http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=why-soldiers-get-a-kick-out-of-kill-2010-04-23
Do some soldiers enjoy killing? If so, why? This question is thrust upon
us by the recently released video
of U.S. Apache helicopter pilots shooting a Reuters cameraman and his
driver in Baghdad in 2007. Mistaking the camera of the Reuters reporter
for a weapon, the pilots machine-gunned the reporter and driver and
other nearby people.
The most chilling aspect of the video, which was made public by Wikileaks, is the chatter between two
pilots, whose names have not been released. As Elizabeth Bumiller of The
New York Times put it, the soldiers "revel in their kill."
"Look at those dead bastards," one pilot says. "Nice," the other
replies.
The exchange reminds me of a Times
story from March 2003, during the U.S. invasion of Baghdad. The
reporter quotes Sgt. Eric Schrumpf, a Marine sharpshooter, saying, "We
had a great day. We killed a lot of people." Noting that his troop
killed an Iraqi woman standing near a militant, Schrumpf adds, "I'm
sorry, but the chick was in the way."
Does the apparent satisfaction—call it the Schrumpf effect—that some
soldiers take in killing stem primarily from nature or nurture? Nature,
claims Richard
Wrangham, an anthropologist at Harvard University and an authority
on chimpanzees. Wrangham asserts that natural selection embedded in both
male humans and chimpanzees—our closest genetic relatives—an innate
propensity for "intergroup coalitionary killing" [pdf],
in which members of one group attack members of a rival group. Male
humans "enjoy the opportunity" to kill others, Wrangham says, especially
if they run little risk of being killed themselves.
Several years ago, geneticists at
Victoria University in New Zealand linked violent male aggression to
a variant of a gene that encodes for the enzyme monoamine oxidase A,
which regulates the function of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and
serotonin. According to the researchers, the so-called "warrior gene" is
carried by 56 percent of Maori men, who are renowned for being
"fearless warriors," and only 34 percent of Caucasian males.
But studies of World War II veterans suggest that very few men are
innately bellicose. The psychiatrists Roy Swank and Walter Marchand
found that 98 percent of soldiers who endured 60 days of continuous
combat suffered psychiatric symptoms, either temporary or permanent. The
two out of 100 soldiers who seemed unscathed by prolonged combat
displayed "aggressive psychopathic personalities," the psychiatrists
reported. In other words, combat didn't drive these men crazy
because they were crazy to begin with.
Surveys of WWII infantrymen carried out by U.S. Army Brig. Gen. S.L.A.
Marshall found that only 15 to 20 percent had fired their weapons in
combat, even when ordered to do so. Marshall concluded that most
soldiers avoid firing at the enemy because they fear killing as well as
being killed. "The average and healthy individual," Marshall contended
in his postwar book Men
Against Fire, "has such an inner and usually unrealized
resistance towards killing a fellow man that he will not of his own
volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that
responsibility…At the vital point he becomes a conscientious objector."
Critics have challenged Marshall's claims, but the U.S. military took
them so seriously that it revamped its training to boost firing rates in
subsequent wars, according to Dave Grossman, a former U.S. Army
Lieutenant Colonel and professor of psychology at West Point. In his
1995 book On
Killing, Grossman argues that Marshall's results have been
corroborated by reports from World War I, the American Civil War, the
Napoleonic wars and other conflicts. "The singular lack of enthusiasm
for killing one's fellow man has existed throughout military history,"
Grossman asserts.
The reluctance of ordinary men to kill can be overcome by intensified
training, direct commands from officers, long-range weapons and
propaganda that glorifies the soldier's cause and dehumanizes the enemy.
"With the proper conditioning and the proper circumstances, it appears
that almost anyone can and will kill," Grossman writes. Many soldiers
who kill enemies in battle are initially exhilarated, Grossman says, but
later they often feel profound revulsion and remorse, which may
transmute into post-traumatic stress disorder and other ailments.
Indeed, Grossman believes that the troubles experienced by many combat
veterans are evidence of a "powerful, innate human resistance toward
killing one's own species."
In other words, the Schrumpf effect is usually a product less of nature
than of nurture—although "nurture" is an odd term for training that
turns ordinary young men into enthusiastic killers.