The Psychohistory of Atrocity in Guerilla and Civil Wars

In the midst of the carnage of World War I, Freud declared: “If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death” (Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” Standard Edition, XIV [London: Hogarth Press, 1915], p. 300). The end of life comes in a variety of ways. Some expire asleep in their beds, others are dismembered in battle. The aspect of death this essay will explore is atrocity in war. Understanding combat in an extreme form may reveal something about the place of death in life. Atrocities are deadly violence inflicted in wartime on civilians, prisoners or others perceived as the enemy. As a Vietnam veteran and historian these are issues

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of vital concern to me.

The problem of wartime atrocity goes beyond the rage filled action of soldiers in the field. More civilian casualties are produced by policies originating with presidents and generals than by outbursts of privates and lieutenants. This paper will discuss the psychology of war as experienced by ground soldiers in a guerilla conflict in Vietnam and a civil war in Iraq; in another paper I will examine leaders approving policies that target civilians.

Atrocities in combat are generally group activities that usually follow a military command. To explain the brutal wasting of non-combatants it helps to comprehend the trauma of a combat zone, the military command structure, the brotherhood of soldiers, and the psychology of separation, grief and revenge.

In conventional warfare, there is often a sharp distinction between enemy and friendly territory. Not so in many guerilla and civil conflicts. Those who present themselves as an ally often turn out to be the enemy. South Vietnamese urchins might get next to an American soldier ask for candy; then suddenly pull the pin on the soldier’s grenade to blow him up. The residents of a Vietnamese village might be hospitable to Americans in the daylight, and attack them when darkness falls. Stepping on a land mine or booby trap in the jungle could terminate life in a flash. “Only three to four percent of American casualties in World War II and Korea,” writes psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, “were from booby traps, while 11 percent of the deaths and 17 percent of the injuries in Vietnam were from these lowest-echelon attacks of surprise and deception” (Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character [NY: Scribner, 1994], p. 34).

With no safe haven, endangerment for combat soldiers is ever present, and life is lived on the edge. In these dire circumstances, military men traditionally bond with the members of their unit in symbiotic interdependency. As noted by Jonathan Shay, “Combat calls forth a passion of care among men who fight beside each other that is comparable to the earliest and most deeply felt family relationships” (p. 39). “It’s a closeness you never had before,” says one Vietnam veteran to Shay. “It’s closer than your mother and father…. We needed each other to survive” (p. 40). Another Vietnam veteran wrote: “there’s a love relationship that is nurtured in combat” to “the man next to you” for you depend “on him for…your life, and if he lets you down you’re either maimed or killed….this bond is stronger than almost anything, with the exception of parent and child” (quoted in Dave Grossman, On Killing [NY: Little, Brown and Company, 1996], p. 90).

This group bonding is reminiscent of the infant’s attachment to the mother. Newborns often depend on their mother for survival; separation from mother arouses, as Bowlby reminds us, anxiety and anger; loss of the mother brings sadness and depression (John Bowlby, Attachment; Separation: Anxiety and An–

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ger; Loss: Sadness and Depression [NY: Basic Books, 1969, 1973, 1980]). “Across all human cultures and even some primate species,” psychologist Jeffrey Simpson writes, “young and vulnerable infants” immediately after separation from the mother “often protest vehemently, crying, screaming and throwing temper tantrums as they search for their caregivers” (Jeffrey Simpson, “Attachment Theory in Modern Evolutionary Perspective,” in Jude Cassidy and Phillip Shaver, eds., Handbook of Attachment [NY: The Guilford Press, 1999], p. 115). Separation can bring feelings of helplessness and endangerment to infants, so they seek reunion with their mother.

Similarly, many soldiers cling to each other for emotional sustenance especially after witnessing the violent death of their comrades. Vietnam veteran R. B. Anderson writes of “the deep fraternity of the brotherhood of war….and the terrible bitterness of losing a friend who is closer to you than your own family” (quoted in Grossman, On Killing, p. 236). In a World War II survey of American enlisted soldiers in the Pacific, when the going got tough 61 percent kept going because they did not want to let their mates down, compared to 38 percent motivated by hatred of the enemy (Cited in Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing [NY: Basic Books, 1999], p. 146).

The grief and anger that follows the death of a squad member is often what motivates killing in war. “Most men,” writes Joanna Bourke, “only became willing to take another human life after seeing their wartime companions slaughtered” (p. 215). A Marine veteran of Vietnam told Jonathan Shay, “EVERY TIME YOU LOST A FRIEND IT SEEMED LIKE PART OF YOU WAS GONE.” To get even he began to kill and “couldn’t get enough. For every one that I killed I felt better. Made some of the hurt went away” (Quoted in Shay, Achilles, p. 78). Bourke writes that the “slaughter of comrades” is “rendered significant” by retaliating against the enemy. “In this way, grief was converted into rage” (pp. 215-216). There can be fury that the condition of being human too often includes loss and death of loved ones. Sometimes the rage is directed at specific enemies and at other times civilian substitutes would satisfy the need for revenge. In civilian life, rage filled violent responses to grief are usually socially prohibited. In combat, such actions are often encouraged and rewarded. War brings with it the “luxuriant release of explosive hatred” (Randolph Bourne, “Twilight of Idols,” in The Radical Will [NY: Urizen Books, 1917], p. 337).

Connectedness to others, to existence, to an inner core of self sustains us. Separation, fear of loss and death may unsettle and even undermine us; particularly when in combat death appears with a brutal gruesomeness. The cords that give humans sustenance can be frayed. There is no adequate preparation for this sudden encounter with violent mortality. The grief, disillusionment and fury that may result from these emotionally wrenching losses may push some to retaliatory rages of killing. For some, these rampages are liberating, it gives them the ultimate power over others, that of life and death. For others, the killing haunts them; it destroys the moral order, the sense of self-validity.

Atrocities are one sign of the moral disorder occurring in the midst of combat. “In one study of Vietnam veterans,” Judith Lewis Herman reports, “about 20 percent of the men admitted to having witnessed atrocities during their tour of duty in Vietnam, and another nine percent acknowledged personally

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committing atrocities” (Trauma and Recovery [NY: Basic Books, 1992], p. 54). A Defense Department task force from the 1970s, the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group, confirmed 320 atrocities committed by American soldiers on ordinary Vietnamese, including seven massacres where at least 137 civilians were killed. There were hundreds of other attacks on Vietnamese in their homes or in rice paddies (Nick Turse and Deborah Nelson, “Civilian Killings Went Unpunished,” Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2006). What could prompt the killing of innocent non-combatants? The anger following grief is a pre-condition for more organized slaughter. To get from fury to mass killing requires an additional sanction. That sanction comes from an authority, a superego figure who implicitly says murder of non-combatants is not only justified, but there is a direct order to waste (kill) these people.

The military is a hierarchical order which stresses the privileges of command and the obedience of underlings to their superiors. In the military, soldiers are trained to obey whatever commands are given to them by their superiors and be fearful of the retaliation that can follow disobedience. Within the umbrella of the military, and the extreme stress of warfare, for some the sanction of a direct order enables them to act out their outrage on others, as during the Vietnam War. Others with different ego ideals resist directives of commanders.

At My Lai in Vietnam on March 16, 1968, 502 non-combatant Vietnamese, many women and children, were massacred by American soldiers. A directive to kill these Vietnamese may or may not have been given by the company captain, but the killings were definitely ordered by Charlie Company platoon leader Lieutenant William Calley and committed by him and his men. In the three months prior to the massacre, Charlie Company had lost 25 percent of their men to sniper fire, mines and booby traps (Bourke, History, p. 192). On February 25, 1968, six men from Charlie Company were killed in a minefield. One of the company’s men, Herbert Carter, told Seymour Hersh: “The VC were blowing us up with mines – sending little kids with grenades. It was getting ridiculous” (Seymour Hersh, My Lai 4 [NY: Random House, 1970], p. 34). As with most units, the loss of their buddies was hard. “Charlie Company…depended on each other for their lives. A strong sense of comradeship grew up and later a number of them said the company was like a family” (Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999], p. 59). The death of their comrades and orders from their commander justified indiscriminately striking out at non-combatants. Charlie Company member, James Bergthold, according to Hersh, “directed his anger at the Vietnamese: ‘Why shouldn’t I? They were the enemy’” (Hersh, My Lai 4, p. 25). Civilians killed were often counted as enemy kills. The saying among American soldiers in the region, Hersh says, was “Anything that’s dead and isn’t white is a VC” (p. 13). This familiar projection of enemy status onto the South Vietnamese provided an outlet for their discontent.

Some of Charlie Company wanted to retaliate for the damage done to them. Sergeant Gregory Olson of Charlie Company said: “the attitude of all the men, the majority, I would say was a revengeful attitude, they all felt because we lost a number of buddies prior to My Lai. Everybody was ‘psyched up’” (In Bourke, History, p. 192). Not surprisingly even prior to March 16^th, this rage was taken out on some Vietnamese civilians. Calley himself killed at least one Vietnamese old man in cold blood. According to Charlie Company member, Michael Bernhardt, a few soldiers came across a woman working in a field in a friendly area and “they raped her and killed her…I guess they killed her baby, too.” One soldier photographed the rape and murders while they were happening (Hersh, My Lai 4, pp. 31-35). Standards were loose; and human life cheap.

After coming into the village on the morning of the 16th, a verbal directive came from Calley for the villagers to be killed, even though there was no sign they were the enemy. Village residents were pushed into a ditch, where many were slaughtered. They enacted their fury on the women and children of this little Vietnamese village. “And revenge,” Jonathan Glover writes, “clearly coloured the psychology of the soldiers as they killed” (Humanity, p. 61). One soldier said: “you have a need to explode” (p. 61). There were shouts during the massacre of “VC bastards, you dirty VC bastards, That’s for Bill Weber,” and “Cry, you dirty gook bastards, cry like you made us cry” (Robert Jay Lifton, Home From the War [NY: Simon and Schuster, 1973], p. 53). Varnardo Simpson admitted to murdering twenty-five people at My Lai. This went, he said, from “shooting them, to cutting their throats, scalping them, to cutting off their hands and cutting out their tongue” (Glover,

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Humanity, p. 61). Twenty Vietnamese girls and women were raped in My Lai that day; nineteen of those raped were either shot or died from their wounds (James Olson and Randy Roberts, My Lai: A Brief History With Documents [Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 1998], pp. 99-102).

Not all the members of Charlie Company were eager participants in the My Lai massacre. Even though all had endured the deaths and injuries to their fellow soldiers for some neither obedience nor rage led to the desire to kill innocent civilians. Calley had specifically ordered a reluctant enlisted man in his unit, Paul Meadlo, to kill some of the villagers. When Meadlo did not, Calley returned and ordered him again to waste them. Meadlo carried out the directive, but later in the day was observed in tears, upset that he was forced to kill innocent people. Not long afterwards Meadlo said to Calley: “God will punish you for what you made me do” (Hersh, My Lai 4, p. 84). Despite the horrors they endure, some soldiers retain enough of their own values to be troubled by brutality, resist it, find ways to get around the order, and even try to stop the killing. One enlisted man resisted the order by shooting animals. Others, according to their own account, just ignored the order. Harry Stanley later said: “ordering me to shoot down innocent people, that’s not an order, that’s craziness to me….I don’t feel like I have to obey that” (In Bourke, History p. 197). Then there was the 25 year old helicopter pilot, Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, who was not under Calley’s command. The killings at My Lai reminded him of Nazi exterminations. He tried to stop the killing, and reported the massacre at My Lai to his commanding officer. Not surprisingly, little came of Thompson’s attempt to inform the proper authorities of a war crime. It took much effort by others, including the media, before this massacre was dealt with by the military and came before the public.

Allegations of atrocities are present in many wars, including America’s current engagement in the Persian Gulf. There are some parallels between the Vietnamese guerilla war and the civil war in Iraq. In Vietnam some soldiers acknowledged their use of excessive force against civilians. A 2006 report by the Mental Health Advisory Team of American soldiers in Iraq showed that 10 percent of those surveyed admitted to mistreating noncombatants. In Iraq 62 percent of soldiers and 66 percent of Marines knew someone seriously injured or killed or a member of their unit had become a casualty. Army Major General Gale Pollock said that the troops in Iraq saw their friends killed and injured and anger is a normal reaction. The report found that more than one third of all soldiers and Marines approved torture to save lives of the American military. Less than fifty percent of these troops would report someone on their team for behaving unethically (Sara Wood, “Defense Department Releases Findings of Mental Health Assessment,” Armed Forces Press Service, May 4, 2007, http://www.newsbull.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=44818).

In this familiar setting, where anger and rage follow the death of a unit member, some soldiers and there superiors may not be able to control their desire to retaliate. On the morning of November 19, 2005, in the Iraqi town of Haditha a roadside bomb killed a young American marine, Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas of Kilo Company, 3^rd Battalion, 1^st Marine Regiment. The death of a member of a combat unit can awaken the dread and fury an infant feels when separated from mother. According to a Washington Post report, after a period of time one of the Marines took charge and he directed others into a house fifty yards away from the blast, again the role of a leader in these aggressive actions are crucial. Over the next several hours, U.S. Marines from Kilo Company went into three homes killing civilian inhabitants and also shot four Iraqi college students in a taxi (Ellen Knickmeyer, “In Haditha, Memories of a Massacre,” Washington Post, May 27, 2006, p. A01).

A total of twenty-four Iraqi civilians were killed, about ten of whom were children. Tim McGirk of Time magazine reports that eyewitnesses accused the Marines of a going on a rampage, and human rights activists says that if the accusations are true this would be “the worst case of deliberate killing of Iraqi civilians by U.S. service members since the war began” (“Collateral Damage or Civilian Massacre in Haditha?” Time, March 19, 2006). Carolyn Marshall reports that Haditha “has conjured disturbing memories of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam for former marines” (“On a Marine Base, Disbelief Over Charges,” New York Times, May 30, 2006.)

The next day, a Marine communiqué reported the Iraqis at Haditha were killed by shrapnel from a roadside bomb and an exchange of gunfire. A physi-

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cian director of the Haditha hospital where the bodies were dropped off contested this. He told Time: “it was obvious…there were no organs slashed by shrapnel….Most of the victims were shot in the chest and head—from close range” (McGirk, “Collateral Damage,”). According to his death certificate as reported in the Washington Post, a seventy-six year old Iraqi man “took nine rounds in the chest and abdomen, leaving his intestines spilling out of the exit wounds in his back” (Knickmeyer, “In Haditha”).

Through attorneys, the Marines involved claim they followed the rules of combat. They said they received gunfire from a house, went in, noticed people gathered in a room, kicked in the door, dropped a fragmentation grenade, followed by gunfire, killing several people (Josh White, “Wuterich Says Rules Followed in Haditha,” Hartford Courant, June 11, 2006, p. A13). In the house were an elderly couple, four middle aged adults, four children and no weapons. At best, it can be said, feeling attacked, these Marines shot first without asking questions. From other accounts, the victims had beseeched the marines not to kill them, and were shot at close range. Whether Haditha was an atrocity or Marines taking no chances, Iraqi civilians (including many women and children) were killed.

John Pike, director of Global.security.org told the Associated Press: “Anybody who contemplates a decision to use force, anybody who contemplates putting boots on the ground has to understand that part of what they’re assuming responsibility for is stressed-out soldiers [who] are going to massacre civilians. It just comes with the territory” (Robert Tanner, “Experts: Troop Allegations Signal a Critical New Point in Iraq War,” Hartford Courant, June 24, 2006, p. A6). This so-called collateral damage of civilian deaths is exacerbated in guerilla warfare where those attacking the armed forces easily blend in with the civilian population. But the distinction between civilians and the military has been eroded in the age of total war. Writing on a related subject, Herbert Kelman observed: “The use of torture in war situations – often directed at civilians…has become more probable as war has moved from the classical clash between organized armed forces to a clash between whole populations, in which civilian groups are often specifically targeted” (Herbert Kelman, “The Policy Context of Torture: A Social Psychological Analysis” in Richard Falk, Irene Gendzier, and Robert Jay Lifton, eds., Crimes of War: Iraq [NY: Nation Books, 2006], p. 374).

In the age of total war, there are both accords designed to keep war within bounds and wartime practices that make combat more terrifying than before. What distinguishes the rage of ground soldiers who rape and murder a woman working in a field from the fire bombing of Dresden? In “the twentieth century,” writes social psychologist James Waller, “well over a 100 million persons…met a violent death at the hands of their fellow human beings.” In the “four decades after the end of World War II,” there were “150 wars and only 26 days of world peace” (James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing [NY: Oxford University Press, 2002], p. x). As humans become more technologically advanced, we more frequently find organized ways of blowing each other to bits. We dread and embrace death. Preparing for death may no longer be the sole prescription for enduring life, recognizing death’s hold on humanity may be an important element in understanding civilization.

Whether it is the horror of ground combat where soldiers act out primal emotions or political leaders targeting civilians, modern war is often fatal for non-combatants. Atrocities such as My Lai and ethnic cleansing of Bosnia reveal the dark side of the human experience. What are we to learn from war that teaches us about enduring life? In Akira Kurosawa’s bloody film masterpiece, Ran, there is a powerful, if one sided answer: “human beings…believe their survival depends on killing others….Human beings seek sorrow, not happiness, and prefer suffering to peace….people are fighting for sorrow and suffering, reveling in murder and bloodshed” (Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Ide Masato, Ran [Boston: Shambala, 1986], p. 99). Despite the extraordinary inventiveness of humanity, dread and anxiety, fear and trembling, sadism and masochism intermix in our loftiest and lowest endeavors, both promoting discovery and perpetuating destruction. The rage present in humans since infancy finds an authorized outlet in the brutality of combat. John Keegan reminds us: “All civilizations owe their origin to the warrior;” and “the facts of war….burn with the heat of the fires of hell” (Keegan, Warfare, pp. xvi, 6). Humans too often seek sorrow, revel in bloodshed, celebrate combat, and murder others in protest at the losses and

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grief inherent in the human condition.

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