War Psychiatry and Iraq Atrocities:
How Killing Becomes a Reflex
by Penny Coleman
www.alternet.org, August 22, 2007
In 1971, Lt. William Calley was sentenced
to life in prison for his role in the massacre of some 500 civilians
in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai. In response to Calley's conviction,
Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) convened the "Winter
Soldier Investigation." Over a three-day period, more than
a hundred veterans testified to atrocities they had witnessed
committed by U.S. troops against Vietnamese civilians. Their expressed
intention was to demonstrate that My Lai was not unique, that
it was instead the inevitable result of U.S. policy. It was a
travesty of justice, they claimed, to focus blame on the soldiers
when it was the policy makers, McNamara, Bundy, Rostow, Johnson,
LeMay, Nixon and the others who were truly responsible for the
war crimes that had been committed.
In 2004, the release of the Abu Grahib
photographs broke the unforgivable silence in the mainstream press
about atrocities committed by American soldiers in Iraq. Haditha
followed, then Mahmoudiyah, Ishaqi, and at this writing, countless
other instances of savage, homicidal violence directed at civilians
have been reported. The July 30 issue of the Nation included an
article, "The Other War," by Chris Hedges and Laila
Al-Arian, which used interviews with 50 combat veterans to make
the case that American soldiers are using indiscriminate and often
lethal force in their dealings with Iraqi civilians. These veterans,
the authors report, have "returned home deeply disturbed
by the disparity between the reality of the war and the way it
is portrayed by the U.S. government and American media."
I would wager that they are more deeply disturbed by the reality
itself than the way the media reports it, but certainly government
and media distortions are another layer of betrayal. In a letter
protesting that article, Paul Rieckhoff, president of the anti-war
organization Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, made an
argument parallel to that of VVAW, namely that "(a)nyone
who wants to write a serious piece about the ethical lapses of
the U.S. troops should start and end the article by putting blame
where it belongs -- on the politicians who sent our troops to
war unprepared and without a clear mission" (the Nation,
7/13/07).
I'm not suggesting that American soldiers
take no responsibility for their actions. Like Rieckhoff, I would
argue that we must balance outrage at criminal and sadistic acts
with the insistence that we "guard against blaming this new
generation of veterans for the terrible and tragic circumstances"
that led to those acts. And I agree that, once again, the architects
have been given a free pass and that the soldiers, who are doing
exactly what they have been trained to do, are taking the blame.
But I want to focus on an aspect of the situation that is never
addressed in the mainstream media, and not often enough elsewhere:
specifically that American troops are trained to act in criminal
and sadistic ways.
Military training has been part of the
experience of millions of young American men since the Revolutionary
War. Prior to the Vietnam era, however, that training consisted
largely of practicing military skills and learning to manage military
equipment. It is only in the last half century that training has
evolved into an entirely new phenomenon that makes use of the
principles of operant conditioning to overcome what studies done
over the last century have consistently demonstrated, namely,
that healthy human beings have an inherent aversion to killing
others of their own species.
Operant conditioning holds that organisms,
including human beings, move through their environment rather
haphazardly until they encounter a reinforcing stimulus. The experience
of that stimulus becomes associated in memory with the behavior
that immediately preceded it. In other words, a behavior is followed
by a consequence, and the nature of the consequence, reward or
punishment, modifies the organism's tendency to repeat the behavior.
Today's recruits are intentionally and methodically subjected
to a training regimen that is explicitly designed to turn them
into reflexive killers. And it is very effective. It is also carefully
concealed. The military would prefer to keep their methods out
of sight because of the moral and ethical discussions, not to
mention the legal restraints, which public scrutiny and constitutional
debate might impose. Or so I would like to believe.
War Psychiatry, the army's textbook on
combat trauma, notes that "pseudospeciation, the ability
of humans and some other primates to classify certain members
of their own species as 'other,' can neutralize the threshold
of inhibition so they can kill conspecifics." Modern military
training has developed carefully sequenced and choreographed elements
of what many would call brainwashing to disconnect recruits from
their civilian identities. The values, standards and behaviors
they have absorbed over a lifetime from their families, schools,
religions and communities are scorned and punished. Using cruelty,
humiliation, degradation and cognitive disorientation, recruits
are reprogrammed with an entirely new set of learned responses.
Every aspect of combat behavior is rehearsed until response becomes
reflexive. Operant conditioning has vastly improved the efficacy
of American soldiers, at least by military standards. It has proven
to be a reliable way to turn off the switch that controls a soldier's
inherent aversion to killing. American soldiers do kill more often
and more efficiently. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, author of On Killing,
calls this form of training "psychological warfare, [but]
psychological warfare conducted not upon the enemy, but upon one's
own troops."
The psychological warfare that is being
conducted on today's recruits is a truly disturbing indication
of the worldview of our leadership, both military and political.
The group identity they are drilling into these kids, the "insider"
identity, is based on explicit contempt not only for the declared
enemy of the week, but for the entire civilian population, with
a special emphasis on women and homosexuals. In an army that is
now 15 percent female and who knows (don't ask, don't tell) what
percentage gay, drill instructors still rely on labels like "girl"
or "pussy," "lady" or "fairy" to
humiliate, degrade and ultimately exact conformity. Recruits are
drilled with marching chants that privilege their relationships
with their weapons over their relationships with women ("you
used to be my beauty queen, now I love my M-16"), or that
overtly conflate sex and violence ("this is my rifle, this
is my gun; this is for fighting, this is for fun."). Aside
from teaching these kids to quash their innate feelings about
killing in general, they are being programmed with a distorted
version of not only what it means to be a man, but of what it
means to be a citizen. To ascend to the warrior class, one must
learn to despise and distrust all that is not military. Chaim
Shatan, a psychiatrist who worked with Vietnam-era veterans, described
this transformative process as deliberate, as opposed to capricious,
sadism, "whose purpose is to inculcate obedience to command."
There are any number of ways that modern
training methods both support violence, aggression and obedience
and help to disconnect a reflex action from its moral, ethical,
spiritual or social implications, but one of the best illustrations
of this process is the marching chants, or "jodies,"
as they are known in the services. "Jody" is the derivative
of an African-American work song about Joe de Grinder, a devilish
ladies' man who is at home making time with the soldier's girlfriend
while the soldier is stuck in the war ("ain't no use in going
home; Jody's on your telephone"). According to the military,
jodies build morale while distracting attention from monotonous,
often strenuous, exertion. The following, originally a product
of the Vietnam era, has been resurrected for training purposes
in every war since and is an example of the kind of morale building
that has been judged appropriate to the formation of an American
soldier:
Shell the town and kill the people
Drop the napalm in the square
Do it on a Sunday morning
While they're on their way to prayer
Aim your missiles at the schoolhouse
See the teacher ring the bell
See the children's smiling faces
As their schoolhouse burns to hell
Throw some candy to the children
Wait till they all gather round
Then you take your M-16 now
And mow the little fuckers down
Thankfully, the brainwashing has not yet
been developed that will override the humanity of most American
soldiers. According to the troops interviewed in the Nation, the
kind of psychotic brutality described in the marching cadence
above is indulged by only a minority. Still, they described atrocities
committed against civilians as "common" -- and almost
never punished. As multiple deployments become the norm, however,
and as more scrambled psyches are sent back into combat instead
of into treatment, it is frightening to consider that the brainwashing
may yet prevail. Given the training to which these soldiers have
been subjected and the chaotic conditions in which they find themselves,
it is inevitable that more will succumb to fear and rage and frustration.
They will inevitably be overwhelmed by cumulative doses of horror,
and they will lose control of their judgment and their compassion.
Thirty-six years ago, American veterans tried to cut through the
smoke and mirrors of the official response to civilian atrocities,
the version that scapegoated soldiers and ignored those who gave
the orders. As then Lt. John Kerry put it, "We could hold
our silence; we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we
feel (that it is) not reds, and not redcoats (that threaten this
country), but the crimes which we are committing." The soldiers
who, following orders, have run over children in the road rather
than slow down their convoy will never be the same again, regardless
of whether government and the media tell the truth. Nor will the
soldiers manning checkpoints who shoot, as ordered, and kill entire
families who failed to stop, only to learn later that no one had
bothered to share with them that the American signal to stop --
a hand held up, palm towards the oncoming vehicle -- to an Iraqi
means, "Hello, come here." I have heard a number of
the men cited in the Nation article speak about their combat experiences,
and they are tormented by what they saw and did. They want to
tell their stories, not because they are looking for absolution,
but because they want to believe that Americans want to know.
But neither are they willing to take the blame.
They have already carried home the psychic
wounds and the dangerous reflexive habits of violence that will
always diminish their lives and their relationships. In return,
they are hoping we will listen to them this time when they ask
us to look a little harder, dig a little deeper, use a little
more discernment. Or have we already arrived at a point in our
collective moral development when, as Shatan predicted, "Like
Eichmann, we consider evil to be banal and routine?"
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