This past summer, I culminated my ROTC training at Dartmouth by completing Advanced Camp. This is really just a five-week boot camp for college kids where military skills are evaluated. The last two weeks of camp were spent in the woods of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington conducting infantry training exercises.
The kick-off for this training was a speech by Lt. Colonel David Grossman of Arkansas. He was one of the most animated, educated and effective speakers I have ever heard. By the end of the speech, we really were ready to go out and fight. I was so impressed by the speech, that when I heard Lt. Colonel Grossman was an award-winning author, I went and bought his book. The book is "On Killing," an account of the psychological cost of killing and people's inclination to do so.
According to studies done by the U.S. military, only 15 to 20 percent of all infantry combatants in World War II would fire their rifles during battle. Other studies support that this firing percentage was similar for riflemen throughout history. Most casualties of war result from bombings, artillery and other indirect fire. What this suggests is that when we are close enough to watch another human crumple and die as we unleash deadly force, we will choose not to kill.
This response seems to be one that is inherent in all but the two percent of human beings who are sociopathic and lack an internal restraint against killing a member of their own species. Those who are not sociopathic and do kill often suffer psychological trauma. When talking to veterans, the one thing they often have most trouble speaking of is killing. Decades after killing, they are still haunted by the event.
After the studies on firing rates of infantry soldiers in World War II, the army began to look at ways to change this figure. It stands to reason that if a higher percentage of soldiers are firing, they could gain control of a battlefield more easily. The idea was to teach soldiers to fire instinctively, to retrain their minds so that they would not consider their enemies people, but targets. The change in training techniques was very successful. By the Vietnam War, 95 percent of participants fired in an average battle.
How was this accomplished? First, paper targets for firing practice were replaced by more realistic metal outlines of human figures that fall over when you shoot them. During training, firers are only given a few seconds to acquire the target and shoot, so it becomes a reflex-action. Another major part of the new training was dehumanizing the enemy and desensitizing soldiers to violence. Along with other things, this is accomplished with marching cadences and realistic training scenarios using blanks and simulated casualties.
My own training last summer used all these techniques. We fired at the human-shaped targets, we did infantry training using M-16s loaded with blanks and were yelled at if we didn't fire and we sang cadences such as this: "I see an Iraqi; I cut off his head/I hold it up and wonder why/Freedom calls, men must die."
The controversial portion of the book "On Killing" deals with what these findings mean to society. Lt. Colonel Grossman states that the popular forms of media and multimedia such as movies, television, music and video games have the same effect on the average American citizen as new training techniques have had on soldiers. Violent crime has increased dramatically in the United States over the past 50 years since these media were introduced. This is a portion of the argument in "On Killing" as to why this correlation exists: Violent images and music desensitize the viewer/listener over time. Video games like the old Hogan's Alley for Nintendo accomplish the same thing as shooting human shaped targets with a rifle. Other games such as Mortal Kombat and Tekken not only have the player kill their opponent, but it is done in horrific styles such as by pulling the opponent's spine out.
There is also the group validation of violence. If we close our eyes during a horror film, our friends call us wimps. When a bad guy is killed with extreme prejudice by a vigilante hero in an action movie, the audience claps approval. The violence is enjoyed, and others are encouraged to enjoy it. Slowly, in the reverse process of what occurs in the movie Clockwork Orange, we are desensitized to violence.
Obviously, Lt. Colonel Grossman has a very controversial thesis, and one with which I'm sure many readers do not agree. It does raise interesting questions about our society's values, however. In "Pulp Fiction," when John Travolta's character accidentally shot another character in the face and yelled "I shot Marvin's head off!" everyone in the theater laughed.
When I watched "Face/Off" last term, and a character's body was flying through the air after being hit by a shotgun blast, the audience laughed and cheered. The most disturbing thing to me was that I was laughing with them and didn't quite know why.
Even if a causal relationship between media violence and criminal violence has not yet been made, I feel it is a good idea to keep stock of what I am being taught when I witness the blood and gore of an action movie. Perhaps the rest of our society should do so as well.