Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (55 page)

At one point in the
“Collateral Murder” video, one of the helicopter gunners says of the injured man trying to crawl away, “Come on, buddy. All you gotta do is pick up a weapon.” Here, too, we see the convergence of violence and the confirmation that it was justified. The gunner wants the man to behave according to the soldiers’ definition of the situation, as an insurgent, so that they can kill him. We observed the same mode of self-fulfilling prophecy in relation to World War II soldiers’ treatment of supposed partisans. In that case, it was the ammunition allegedly found on victims that justified executing them as “terrorists.”

This is a general characteristic of violence in war. The behavior of those defined as the “enemies” confirms the legitimacy of that designation. This has nothing to do with stereotypes, prejudices, or “worldviews.” The only characteristic of “target persons” that counts is that they pose a threat. Any indication to that effect provides sufficient reason to kill. In the
Vietnam War, soldiers feared that even babies could be carrying concealed hand
grenades. In World War II, children could be considered partisans, just as in the
Iraq War they could be regarded as insurgents.

In a voluminous study of the dynamic of violence in the Vietnam
War, historian
Bernd Greiner cited a series of examples of the “self-evident” identification of enemies. The simplest one was that anyone who tried to flee was automatically an enemy who should be shot. The attempt to escape confirmed suspicions that an individual was a
Vietcong.
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Somewhat more complicated is the discovery of “evidence.” When examining the surveillance protocols, we highlighted the story of the presence of ammunition being used to distinguish supposed partisans from civilians. The same procedure, however illogical it was, was applied in the Vietnam War, where GIs sometimes razed villages in which they had previously deposited Soviet-made ammunition as proof of a Vietcong presence there. The
U.S. 9th Infantry Division killed a total of 10,899 people but only secured 748 weapons. That suggests that 14 civilians were murdered for every true Vietcong eliminated. As a justification, soldiers often claimed that the Vietcong were killed before they could go get their weapons.
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It was difficult for American soldiers in Vietnam to precisely identify enemies since the Vietcong waged a
guerrilla war. Not knowing whether they were confronted with incognito fighters, men and women, or harmless civilians, created a huge challenge. The lack of orientation soldiers feel in a “war without fronts,” or what we today would call asymmetrical warfare, underscores the compulsive need soldiers feel to establish certainty, particularly under violent conditions. Precisely in
situations in which soldiers do not face standard sorts of battle, but can be killed in irregular attacks, explosive traps, and ambushes, their ability to orient themselves is a precondition for survival. Ambush situations also make soldiers feel helpless. As one present-day German sergeant serving in
Afghanistan described it: “If you’re ambushed, things get hectic. You require a phase of orientation. Who is being shot at from where? It feels awful, to say the least. The enemy is always at an advantage since he chose the place of the attack and is familiar with it.… I was also glad if I could alight from my vehicle. You may lose some cover, but you’re a much smaller target. And you can act on your own terms again, decide whether to shoot back or hide.”
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Only when a situation of clarity has been restored about who the enemies are do soldiers once again feel secure. Fatally, violence is precisely the means by which orientation can be regained most simply, quickly, and unambiguously. A successful act of violence removes the gray areas.

This was the reason why the Wehrmacht most often engaged in acts
of extreme violence against innocent civilians in the context of fighting partisans. It is beyond question that the POWs in the surveillance protocols operated under the assumption that in the battle against presumed partisans, one was allowed to kill, burn down villages, and terrorize civilians. The threatening chimera of the “Franc-tireur,” the irregular fighter, had already played a prominent role in the
Franco-Prussian
War of 1870–71, and it was an established Wehrmacht doctrine to nip any incipient
guerrilla activity in the bud with brute force.
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Thus, internalized cultural factors combined with objective uncertainty to make the use of “ruthless severity” seem unavoidable and normal.

It is unique to the conditions of war that the definition of the
enemy justifies all acts taken as a result of that definition. In this respect, the way the Wehrmacht waged war was no different from the way many fighting forces have. This perspective applies equally to war between sovereign states and asymmetrical warfare. The parties at war have the right to define who is and isn’t an enemy. The perennial argument that one was only trying to defend oneself against an enemy bent on world domination or enamored of senseless violence is a standard element of war crimes trials or interviews and personal testimonies. It’s the excuse perpetrators use to justify why they did certain things. At the moment when violence occurs, though, it needs no justification. Or as the leader of a German mobile medical unit in
Afghanistan formulated things: “You feel great rage in battle. You don’t have much time to think. That only comes later.”
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The decisive point in the example of the U.S.
helicopter crews’ behavior is this: entirely unrelated to historical, cultural, and political circumstances, the definition of a specific situation and all the actors present in it establishes the frame of reference for everything that happens subsequently. Group thinking and the dynamic force of unfolding violence ensure that the ending is almost always deadly.

The analogy of killing can be extended by definition all the way to the level of
genocide. The murder
of Jews was also defined as an act of
self-defense, at least by racial theorists and those who helped arrange the
Holocaust. Only here the subject of the
fear and aggression was
a whole community and not an individual. It is no accident that Jews about to be killed were also described as partisans, that is: irregular enemies it was permissible to eradicate. As one Wehrmacht soldier remarked, “Where there’s a Jew, there’s a partisan.”
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Killing under the guise of self-defense also occurs in other cultural and historical contexts. The genocide carried out by the
Hutu against
Tutsi in 1990s
Rwanda was preceded by forms of
perception and
interpretation that American historian
Alison Des Forges vividly described as “accusation in a mirror.” In a kind of putative genocidal fantasy, one side accuses the other of planning to completely
annihilate it. This schema of
mirror-image accusations is not just a psychosocial phenomenon. It is also an explicitly promoted
propaganda method. With the help of this technique, as one source quoted by Des Forges asserts, “the side actually terrorizing the other will accuse its
enemy of terrorizing it.”
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The logical corollary to spreading fantastic fears of being threatened is to create a willingness for self-defense among the party that feels itself under threat. Every form of murderous attack and systematic annihilation can also be perceived as a necessary act of self-defense.

This emerges very tangibly in the motif of “revenge” that plays such a prominent role in narratives of war, irrespective of cultural, historical, or geographical context. Indeed, we have to speak of a narrative trope here. The basic story, as exemplified in countless novels, films, and oral war stories, begins with a soldier relating how a close friend died in battle in an especially horrible or treacherous way. From that moment on, the story usually concludes, the protagonist decided to pay the enemy back in kind. Occasionally this narrative figure is augmented with a promise made to the dying friend by the storyteller. In any case, personal trauma legitimizes the protagonist’s lack of mercy toward the enemy. It was in this sense that one American soldier
in
Vietnam told his father in a letter that total destruction was the only way to deal with the
Vietcong and confessed that he could never have imagined feeling such hatred.
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Psychiatrist
Jonathan Shay, who worked with a number of Vietnam veterans, reported that the desire to revenge the death of a buddy inspired some GIs to reenlist for additional tours of duty.
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One of them was author
Philip Caputo: “Finally, there was hatred, a hatred buried so deep that I could not then admit its existence. I can now, though it is still painful. I burned with a hatred for the Viet Cong and with an emotion that dwells in most of us, one closer to the surface
than we care to admit: a desire for retribution. I did not hate the enemy for their politics, but for murdering Simpson, for executing that boy whose body had been found in the river, for blasting the life out of Walt Levy. Revenge was one of the reasons I volunteered for a line company. I wanted a chance to kill somebody.”
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These sorts of desires for revenge, which ascribe the necessity of horrific and brutal actions to experiences of loss, can be generalized. With allusions to the biblical idea of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, the enemy’s behavior can be defined as a transgression that demands a payback in kind. In World War II, for instance, an American GI wrote home about the requisitioning of German apartments: “It’s a really rough deal and these Krauts are getting a good belly full of their own medicine.”
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Desire for revenge was one of the central themes in a comprehensive study of American soldiers’ attitudes during World War II made by a group of authors under the direction of
Samuel A. Stouffer.
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Not all soldiers, of course, were able to live out their desires for vengeance
against those they considered their enemies. Sometimes, they were hindered by comrades or sudden, unexpected feelings of empathy for the adversary. The desire to perform one’s tasks efficiently can also act as a counterweight, as is evident in a letter from a senior German staff medic in
Afghanistan: “At the very latest when the alarm sounds for the second time in a bunker, even the greatest philanthropist will develop desires for bloody revenge. The simplest solution in military terms, the one favored by soldiers here, is a major artillery counterstrike. Technically speaking, this is no big problem. You locate the target, point your guns and fire away. It takes less than a minute. The first time the enemy shelled us they had bad luck, but the Taliban aren’t stupid. The next time they attacked, they used longer cables and fired their rockets from a spot next to a kindergarten.”
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Yet even such reflections and observations about the potentially self-defeating nature of desires for revenge, comparable to those in all situations of war,
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underscore the significance of the vengeance motif in the daily lives of soldiers.

During World War II,
POWs were treated in radically different fashions. Some were dealt with according to a strict interpretation of the
Geneva Convention, while others were put to death en
masse. While only 1 to 3 percent of Anglo-
American
POWs died in
German captivity, 50 percent of Red Army prisoners perished
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—a figure that exceeded even the high numbers of Allied soldiers who died in Japanese captivity. The
Wehrmacht decision to let Russian POWs starve to death, which soldiers discussed in the surveillance protocols, was something that went beyond the normally accepted boundaries of war and can only be understood in the context of the Nazi campaigns of
annihilation. That is the reason why German POWs were disgusted at how Russian prisoners were being treated and even sympathized with them.
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Although most German soldiers never came into contact with
German POW camps, many had witnessed the transport of prisoners from the front lines and had a good idea of how captured enemies were being mistreated. The German soldiers remained mere witnesses, though, with scant opportunities for changing what they found objectionable.

The situation was different on the battlefield. Here, practically every foot soldier was an active participant who decided for himself whether or not to kill his enemy. In the heat of battle, questions of whether an enemy taken prisoner would be allowed to live were subject to constant renegotiation. Gray areas could persist for hours or even days, especially when the troops that had taken prisoners became embroiled in new battles.

Depending on the situation, enemies who surrendered were sometimes shot without any further ado. But that was unique neither to the Wehrmacht nor to the Nazi approach to war. Examples of POWs being executed go all the way back to antiquity, although the dimensions expanded dramatically in the twentieth century. In other wars as well, there were standing official and unofficial orders to “take no prisoners,” and even when no such instructions existed, it was often more expedient for soldiers to simply kill enemies rather than have to disarm, care for, transport, and guard them. Reports about such executions often read “shot while attempting escape” or simply “no prisoners taken.”
In World War I as well, POWs were killed out of revenge or simple jealousy, since many soldiers resented the fact that they would have to fight on, while the lives of the prisoners were presumably safe—or because keeping POWs was inconvenient or dangerous.
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The same was true in the
Korean and Vietnam wars, and we can assume nothing has changed in the
Afghanistan and
Iraq wars either.