| "On
Killing II: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill" |
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Conclusion:
An Application to PTSD Resulting from Killing
Thus
we have seen that there is a powerful resistance to killing
in most healthy human beings. We have also seen that military
and law enforcement organizations around the world have
initiated a powerful conditioning process, through military
combat training, that has enabled combatants to bypass this
resistance. An extraordinarily high firing rate resulted
from this process among US troops in Vietnam, British troops
in the Falklands, and among modern US law enforcement officers.
But
conditioning which overrides such a powerful, innate resistance
has enormous potential for psychological backlash. It has
been noted that every warrior society has a “purification
ritual” to help the returning warrior deal with his “blood
guilt” and to reassure him that what he did in combat was
“good”. In primitive tribes this generally involves ritual
bathing, ritual separation (which serves as a cooling-off
and “group therapy” session), and a ceremony embracing the
veteran back into the tribe. Modern Western rituals traditionally
involve long separation while marching or sailing home,
parades, monuments, and the unconditional acceptance of
society and family. As was noted previously, after Vietnam
this purification ritual was turned on its head, and America
paid a tragic price, with anywhere from 0.5 to 1.5 million
cases of PTSD occurring as a result of our conduct of that
war.
One
vital, age old aspect of this "purification ritual", can
and has been, reintroduced since Vietnam and that is the
"debriefing," conducted every night around the campfire.
The introduction of 24-hour combat for months on end in
World War I created an environment in which it became impossible
for the soldier to perpetuate this ancient, nightly ritual.
Throughout the 20th century the opportunity to conduct a
daily processing of combat experiences disappeared from
the battlefield. The group critical incident debriefing
is not a new occurrence on the battlefield. The absence
of this daily debriefing is what is new, and now we are
reintroducing this ancient process, with a degree of systematic,
scientific expertise that has never occurred before.
Today, there is a moral, medical, and legal obligation to
conduct these group debriefings. These debriefings must
include all of the individuals who were involved in the
critical incident, or, if that is not possible, individuals
who were involved in similar incidents. Any organization
that sends individuals in harms way, and especially any
organization that calls upon humans to participate in the
psychologically toxic realm of interpersonal aggression
(which is, perhaps, the “universal human phobia”), and does
not subsequently conduct a critical incident debriefing
is morally, medically, and legally negligent.
Furthermore, there must be an environment wherein there
are no “secrets” to be kept, since the perpetrators may
well be “only as sick as their secrets.” That means, to
the utmost of our ability, we create an environment of transparency
and accountability in which no atrocities or criminal acts
can occur, since these are the ultimate “secrets” which
often cannot be confessed and must be kept at all costs.
Col. Greg Belenke, a psychiatrist and head of one of the
combat stress teams in the Gulf War, has definitively stated
that atrocities and criminal acts are one of the surest
paths to PTSD. PTSD can be thought of as “the gift that
keeps on giving,” since it impacts not just the perpetrators,
but also their spouses and their children in the decades
to come (Belenke, 1996).
Rachel MacNair, in her research, has found that: "The item,
'There were certain things I did in the military I can't
tell anybody,' was a strong indicator of the perpetration
groups in just about every way I looked at it. When I compared
those who were directly involved in the killing of civilians
or prisoners with those who witnessed that but were not
directly involved, yet did kill in other contexts (presumably
more in line with traditional combat), the two items that
differentiated were that one and nightmares" (R.M. MacNair,
personal communication, June 15, 2000).
This means that atrocities, the intentional killing of civilians
and prisoners, must be systematically rooted out from our
way of war, for the price of these acts is far, far too
high to let them be tolerated even to the slightest, smallest
degree. This means that we enter into an era of transparency
and accountability in all aspects of our law enforcement,
peacekeeping, and combat operations. This also says something
about that those who are called upon by their society to
“go in harm’s way,” to use deadly force, and to contend
with interpersonal human aggression. These individuals require
psychological support just as surely as they require logistical,
communications, and medical support. Thus, as our society
enters into the Post-Cold War era, the fields of psychiatry
and psychology have much to contribute to the continuing
evolution of combat, and to the evolution of our civilization.
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