous feats,
including running onto the battlefield to rescue fellow soldiers, and
sometimes they even placed themselves in greater personal danger by
refusing to fire. And yet at the moment of truth, they just couldn't
kill.
While modern scholars have debated his methodology, other contemporary
researchers have reached conclusions similar to Marshall's that "fear
of
killing, rather than the fear of being killed, was the most common
cause of
battle failure in the individual."
Go back even further in U.S. history. Grossman noted this "Civil War
Collector's Encyclopedia" citation about recovered muskets after the
Battle
of Gettysburg: Almost 90 percent were loaded, half of those multiple
times.
Given that a Civil War soldier would spend 95 percent of his time
laboriously loading his musket and only 5 percent aiming and firing it,
that many loaded muskets seems to make sense only if the soldiers in
battle
were faking it -- all the while looking busy so that their comrades
would
never know the difference.
The FBI discovered a similar problem among law enforcement officers
through
the early 1960s: a startling number were refusing to fire at suspects
even
when other lives were endangered.
Even those who fired their weapons were not necessarily trying to kill
--
it is hard for an observer to detect soldiers or cops who fire high to
intentionally miss.
Psychologists who advised the military and law enforcement agencies
began
to push for changes that would revolutionize training to improve kill
rates. Their methods -- familiar to those who operate boot camps,
police
academies and aggressive-response self-defense courses -- are a
distasteful
mystery to most in the outside world. But they work.
The Pentagon improved firing rates. Research suggests that 55 percent
of
U.S. soldiers fired on the enemy in the Korean War. By Vietnam that
rate
had climbed to more than 90 percent. Police studies document similar
changes in recent decades.
One of the key changes was to get rid of the old firing ranges, where
shooters took target practice in an open field aiming at a bull's-eye.
This
failed miserably at preparing shooters for real-world confrontations.
Today's apprentice killers train in situations designed to simulate
combat
as closely as possible, and they rehearse in a fashion that would be
instantly recognizable to pioneers of behavior modification, from Ivan
Pavlov to B.F. Skinner. The bull's-eyes have been replaced by
human-shaped
targets that pop up without warning, for example, with polyurethane
faces
on balloon bodies inside uniforms. A trainee spots the targets, fires
almost on instinct and gets rewarded with points, badges and three-day
passes. Over and over, these "kill drills" build muscle memory and
acclimate the brain to the act of killing.
Aggressive self-defense courses filled with students who may be more
hesitant to go for the jugular use similar rehearsals to form a kinetic
memory of how to react if attacked. Instructors may push students to
overcome their squeamishness by, for example, taping a peeled orange
over
an actor's eye and having students practice sticking their thumbs into
it.
But most apprentice killers have had years of moral training
reinforcing
the commandment "thou shalt not kill." Suppressing that is the greatest
challenge of killology.
Some training focuses on rationales for killing -- to overcome an enemy
that threatens the "American way of life" or "wages war against
freedom" or
simply trying to kill innocent victims. But a key part of many programs
is
to make killing more palatable -- even socially acceptable and
desirable.
Consider an excerpt of a lecture on mines to Marines at Parris Island,
who
grunted their approval.
"You want to rip (the enemy's) eyeballs out, you want to tear apart his
love machine, you want to destroy him, privates. ...You want to send
him
home in a Glad bag to his mommy!"
Such bloodthirsty language helps "desensitize them to the suffering of
an
'enemy' at the same time they are being indoctrinated in the most
explicit
fashion, as previous generations of soldiers were not, with the notion
that
their purpose is not just to be brave and to fight well; it is to kill
people," observes military historian Gwynne Dyer in his book "War: The
Lethal Custom."
Another technique is to create physical and emotional distance between
the
killer and the target by fostering a sense of us versus them. While
physical distance is achieved with bombs, rocket launchers and even
night-vision goggles, which reduce humans to ghostly green silhouettes,
emotional distance often is achieved by categorizing targets as
different
because of their race, ethnicity or religion. The military does
whatever it
can to deny the fellow humanity of enemy soldiers and is loath to
repeat
the spectacle of Christmas Day in 1914, when German and British
soldiers
crawled out of their trenches to share cigarettes, candy and soccer.
In his autobiography, top Marine sniper Jack Coughlin writes from Iraq:
"So
far in this war I had fired six shots and had six kills -- exactly the
right ratio. I considered the ill-trained, poorly led soldiers of Iraq
to
be hamburger in my scope, practically begging me to kill them, and I
was
more than ready to grant their wish."
Social dynamics often are critical as well. Soldiers and cops forge
deep
bonds with their colleagues and some studies report that their greatest
fear on the battlefield or in the line of fire is not dying but letting
their buddies down -- a potent motivator for killing.
And finally, organizations like armies and police forces rely on
elaborate
codes and strict authority figures who order killing to be done. In a
most
amazing and famous demonstration, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram
established that almost two-thirds of people would be willing to
administer
shocks to others -- even to the point of a lethal 450 volts -- simply
because they were ordered to do so by a scientist in a white lab coat.
The institutions that teach killing emphasize that they do so with
built-in
safeguards against indiscriminate violence. Their pupils know, at least
theoretically, that if they fire in an unauthorized way, they can be
ostracized, washed out, charged or court-martialed. In his seminal work
"On
Killing," Grossman takes pains to distinguish that kind of training
from
violent video games, which mimic the techniques of operant conditioning
and
desensitization without any of the safeguards.
But as the rape and homicide charges against Pfc. Green and four of his
fellow soldiers show, in rare instances the safeguards simply fail.
Atrocities result.
A more pervasive risk, however, is that soldiers and cops who kill pay
a
steep psychological price for not only using the new skills they
acquire
but also for acquiring the skills in the first place. The Pentagon is
waging an unprecedented campaign to deal with the mental and emotional
scars of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. Turning human beings into
killers
is a tricky business.
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