Fear,loathing,and moral qualms on the battlefield

Introduction: Randall Collins on war and violence

I have long been indebted to the creativity and scholarship of Randall Collins, especially his work on violence. I have frequently drawn upon his classic article, ‘The Three Faces of Cruelty’ (1974), which perceived a historical shift from ‘ferocious’ to ‘callous’ violence in war, especially helpful to me in rejecting claims that war has declined through history. In reality there has only been a shift from plunging weapons into flesh to killing from a distance. The deadliest weapons are now wielded by soldiers who see dots on the landscape, no enemies at all, or video images of enemies thousands of miles away.

In his 2008 book Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory Collins analyzed all kinds of violence, including wars. He finds that in confrontations human beings experience much fear and tension. They do not like violence and are not very good at it. Fights are not like in the movies. They are clumsy, imprecise and frenzied, with more flailing and slapping than solid punching. Bystanders rarely get drawn in. Violence is ‘hard’ he says, because ‘humans are hard-wired for interactional entrainment and solidarity’, and this ‘is stronger than mobilized aggression’ (2008: 27). Collins says people can only overcome fear and tension, and so commit violence, in situations when people are sucked into what he calls a ‘tunnel of violence’, where normal perceptions are distorted, and pulse rates accelerate as cortisol and adrenaline flood the body. There can only be headlong retreat or forward momentum down the tunnel produced by a quick-fire sequence of provocative events. The forward momentum he calls ‘forward panic’, found especially in micro-conflicts in which bullies attack the weak without mercy, but also on a grand scale in wars, where one army begins to flee, emboldening the other to rush forward and engage in a killing frenzy. It is this context, he concludes, that produces most of the casualties of war in earlier times, though in modern wars, he says, it is more common in local atrocities than in major battles.

Collins believes that violence in both war and peace reveals similar fear-tension emotions, producing inefficient violence. He recognizes that war is different in that armies have devised organizational techniques for keeping men fighting, even though they may be tense and afraid. He instances the infantry phalanx, drilling, discipline, the cultivation of an esprit de corps, and a hierarchical officer corps backed by military police – and, I would add, the cultivation of small group solidarity (the ‘buddy’ system) and ‘just cause’ ideologies. Violence is not primordial, nor does civilization tame it; the opposite is nearer the truth (Collins, 2008: 28–9; cf. Malešević, 2017).

This is impressive research, full of brilliant insights, by far the best analysis of violent confrontations I have seen. But I have two specific disagreements. First, by focusing on the emotional states of the soldiers, he sometimes neglects the organizational bases of military inefficiency, what Von Clausewitz called the ‘friction’ of battle. As Clausewitz said, ‘Everything is very simple in war but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties produce a friction which no man can imagine who has not seen war’. Battle becomes semi-chaos amid ‘the fog of war’ (2007: Book 1, Chap. 7). These frictions occur as a consequence of interaction between the rival armies. Though Collins does stress the situational determinants of soldiers’ behavior, he sometimes seems to forget this. An example is casualties caused by friendly fire. Collins notes that some estimates put them as 10 to 15 percent of all casualties. He attributes this to the fear-tension of the soldiers, making them jittery, prone to panicky firing. Of course, this does happen, but most friendly fire casualties result from organizational friction, from artillery or bombers given the wrong co-ordinates, from ground units getting lost or unaware of friendly units nearby, etc. They are structural more than emotional.

Second, Collins suggests that violence is morally repugnant to human beings, and this will often prevent soldiers from firing. This view has become conventional wisdom. Collins and many others have been influenced by the research of two soldier-scholars who claimed that soldiers cannot fire their weapons because of moral qualms about killing: US Brigadier-General S.L.A. Marshall and US Lieutenant-Colonel Dave Grossman. Their findings are cited approvingly by many authors, including two of our authors, Randall Collins himself and Sinisa Malešević. There are two relevant issues, the extent of non-firing and the reasons for it. I will explore them mainly through the experiences of American and British Commonwealth soldiers in major wars from the 1860s.

The American Civil War

Grossman, citing Marshall, says that many Civil War soldiers could not bring themselves to fire at the enemy out of qualms at killing. His first evidence is that casualties were few even when infantry regiments fired directly at short range at each other. This was indeed so, but Grossman presents no evidence that this was due to soldiers’ repugnance at killing. Griffith gives a more persuasive explanation of low casualty rates: Civil War soldiers were barely-trained, with almost no live target practice before going into battle. When battle did start, greyish-white smoke from the powder enveloped the men so that they only dimly saw the enemy. Muskets were short-range weapons. Line infantry were drilled to fire only when close to the enemy. Officers demanded a distance of only 20 to 30 yards. Highly disciplined forces, like Wellington’s British squares at Waterloo, might wait this long, but hastily-trained Civil War soldiers could not. Advancing infantry were under enemy artillery fire before they could close to short range, so that obeying orders meant many died without having fired their musket. Nothing is more intolerable to soldiers than being inactive when under fire. So they fired too soon in order to relieve this fear. They blazed away into the fog, usually aiming too high (Griffith, 1989: 84–90; 111–13). Thus casualties were relatively few in individual battles, although overall casualties in the war were high because there were so many battles.

The United States in 1870 had a male literacy rate of 80 percent, and for the first time in history we can draw on soldiers’ letters and diaries. McPherson (1997) analyzes over a thousand of them. They reveal that soldiers experienced battle as horrific, utterly different from the adventure they had anticipated. They loathed it. A private wrote: ‘I have seen enough of the glory of war…I am sick of seeing dead men and men’s limbs torn from their bodies.’ A sergeant wrote: ‘I don’t know any individual soldier who is at all anxious to be led, or driven, for that matter to another battle.’ A captain confessed to his wife: ‘this has broken me down completely…[I am] in a state of exhaustion…I never saw the Brigade so completely broken down and unfitted for service.’ These men attest to the terrors of battle – just as men have in all modern wars. Fear and loathing have dominated battlefield emotions. Collins is well aware of this.

Some soldiers reported that they found the first killing difficult, but they nonetheless did it. There was less of a problem the second time, and rarely any the third time. When they could see the enemy’s face, they might momentarily pause, but then they fired. They alleged that many ‘skulkers’ lagged behind, trying to evade combat, but none suggested that this was due to moral objections. They are depicted as cowards, overcome by fear (McPherson, 1997: 6–7, 79).

Grossman secondly presents a curious piece of evidence, much-cited subsequently, concerning abandoned muskets found on the field of Gettysburg after the battle. Of the 27,574 muskets, 24,000 were loaded; 12,000 contained two loads, and 6000 were charged with from three to ten loads. Grossman and others have argued that the musketeers had not fired because they found killing repugnant. They only pretended to fire – hence the multi-loaded muskets. Malešević (2010: 220) explains that ‘killing is, in fact, terribly difficult, messy, guilt-ridden, and for most people, an abhorrent activity’, although he does hedge his bets a little in observing soldiers becoming ‘paralyzed by fear’ alongside this ‘conscious inability to kill other human beings’. Morality tinged with fear for oneself is his argument (2010: 221, 229; cf. Jacoby, 2008: 90).

The source for these muskets was an 1865 article by Major Laidley of the Union Ordnance Department. His evidence was soon repeated in a West Point textbook (Benton, 1867: 69). Yet both officers attributed non-shooting to technical failures of muzzle-loading muskets and the inefficiency of soldiers unable to master the complex sequence of 17 or 18 distinct physical movements which drill manuals required for loading powder, bullet, and wadding, and then firing. The new breech-loading muskets and rifles would improve firing, they concluded. They never mentioned any qualms. Military historians Griffith (1989: 86) and Rottman (2013) agree. Adams (2014: 114–15) imagines the scene at Gettysburg as ‘at least 18,000 men, in a highly distracted mental state, loaded and over-loaded their weapons, oblivious of never having fired them’. Given the noise, the dense grey smoke coming from the gunpowder, the chaos of the battle, and the fear that makes some soldiers’ hands shake uncontrollably, non-firing resulted. At Gettysburg a mixture of incompetence and fear was much more important in producing mischarged muskets than moral qualms about killings.

World wars: Non-firing by infantry

In the Second World War we can additionally draw on sociological interview surveys. I begin with Marshall’s reports on firing by American infantry, cited by most authors on modern war. Some have recently acknowledged that methodological doubts have been raised about his data, but they nonetheless repeat his conclusions as facts (e.g. Collins, 2008: 43–54; Dyer, 1985: 118–19; Holmes, 1985: 58; Keegan, 1976: 74; Malešević, 2010: 220–1; Jacoby, 2008: 90–1; Ferguson, 2006: 521). They err.

Marshall’s ‘interviews’ were almost all collective discussions with battalions of soldiers. According to eyewitnesses, he posed questions and listened to the freewheeling responses of the men. He concluded that those firing at the enemy ‘did not rise above 20 to 25%’ – astonishingly low. He explained:

the average and healthy individual…. has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance to killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible for him to turn away from that possibility.…At the vital point he becomes a conscientious objector, unknowing. (1947: 54, 79).

King (2013: 45–8) is more sympathetic to Marshall. He suggests that although the statistics were phony, Marshall may have derived a general impression of non-firing from the soldiers. He adds that Marshall was much influenced by one individual and two group interviews. The individual interview was with Lieutenant-Colonel Cole, in command of an American paratroop regiment in Normandy. His men were receiving incoming fire while crossing a causeway, but they did not return fire, despite Cole’s urging, because they were fearful. This case has been much-quoted. But there is an alternative explanation: they were in such an exposed position that they hurried across the causeway as quickly as possible to avoid presenting a stationary target by stopping to fire. Cole does not suggest that moral qualms played any role in the incident.

Marshall’s group discussions proved fertile in helping him build up a picture of the engagements of single battalions by stringing together the partial view of the battle of each soldier. As Collins notes (2008: 48), this enabled him to narrate vivid and convincing accounts of how each engagement unfolded, somewhat chaotically, never going as planned. In two of his Second World War Pacific narratives, American infantry soldiers were passive, unwilling to fire or expose themselves. In a 1943 battle on Kwajalein Atoll, machine gunners plus one brave sergeant saved the day for the rest of the battalion, who remained passive (Marshall, 1944). In a 1944 battle in the Makin islands only the 36 machine gunners of a 200-strong battalion fired at the enemy. On landing, the battalion had mistakenly thought the Japanese had already been defeated and so had only prepared flimsy defensive positions. When the Japanese unexpectedly attacked, they panicked, went to ground, and remained passive (Marshall, 1968: 56). But Marshall wrote a dozen battle narratives. In the other 10 he did not refer to non-firing, which suggests it was quite rare.

King adds examples of passivity among American, British, and Canadian troops in Normandy, blaming poor officer quality and inadequate infantry training, which he sees as the defects of mass conscripted, armies (King, 2013: 170–80). Troops’ morale varied. Many regiments were considered as ‘elite’, but most were not. Obviously some performed worse than others. But in none of these cases do either Marshall or King attribute passivity to moral qualms. Fear and loathing predominate.

Malešević cites six authors as confirming Marshall. But three of them simply repeat his conclusion without adding new data. Only three, Collins, Grossman, Bourke, produce any new information, and it proves insubstantial. I have criticized Grossman already. Bourke (1999) examines battle experience by drawing on psychiatric reports and the war diaries of 28 British, American, and Australian soldiers in the two world wars and Vietnam. Her support of Marshall is equivocal at best. She does initially present his conclusions without criticism, and then she instances the causeway-crossing paras. But she doesn’t mention non-firing again. Instead, she discusses moral qualms in general. Soldiers could empathize with the enemy, she says. Said one: ‘face to face with them you couldn’t feel a personal hatred, they were like ourselves, manipulated by statesmen and generals and war-mongers. We were – they were – cannon fodder’ (1999: 155). But this did not stop them from killing. During Allied bombardments they could feel pity for enemy soldiers, while declaring that they would kill as many of them as possible. She adds: ‘With occasional exceptions most servicemen killed the enemy with a sense that they were performing a slightly distasteful but necessary job’ (p. 154). The main exceptions were the few who enjoyed killing.

She adds that war allows men to commit legitimate killing which in peacetime they would view with horror. Soldiers felt that they should feel guilty for killing, since ‘Men who did not feel guilt were somehow less than human, or were insane: guiltless killers were immoral’ (p. 227). But ‘survivor’s guilt’, guilt for having lived while one’s comrades died, far outweighed ‘killer’s guilt’ (p. 208). So many soldiers did feel qualms but this did not prevent them killing without much sense of guilt. Bourke describes how easily initial repugnance at killing could be overcome in battle, how fear, though sometimes immobilizing, could be channeled into killing, and how easily those who accomplish this can later slip back into civilian life with little sense of guilt. I return to this last point later.

Third, Collins mentions three additional sources on non-firing. First, Colonel Ardant du Picq distributed a questionnaire in the late 1860s to French officers who, Collins says, ‘reported a tendency for soldiers to fire wildly into the air’. Actually, Ardant du Picq’s posthumously published book (1947 [1880]) only reports seven officers’ responses, and only two of them say this. I have already argued that over-firing in this period had little to do with moral qualms.

The other two sources begin by praising Marshall’s research. They were written before the methodological criticisms had surfaced. Then, Langley (1958: 14) says of Australian troops in Korea:

40 to 50 per cent of the individuals in night ambushes…failed to fire at all or produced ineffective fire as a result of firing their weapon in such a way that their position was not betrayed to the enemy by the muzzle flash of their personal weapon. The underlying reason for this apparent defection was simply active expression of the desire for self-preservation in the more psychologically inadequate individuals.

Second, Rowland (1986) presents research conducted by the British Ministry of Defence comparing casualty rates in 100 real battles with hit rates by test subjects in simulated battles using pulsed laser weapons. The test subjects could neither inflict nor receive harm from the virtual ‘enemy’, and they killed far more of the simulated enemy than had soldiers in the real battles. Yet the test subjects could experience neither fear nor loathing in such an experimental setting, with none of the noise, blindness, chaos, and fog of actual battle conditions. It was a tension- and fear-free game of skill. This is not a valid comparison.

Collins also refers extensively to the pioneering interview surveys of American Second World War soldiers by Samuel Stouffer and colleagues (1949). But their results emphasize fear, not qualms. In an infantry regiment in France, 65 percent of the soldiers admitted that they had failed to do their job properly on one or more occasion because of extreme fear. Further surveys of almost 5000 infantry in the Pacific theatre revealed that 76 percent of soldiers said they had sometimes felt a violent pounding of the heart, 52 percent had experienced uncontrollable trembling, and about 50 percent admitted to feeling faint, breaking out in a cold sweat, or feeling sick in their stomach. In addition, 19 percent said they had vomited and 12 percent said they had lost control of their bowels (Stouffer et al., 1949: Table 3, 201; Collins, 2008: 46–9). This is more than just fear. It is an absolute loathing of battle generating incapacitating physiological consequences. Similar statistics had been reported by Dollard and Horton (1943) in their survey of American Spanish Civil War veterans.

This does not necessarily lead to defeat since the enemy is also being incapacitated. You just have to be a little less disturbed than the enemy. Generals know this is the most they can expect. General Patton said: ‘Courage is fear holding on a minute longer’ than the enemy. General Bradley concurred: ‘Bravery is the capacity to perform properly even when scared half to death.’ Studies reveal that the management of fear and loathing into adequate battle performance has five main possible determinants: drilling, discipline, fear of being called cowardly by one’s comrades, a basic belief in the cause, and a belief that victory is possible. The first three concern fear of one’s own army, while the last two are more positive.

Stouffer and colleagues also asked about the commonest errors of new and seasoned soldiers. Shooting too much, not too little, before they were able to see the target, was the third most common error for both groups, after the sins of bunching up when on patrol, and making too much noise at night. ‘Freezing’, a likely indicator of non-firing, came only ninth (1949: 283). Captured Japanese soldiers’ diaries tried to make sense of American over-firing by claiming that the Americans were paid according to the number of times they fired (Glenn, 2000: 30). Of course, both non-firing and over-firing are manifestations of fear-induced risk avoidance. They have in common not revealing oneself to the enemy. Who can blame them, given the range and lethality of modern weapons and the fog of war?

Ashworth (1980) uses First World War diaries and letters to conclude that the ‘live-and-let-live’ system he unearthed, tacit truces between British and German soldiers on quieter sectors of the front, is compatible with Marshall’s stress on non-firing, but he disputes Marshall’s argument that this was due to soldiers’ moral qualms. He finds no evidence that ‘the tension between normal human impulses and order to kill caused paralysis’. Mutual, rational fear of death was the motive. Ashworth adds ‘only a small proportion of soldiers hospitalised with battle fatigue had a fear of killing’ (pp. 215–16). This is confirmed by Watson (2009) analyzing psychologists’ reports. ‘Battle fatigue’ and ‘shell-shock’ resulted mainly from incapacitating fear for oneself plus sheer loathing of the battlefield. Similarly, Rousseau (2003) and Sheldon (2005) analyzing First World War French and German soldiers’ letters and memoirs do not report moral qualms about killing. On the contrary, they report that battle intensified aggression.

Engen (2008, 2009, 2011) examined questionnaires filled in by 161 Canadian officers in Normandy in 1944–5. They made many complaints, but none concerned soldiers not firing enough. Indeed, a third complained of over-firing. Fennell’s (2011) study of the British North African campaign mentions neither non-firing nor moral qualms. Instead, fear figures prominently, as measured by desertion, surrender, and missing rates, at first commoner among British soldiers, then among the Germans, reflecting the ebb and flow of battle across open desert. Cameron’s study of US Marines in the Pacific never mentions non-firing and he downplays skulking. He says Marshall’s argument ‘is a specious argument to assuage moral sensibilities among civilians’ (1994: 51, 201).

Blake (1970: 340–1) analyzed the autobiographies of 33 Second World War infantrymen. He noted that officers often gave new soldiers sight of disfigured and mutilated corpses before their own first action. This toughening strategy worked:

most men, after exposure to violence, are able to commit violence with no after-shock. Men report their first kill [after exposure] casually, as part of an ongoing action, or if they say anything about it, talk in terms of killing as a ‘natural function’, ‘instinctive’ etc.

A study of Allied soldiers in Normandy found a learning curve. Some novices did find it difficult initially to kill a clearly visible enemy but they almost always did kill, and then they got used to it. They became effective task-completing soldiers after about 10 days of battle, at peak efficiency after around 25 days. But if combat lasted longer, fighting spirit declined. From about 40 days they were emotionally shattered, keeping their heads down, doing the minimum. At the extreme there was passive non-firing and sickness, and self-wounding rates increased. In the longer campaign cycle effectiveness was maintained for up to 140 to 180 days, but then came ‘an acute incapacitating neurosis or becoming hyper-sensitive to shell fire’.

In the Second World War, 10 to 20 percent of British soldiers were defined by the authorities as psychiatric cases (Keegan, 1976: 335; Holmes, 1985: 214–16, 326; Dyer, 1985: 143–5). But most soldiers just reduced their commitment, kept their heads down, took fewer risks, and suffered. Few front-line soldiers expressed deep hatred for the enemy. Those firing from a distance showed more hatred than those firing at short range, as did non-combatants in the rear. Women in support roles were no less aggressive than men, Bourke says, in a blow to gender essentialism (Stouffer et al., 1949: 159; Bourke, 1999: 145–9; Malešević, 2010: 224–5). ‘Anger comes out’, notes Collins acutely (2008: 77, 67–70), ‘where there is little or no confrontational fear’. Fear restrains anger.

Fighter pilots: The Second World War and Korea

Collins (2008: 387–99) also stresses non-firing by fighter pilots. He notes that Second World War American ‘aces’, those who shot down at least five enemy planes, comprised under 1 percent of all fighter pilots. Yet they downed between 37 percent and 68 percent of ‘kills’ of enemy planes in the various theatres of war. Among British and American pilots, 60 to 75 percent had no kills at all (Wells, 1995: 49; Gurney, 1958: 258). Collins notes skewed distributions among German pilots too. He suggests that all this supports Marshall’s arguments. But the reasons for such skewed distributions did not concern moral qualms. There were four main reasons.

The taxing, interactive nature of the job. Even flying without engaging in combat was difficult. During the World War 6000 RAF personnel died in accidents (Wells, 1995: 31). Fighter combat was exponentially more difficult. Enormous skill in making split-second decisions at high speed in a juddering plane was needed to out-maneuver an enemy pilot and get inside the kill zone in his rear, when both planes were travelling at 350 mph, and over 450 mph in Korea. The pilot then had to fire steadily while maneuvering to counter other enemy planes’ response. The most crucial decision-making lasted two seconds. Many new pilots, thrust prematurely into battle, could not shoot down enemy planes because the skill set was beyond them. Different skill levels helped produce different firing and killing rates.

Nonetheless, the pilots variously estimated that 12 to 20 percent of their colleagues were useless in combat – from fear and lack of confidence, not moral qualms (Wells, 1995: 48; Werrell, 2005: 125).

A further possible indicator of pilot frailty is through aborted sorties, where a pilot turns back from the mission before combat. The US Eighth Air Force calculated that in the month of January 1944, 70 percent of its 6770 sorties completed their mission. Of the 30 percent which did not, 61 percent turned back for weather-related problems, and 29 percent for mechanical reasons. That leaves a residual of 10 percent who might have been faking it. The RAF rate of fighter abortions was less, only about 10 percent, mostly due to genuine problems with the planes or weather conditions (Wells, 1995: 105, 129). On landing, RAF aborted planes were examined for confirmation of the pilot’s reported problem, and the pilot was intensively questioned by superior officers. If pilots repeatedly aborted, alarm bells went off about what was termed ‘LMF’ (low moral fibre). But this was not a major problem for either airforce.

None of these studies suggest that failure to shoot resulted from moral qualms. Pilots showed respect for enemy pilots, but that was all. Werrell presents Korean combat stories for over 30 pilots. Only one says he felt bad after shooting up a MiG. He could clearly see the pilot in his death-agonies, trapped in a burning cockpit. His response was to put him out of his agony with a further burst of fire. However, there was a norm shared by pilots on all sides: once a pilot ejected, he would not be shot at. Blake (1970: 339) notes that American fighter pilots in the Second World War describe the plane, not the pilot, as the enemy, and even refer to it as ‘he’ and ‘him’. It is American ‘pilots’ versus enemy ‘aircraft’. ‘Kills’ meant planes, not pilots, a euphemism evading moral qualms

Thus structural (technical, selection, and mission) reasons made kills imbalanced, although perhaps 10 to 20 percent of pilots prevented aggressive action due to fear and tension. Pilots had every reason to be fearful, given their high casualty rates. Only a quarter of American and British pilots came away unscathed (Wells, 1999: 115, 45–6). German and Japanese casualty rates were very much higher. Their courage in carrying on fighting into defeat was extraordinary. But once in a dog fight, skilled pilots reported having no time for fear since the task filled their mind. Total task absorption brought exhilaration and thrust fear onto the back-burners. The more passive bomber crews feared death more, although they were only half as likely to be killed. Bomber crews had ‘occasional reservations’ about the civilian casualties they inflicted, but no-one refused to bomb, says Wells (1999: 99). Aces were feted as national heroes everywhere, a major incentive to keep on killing. Stouffer et al. (1949: Ch. 7) found that the morale of Second World War air crews was higher than that of infantry, while fighter pilots’ morale was higher than that of other air crews – due to pride in their skill, their heroic status, their caste community life, and their task absorption once up in the skies (Forstchen and Chancey, 2000: 80: 131–6). Conversely, fear plus a sense of limited competence explain non-firing. The assertion that moral qualms restrained killing is once again not supported.

Infantry in Korea, Vietnam, and later

Marshall also wrote reports on American infantry in Korea and Vietnam. On Korea he concludes that

well in excess of 50 percent of troops actually committed to ground where fire may be exchanged directly with the enemy will make use of one weapon or another in the course of an engagement.…this showing is a substantial improvement over the participation averages among World War II troops.

King (2013: 181–2) is scathing about the battle performance of the UN army of conscripts in Korea. He sees them as barely-trained and unmotivated, with a tendency to ‘bug out’, to run away when under attack, and to go to ground in attack rather than press on to Chinese positions which would have provided them more cover. Tomedi (1993: 67) confirms this from interviews with US veterans. But none mention moral qualms about killing. Fear made them passive. Watson (2002) also denigrates the performance of Canadian infantry in Korea. Most were extremely fearful. They performed just enough to avoid being labeled a coward by their comrades, but they were persistently outclassed by Chinese soldiers in their main task, patrolling in no-man’s land. He quotes only one case of a soldier with moral qualms and his qualms came after the war:

I was just a simple kid who should have stayed in Canada. But I had to shoot and kill over there, and I knew I killed people, and I sometimes have trouble about that. That’s the hard part about remembering…knowing that I did that and my country didn’t really give a shit. (2002: 176)

Glenn (2000) interviewed 302 Vietnam veterans. Only 3 percent said they had never personally fired on the enemy. Perhaps they would hesitate to admit their own shortcomings, so Glenn asked them how many of their comrades fired. The average declined to 83 percent, although some non-shooters were in support units not required to fire. Eighty percent gave fear as the main reason for others’ non-firing, though 15 percent mentioned moral qualms, including the novelty in the history of war of a few conscientious objectors given tasks without firearms. Glenn said most non-firing was justified, and he confirmed Marshall’s finding that shooting was most common in teams of soldiers firing weapons together, like machine gun crews (Glenn, 2000: 46–8, 160; cf. Collins, 2008: 52–9).

A further moral issue arises over the killing of prisoners and civilians. Most soldiers disapprove in principle, making a moral distinction between legitimate and illegitimate killing. This ‘maintained men’s sanity throughout the war and helped insulate them against agonizing guilt and numbing brutality’, says Bourke (1999: 229). But the distinction was often hard to make in practice. Should prisoners be killed if guarding them would take soldiers away from the fighting, or if they might escape and rejoin their army? Yes, said almost all soldiers. They even sympathized with the perpetrators of atrocities against civilians, aware that if they had been ordered to shoot, they might have complied. In both Korea and Vietnam distinguishing enemy soldiers from civilians was especially problematic. Often the enemy did not wear uniform, hid in refugee columns (as in Korea), or women and children hurled grenades at them (as in Vietnam). US orders in Korea were to fire as a last resort to halt refugees trying to surge through US roadblocks, although one officer said he could not obey this order, even though this might risk allowing enemy guerillas into his rear. At the other extreme the order was notoriously carried out at No Gun Ri in Korea by soldiers killing a large number of civilian refugees (the number is disputed; see Conway-Lanz, 2004). Even worse was the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, where infantry rampaged through a suspect village, killing over 350 people, overwhelmingly the elderly, women, children, and babies. Women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated. But most American soldiers and civilians alike believed that Lieutenant Calley, who led the massacre, should not be put on trial. Morality often sleeps in wartime.

There are no stories of US soldiers failing to fire in Afghanistan or Iraq – the problem is again the opposite, of trigger-happy soldiers, sometimes killing civilians by mistake, but occasionally in wild anger. The massacre of 24 civilians by US Marines at Haditha in 2005 was revealed by verbal and photographic evidence to result from indiscriminate fire from highly stressed marines on their third deployment to Iraq in 2½ years. During their previous deployment 30 members of their battalion had been killed at Falluja. This made their evil-doing more explicable although not excusable.

Over-firing has increased through time, as measured by the ratio of casualties inflicted to rounds fired. In the musket era the ratio of shots fired to casualties varied from one hit per 500 rounds fired to one hit per 2000 to 3000 rounds (Collins, 2008: 57–9). The new breech-loading rifles of the late 19th century increased the number of shots, but not the casualty rate, and this trend continued through the 20th-century revolution in fire-power. In Vietnam, Americans armed with automatic weapons inflicted one casualty per 50,000 bullets fired. That might seem extraordinary, but in Iraq and Afghanistan, US forces fired 250,000 shots for every enemy killed, according to the General Accounting Office (quoted by Buncombe, 2005)! Over-firing enables soldiers to manage their fear by spraying bullets almost continuously in all directions, while prudently retaining concealed positions. One can understand why.

Qualms too late

Nonetheless we do find significant moral qualms…after the war is over. Veterans have sometimes revealed this in their memoirs, but from Vietnam onwards came the medical diagnosis and legitimation of ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’ (PTSD), in which the soldier has terrible flashbacks and incapacitating anxiety caused by the trauma of battle. About 10 percent of US Afghan veterans and 20 percent who served in Iraq return home suffering from PTSD and a loathing of their war experiences so extreme as to induce repeated nightmares and inability to cope with civilian life. A smaller but significant number reveal moral qualms. Litz et al. (2009) call this ‘moral injury’, defined as ‘the lasting psychological, biological, spiritual, behavioral, and social impact of perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations’. They say that moral injury and PTSD are based on different emotions – in PTSD, the memory of fear and loathing; in moral injury, shame and guilt.

A veteran of the first Gulf war, Charles Sheehan-Miles, was one of the few who experienced moral qualms immediately after killing. He had fired at two Iraqi trucks and they caught fire. As one of the occupants ran ablaze from the truck, Miles fired and instantly killed him. His immediate response was ‘a sense of exhilaration, of joy’, but a split second later he felt ‘a tremendous feeling of guilt and remorse’. The image of the man on fire, running and dying, stayed with him ‘for years and years and years’. Later he went to the military chaplain and told him he might not be able to kill again. ‘It’s not that I couldn’t, it’s that I knew I could. Because it was…it was so easy to pull the trigger and kill people. […] I was afraid of what it would do to me. What kind of person I would become.’ His unit returned home amidst great celebration and he was awarded a medal, yet he felt, in his words, ‘probably the worst person alive’ (Skelly, 2006). Actually, he was one of the best.

Among Vietnam veterans, a helicopter machine gunner wept: ‘Sometimes I think that now I’m being paid back for all the men I killed and I killed a lot of them. If there is a judge, I figure I’m going to hell in a hand-basket’. In a study of 603 combat veterans seeking help at a Veterans PTSD clinic, an astonishing 91 percent reported witnessing or participating in wartime atrocities, 76 percent said they had themselves participated directly in killing civilians, and 31 percent said they had participated in the mutilation of bodies. Behavior they defined as immoral was coming back to haunt them (Dennis et al., 2016; cf. Marx et al., 2010). US soldiers interviewed by Finkel (2013) recounted throwing women across rooms, kicking elderly men down stairs, posing for photos leering at mutilated corpses or skulls. ‘We never had any remorse for anybody we saw dead. Because fuck it! I guess I’m trying to learn compassion all over again’, said another. A third recounted how the Iraqi police would bring them dead bodies.

They’d throw ‘em in the back of a truck…we’d all run down there and go take pictures. You know? And one guy his head was chopped off, his body was all bloated and shit, because it had been sitting in raw sewage, you know? And now I can’t get those images out of my mind. At the time, though, it was ‘Yeah, this is so cool. This is so cool.’ I mean, what were we thinking? Why did we even want to go look at that shit? You know?

But we have as yet no statistics as to the proportion of veterans who suffer moral injury, though 10 to 20 percent is a range sometimes hazarded. Nor do we know whether this range might have been typical of earlier wars. It is possible that contemporary psychology legitimizes such memories so that they well up to the surface rather than being repressed.

Except for Sheehan-Miles, their moral qualms had not come in battle, but in peacetime. The memory of their behavior tore at their psyches through a remorse which destroyed their mental well-being. The tragedy of moral qualms is in coming too late to ameliorate the carnage of war, disabling many of the perpetrators after killing or maiming the victim. The soldiers are to be pitied whether they live or die, forced to fight by the coercive pressures of drilling, discipline, the fear of incurring the contempt of one’s comrades, and the lethality of the enemy’s fire.

Conclusion

Randall Collins identifies the demoralizing and disorganizing effect of fear in battle. Yet there is almost no evidence to support the popular view he shares that moral qualms have prevented many modern soldiers or airmen from shooting or killing. Soldiers rarely do more than hesitate momentarily before their first killing. After that, killing eases, restricted only by the fears induced by prolonged battles – except in post-war memories. Unfortunately, human beings are not inherently pacific, not even those from a fairly pacific civilian society like ours. Men and probably women too can kill easily if ordered to by effective coercive authority, especially if the enemy is shooting at them. Modern callous killing, at a distance, is even easier. I am aware that this is an extremely grim conclusion, but at least it is balanced by the rarity of ‘real killers’ – men and women who enjoy and are excited by killing. But as Malešević (2017) observes, all this is not a question of human nature but of coercive military organizations, one’s own and the enemy’s. Coercion plus self-defense drives out conscience.