The Trauma of Close-Range, Interpersonal Aggression

"Psychological Effects of Combat"

During World War II, the carnage and destruction caused by months of continuous German bombing in England and years of Allied bombing in Germany was systematically inflicted in order to create psychological casualties among civilian populations. Day and night, in an intentionally unpredictable pattern, civilians, relatives, and friends were mutilated, killed and their homes were destroyed. These civilian populations suffered fear and horror of a magnitude that few humans will ever experience.

This unpredictable, uncontrollable reign of shock, horror, and terror is exactly what psychiatrists and psychologists prior to World War II believed to be responsible for the vast numbers of psychiatric casualties suffered by soldiers in World War I. And yet, incredibly, the Rand Corporation's Strategic Bombing Study published in 1949 found that there was only a very slight increase in the psychological disorders in these populations as compared to peacetime rates and that these occurred primarily among individuals already predisposed to psychiatric illness. These bombings, which were intended to break the will of the population, appear to have served primarily to harden the hearts and increase the determination to fight among those who endured them.

The impact of fear, physiological arousal, horror, and physical deprivation in combat should never be underestimated, but it has become clear that other factors are responsible for psychiatric casualties among combatants. One of those factors is the impact of close-range, interpersonal, aggressive confrontation.

Through roller-coasters, action and horror movies, drugs, rock climbing, whitewater rafting, scuba diving, parachuting, hunting, contact sports, and a hundred other means, modern society pursues fear. Fear in and of itself is seldom a cause of trauma in everyday peacetime existence, but facing close-range interpersonal aggression and hatred from fellow citizens is a horrifying experience of an entirely different magnitude.

The ultimate fear and horror in most modern lives is to be raped, tortured, beaten, or physically degraded in front of loved ones or to have the sanctity of the home invaded by aggressive and hateful intruders. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association affirms this when it notes that, "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) . . . may be especially severe or longer lasting when the stressor is of human "design." PTSD resulting from natural disasters such as tornadoes, floods, and hurricanes is comparatively rare and mild, but acute cases of PTSD will consistently result from torture or rape. Ultimately, like tornadoes, floods, and hurricanes, bombs from 20,000 feet are simply not "personal" and are significantly less traumatic to both the victim and aggressor.

Death or debilitation is statistically far more likely to occur by disease or accident than by malicious action, but statistics have nothing to do with fear. Statistically speaking, cigarette smoking is an extraordinarily dangerous activity that annually inflicts slow, hideous deaths upon millions of individuals worldwide, but this fact does not dissuade millions of individuals from smoking, and around the globe few nations are motivated to pass laws to protect their citizens from this threat. But the presence of one serial rapist in a large city can change the behavior of hundreds of thousands of individuals, and there is a broad tradition of laws designed to protect citizens from rape, assault, and murder.

When snakes, heights, or darkness cause an intense fear reaction in an individual it is considered a phobia, a dysfunction, an abnormality. But it is very natural and normal to respond to an attacking, aggressive fellow human being with a phobic-scale response. This is a universal human phobia. More than anything else in life, it is intentional, overt human hostility and aggression that assaults the self-image, sense of control and ultimately, the mental and physical health of human beings.

The soldier in combat is inserted straight into the inescapable midst of this most psychologically traumatic of environments. Ultimately, if the combatant is unable get some respite from the trauma of combat, and if not injured or killed, the only escape available is the psychological escape of becoming a psychiatric casualty and mentally fleeing the battlefield.

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