On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (33 page)

Chapter One

A Virus of Violence

How simple it now seems for our ancestors to have stood outside their caves guarding against the fang and claw of predators. The evil that we must stand vigilant against is like a virus, starting from deep inside us, eating its way out until we're devoured by and become its madness.

— Richard Heckler

In Search of the Warrior Spirit

The Magnitude of the Problem

If we examine the chart showing the relationship between murder, aggravated assault, and imprisonment in America since 1957, we see something that should astound us.

"Aggravated assault" is defined in the
Statistical Abstract
(from which this data was gathered) as "assault with intent to kill or for the purpose of inflicting severe bodily injury by shooting, cutting, stabbing, maiming, poisoning, scalding, or by the use of acids, explosives, or other means." We are also informed that this " e x -

cludes simple assaults."1

The aggravated assault rate indicates the incidence of Americans
trying
to kill one another, and it is going up at an astounding rate.

T w o major factors serve as tourniquets that suppress the bleeding

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The Relationship Between Aggravated Assault, Murder, and Imprisonment Rates in America Since 1957

A V I R U S OF VIOLENCE

301

that would occur if the number of murders increased at the same rate as aggravated assaults. First is the steady increase in the presum-ably violent percentage of our population that we imprison. The prison population in America has quadrupled since 1975 (from just over two hundred thousand to slightly more than eight hundred thousand in 1992: nearly a million Americans in jail!). Professor John J. Dilulio of Princeton states unequivocally that "dozens of credible empirical analyses . . . leave no doubt that the increased use of prisons averted millions of serious crimes." If not for our tremendous imprisonment rate (the highest of any major industrial-ized nation in the world), the aggravated assault rate and the murder rate would both be even higher.

The other major factor that limits the success of these attempts at killing is the continued progress in medical technology and methodology. Professor James Q. Wilson of UCLA estimates that if the quality of medical care (especially trauma and emergency care) were the same as it was in 1957, today's murder rate would be three times higher. Helicopter medevacs, 911 operators, para-medics, and trauma centers are but a few of the technological and methodological innovations that save lives at ever-increasing rates.

This more rapid and effective response, evacuation, and treatment of victims is
the
decisive factor in preventing the murder rate from being many times higher than it is now.

It is also interesting to note the dip in aggravated assault rates between 1980 and 1983. Some observers believed this was due to the maturing of the baby-boom generation and the overall aging of America and that violent crime would continue to decrease in succeeding years. However, this did not happen, and, in retrospect, although the aging of our society
should
cause a decrease in violence, a major factor may have been the sharp increase in the imprisonment rate during that period.

But demographers predict that our aging society will again become more youthful as the children of the baby boom have their own teenagers. And just how much longer can America afford to imprison larger and larger percentages of its population? And how much longer can advances in medical technology continue to keep up with advances in the aggravated assault rate?

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Like Alice, we are running as fast as we can to stay where we are. America's huge imprisonment rate and desperate application of medical progress are technological tourniquets to stop us from bleeding to death in an orgy of violence. But they do so by dealing with the symptoms of the problem rather than the root cause.

The Cause of the Problem: Taking the Safety Catch off of
a Nation

We know, as surely as we know that we are alive, that the whole human race is dancing on the edge of the grave. . . .

The easiest and worst mistake we could make would be to blame our present dilemma on the mere technology of war. . . . It is our attitudes toward war and our uses for it that really demand our attention.

— Gwynne Dyer

War

What
is
the root cause of this epidemic of violence in our society?

An application of the lessons of combat killing may have much to teach us about the constraint and control of peacetime violence.

Are
the same processes the military used so effectively to enable killing in
our adolescent, draftee soldiers in Vietnam being indiscriminately applied
to the civilian population of this nation?

The three major psychological processes at work in enabling violence are classical conditioning (a la Pavlov's dog), operant conditioning (a la B. F. Skinner's rats), and the observation and imitation of vicarious role models in social learning.

In a kind of reverse
Clockwork Orange
classical conditioning process, adolescents in movie theaters across the nation, and watching television at home, are seeing the detailed, horrible suffering and killing of human beings, and they are learning to associate this killing and suffering with entertainment, pleasure, their favorite soft drink, their favorite candy bar, and the close, intimate contact of their date.

Operant conditioning firing ranges with pop-up targets and immediate feedback, just like those used to train soldiers in modern A VIRUS OF VIOLENCE 303

armies, are found in the interactive video games that our children play today. But whereas the adolescent Vietnam vet had stimulus discriminators built in to ensure that he only fired under authority, the adolescents who play these video games have no such safeguard built into their conditioning.

And, finally, social learning is being used as children learn to observe and imitate a whole new realm of dynamic vicarious role models, such as Jason and Freddy of endless
Friday the 13 th
and
Nightmare on Elm Street
sequels, along with a host of other horrendous, sadistic murderers. Even the more classic heroes, such as the archetypal law-abiding police detective, is today portrayed as a murderous, unstable vigilante who operates outside the law.

There are more factors involved. This is a complex, interactive process that includes all the factors that enable killing in combat.

Gang leaders and gang members demand violent, even killing, activity and create diffusion of individual responsibility; and gang affiliation, loosening family and religious ties, racism, class differences, and the availability of weapons provide forms of real and emotional distance between the killer and the victim. If we look again at our model for killing-enabling factors and apply it to civilian killing, we can see the way in which all of these factors interact to enable violence in America.

All of these factors are important. Drugs, gangs, poverty, racism, and guns are all vital ingredients in a process that has resulted in skyrocketing violence rates in our society. But drugs have always been a problem, just as drugs (alcohol, and so on) have always been present in combat. Gangs have always been present, just as combat has always taken place in organized units. Poverty and racism have always been a part of our society (often much more so than today), just as propaganda, class divisions, and racism have always been manipulated in combat. And guns have always been present in American society, just as they have always been present in American wars.

In the 1950s and 1960s students brought knives to high school, whereas today they bring .22s. But those .22s were pretty much always present at home. And while there is new weapons technology 304

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available, fifteen minutes with a hacksaw will make a pistol out of any double-barrel shotgun, a pistol every bit as effective in close combat as any weapon in the world today — this was true one hundred years ago, and it is true today.2

The thing we need to ask ourselves is not, Where did the guns come from? They came from home, where they have always been available, or they may have been bought in the street thanks to the drug culture — which deals in illegal weapons as readily as it deals in illegal drugs. But the question we need to ask is, What makes today's children bring those guns to school when their parents did not? And the answer to
that
question may be that the
important
ingredient, the vital,
new, different
ingredient in killing in modern combat
and
in killing in modern American society, is the systematic process of defeating the normal individual's age-old, psychological inhibition against violent, harmful activity toward one's own species. Are we taking the safety catch off of a nation, just as surely and easily as we would take the safety catch off of a gun, and with the same results?

Between 1985 and 1991 the homicide rate for males fifteen to nineteen increased 154 percent. Despite the continued application of an ever-increasing quantity and quality of medical technology, homicide is the number-two cause of death among males ages fifteen to nineteen. Among black males it is number one. The AP wire article reporting this data had a headline announcing,

"Homicide Rate Wiping Out Whole Generation of Teens." For once the press was not exaggerating.

In Vietnam a systematic process of desensitization, conditioning, and training increased the individual firing rate from a World War II baseline of 15 to 20 percent to an all-time high of up to 95

percent. Today a similar process of systematic desensitization, conditioning, and vicarious learning is unleashing an epidemic, a virus of violence in America.

The same tools that more than quadrupled the firing rate in Vietnam are now in widespread use among our civilian population.

Military personnel are just beginning to understand and accept what they have been doing to themselves and their men. If we

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have reservations about the military's use of these mechanisms to ensure the survival and success of our soldiers in combat, then how much more so should we be concerned about the indiscriminate application of the same processes on our nation's children?

Chapter Two

Desensitization and Pavlov's Dog at the Movies
I yelled "kill, kill" 'til I was hoarse. We yelled it as we engaged in bayonet and hand-to-hand combat drills. And then we sang about it as we marched. "I want to be an airborne ranger . . . I want to kill the Viet Cong." I had stopped hunting when I was sixteen. I had wounded a squirrel. It looked up at me with its big, soft brown eyes as I put it out of its misery. I cleaned my gun and have never taken it out since. In 1969 I was drafted and very uncertain about the war. I had nothing against the Viet Cong. But by the end of Basic Training, I was ready to kill them.

—Jack, Vietnam veteran

Classical Conditioning in the Military

O n e of the most remarkable revelations in Watson's book
War on
the Mind
is his report of conditioning techniques used by the U.S.

government to train assassins. In 1975 Dr. Narut, a U.S. Navy psychiatrist with the rank of commander, told Watson about techniques he was developing for the U.S. government in which classical conditioning and social learning methodology were being used to permit military assassins to overcome their resistance to killing. T h e method used, according to Narut, was to expose the subjects to "symbolic modeling" involving "films specially designed to show people being killed or injured in violent ways.

D E S E N S I T I Z A T I O N AND P A V L O V S D O G 307

By being acclimatized through these films, the men were supposed to eventually become able to disassociate their emotions from such a situation."

Narut went on to say, " T h e men were taught to shoot but also given a special type o f ' C l o c k w o r k Orange' training to quell any qualms they may have about killing. M e n are shown a series of gruesome films, which get progressively more horrific. T h e trainee is forced to watch by having his head bolted in a clamp so he cannot turn away, and a special device keeps his eyelids open."

In psychological terms, this step-by-step reduction of a resistance is a form of classical (Pavlovian) conditioning called systematic desensitization.

In
Clockwork Orange
such conditioning was used to develop an aversion to violence by administering a drug that caused revulsion while the violent films were shown, until the revulsion became associated with acts of violence. In Commander Narut's real-world training the nausea-creating drugs were left out, and those who were able to overcome their natural revulsion were rewarded, thereby obtaining the opposite effect of that depicted in Stanley Kubrick's movie. The U.S. government denies Commander Narut's claims, but Watson claims that he was able to obtain some outside corroboration from an individual w h o stated that C o m -

mander Narut had ordered violent films from him, and Narut's tale was subsequently published in the London
Times.

Remember that desensitization is a vital aspect of killing-empowerment techniques used in modern combat-training programs.

The experience related by Jack at the beginning of this section is a sample of the desensitization and glorification of killing that has increasingly been a part of combat orientation. In 1974, when I was in basic training, we sang many such chants. O n e that was only a little bit more extreme than the majority was a running chant (with the emphasis shouted each time the left foot hit the ground): I wanna

RAPE,

KILL,

PILLAGE'n'

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BURN, a n n n n n '

EAT dead

BAAA-bies,

Iwanna

RAPE,

KILL . . .

Our military no longer tolerates this kind of desensitization, but for decades it was a key mechanism for desensitizing and indoctrinating adolescent males into a cult of violence in basic training.

Classical Conditioning at the Movies

If we believe that Commander Narut's techniques might work, and if we are horrified that the U.S. government might even
consider
doing such a thing to our soldiers, then why do we permit the same process to occur to millions of children across the nation?

For that
is
what we are doing when we allow increasingly more vivid depictions of suffering and violence to be shown as entertainment to our children.

It begins innocently with cartoons and then goes on to the countless thousands of acts of violence depicted on TV as the child grows up and the scramble for ratings steadily raises the threshold

,of violence on TV. As children reach a certain age, they then begin to watch movies with a degree of violence sufficient to receive a PG-13 rating due to brief glimpses of spurting blood, a hacked-off limb, or bullet wounds. Then the parents, through neglect or conscious decision, begin to permit the child to watch movies rated R due to vivid depictions of knives penetrating and protruding from bodies, long shots of blood spurting from severed limbs, and bullets ripping into bodies and exploding out the back in showers of blood and brains.

Finally, our society says that young adolescents, at the age of seventeen, can
legally
watch these R-rated movies (although most are well experienced with them by then), and at eighteen they can watch the movies rated even higher than R. These are films in which eye gouging is often the least of the offenses that are vividly depicted. And thus, at that malleable age of seventeen D E S E N S I T I Z A T I O N AND PAVLOV'S D O G

309

and eighteen, the age at which armies have traditionally begun to indoctrinate the soldier into the business of killing, American youth, systematically desensitized from childhood, takes another step in the indoctrination into the cult of violence.

Adolescents and adults saturate themselves in such gruesome and progressively more horrific "entertainment," whose antiheroes — like Hannibal the Cannibal, Jason, and Freddy — are sick, unkillable, unquestionably evil, and criminally sociopathic. They have nothing in common with the exotic, esoteric, and misunderstood Frankenstein and Wolf Man villains of an earlier generation of horror films. In the old horror stories and movies, very real but subconscious fears were symbolized by mythic but unreal monsters, such as Dracula, and then exorcised exotically, such as by a stake through the heart. In contemporary horror, terror is personified by characters who resemble our next-door neighbor, even our doctor. Importantly, Hannibal the Cannibal, Jason, and Freddy are not killed, much less exorcised; they return over and over again.

Even in movies where the killer is not an obvious sociopath, the common formula is to validate violent acts of vengeance by beginning the movie with a vivid depiction of the villain performing horrible acts on some innocents. These victims are usually related in some way to the hero, thereby justifying the hero's subsequent (and vividly depicted) vigilante acts.

Our society has found a powerful recipe for providing killing empowerment to an entire generation of Americans. Producers, directors, and actors are handsomely rewarded for creating the most violent, gruesome, and horrifying films imaginable, films in which the stabbing, shooting, abuse, and torture of innocent men, women, and children are depicted in intimate detail. Make these films entertaining as well as violent, and then simultaneously provide the (usually) adolescent viewers with candy, soft drinks, group companionship, and the intimate physical contact of a boyfriend or girlfriend. Then understand that these adolescent viewers are learning to associate these rewards with what they are watching.

Powerful group processes often work to humiliate and belittle viewers who close their eyes or avert their gaze during these gruesome scenes. Adolescent peer groups reward with respect and 310 KILLING IN AMERICA

admiration those who reflect Hollywood's standard of remaining hardened and undisturbed in the face
of
such violence. In effect many viewers have their heads bolted in a psychological clamp so they cannot turn away, and social pressure keeps their eyelids open.

Discussing these movies and this process in psychology classes at West Point, I have repeatedly asked my students how the audience responds when the villain murders some innocent young victim in a particularly horrible way. And over and over again their answer was "The audience cheers." Society is in a state of denial as to the harmful nature of this, but in efficiency, quality, and scope, it makes the puny efforts of
Clockwork Orange
and the U.S. government pale by comparison. We are doing a better job of desensitizing and conditioning our citizens to kill than anything Commander Narut ever dreamed of. If we had a clear-cut objective of raising a generation of assassins and killers who are unrestrained by either authority or the nature of the victim, it is difficult to imagine how we could do a better job.

In video stores the horror section repeatedly displays bare breasts (often with blood running down them), gaping eye sockets, and mutilated bodies. Movies rated X with tamer covers are generally not available in many video stores and, if they are, are in separate, adults-only rooms. But the horror videos are displayed for every child to see. Here breasts are taboo if they are on a live woman, but permissible on a mutilated corpse?

When Mussolini and his mistress were publicly executed and hung upside down, the mistress's dress flopped over her head to display her legs and underwear. One woman in the crowd subsequently had the decency to walk up and tuck the corpse's dress between its legs in a show of respect for the dead woman: she may have deserved to die, but she did not deserve to be so degraded after death.

Where did we lose this sense of propriety toward the dignity of death? How did we become so hardened?

The answer to that question is that we, as a society, have become systematically desensitized to the pain and suffering of others. We may believe that tabloids and tabloid TV make us exceedingly conscious of the suffering of others as they spread the stories of D E S E N S I T I Z A T I O N AND PAVLOV'S D O G

311

victims. But the reality is that they are desensitizing us and trivializ-ing these issues as each year they have to find increasingly more bizarre stories to satisfy their increasingly jaded audiences.

We are reaching that stage of desensitization at which the inflicting of pain and suffering has become a source of entertainment: vicarious pleasure rather than revulsion. We are learning to kill, and we are learning to like it.