War Psychiatry and Iraq Atrocities: How Killing Becomes a Reflex
By Penny Coleman
AlterNet
August 22, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/60297/
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 "*****," "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?"
Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life after
coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,
Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006.
http://www.alternet.org/story/60297/
--
The sanity of (Adolf) Eichman is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense
of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capicity to love and
understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve
it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us
that it is precisely the *sane* ones who are the most dangerous.
Raids on the Unspeakable
Thomas Merton
He was found guilty on all counts, sentenced to death and hanged at Ramleh
Prison, May 31, 1962.
A fellow Nazi reported Eichmann once said "he would leap laughing into the
grave because the feeling that he had five million people on his conscience
would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction."
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/biographies/eichmann.htm
--
Iraq war was illegal and breached UN charter, says Annan
Ewen MacAskill and Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday September 16, 2004
The Guardian
The United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, declared explicitly for
the first time last night that the US-led war on Iraq was illegal.
Mr Annan said that the invasion was not sanctioned by the UN security
council or in accordance with the UN's founding charter. In an interview
with the BBC World Service broadcast last night, he was asked outright if
the war was illegal. He replied: "Yes, if you wish."
-cont.-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1305709,00.html
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