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Tue, Aug. 23rd, 2005, 07:23 pm
[pols, psych] War and the Warrior

A moderate Republican blog gets it very right, explaining something which has been much on my mind of late, in light of my vocation, and which I hadn't managed to wrestle into words, yet.

Read it and then come back.

There are no words in psychotherapy which manage to encompass or convey how vast and profound this effect is, though I do not think the psychotherapist has been licensed who does cringe in awe before it. We know; of course we know. We're not allowed to be blind enough not to see it. What is the Active Listening statement you make in reply to a man who tells you the only reason he's alive is that he out-drew an eight year old girl with a gun and a four month old baby?

The only language which comes close to containing this is that of religion: even we psychotherapists, as in a quote in the article, find ourselves reaching for the world soul. Not in a supernatural sense, but in an essential sense. It is the soul which is deformed by the act of killing, no matter how righteous and justified that killing may be.

As so many religions teach: If you murder, you will go to hell. But not in the afterlife. Right here, right now.

It will not matter that you were justified or that your cause was righteous or that you followed the rules, the law, or your orders. There are laws which are not laws of man, but laws of nature. They are subject to no mercy, they make no exemptions, as much as the madmen of the religious right claim otherwise. We have religiosos in our midst who, like those of old, exhort their followers that no harm can come to the faithful, only now it is wounds of the spirit, not arrows and bullets of the enemy, which shall never lodge in the faithful heart. They have stopped believing in the truer part of their religions.

To ask someone to kill for you -- for your nation or your cause -- is to ask them to sacrifice not merely life and limb, but possibly also their mortal soul; to accept their may be spiritually maimed or mutilated. However grievous it is to lose a leg, what is it to lose one's capacity to know peace within oneself? Has the prosthetic been made for the human heart so it can embrace again when it has lost that faculty? Is there a surgery for rebuilding a man's shattered self-regard, self-confidence, or self-love? Can we excise embedded nightmares, shattered bits of toxic reflexes, putrefying memories?

These are not without treatment, but, in our society, they are largely without acknowledgment. They are costs which the Right has swept under the rug; to say any ill will happen to the souls of our soldiers is tantamount, they shrilly claim, to calling those soldiers bad people. There must be no public discourse which suggests our sons and daughters don't come back to us in one piece; they claim it is an insult to the injured to acknowledge the injury.

Were our society more pious or humanistic we would have a language to speak this truth to power. But neither religious accounts of the soul nor science's inquiries into the mind are, in our age, of sufficient consequence to move the hearts of men. We are dumb before cynical materialist hawks' insistence that there is no such thing as sin, or soul, or mind.

So no account is taken of this other sacrifice -- which doubles the cost already reckoned in shattered bodies and blasted futures -- in tallying what this war is really costing the American people.

This is reason enough, besides all the other reasons, why our soldiers must never be committed to a fight except for the very best of reasons. They are not tin soldiers. They are not game pieces on a board. Those who survive will carry their battlefield deeds with them off the battlefield, and into every day of the rest of their lives. They are the flower of America and the magnitude of their magnanmity in accepting that risk should be honored by employing it only to such purposes worthy of so great a nobility.
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Tue, Aug. 23rd, 2005 11:43 pm (UTC)
[info]herooftheage: not as right as all that

One place where the guy isn't getting it is his analysis of people not shooting their weapons. The WWII example is misleading - the riflemen generally didn't shoot, but the guy with the Browning Automatic Rifle did. Why? Because he had the weapon that could have a big effect on the battlefield. The guys with the pop-guns preferred to keep their heads down. IIRC, Marshall was basically the only one to play down that effect - lots of other people in the military understood risk/reward pretty well.

What happens when we get to Viet Nam? Well, everyone is issued an M-16 - a very effective automatic assault rifle. Now the typical infantryman does have an incentive to shoot - shooting can dramatically effect the outcome of the battle. When they say that the training is changed to encourage that in soldiers, I think that's a pretty iffy argument: basic training of shooting a rifle hasn't changed much in over 100 years - it's the rifle that's changed.

Now his psychological comments may still well be spot on; but I'd really discount this part of the foundation for it.

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Wed, Aug. 24th, 2005 01:20 am (UTC)
(Anonymous): Re: not as right as all that

What about all the infantrymen who filed down the pins of their M-1s so that they would fire on full auto (a trick my own father employed in Korea)?

And even if you are correct w/r/t Marshall's research, in what way does it undermine my larger point?

-- Lex
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Wed, Aug. 24th, 2005 03:28 am (UTC)
[info]herooftheage: Re: not as right as all that

What about all the infantrymen who filed down the pins of their M-1s so that they would fire on full auto (a trick my own father employed in Korea)?

My expectation is that their frequency of fire would be larger, given no other mitigating factors. Effectiveness of artillery, air strikes, anti-personnel countermeasures, and enemy tactics can all play a part in whether a soldier decides to fire. I'd be interested to see frequency of fire figures for the Korean war.

And even if you are correct w/r/t Marshall's research, in what way does it undermine my larger point?

In that you offer it as evidence in favor of killing having deep psychological effects, it weakens it, in that the more normal economics public goods argument are quite adequate for explaining the behavior. (I tend not to fire my rifle because it exposes my position but doesn't substantially help our side and therefore my survival. I see over time that other people are behaving likewise, and that reinforces the behavior. I go bring ammo to the machine gun because that does impact my survival chances postively. All very straightforward. A robot with a survival instinct would behave similarly.)

Part of the problem is that you offer some evidence that we're geared to kill: "It has been common knowledge for at least three decades that absent rigorous training and close supervision, human beings almost invariably become sadistic and abusive when given the power of life and death over others." So for your thesis to work out, we have to be ready to kill given sufficient opportunity but then feel guilty about it afterwards.

Can such a thing occur? Sure - there are lots of forces making up human psyche, and people being adaptable means they have to hold in their heads both the idea that killing is repugnant and an opportunity at the same time. I'd be interested in seeing whether other primates get guilty when they slaughter each other, or if that's a human invention.

But the two pieces of evidence together - we kill when we're in a position of power, and we don't kill when it puts us at risk, means the need for psychological degradation as an explanation for behavior is superfluous. Your comments about following authority here ring truer in that I can get to the observed behavior on that alone, without resorting to the psychological damage arguments.

There's another level on which I find the argument "we should be careful about killing because of the damage it does to the killers and they couldn't have known about it" to be missing some important bits: the real point behind having volunteered for the duty is that the culture they are entering is distinctly different from those of WWII, Korea, and Viet Nam. It is much more oriented towards a warrior culture than those armies were, and in such an environment, killing may turn out to be a psychological benefit for the individual, not a psychological cost. I think the US military is on a cusp sort of situation here - the combination of relying so heavily on reserves combined with a penchant of spending more on better guns than on paying soldiers means that the percentage of people who think of the military as a lifetime career is still quite low. Change that mix a bit, by building a larger permanent army or making the life competative with a peacetime career and look what happens when it isn't necessary to reintigrate soldiers into civilian life. If we choose to be Sparta instead of Athens then a whole bunch of the bads become goods; and then I think we're back to being careful about making sure our behavior is moral because it must follow a higher ethic, and not that we have to be careful because we might be damaging our soldiers.
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Wed, Aug. 24th, 2005 10:29 am (UTC)
(Anonymous): Re: not as right as all that

[["It has been common knowledge for at least three decades that absent rigorous training and close supervision, human beings almost invariably become sadistic and abusive when given the power of life and death over others."]]

This does NOT contradict the Marshall research, inasmuch as Marshall was looking at men in combat and the research this passage refers to looked at people who had custody of prisoners -- quite a different situation.

As for looking at this issue in terms of public-goods theory, I might be wrong, but I suspect that what goes on with people in combat takes place in, shall we say, a much different, and much more primitive, part of the brain. Put another way, I suspect that rational choice has very little to do with it.

But I could be wrong.

-- Lex
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Wed, Aug. 24th, 2005 09:37 pm (UTC)
[info]fabrisse

There's another level on which I find the argument "we should be careful about killing because of the damage it does to the killers and they couldn't have known about it" to be missing some important bits: the real point behind having volunteered for the duty is that the culture they are entering is distinctly different from those of WWII, Korea, and Viet Nam. It is much more oriented towards a warrior culture than those armies were, and in such an environment, killing may turn out to be a psychological benefit for the individual, not a psychological cost. I think the US military is on a cusp sort of situation here - the combination of relying so heavily on reserves combined with a penchant of spending more on better guns than on paying soldiers means that the percentage of people who think of the military as a lifetime career is still quite low.

Please define "more oriented towards a warrior culture."

My take is that the current US Army is far less oriented toward being a warrior culture than the military I grew up in during Vietnam. (My father was assigned there in 1961-62, 1973-75 and the whole family went 1964-65 -- it's where I went to nursery school.)

These days there are support systems in place for the families. VA helps with psychological counseling both for the returning soldiers and their families. Research is being done into Gulf War syndrome (and with my dad part of the Agent Orange cancer cluster, I can tell you that getting that research done now is a huge change in military policy).

Still, there have been articles in The New Yorker and other places discussing the troubling rise of spousal and family abuse and murder in returning soldiers. The suicide rate in Iraq is higher than in any previous war according to Army statistics.

And lifetime career? It's impossible unless you make general. If you don't make general, you are required to leave at the end of 30 years service. Period. Certain exceptions can be made, but require a vote by Congress and that doesn't always work. Anyone who has been in the US military will be required to re-enter wider society at some point.

I am a firm and strong believer in Just War theory. The first Gulf War met the test. This war doesn't on several levels.

But the moral duty for the civilian government doesn't change. Protecting the veterans has been an issue and a problem from Roman times at least. Even warrior societies recognize that perpetual war takes a toll.
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Wed, Aug. 24th, 2005 03:32 pm (UTC)
[info]43duckies

As a related aside: Much was made in the (public) radio coverage of Bush's speech in Utah of the fact that he actually mentioned the total number of US soldiers killed in Iraq (and possibly Afghanistan...not sure) for the first, and so far only, time. However, I noticed that he did NOT mention the numbers of wounded and permanantly (physically) disabled. I have heard it said many times that one of the new developments of this war is the fact that many soldiers are surviving horrible injuries that would have killed them in any previous war, but of course they are surviving with rates of permanant disability not seen in previous wars.

And of course, even the number of wounded and permanantly disabled does not include the soul-sick.

I remember being told as a child of an uncle of my father who was never the same after World War I. He was apparently pretty non-functioning. When brought to family gatherings, he would go sit by himself under a tree, in his own little world, and not talk to anyone. He never recovered from the shell-shock he suffered; he was like that until he died years and years later.
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