Saturday, November 7, 2009

We're not meant to kill

I just read that in World War 2, 80% of soldiers didn't shoot at the enemy. (In the excellent book How We Decide.)

Only 20% of our soldiers were able to overcome their natural instinct to not hurt another person, and shoot. I think that's excellent. It impresses me greatly that so many people, honorable people who wanted to serve their country, still couldn't bring themselves to harm another person.

The book goes on to describe how the Army saw this as a problem, and set about designing conditioning that would overcome our basic instincts of humanity. By the Korean war, they got 55 percent of soldiers to shoot. In Vietnam, the number reached 90 percent.

I believe this is a big part of why our veterans come back from war so much more damaged now than in the past. PTSD and the other mental damage our soldiers receive comes from overriding the basic human instinct to not kill another person.

It seems ridiculous to advocate for a military that's inefficient, where we have people whose job it is to kill who can't or don't. Obviously, as a hippy, I favor increased diplomacy and work to find peaceful solutions to conflicts so the military doesn't have to kill anyone.

But I think more than that, I'm intrigued by the fact that 20% of soldiers were able to fire in the past. And my impression is that the returning veterans were more able to reenter society successfully then. There are lots of complicating factors - differing political support for the different wars, new medical technology to help badly wounded soldiers survive - but I think the military's ruthless efficiency at "helping" our soldiers become ruthless has a real cost that must be weighed and noted. Our soldiers lose a part of their souls in their training. I'm not sure the nature of the debt, but we owe them something for that.

No comments: