"Only 15 to 20% of the men on the front lines fired their weapons"

Mind Field
Rachel MacNair has come up with a theory to bring peace. But it could turn soldiers into better killers.
By Ben Paynter
Article Published Oct 21, 2004

http://www.pitch.com/issues/2004-10-21/news/feature_2.html

The limousine carried just one occupant as it rolled through sun-bleached Santa Monica, California: a short, plainly dressed woman with graying hair and a gap between her front teeth. The driver at the airport had held a sign with his passenger's name on it because he knew he would not recognize her. Rachel MacNair was not famous.

MacNair is a psychologist from Kansas City who has developed a volatile theory about how war affects the soldiers who fight it.

Nearly a year before her trip to Hollywood, MacNair had watched on television as the president stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared that major combat operations in Iraq had ended.

In the months preceding the president's announcement, MacNair had paid attention to other news, too, such as when four soldiers (three of whom had served in a Special Forces unit in Afghanistan) had returned to their base in North Carolina and butchered their wives; two of the men then killed themselves. Other stateside suicides followed -- a 28-year-old specialist poisoned himself in a Kentucky hotel, a 36-year-old chief warrant officer shot himself in his family's Colorado home. Earlier this year, the Pentagon had sent Combat Stress Control teams to Iraq because soldiers there were killing themselves at an alarming rate.

This past July, MacNair was quoted discussing her theory in The New Yorker. A few weeks later, the Los Angeles Times referred to her as an expert on veteran psychology. And director David O. Russell wanted MacNair to be a pundit in his Iraq War documentary, Soldiers Pay. The filmmaker's 1999 movie Three Kings, a dark comedy about the first Gulf War, had earned critical praise; now Russell was spending $207,000 to make a 35-minute film with commentary from soldiers, a retired general, a Republican congresswoman and psychologists in an effort to provide a behind-the-scenes look at each cog in the American war machine.

MacNair sat in a Holiday Inn room facing a camera and one of the movie's co-directors. She wore a goldenrod-colored jacket she'd recently bought at a Goodwill thrift store. She'd sent ahead color-coded charts, but she didn't need to reference them. Speaking carefully, she parsed her research into sound bites.

It's common knowledge that some soldiers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, a chronic disease characterized by nightmares, skittish behavior, concentration problems, depression and violent outbursts. Experts say it is caused by the interplay of two things: exposure to traumatic events in which there are serious threats of injury or death to oneself or others; and, as the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders puts it, associated feelings of "intense fear, helplessness or horror" -- one must not only be exposed to a traumatic situation but also have an emotional response to it.

MacNair's research took commonly held beliefs about PTSD a step further. She argued that in war, the major stressor that causes PTSD isn't watching a buddy die or coming under heavy fire from enemies.

Instead, she believes, the key factor in PTSD is killing someone else. She calls her version of the malady "Perpetration Induced Traumatic Stress," or PITS.

(snip)

<b>Grossman's 1995 book On Killing cites a study by World War II historian Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall, who interviewed troops after battle and concluded that only 15 percent to 20 percent of the men on the front lines had fired their weapons and that those who did often aimed high to avoid killing. Marshall said the reason wasn't cowardice; the men had stood their ground and performed other battle duties unwaveringly. </b>

(snip)


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I saw a documentary about this on TV in the UK about three years ago, and it was fascinating. According to that program, only about 2% of the combat soldiers in the Korean War ever actually shot to kill. The other 98% shot in the air, at the ground, or froze up. Of the 2%, 1% were real hero types, killing the enemy to save their friends. The other 1% were psychopaths who just wanted to kill, the same people who would've been doing it in the real world, without a stamp of approval from the state. Fascinating stuff.

Throughout history, about 10% of the soldiers did all the killing. This is known as the "reliability factor".

Most just closed their eyes and emptied their guns in the general direction of the enemy, satisfied to keep their heads down and survive for the return home.

After the Viet Nam war the US military, well aware of the above statistic, went to work to make each soldier as "reliable" as possible.

Having volunteers only at hand was the first easy step in the psychological conditioning that has raised the ratio of today's soldier to 80% reliability or higher.

This increased efficiency has come at a human cost, of course, in this transformation of today's military from Beetle Bailey to Rambo.

Very little is spent in detraining for a return to civilian life as most are assumed to stay until retirement.

Episodes like Haditha are to be expected if the troops aren't "pulled back" by their commanders at the scene. I think the focus of the investigation is why the immediate officers weren't on hand to control the situation for more than 5 hours.

...but one that usually gets swamped by the other instincts we've evolved, the ones telling us to use our big brains to cooperate with or to swindle other people, rather than killing to get our way.

In fact, you don't get large groups of people to kill at the same time without exploiting those other cooperative instincts.

was to kill someone. He had a black belt in karate and had been trying to kill me, and nearly succeeded. Luckily I'm solidly built and can fight a little, so he exhausted himself. Then he held me down on the floor trying to rape me, and warning me that he'd kill me if I got the police, or if I didn't let him move in with me. Then, having drunk heaps and waited up late preparing to do this to me when I got home, he went to sleep on his back on the floor. I was then able to get a weapon, and could easily have made it look as though I'd killed him in self defense while he was still attacking me.

But I had the feeling someone was stopping me, and couldn't lift my hand to do it. It sunk in as I stood there, thick branch in hand, that if I did this I'd never be the same again. So, disgusted with my own irrational wimpyness, I rang the police.

Again I was lucky, but they weren't. He badly injured a police officer, so they kept an eye on him ever since, making sure, one way or another, that he was never out of jail for long.

So I always wondered about soldiers, thinking that the worst damage they could suffer was to actually kill. There's something really weird about taking a life, it's completely different when it happens than what you'd expect.

I believe it's far easier to get over the evil others do to you, than the evil you do to others.

metaphorically speaking.


Grossman's book has been largely debunked, and that portion of S.L.A. Marshall's work is widely regarded as bunk. FWIW, Grossman is a right-winger who is stumping for tight controls on first-person shooter video games, as I recall.

Here's a one critique of Grossman by a police trainer: http://www.theppsc.org/Grossman/Main-R.htm.