Cost of killing

Many a soldier’s story makes a profound antiwar statement. A powerful example appeared last week in a New York Times article, “Distant Wars, Constant Ghosts.” Shannon P. Meehan, a tank platoon leader in Iraq, writes of the psychic toll killing takes on soldiers.

In Iraq, Meehan called an artillery strike on a house, killing a father, a mother and their children huddled inside. The mistake left him filled with self-loathing. Eventually, Meehan says, “the deaths that I caused also killed any regard I had for my own life.”

Meehan was responsible for killing civilians, but killing combatants changes a person too, he says. It destroys one’s regard for human life, so that “once you’ve crossed the line, there is little difference in killing 10 or 20 or 30 more after that.”

Meehan notes that few people wish to talk about the fact that soldiers are trained and expected to kill. One who is willing to do it is former Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, who gave a memorable Peace Lecture at Bethel College in North Newton, Kan., in 1998. Grossman directs the Killology Research Group.

Every species has a hard-wired resistance against killing its own kind, Grossman said, and humans are no different. He shared research that showed in World War II only 15 to 20 percent of combat infantry soldiers were willing to fire their rifles.

In On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Grossman wrote: “The vast majority of combatants throughout history, at the moment of truth when they could and should kill the enemy, have found themselves to be conscientious objectors.”

The bad news, Grossman said, is that with the right conditioning almost anyone and learn to kill. By breaking down the moral aversion to killing — rather than just teaching soldiers to use their weapons and assuming that they would — U.S. soldiers’ firing rates increased to about 50 percent in Korea and more than 90 percent in Vietnam.

Grossman’s On Killing, published in 1995, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. I’ve heard that another powerful portrayal of war’s toll on the human psyche is the 2009 movie The Hurt Locker, nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. Several Mennonite reviewers agree that it is one of the year’s best. — Paul Schrag