The graphic evidence that a small “kill team” of five U.S. soldiers made a deadly sport of Afghan civilians, faking attacks to cover up random killing, collecting pinkie fingers and teeth as souvenirs, and all but Facebooking the process, is, the media tells us, shocking the world. Or at least it will, once the German news magazine Der Spiegel unloads more than three of some 4,000 similar photographs they took of their criminal exploits. New York magazine says “the photos are a chilling reminder of the unanticipated consequences of war,” while in The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh believes “these soldiers had come to accept the killing of civilians — recklessly, as payback, or just at random — as a facet of modern unconventional warfare.”
History suggests otherwise. Though we are saturated in war reporting, war movies, war games, endless prognostications on strategy and tactics that promote us all into armchair generals and presidents, the experience of war is fundamentally elusive to those who do not fight. Even the embedded war reporter is kept at a distance by having choices denied to the soldier. This was the conclusion of the great and gifted CBS reporter Eric Sevareid, and the message he delivered to radio listeners in 1944: “War must be seen to be believed, but it must be lived to be understood. We can tell you only of events, of what men do. We cannot tell you how or why they do it. We can see and tell you, that this war is brutalizing some among your sons and yet ennobling others. We can tell you little more.”
It is here that Gerald F. Linderman, professor emeritus of history at the University of Michigan, provides a bridge to this missing knowledge. In “The World Within War: America’s Combat Experience in World War II,” Linderman excavates events for their psychological impact on soldiers rather than, as most military history does, their impact on strategy and the chronology of victory or loss.
The psychological turning point for American and British soldiers came after the invasion of Sicily in 1943. The war in Africa had been almost chivalrous; for the most part, the combatants respected the “decencies” of warfare, with British ideas of being a good sport meshing well with German formalism. When the Americans arrived, the Germans viewed them, writes Linderman, as almost “supercivilized.” Theresa Archard, an American Army nurse, wrote that she had “infinite faith in the integrity of the Germans as far as the Geneva Pact was concerned.”
But all participants were fighting on a distant and vast landscape with few civilians in the way of the shells. This all changed in hilly, small-town Italy — and it was almost, officers recalled, as if they were suddenly fighting a different enemy, one that fought with more intensity and savagery, one that took to killing civilians for no apparent military advantage.
Not unlike Afghanistan, German soldiers couldn’t be assured that the civilian population supported them, something which became more acute when Mussolini was deposed and Italy signed an armistice with the Allies. The sense or suspicion of treachery quickly led to remorseless behavior not only toward civilians but a more brutal attitude toward Allied soldiers (It was far worse on the eastern front and the Far East, where Japanese officers instructed their soldiers to kill civilians or to eat the livers of executed prisoners to toughen them up).
As Linderman notes, “Soldiers suffering battle strain, feeling unable to tolerate repeated assaults on their nerves and seeking refuge in emotional withdrawal, moved through stages … numbing, toughening, coarsening, and brutalization. It was in the third stage that the process began to pose problems for the war of rules; enemy targets became the first targets of a new callousness.” Sevareid recalled the way American artillerymen would just blow buildings up because they were there and annoyed them, irrespective of who they might be sheltering.
Whether members of the “kill team” were brutalized by experience or closet sociopaths, it is delusional to think that the experience of combat in Afghanistan does not entail diabolical stress. What prevents brutalization is intense military discipline, as demonstrated by the final stage of war’s horrors when you turn on your own kind and yourself.
This was the awful fate of American POWs on the Japanese ship Oryoku Maru during World War II, where, in the foulest of holding conditions, many went mad. “They tore at each other,” recounted Sidney Stewart in “Give Us This Day.” “As I looked at a body lying beneath me … His throat had been cut and the blood was being drunk.” However, on another bedlam voyage, where American soldiers killed others to stop their howling, 50 British troops, veterans of captivity, maintained unit discipline and the chain of command, and kept their composure.
Do the rogue activities and the drug use of “kill team” suggest a loss of discipline similar to that in Vietnam? Or should we, after 10 years of war, be surprised that there aren’t more atrocities and worse? These are the questions we need to ask of those who shed their innocence so that we can keep ours.
History suggests otherwise. Though we are saturated in war reporting, war movies, war games, endless prognostications on strategy and tactics that promote us all into armchair generals and presidents, the experience of war is fundamentally elusive to those who do not fight. Even the embedded war reporter is kept at a distance by having choices denied to the soldier. This was the conclusion of the great and gifted CBS reporter Eric Sevareid, and the message he delivered to radio listeners in 1944: “War must be seen to be believed, but it must be lived to be understood. We can tell you only of events, of what men do. We cannot tell you how or why they do it. We can see and tell you, that this war is brutalizing some among your sons and yet ennobling others. We can tell you little more.”
It is here that Gerald F. Linderman, professor emeritus of history at the University of Michigan, provides a bridge to this missing knowledge. In “The World Within War: America’s Combat Experience in World War II,” Linderman excavates events for their psychological impact on soldiers rather than, as most military history does, their impact on strategy and the chronology of victory or loss.
The psychological turning point for American and British soldiers came after the invasion of Sicily in 1943. The war in Africa had been almost chivalrous; for the most part, the combatants respected the “decencies” of warfare, with British ideas of being a good sport meshing well with German formalism. When the Americans arrived, the Germans viewed them, writes Linderman, as almost “supercivilized.” Theresa Archard, an American Army nurse, wrote that she had “infinite faith in the integrity of the Germans as far as the Geneva Pact was concerned.”
But all participants were fighting on a distant and vast landscape with few civilians in the way of the shells. This all changed in hilly, small-town Italy — and it was almost, officers recalled, as if they were suddenly fighting a different enemy, one that fought with more intensity and savagery, one that took to killing civilians for no apparent military advantage.
Not unlike Afghanistan, German soldiers couldn’t be assured that the civilian population supported them, something which became more acute when Mussolini was deposed and Italy signed an armistice with the Allies. The sense or suspicion of treachery quickly led to remorseless behavior not only toward civilians but a more brutal attitude toward Allied soldiers (It was far worse on the eastern front and the Far East, where Japanese officers instructed their soldiers to kill civilians or to eat the livers of executed prisoners to toughen them up).
As Linderman notes, “Soldiers suffering battle strain, feeling unable to tolerate repeated assaults on their nerves and seeking refuge in emotional withdrawal, moved through stages … numbing, toughening, coarsening, and brutalization. It was in the third stage that the process began to pose problems for the war of rules; enemy targets became the first targets of a new callousness.” Sevareid recalled the way American artillerymen would just blow buildings up because they were there and annoyed them, irrespective of who they might be sheltering.
Whether members of the “kill team” were brutalized by experience or closet sociopaths, it is delusional to think that the experience of combat in Afghanistan does not entail diabolical stress. What prevents brutalization is intense military discipline, as demonstrated by the final stage of war’s horrors when you turn on your own kind and yourself.
This was the awful fate of American POWs on the Japanese ship Oryoku Maru during World War II, where, in the foulest of holding conditions, many went mad. “They tore at each other,” recounted Sidney Stewart in “Give Us This Day.” “As I looked at a body lying beneath me … His throat had been cut and the blood was being drunk.” However, on another bedlam voyage, where American soldiers killed others to stop their howling, 50 British troops, veterans of captivity, maintained unit discipline and the chain of command, and kept their composure.
Do the rogue activities and the drug use of “kill team” suggest a loss of discipline similar to that in Vietnam? Or should we, after 10 years of war, be surprised that there aren’t more atrocities and worse? These are the questions we need to ask of those who shed their innocence so that we can keep ours.
