Who could do such a thing?

Tragic and violent events, and there follow the inevitable questions, from opposite ends of the world … Who could do such a thing?

In southern Kandahar province in Afghanistan, following the massacre of sixteen villagers allegedly by a US soldier, the bodies of dead children are taken in a truck to the NATO military base down the road, and a mother, Gul Bashra, shows reporters the body of her two-year-old who was among those gunned down. She asks: “Was this child a Taliban?”

Samad Khan, a farmer from Balandi village, lost his entire family, eleven victims including women and children. "This is an anti-human and anti-Islamic act," Khan is reported as saying: "Nobody is allowed in any religion in the world to kill children and women." (Global News, March 11)

            Now, in the US, forty-four years after the atrocity at My Lai, the Vietnamese village where up to some 500 women and children were slaughtered by US units, the debate centres again on the mental stress suffered by young men sent into chaotic combat environments, where at times the rule of “free fire zone” operates. Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is invoked here as the explanation of euphemistically termed “out of character” behaviour.

The Independent’s Robert Fisk, always challenging, hurls into the fray: “I'm getting a bit tired of the ‘deranged’ soldier story.” (March 17) He quotes “a remarkable and highly significant statement” from the US army's top commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, exactly 22 days before. Allen told his men that “now is not the time for revenge” for the deaths of two US soldiers killed in the riots provoked by the Koran burning incident in February. They should, he said, "resist whatever urge they might have to strike back."

Fisk concludes that the general knew only too well the mood of his men following their comrades’ deaths. Indeed, Charlie Company had had similar losses, five soldiers killed by booby traps, previous to the infamous slaughter at My Lai on March 16, 1968.

Meanwhile, in Paris, the BBC correspondent Hugh Schofield asks, of this week’s murder of three children and an adult at a Jewish School in Toulouse: “…what prompts a man to turn a .45 pistol on a three-year-old? Or to pursue an eight-year-old girl into a schoolyard, and put a bullet in her head?” A “deranged far-rightwinger”? he speculates.

Witnesses of the event commented that the aggressor was of athletic build and movement, and in his pursuit of the little girl, when his firearm jammed, he took out another gun and shot her in cold blood.

As we now know, the same gun was used in other fatal attacks, only days before, two of the three victims being soldiers in uniform. According to latest reports, the suspected attacker has been identified as of Algerian origin, with some criminal history of violence, and claims to be a mujahideen acting to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children. He clearly has some background in weapons training and was linked to a group recently banned in France for its “armed struggle” internet messages, a group which has openly sought to recruit “soldiers” familiar with martial arts and rapid response. Cold blooded revenge here seems  to be the dominant motive. “Deranged”? Or just dedicated and ruthlessly efficient?

There is something missing. In the Afghan case, no one is asking the bigger question: Who could do such a thing? Fisk is right: the real issue is not the “madness” of a rogue soldier. If that were so, he points out, the mad soldier would be killing his own side, not going out at night to a nearby Afghan village. Nor is the event in Kandahar province simply a matter of revenge for the loss of comrades in arms. Revenge can take many forms without going down the path of mass murder.

The answer we are evading is that soldiers could do such a thing, precisely because soldiers are trained to kill.

The expert in this field of study, strikingly called “killology”, is Lt Col David Grossman, a US army psychologist whose books on the subject are supposed to be required reading by the American military.

In an interview, Grossman plays down the significance of post traumatic stress disorder which he says is a condition from which the sufferer can recover with suitable treatment. At the same time, he points out that a high proportion of combat soldiers suffer from its effects to some degree. So we may look upon PTSD as an occupational hazard for the military. It is not a coverall explanation for all excesses of behaviour.

Where Grossman puts the emphasis is on the training that soldiers undergo prior to combat, the very training that overrides their civilian norms and inhibitions for the military requirement of killing. He outlines the several stages that recruits are taken through in order to be able to kill on demand. These include brutalisation, desensitisation, different kinds of emotional and reflex conditioning, and adopting aggressive role models to imitate.

            Without this programme of psychological transformation, young men from normal civilian backgrounds would be unable to take the lives of others, except perhaps in emergencies of self-preservation.

            In an alarming extension of his ideas, Grossman points out that the very same programming is built into aggressive video games which inure youngsters to any compunction about aggressive acts and “kills”.

            What we must conclude is that, where such training is effective, homicidal acts  -- what we now call “war crimes” -- can potentially be carried out regardless of who the victims may be. Women? Children? No matter. We dehumanise in order to "take out", as the phrase goes, whether as US "kill teams" in Afghanistan, or as British soldiers using "gollies" for target practice in Aden. We micturate on the bodies of the dead since we no longer have any human connection with them as people.  So now, perhaps, we can answer the question, Who could do such a thing?

The answer was all too plain to the mother of a US soldier accused of killing civilians at My Lai, who is said to have remarked: "I sent them a good boy, and they made him a murderer."

CJM

March 2012