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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JDN who wrote (151118)	12/15/2005 2:19:30 PM
From: Alastair McIntosh	Respond to of 793891

Re: U.S. Troops Are 'Killing Machines' If you read the original W.P. article Fonda really never claimed that U.S. troops have been trained to commit atrocities against innocent civilians as a matter of military policy. However, she seems to be generally correct that the military was concerned in WW II that soldiers were not being conditioned to kill and had to change training methods to overcome the reluctance of riflemen to fire at another human being. This apparently started with the work of United States Army lieutenant colonel S. L. A. Marshall in 1943. In 1947, in a slim volume entitled “Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War,” Marshall took the military by surprise. Throughout the war, he declared, only about fifteen per cent of American riflemen in combat had fired at the enemy. One lieutenant colonel complained to Marshall that four days after the desperate struggle on Omaha Beach he couldn’t get one man in twenty-five to voluntarily fire his rifle. “I walked up and down the line yelling, ‘God damn it! Start shooting!’ But it did little good.” These men weren’t cowards. They would hold their positions and willingly perform such tasks as delivering ammunition to machine guns. They simply couldn’t bring themselves to aim a rifle at another human being—even an armed foe—and pull the trigger. “Fear of killing, rather than fear of being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure in the individual,” Marshall wrote. “At the vital point, he becomes a conscientious objector.” Today, Marshall’s methodology seems questionable—he claimed to have interviewed more than four hundred units, which would have meant interviewing a company a day, leaving no time for travel—but the spirit of his conclusions is still generally accepted. “We are reluctant to admit that essentially war is the business of killing,” Marshall wrote, while the soldier himself “comes from a civilization in which aggression, connected with the taking of life, is prohibited and unacceptable.” The Army, having just fought the Second World War, embraced Marshall’s findings. Within months, Army units were receiving a “Revised Program of Instruction,” which instituted many of Marshall’s doctrines. It was no longer sufficient to teach a man to shoot a target; the Army must also condition him to kill, and the way to do it, paradoxically, was to play down the fact that shooting equals killing. “We need to free the rifleman’s mind with respect to the nature of targets,” Marshall wrote. A soldier who has learned to squeeze off careful rounds at a target will take the time, in combat, to consider the humanity of the man he is about to shoot. Along with conventional marksmanship, soldiers now acquired the skill of “massing fire” against riverbanks, trees, hillcrests, and other places where enemy soldiers might lurk. “The average firer will have less resistance to firing on a house or tree than upon a human being,” Marshall added. Once the Army put his notions into practice, they bore spectacular results. By the time of the Vietnam War, according to internal Army estimates, as many as ninety per cent of soldiers were shooting back. And some were paying a price. Read the complete article at: newyorker.com