Research carried out by the American General S. L. A. Marshall on the behavior of soldiers during the Second World War showed, to the great surprise of his general staff, that only 10% to 15% of soldiers in combat situations had used their weapons to shoot at the enemy. The others showed bravery nevertheless: they debarked on the beaches of Normandy, came to the aid of their wounded comrades, provided others with ammunition, but did not use their weapons. They didn’t hide or run away, but they did not fire at the enemy, even when they were attacked and their lives were in danger. General Marshall concludes:
It is therefore reasonable to believe that the average and normally healthy individual—the man who can endure the mental and physical stresses of combat—still has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance toward killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility.1
The conclusions of his study were challenged for some time, so unexpected were they, but analysis of the Napoleonic wars, the Civil War in the United Sates, the Falkland Islands war, and other conflicts leads to the same conclusions.2 These facts concern traditional wars, during which conscripts and professional soldiers fight in an army. Things are different in the case of massacres and genocides during which individuals, by various means, including dehumanizing the other and desensitization, annihilate their natural repugnance to kill.
During the Second World War, it turned out that, most often, soldiers fired only when they were forced to do so by their superiors, and stopped as soon as those superiors left. According to Colonel Albert J. Brown, “Squad leaders and platoon sergeants had to move up and down the firing line kicking men to get them to fire. We felt like we were doing good to get two or three men out of a squad to fire.”3
The majority of soldiers avoid obeying orders: some hold their rifle at their shoulder and pretend to fire, while others fire above or to the side of their target. There are even some who explain with pride and satisfaction how they managed to disobey the order to kill. According to the American Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, who explores this question in his book On Killing, “At the decisive moment, each soldier found that, in his heart, he could not bring himself to kill the man standing before him.”4
Repugnance to kill increases as physical proximity between combatants increases: one then realizes that one is facing a human being like oneself. The historian John Keegan noted with surprise the almost complete absence of sword injuries during massive bayonet charges in Waterloo and during the Battle of the Somme. When soldiers came to hand-to-hand combat, the aversion to use the bayonet to pierce the other’s body was so great that they usually turned their weapons around and fought with the butts of their rifles.5
We can imagine different explanations for this natural repugnance. If, for instance, I perceive the other as my fellow, I realize he has children, a family, life plans, the closer I feel to him, the more concerned I am by his fate. As soon as the other has a face, I naturally grant value to his existence, and it becomes difficult for me to inflict suffering on him, even more so to kill him. “Up to that time, a man I was going to kill had always seemed my direct opposite. This time I was kneeling on a mirror,”6 says the Trojan hero Hector from the pen of Jean Giraudoux.
It is during close combat that trauma caused by the conditioning to kill is at its worst. By gaze and by physical contact, one finds oneself closely and intensely confronted with the other’s humanity, without any way to escape the stages of the death one is inflicting. The soldier who directly confronts the enemy knows that he has killed and knows who he has killed.
He thus finds himself confronted with a hopeless dilemma: either he overcomes his repugnance to kill, but acts against his conscience, or he does not fire at the enemy, but then feels guilty for abandoning his companions in arms, especially if some of them have not survived. As Glenn Gray, an American writer and veteran of the Second World War, writes, “Consciousness of failure to act in response to conscience can lead to the greatest revulsion, not only for oneself, but for the human species.”7 By killing another person, one kills a part of oneself.
To prevent the soldier from thinking of the enemy as his fellow, the idea is drilled into him that the opponent is despicable, hateful, different in every way from him. The enemy becomes a repugnant being, a “rat,” “vermin,” an inferior being who does not deserve to live and who threatens the soldier’s relatives, his country, all of humanity. When “the other” appears with such abject features, the process of identification is rendered very difficult, and it becomes desirable to eliminate him. Dave Grossman distinguishes several types of distance between the killer and his victims: cultural, moral, social, physical, and semantic.8
Cultural distance is based on ethnic, racial or religious differences that permit the killer to dehumanize the other by asserting he is fundamentally different from himself.
Moral distance stresses belief in the moral legitimacy of the soldier and his desire for vengeance. According to studies by Samuel Stouffer, 44% of GIs in the Second World War wanted to kill a Japanese soldier, whereas only 6% of them expressed this desire with regard to German soldiers.9 This difference was attributed to the desire to avenge the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Moral distance increases when the soldier reassures himself, saying that he is only doing his duty and faithfully carrying out the orders of his superiors. According to Grossman, the soldier “must assure himself the world is not mad, that his victims are less than animals, that they are evil vermin, and that what his nation and his leaders have told him to do is right.… The killer must violently suppress any dissonant thought that he has done anything wrong. Further, he must violently attack anyone or anything that would threaten his beliefs. His mental health is totally invested in believing that what he has done is good and right.”10
Social distance grows with the conviction that certain social classes are inferior to others from any perspective, and that they are made up of subhumans whose lives are a negligible quantity. During feudal wars, for example, massacres were not the work of serfs or peasants, but of the aristocratic elite, who pursued their adversaries on horseback. In India, the Dalits (literally “the crushed”), previously called “untouchables,” are victims of numerous crimes committed by caste members who think they are superior. The court very rarely rules in favor of untouchables, even when there is flagrante delicto: the massacre of fourteen untouchables perpetrated in 1982 in the village of Kestara, for example, resulted in all the accused, who had acted in broad daylight, being acquitted.
Physical distance makes the act of killing more abstract. As the psychologist and military instructor Richard Strozzi-Heckler writes, “The combatants in modern warfare pitch bombs from 20,000 feet in the morning, causing untold suffering to a civilian population, and then eat hamburgers for dinner hundreds of miles away from the drop zone.” He will not have “to live his days remembering the man’s eyes whose skull he crushed.”11 André Malraux said one cannot kill an enemy who looks you in the eyes. A Hutu who took part in the Rwandan genocide testifies:
Still I do remember the first person who looked at me at the moment of the deadly blow. Now that was something. The eyes of someone you kill are immortal, if they face you at the fatal instant. They have a terrible black color. They shake you more than the streams of blood and the death rattles, even in a great turmoil of dying. The eyes of the killed, for the killer, are his calamity if he looks into them. They are the blame of the person he kills.12
Mechanical distance separates the operator from his future victims, reduced to being only simple virtual targets on a screen. The Gulf War was nicknamed the “Nintendo War.” The enemy has become an echo on a radar screen, a thermic image at night, a simple pair of geographic coordinates on a GPS.
The use of drones, guided from command posts situated at the other end of the world, is a contemporary example of this virtual distance. Still, new techniques allow the operator to see the effects of his actions with much more realism, and many drone operators, revolted by their task, develop serious psychological disorders.
Brandon Bryant was a drone pilot for six years.13 He just had to press a button in New Mexico for a man to die on the other end of the planet. Brandon remembers his first missile firing: on his screen, he clearly saw two men die immediately, and he witnessed the slow death of a third. The man lost a leg; he held the stump as his hot blood streamed onto the asphalt. After returning home, Brandon called his mother, crying. “I felt disconnected from humanity for almost a week,” he said. For six years, Brandon saw men, women and children die in real time. “I never thought I would kill that many people,” he writes. “In fact, I thought I couldn’t kill anyone at all.”
One day, after firing a missile at a house that supposedly was sheltering Taliban fighters, suddenly he saw a child walk around the corner. Then a flash filled the screen—the explosion. Sections of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Brandon felt sick to his stomach. He couldn’t bear anymore to watch people explode on his screen: “I wish my eyes would rot,” he confided. He collapsed, bent double, and spat blood. The doctors diagnosed post-traumatic stress syndrome. Brandon quit the Air Force and is now trying to reconstruct his vision of the world.
Semantic distance is also created. One does not speak of “killing” the enemy; rather, the enemy is “neutralized” or “liquidated.” The enemy’s humanity is negated; he becomes a strange beast called a “Kraut,” a “Jap,” a “Reb.” Even weapons of war receive benign nicknames. The most monstrous bomb the United States used in Vietnam and Afghanistan weighed 6.8 tons, razed everything for hundreds of feet around, and was called “Daisy Cutter.” One of the most terrible defoliants, 80 million liters of which were poured over Vietnam and which still causes numerous cancers and birth defects, bears the harmless name “Agent Orange.” All kinds of euphemisms are used according to the situation; a zone is “zapped” or “treated,” and a “pocket of resistance is liquidated.” One does not say that a man was killed trying to kill other men, but that he died “on mission” or in the “field of honor”; one isn’t killed by one’s own troops, but is a “victim of friendly fire,” and so on.
In order to avoid killing, ancient cultures and, more recently, urban gangs have developed codes and rituals that allow them to perform simulacra of battles, victories, and submissions. This recourse to symbolic acts allows them to display their strength and show their resentment while avoiding actual violence. As the social psychologist Peter Marsh explains, the protagonists thus create a perfect facade of aggression and power, but the actual level of violence remains very low.14 Gwynne Dyer concludes that while one can certainly find “the occasional psychopath who really wants to slice people open,” most of the participants are more interested in “status, display, profit, and damage limitation.”
Another point revealed by these studies is equally disturbing: in armed conflicts, a tiny percentage of men is responsible for most enemy losses. That is true both for the land army and the air forces. It has been shown that during the Second World War only 1% of American fighter pilots were responsible for 30% to 40% of in-flight destruction of enemy planes, not because they were better or bolder pilots than the others, but, according to R. A. Gabriel, because “most fighter pilots never shot anyone down or even tried to”; they looked in the cockpit at another man, a pilot, a flier, one of the “brotherhood in the air,” a man frighteningly like them.15
Who, then, are these soldiers who feel no inhibitions about killing? There is such a thing as a “natural soldier,” according to the Canadian military historian Gwynne Dyer; “he will have no objections [to killing] if it occurs within a moral framework that gives him justification—like war—and if it is the price of gaining admission to the kind of environment he craves.”16 Most of these soldiers “end up in armies (and many move on again to become mercenaries, because regular army life in peacetime is too routine and boring).” But such men are so rare, Dyer writes, that they form “only a modest fraction of small professional armies, mostly congregating in the commando-type special forces.”
A study by Swank and Marchand,17 still concerning the Second World War, revealed that the 2% of the soldiers who were capable of enduring uninterrupted combat for long periods of time presented the profiles of aggressive psychopaths. It became apparent that these men felt no remorse about their actions. As for the others, after sixty days of continuous combat, 98% of the survivors suffered from various psychiatric disorders.
Certain individuals go even further. Dave Grossman cites the case of a Vietnam veteran, R. B. Anderson, who, in a testimonial entitled Parting Shot: Vietnam Was Fun, writes:
The fact is that it was fun.… It was so great that I went back for a second helping. Think about it.… Where else could you divide your time between hunting the ultimate big game and partying at “the ville”? Where else could you sit on the side of a hill and watch an airstrike destroy a regimental base camp?… I was a warrior in war. Only a veteran can know the thrill of the kill and the bitterness of losing a friend who is closer to you than your own family.18
Other veterans admit having felt a certain euphoria when they hit the bull’s-eye and killed an enemy. But most often this euphoria is quickly overcome by a profound feeling of guilt.
In order to be capable of killing, one must manage to stifle any feeling of empathy for, closeness to, or resemblance to the other. A psychopath naturally lacks empathy. He is capable of coldly inflicting the worst tortures on others without being moved by it.
So it is not surprising that the training of soldiers in modern armies integrates techniques aiming specifically at making this natural repugnance to kill disappear. Since only few people are psychopaths (about 1 to 2% of the population), armies try to annihilate empathy in the others. To do this, they have the soldier simulate the act of killing numerous times, in order to make this action commonplace and gradually to desensitize the doer.
After the Second World War, military instructors realized that in order for this conditioning to be effective, they had to give the targets human forms and make them appear suddenly in a given environment—which forces the soldier to shoot very quickly, without thinking. The figures fall backwards when the shooter hits a bull’s-eye, which provokes a feeling of satisfaction in him. Thus he undergoes a conditioning that is reinforced by a reward. By imitating a credible environment in a realistic way, the soldier is led to stop feeling the slightest hesitation or emotional reaction when he aims at living beings. When an enemy suddenly appears, soldiers who have gone through this intensive conditioning phase assert they shoot automatically, as if they were still training in aiming at moving targets.
American soldiers have had recourse to various other techniques of extreme conditioning to root the act of killing in the deepest part of the recruits’ psyches. An American sergeant in the Marines, a Vietnam vet, testifies, “We’d run PT in the morning and every time your left foot hit the deck you’d have to chant ‘Kill, kill, kill, kill.’ It was drilled into your mind so much that it seemed like when it actually came down to it, it didn’t bother you, you know?”19 This conditioning was imposed repetitively for thousands of hours, under the direction of a strict authority, under the constant threat of punishment for anyone who failed. So it is not surprising that many authors, including Gwynne Dyer, speak of a Pavlovian conditioning to kill, rather than training.20 These methods have allowed the number of soldiers ready to kill to be considerably increased. During the Korean War, the percentage of combatants who fired at the enemy went from 15% to over 50%, and reached 90% to 95% during the Vietnam War, an unprecedented circumstance in the history of warfare.
Today, things have changed. A new code has been adopted among American Marines, urging soldiers to regard every adversary as a human being just like them and to avoid any violence not indispensable to the success of their mission.
The American military also observed that this training had few effects on adult recruits, and that it was between the ages of seventeen and twenty that men had to be trained to kill. After twenty, there wasn’t much point, since it then becomes difficult to overcome the repugnance to kill. Young recruits, on the other hand, readily participate in the conditioning, motivated by their confidence in their hierarchical superiors. According to Grossman, they are forced to “internalize the horrors of combat during one of the most vulnerable and susceptible stages of life.”21 The Vietnam War was nicknamed the “teenagers’ war,” since the average age of combatants was under twenty.
Research in the neurosciences has shown that the brain is the theater for major modifications mainly during the first two periods of life: an initial spike in brain activity occurs just after birth, when the newborn is exposed to all the wealth and variety of sensorial stimulation from the outside world. Then this process slows down until puberty.
Recent studies have revealed that a second period of major modification occurs at adolescence. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty, a large number of neural networks formed during childhood come undone. New networks are formed, more specialized and more stable, which will be preserved into adulthood.22
What’s more, before the age of twenty, the prefrontal cortex, which ensures the regulation of emotions engendered by other brain regions, is not completely developed. This explains the emotional instability of adolescents, their hypersensitivity, and their taste for danger and novelty. This stage is necessary, but it is accompanied by great vulnerability.
Thus, with the sole aim of increasing their effectiveness in combat, the ability to kill their fellows has been profoundly, lastingly, drilled into young people who, in Vietnam for example, were drafted by their government and not volunteers. Their most profound mental dispositions were manipulated, and the image they had of their fellows was radically modified. Such a conditioning requires time, and an equal amount of time, if not more, would be required to undo it. However, not much action is taken in that direction. After having served their time in war, the veterans are often left to themselves in society, without anyone worrying about compensating for the dehumanizing conditioning they underwent with any adequate antidote. Today, many psychologists and neurobiologists, among them Amishi Jha at the University of Miami and Richard Davidson at the University of Madison, have undertaken to help these veterans.
It goes without saying that the main victims of war are those who undergo this violence. But there are no victims without aggressors, and it is essential to understand better the mechanisms of aggression. When, for various reasons, soldiers overcome their repugnance to kill, the psychological aftereffects are profound. William Manchester, who enlisted in the American navy during the Second World War, tells in his memoirs that when he shot an elite Japanese marksman he had furtively approached, he whispered, as if in a daze, “I’m sorry,” and began vomiting uncontrollably. “It was a betrayal of what I’d been taught since a child,” he writes.23
The price to pay to force men to overcome their repugnance to kill is thus very high. According to various estimates, almost 90% of American soldiers in the Vietnam and Iraq wars have subsequently suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome, PTSD, which manifests as crises of extreme anxiety, terror, recurrent nightmares; phenomena of dissociation from reality; obsessive, depressive, and asocial behavior; and, too often, suicide: there were more suicides among veterans who returned from Iraq and Afghanistan than deaths in combat.24
A study carried out at Columbia University on 6,810 veterans showed that only those who had taken part in intensive combat were affected by this syndrome.25 Compared to the rest of the American population, they are far above the national average when it comes to the use of tranquilizers, number of divorces, unemployment rate, alcoholism, suicide, hypertension, heart disease, and ulcers. On the other hand, Vietnam veterans who were not in combat situations present characteristics similar to those of draftees who served in the United States.
We have seen how the conditioning to kill can profoundly modify the behavior and self-esteem of young soldiers. However, the malleability of temperament and the plasticity of the brain allow us to envisage the possibility for transformations that are just as substantial, but this time toward kindness.
Collaboration between the neurosciences and meditators who for millennia have refined effective methods has shown that the fact of cultivating altruistic love also has profound and lasting effects. It would seem that the mind training suggested by Buddhist contemplatives is diametrically opposed to that of young recruits. It consists of reviving, amplifying, and stabilizing our natural tendency to feel empathy and grant importance to others, regardless of who they are. This training also differs from conditioning, since it is associated with profound reflection on the reasons that make altruism a virtue useful for every human being.
Since they claim to convey a message of love, we expect from religions a clear, unequivocal condemnation of all acts of killing. But stances are sometimes, to say the least, ambiguous, especially on the question of war. A young soldier stationed in Iraq read one day, above the door of the military chaplaincy, “We are doing the work of God.” That seemed so aberrant to him that he lost his faith.26 As the Dalai Lama remarked, “God must be very confused. Both sides kill each other and in the meantime they pray to God.”27
Anthony Swofford, a former US Marine who fought during the second Gulf War, says very justly in his book Jarhead:
I recognized the incompatibility of religion and the military. The opposite of this assertion seems true when one considers the high number of fiercely religious military people, but they are missing something. They’re forgetting the mission of the military: to extinguish the lives and livelihood of other humans. What do you they think all those bombs are for?28
We often hear that the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” means “Thou shalt not commit murder,” but that the Bible does not forbid killing altogether, since many eminent characters in the Bible killed their enemies for reasons that seemed justified to them.
In fact, the Old Testament and the Torah exonerate the act of killing in the case of a so-called just war, a concept that has given rise to numerous interpretations.29 The Torah also accepts capital punishment in the case of murder, incest, adultery, and idolatry.30 In his Large Catechism, Martin Luther also explains that God and governments are not bound by that commandment, since they must punish criminals. The Koran adopts a similar position: “And do not take any human being’s life—that God willed to be sacred—other than in [the pursuit of] justice.” However, the Koran does forbid attacking first.31
Thus, exempting war and the death penalty from the biblical commandment has often, by widening the limits of what is regarded as just and acceptable, led to the perpetration of massacres and genocides in the name of “good.” During the Second World War, for example, religious authorities, both Catholic and Protestant, forbade priests and pastors from being conscientious objectors. That did not prevent the pastor André Trocmé, who saved several thousand Jews with the villagers of Chambon-sur-Lignon, from militating for nonviolence. In the will he drafted during the war, when his activities as a rescuer of Jews constantly placed him in danger, he wrote about being a conscientious objector: “I can neither kill nor take part in this work of death that is war.”32
This point of view seems more in keeping with the words of Saint Paul: “For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Love worketh no ill to his neighbor: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.”33
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, sums it up clearly: “I know no religion that states it is permissible to kill.”34 When he uttered these words at a meeting between representatives of several religions in which I took part at the World Economic Forum in Davos, I suggested that the religious leaders issue a common declaration on the basis of Tutu’s statement. The question was evaded under the pretext that there were “a variety of points of view on this subject.”
For Buddhism, there is no difference between killing in peacetime and killing in wartime. A soldier is responsible for the murders he has committed; a general is responsible for the murders committed under his orders. A sincere Buddhist can do nothing but refuse to take part in acts of war. The same is true for Jainism, which preaches strict nonviolence, ahimsa. Followers of Jainism are models in the matter of carrying this ideal into everyday life. These two nontheistic religions base their understanding of the world on the laws of cause and effect. According to these laws, ignorance, hatred, animosity, and desire are the first causes of violence. Malevolence is always counterproductive because it gives rise to or perpetuates hatred.
It is no less possible to carry out a firm, determined action without feeling the slightest hatred, in order to prevent a dangerous being from doing harm. One day the Dalai Lama was asked what the best conduct would be to follow if a criminal entered a room and threatened its occupants with a revolver. He replied in a half-serious, half-teasing tone, “I would shoot him in the legs to neutralize him, then I’d go over to him to stroke his head and take care of him.” He was quite aware that reality is not always so simple, but wanted to get it across that an energetic action was enough, and that it was not only useless but harmful to add hatred to it.
Such a position immediately rouses questions: “Are you going to give up defending yourself or defending your country faced with an attack? Do we have to let dictators oppress their people and massacre their opponents? Don’t we have to intervene to interrupt a genocide?” These questions asked out of context imply obvious answers: “Yes, we have to defend ourselves against an attack. Yes, a dictator should be eliminated, if that’s the only way to avoid countless sufferings. Yes, genocide must be prevented at all costs.” But one should also ask the right questions. If one finds oneself driven to such extremes, it is because one has, often for a long time, turned a blind eye on causes of discontent or neglected to undertake everything that could have prevented the attacker from attacking us and a genocide from occurring. We know too well that the warning signs of practically all genocides have been ignored, when it could have been possible to remedy them in due course.
If I want to avoid getting dysentery in a tropical country, I’m not content just with bringing a bag of antibiotics: I find out about the quality of the water. I filter it and boil it. I dig a healthy well in the village, respect the rules of hygiene, and teach them to others. Similarly, whoever wants to avoid killing at all costs is not content with saying to himself, “If it turns bad, I’ll take my rifle and settle the question.” He will be constantly attentive to all the possible causes of the other’s discontent and resentment, and will try to remedy them before animosity flares up and inflames tempers irremediably. Too often, violence is regarded as the most effective and quickest way to settle a conflict. But as the Buddha taught, “If hatred answers hatred, hatred will never cease.”