[...]
Carl still marvels at the lethality of ["
the 3rd Infantry Division’s 3rd Brigade, a mechanized unit known as"] the Sledgehammers. I
raqi soldiers, believing they were concealed by darkness or smoke, would expose themselves to the Bradley’s thermal sights and the devastating rapid fire of its twenty-five-millimetre cannon. Carl and his squad would tumble out the back of the Bradley and attack Iraqi soldiers who had survived. “We killed a lot of people,” he said as we ate. Later, Carl and his men had to establish roadblocks, which was notoriously dangerous duty. “We started out being nice,” Carl said. “We had little talking cards to help us communicate. We’d put up signs in Arabic saying ‘Stop.’ We’d say, ‘Ishta, ishta,’ which means ‘Go away.’ ” But people would approach with white flags in their hands and then whip out AK-47s or rocket-propelled grenades. So Carl’s group adopted a play-it-safe policy: if a driver ignored the signs and the warnings and came within thirty metres of a roadblock, the Americans opened fire. “That’s why nobody in our whole company got killed,” he said. Debbie stopped eating and stared into her food. “You’re not supposed to fire warning shots, but we did,” Carl said. “And still some people wouldn’t stop.” He went on, “A couple of times—more than a couple—it was women and children in the car. I don’t know why they didn’t stop.”
Carl’s squad didn’t tow away the cars containing dead people. “You can’t go near it,” he said. “It might be full of explosives. You just leave it.” He and his men would remain at their posts alongside the carnage. “Nothing else you can do,” he said.
[...]
Since Vietnam, the Army has not had to dwell on how soldiers are affected by the killing they do. The first Gulf War was very short, and the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo were largely fought from long range, with airpower and artillery, which rendered the killing abstract. In the current Iraq war, though, soldiers are killing with small arms on battlefields the length of a city block. Exactly how many Iraqis American forces have killed is not known—as General Tommy Franks said, “We don’t do body counts”—but everyone agrees that the numbers are substantial. Major Peter Kilner, a former West Point philosophy instructor who went to Iraq last year as part of a team writing the official history of the war, believes that most infantrymen there have “looked down the barrel and shot at people, and many have killed.”
American firepower is overwhelming, Kilner said. He ran into a former student in Iraq who told him, “There’s just too much killing. They shoot, we return fire, and they’re all dead.” Even some of the most grievously wounded Iraq-war veterans seem more disturbed by the killing they did than they are by their own injuries. I spent a week in December among amputees at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington, D.C., and was struck by how easily they could tell the stories of the horrible things that had happened to them. They could talk about having their arms or legs blown off in vivid detail, and even joke about it, but, as soon as the subject changed to the killing they’d done, a pall would settle over them.
[...]
A regular soldier can serve years in the Army and hardly ever hear the word “kill” outside bayonet practice, a vestigial relic of the days before the use of assault rifles. (No American soldier has participated in an organized bayonet charge since the Korean War.) Army manuals and drill sergeants speak of “suppressing enemy fire,” “engaging targets,” and “attritting” the enemy.
“We attempt to instill reaction,” said Captain Tim Dunnigan, who trains infantry in the woods of Fort Benning, Georgia. “Hear a pop, hit the ground, return fire. Act instinctually.” Captain Jason Kostal, a twenty-eight-year-old former commander at Fort Benning’s sniper school, says that, even in a unit whose motto is “One Shot One Kill,” explicit discussion of the subject is avoided. “We don’t talk about ‘Engage this person,’ ‘Engage this guy.’ It’s always ‘Engage that target,’ ” he said. “You’re not thinking, I wonder if that guy has three kids.”
In his West Point classes, Peter Kilner found what he called “an institutional resistance” to the topic. “I don’t think people saw it as a great problem, as I do, so it hasn’t been integrated into the curriculum,” he said.
When “60 Minutes” approached Kilner in 2002, shortly before the invasion of Iraq, he recalled an Army public-affairs officer telling him, “On the verge of war, we don’t need to be talking about this upsetting thing.” Colonel Thomas Burke, the director of mental-health policy for the Defense Department, told me that young soldiers shouldn’t be burdened with moral questions during training. As far as killing is concerned, he said, “Trying to get too deeply into it, I don’t know how much good it would do.”
Kilner argues that killing in war is morally justifiable, and that
military leaders should impress this justification on their soldiers. This may help protect their long-term mental health, and
it also readies them for combat. Without a good grasp of why they are being asked to kill, he says, many soldiers may hesitate in dangerous and ambiguous circumstances. Kilner, who operates a Web site for Army captains, told me about a tank commander in Iraq who ordered his men to fire on an oncoming car, only to have the gunner and the loader freeze up. “The loader responded in a slow, numbed voice, ‘You’re, you’re killing people. And it doesn’t even seem to bother you,’ ” the captain said. Soldiers who are morally prepared to accept the justification for killing in war “fight with the assurance of moral rightness,” Kilner says.
[...]
To win wars, the Army must turn soldiers, momentarily, into reflexive, robotic killers. But, as a volunteer force dependent on the good will of the public, it cannot send home generation after generation of combat-traumatized veterans. Commanders who are trying to win battles and keep their men alive feel that they can’t afford to worry about a soldier’s long-term mental health
. “I want that reflexive killing,” a captain wrote to Kilner. “That serves me better in combat, but am I responsible for them after the fact?” As for the Army’s psychiatric corps, it has a contradictory mission. During the Second World War, the American military lost more front-line soldiers to psychological collapse than to death by enemy fire. Since Korea, every Army division (of about three thousand soldiers) has been assigned nine combat-stress experts, six of whom are enlisted personnel and three of whom are officers. A soldier troubled by the killing he has done—or by anything else—can, theoretically, ask to see a psychologist. But almost half of the American soldiers in Iraq who have screened positive for mental-health problems tell the Army that they’re rarely given the time to do so, and more than half say that they fear the stigma. Last year, an Army staff sergeant, disturbed by the sight of an Iraqi’s mutilated body, confided his concern to his unit’s combat-stress officer and, according to the Army, asked to be sent back to the United States. He was charged with cowardly conduct. (The charge was subsequently reduced to dereliction of duty and ultimately dismissed.) Although this was an extremely unusual case,
military psychiatrists agree that their first job is to keep soldiers fighting. Even when a soldier is on the verge of cracking up, “if he’s more of a benefit to the unit than a detriment,” the Defense Department psychiatrist Thomas Burke told me, an Army shrink’s job is to “get him back to duty.”
[...]
Holloway, who as an Army psychiatrist repeatedly argued against denying the psychological impact of killing, can understand the Army’s wariness.
“As soon as we ask the question of how killing affects soldiers, we acknowledge we’re causing harm, and that raises the question of whether the good we’re accomplishing is worth the harm we’re causing,” he said. The Army, Holloway said, is reluctant to label any of its heroes as psychological casualties. The military’s concern, he said, is that “if we get into this business of talking about killing people, we’re going to pathologize an absolutely necessary experience.”
Only one job in the Army doesn’t require putting the mission first: chaplains aren’t even addressed by rank, only as “chaplain.” They are already ordained clergy when they enter military service; the Chaplain Center and School, at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, teaches no theology. Chaplains respond to soldiers coping with the aftermath of combat according to the denomination of the chaplain and the religion of the soldier. Chaplain Kenneth Bush, a Presbyterian minister and a lieutenant colonel who is the school’s senior training developer, met me in his office wearing a black cross sewn to the collar of his camouflage fatigues. “As a Christian, I’d tell soldiers that their feelings are normal and help them understand the context in which killing takes place in war,” he said. “If a soldier is going to war, it’s because he raised his right hand and swore to defend the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. It’s not like he’s committing murder.” When I mentioned the Ten Commandments, Chaplain Bush was quick to respond. “The word in the original Hebrew is ratzach, which the King James Bible, written in 1611, translates as ‘kill’—as in ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ ” he said. “But the later, more accurate translations translate that word as ‘murder,’ making the commandment ‘Thou shalt not commit murder.’ The Old Testament is full of killing and war.”
[...]
After Carl and Debbie Cranston told me about Carl’s experiences in Iraq, we paid our check at Red Lobster and went back to their house, in a married-sergeants’ compound at Fort Benning. Their two boys—seven-year-old Anthony and two-year-old Andrew—were brought in from a neighbor’s house. Carl’s mother, Geraldine, who lives with the couple, was just getting home from her job at an Army and Air Force Exchange Service convenience store, a kind of mini-PX on the base, and was still in her red-white-and-blue uniform. Carl asked if I’d ever seen “Band of Brothers,” and his mother gave a sigh that sounded like a locomotive clearing its brakes.
“Band of Brothers” is a ten-part HBO series that follows a company of Second World War paratroopers through the European theatre; Geraldine said that Carl has watched it “millions” of times. Carl put on the episode about D Day, and, as Andrew climbed around on his daddy and Anthony dozed on the carpet, men on the screen were falling from the sky in flames, spewing blood from severed arteries, tommy-gunning enemy prisoners to death. “I’m surprised he can watch this,” Geraldine said, bustling back and forth. As we watched, I asked Carl if he’d been given any counselling since being in combat; he said no. Upon leaving Iraq, his unit was sent to a camp in the Kuwaiti desert to rest for a few days, but there was nothing to do but lie in hot, sandy tents and fill out DD-2796 forms.
We watched two episodes of “Band of Brothers,” and when I rose to go
Debbie told me how the Army had prepared her for Carl’s return. “When he was coming home, the Army gave us little cards that said things like ‘Watch for psychotic episodes’ and ‘Is he drinking too much?’ ” she said. “A lot of wives said it was a joke. They had a lady come from the psych ward, who said—and I’m serious—‘Don’t call us unless your husband is waking you up in the middle of the night with a knife at your throat.’ Or, ‘Don’t call us unless he actually chokes you, unless you pass out. He’ll have flashbacks. It’s normal.’ ”
