News-Record.com

In my (limited) experience with people with post-traumatic stress disorder, I somehow had gotten the notion that it derived exclusively from what one experienced. It does, but this fascinating story in The New Yorker says that in the case of the military, it also can derive, with far more devastation, from what one does -- specifically, from killing other human beings. An Army historian, S.L.A. Marshall, who pioneered the after-action report during extensive post-combat interviews with soldiers and Marines during World War II, concluded that this happens because, despite the training soldiers receive, they remain enormously reluctant to kill other humans directly, even when doing so may be essential to their survival:

In 1947, in a slim volume entitled "Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War," Marshall took the military by surprise. Throughout [World War II], he declared, only about fifteen per cent of American riflemen in combat had fired at the enemy. One lieutenant colonel complained to Marshall that four days after the desperate struggle on Omaha Beach he couldn't get one man in twenty-five to voluntarily fire his rifle. "I walked up and down the line yelling, 'God damn it! Start shooting!' But it did little good." These men weren't cowards. They would hold their positions and willingly perform such tasks as delivering ammunition to machine guns. They simply couldn't bring themselves to aim a rifle at another human being-even an armed foe-and pull the trigger. "Fear of killing, rather than fear of being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure in the individual," Marshall wrote. "At the vital point, he becomes a conscientious objector."

The Army took his findings at face value -- and changed its training accordingly, author Dan Baum writes: In the Vietnam War, 90 percent of riflemen or more fired their weapons. But American soldiers didn't have to engage in high numbers of up-close killings again until the current war in Iraq.

In the current Iraq war, though, soldiers are killing with small arms on battlefields the length of a city block. Exactly how many Iraqis American forces have killed is not known-as General Tommy Franks said, "We don't do body counts"-but everyone agrees that the numbers are substantial. Major Peter Kilner, a former West Point philosophy instructor who went to Iraq last year as part of a team writing the official history of the war, believes that most infantrymen there have "looked down the barrel and shot at people, and many have killed." American firepower is overwhelming, Kilner said. He ran into a former student in Iraq who told him, "There's just too much killing. They shoot, we return fire, and they're all dead." Even some of the most grievously wounded Iraq-war veterans seem more disturbed by the killing they did than they are by their own injuries. I spent a week in December among amputees at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington, D.C., and was struck by how easily they could tell the stories of the horrible things that had happened to them. They could talk about having their arms or legs blown off in vivid detail, and even joke about it, but, as soon as the subject changed to the killing they'd done, a pall would settle over them.

Kilner and a number of observers inside and outside the Army worry that the high rate of closeup killing in Iraq has the potential to traumatize a new generation of veterans. Worse, they say, the Army and the Department of Veterans Affairs avoid thinking or talking about it.

That's not as strange as it sounds. War is, in a nutshell, killing other human beings, and anything that might reduce a military's ability and inclination to kill increases its chances of failure, with potentially devastating consequences for the country.

We ask our young men and women to be prepared to kill in our name. This is the real world; we have little alternative. However, if we're going to ask them to accept that obligation on our behalf, we must accept an obligation on their behalf: to give them all the help and resources they need to deal with the consequences of what they have done, once the shooting has stopped. The military can't simply pretend the problem doesn't exist; to do that is to send these young men and women back to civilian life potentially as disabled as if they had lost an arm or leg. And by extension, we have an obligation to send those young people to kill only when it is absolutely necessary and, therefore, morally justifiable. Doing that makes them better fighters, the research finds. Doing otherwise, on the other hand, significantly increases the chances that they will have psychological problems, either at the time or later. How much? In World War II, before this research had been conducted, the U.S. lost more front-line servicemen to psychiatric problems than to death from enemy fire. If nothing else gets the military's attention, that should.