Free On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by Dave Grossman Page B

that "the most amazing thing of all in this fantastic battle is the fact that all along the front the beaten [Union soldiers] did not pull back to the rear."
    Instead they did exactly what Union and Confederate soldiers had done over and over again in that war: "They stayed where they were, anywhere from 40 to 200 yards from the confederate line, gouging out such shallow trenches as they could, and kept on firing." And the Confederates kept on firing at them, often with cannons firing from the flanks and rear at horrendously short range.
    "All day long," says Catton, "the terrible sound of battle continued.
    Only an experienced soldier could tell by the sound alone, that NONFIRERS THROUGHOUT HISTORY 27
    the pitch of ;he combat in midafternoon was any lower than it had been in the murky dawn when the charges were being repulsed."
    It took over eight hours, not eight minutes, to inflict those horrendous casualties on Grant's soldiers. And as in most wars from the tine of Napoleon on down to today, it was not the infantry but the artillery that inflicted most of these casualties.
    Only when artillery (with its close supervision and mutual surveillance processes among the crew) is brought into play can any significant change in this killing rate be observed. (The greater distance that artillery usually is from its targets, as we will see, also increases its effectiveness.) The simple fact appears to be that, like S. L. A. Marshall's riflemen of World War II, the vast majority of he rifle- and musket-armed soldiers of previous wars were consis-ent and persistent in their psychological inability to kill their fellow human beings. Their weapons were technologically capable, and hey were physically quite able to kill, but at the decisive moment each man became, in his heart, a conscientious objector who could not bring himself to kill the man standing before him.
    This all indicates that there is a force in play here. A previously undiscovered psychological force. A force stronger than drill, stronger than peer pressure, even stronger than the self-preservation instinct. The impact of this force is not limited to only the black-powder era or only to World War II: it can also be seen in World War I.
    Nonfirers of World War I
    Colonel Milton Mater served as an infantry company commander in World War II and relates several World War II experiences that strongly support Marshall's observations. Mater also provides us with several instances in which World War I veterans warned him to expect that there would be many nonfirers in combat.
    When he first joined the service in 1933, Mater asked his uncle, a veteran of World War I, about his combat experience. "I was amazed to find that the experience foremost in his mind was
    'draftees who wouldn't shoot.' He expressed it something like this:
    'They thought if they didn't shoot at the Germans, the Germans wouldn't shoot at them.'"
    28 KILLING AND THE E X I S T E N C E OF R E S I S T A N C E
    Another veteran of the trenches of World War I taught Mater in an R O T C class in 1937 that, based on his experiences, nonfirers would be a problem in any future war. " H e took pains to impress us with the difficulty of making some men fire their rifles to avoid becoming sitting ducks for the fire and movement of the enemy."
    There is ample indication of the existence of the resistance to killing and that it appears to have existed at least since the black-powder era. This lack of enthusiasm for killing the enemy causes many soldiers to posture, submit, or flee, rather than fight; it represents a powerful psychological force on the battlefield; and it is a force that is discernible throughout the history of man. T h e application and understanding of this force can lend new insight to military history, the nature of war, and the nature of man.

Chapter Three
    Why Can't Johnny Kill?
    Why did individual soldiers over hundreds of years refuse to kill the enemy, even when they knew that doing so would