Will War Ever End?. Paul K. Chappell
Killing Grossman said, “War is an environment that will psychologically debilitate 98 percent of all who participate in it for any length of time. And the 2 percent who are not driven insane by war appear to have already been insane—aggressive psychopaths—before coming to the battlefield.”4 These words conveyed a fact about war I already knew from witnessing my father’s agony, but Grossman expressed other profound ideas that changed how I saw war, along with the potential for peace.
In On Killing Grossman said that human beings have an innate resistance to killing other human beings. A country is only capable of waging war, he explained, if propaganda is used to dehumanize the enemy. Sometimes this dehumanization process consists of calling the enemy derogatory names such as “Krauts,” “Japs,” or “Gooks.” In other instances it consists of stereotyping the enemy as the epitome of everything evil in the world while believing that one’s own country is the source of everything good, moral, or holy.
The only way to kill human beings and not experience guilt or remorse is to imagine they are not human beings. This involves viewing people as subhuman—so we can rationalize the act of killing—or seeing people as evil monsters so we can perceive the act of killing as a necessary purging of evil from the world. Grossman also explains that the most traumatic experiences in war occur when someone kills a human being, not when someone is in physical danger. According to Grossman’s extensive research, the survivors of the London bombings during World War II did not suffer as much psychological trauma as the soldiers in Vietnam who killed men, women, and children at close range, where they could see the faces of their victims.
EVERY ARMY’S GREATEST PROBLEM
When I studied the evidence that shows human beings have an innate resistance to killing, I became more determined to answer my second question: why does war seem like the norm and peace seem like the anomaly throughout human history? As I studied military history at West Point, I realized there is a deeper and more intriguing story to the history of warfare, and that everything is not as it first appears. Although war is common throughout history, the greatest problem of every army has been this: when a battle begins, how do you stop soldiers from running away? Where our fight-or-flight response is concerned, the vast majority of people prefer to run when a sword is wielded against them, a spear is thrust in their direction, a bullet flies over their head, or a bomb explodes in their vicinity. In the U.S. Army, a complex system of conditioning trains soldiers to stay and fight—but the ancient Greeks discovered a more effective method still used today.
The Greeks understood that it is not easy to make soldiers stay and fight during a battle. Human beings are not naturally violent after all, because if we were, the majority of people would not be terrified of violence when they experience it up close and personal. If human beings were naturally violent, our “fight response” would be far more powerful than our “flight response,” but in fact the opposite is true. Getting soldiers to run away and retreat during a battle is easy. Getting them to stand their ground, fight, and kill other human beings is the challenge.
The Greeks realized, however, that one simple thing could give soldiers endless courage when their lives were threatened and convince them to not only stay and fight, but to sacrifice their lives. At first glance the Greeks’ solution might seem like a contradiction, because the most powerful motivator that convinces people to stay and fight is not a natural propensity for violence or killing, but their capacity for love and compassion. Halfway around the world, Lao-tzu, a Chinese philosopher who lived during the sixth century BC, also acknowledged this fundamental truth about human nature when he said, “By being loving, we are capable of being brave.”5 Because the ancient Greeks discovered this fact about human nature, they were able to protect their homeland from Persian conquest during the fifth century BC.
In 490 BC, during the Battle of Marathon, the Persians landed on the Greek shore in an attempt to conquer Greece. By some estimates the Athenian soldiers were outnumbered ten to one. Despite the numerical superiority of the Persian military, the Athenians repelled the invading force and saved their country from destruction. Ten years later in 480 BC, the Persians again tried to conquer Greece. During the Battle of Salamis, the Athenian navy was greatly outnumbered by the Persian fleet, but the Athenians again refused to retreat and were victorious once more.
To inspire the courage that made this victory possible, the Athenian warriors shouted the battle cry “Advance, ye sons of Greece. From oppression save your country, save your wives, save your children . . . This day, the common cause of all demands your valor.”6 Although they were greatly outnumbered, the Athenians refused to retreat because they were fighting to protect the lives of their loved ones.
I find it odd that people refer to compassion and love as naïve moral ideals that make one weak, while the U.S. Army uses compassion and love to motivate its soldiers to cooperate and survive in the harshest circumstances. In the army I was taught to treat my military unit like my family and to fight in order to “protect the person to my left and to my right.” At West Point I learned a famous passage from Shakespeare’s Henry V that reads: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother . . .” This ideal of love and brotherhood is responsible for most acts of heroism, along with many of the Medal of Honor recipients who sacrificed themselves to save the lives of their friends. We can see the power of compassion in people such as Private First Class Frederick C. Murphy, who served as a medic during World War II. His citation for the Medal of Honor reads:
An aid man, he was wounded in the right shoulder soon after his comrades had jumped off in a dawn attack 18 March 1945, against the Siegfried Line at Saarlautern, Germany. He refused to withdraw for treatment and continued forward, administering first aid under heavy machine gun, mortar, and artillery fire. When the company ran into a thickly sown antipersonnel minefield and began to suffer more and more casualties, he continued to disregard his own wound and unhesitatingly braved the danger of exploding mines, moving about through heavy fire and helping the injured until he stepped on a mine which severed one of his feet. In spite of his grievous wounds, he struggled on with his work, refusing to be evacuated and crawling from man to man administering to them while in great pain and bleeding profusely. He was killed by the blast of another mine which he had dragged himself across in an effort to reach still another casualty. With indomitable courage, and unquenchable spirit of self-sacrifice and supreme devotion to duty which made it possible for him to continue performing his tasks while barely able to move, Pfc. Murphy saved many of his fellow soldiers at the cost of his own life.7
The Medal of Honor is the highest award a soldier can receive, but when I studied the Medal of Honor recipients while I was at West Point, I realized something surprising. If human beings are naturally violent, as some suggest, then the highest military award should be given for the act of killing, and the person who kills the most people should receive the highest award. However, many of the Medal of Honor recipients I studied never killed a single person. Why then do so many people assume that we are naturally violent, I wondered, if the highest military award is given to those who display incredible selflessness and compassion on the battlefield? And how can compassion not be a defining characteristic of human nature, I thought, if the most admired trait in soldiers is not their ability to kill, but their willingness to sacrifice for their friends?
THE KEY TO HUMAN SURVIVAL
Before I could answer these questions and discover whether human beings are naturally peaceful or violent, I had to ask and answer a more fundamental question: why does compassion encourage these acts of heroism? As I explored the reality of human nature, I realized that compassion’s influence on the battlefield is not a contradiction, but one of the reasons why our ancestors were able to survive in the harshest conditions. And why we, their descendents, are capable of ending war.
Our earliest human ancestors lived on the plains of Africa, but when I was a teenager, I often wondered how they could have possibly survived.