I was reading the book 'Damn the Torpedoes: Fighting Words,
Rallying Cries and the Hidden History of warfare' by Brain Burrell.
Published by McGraw- Hill, 1999.
it contains some interesting info about the reality of war, in
which there is little head-on clashes so often seen in movies. It
also quotes some info from Du Picq and Marshall regarding the
soldiers reactions to battles.
check the net for similar info. found the following site:
http://www.killology.com/article_agress&viol.htm
below are some excerpts from the site that i think merit some
discussion:
"One major modern revelation in the field of military psychology is
the observation that such resistance to killing one's own species
is also a key factor in human combat. "
"Based on his post-combat interviews, Marshall concluded in his
book Men Against Fire (1946, 197
that only
15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen in World War II fired
their own weapons at an exposed enemy soldier. Key weapons, such as
*flame-throwers, were usually fired. Crew-served weapons, such as
*machine guns, almost always were fired. And action would increase
greatly if a nearby leader demanded that the soldier fire. But when
left on their own, the great majority of individual combatants
appear to have been unable or unwilling to kill."
"Human Resources Research Office of the US Army subsequently
pioneered a revolution in combat training, which eventually
replaced firing at targets with deeply ingrained conditioning,
using realistic, man-shaped pop-up targets that fall when hit.
Psychologists assert that this kind of powerful operant
conditioning is the only technique that will reliably influence the
primitive, midbrain processing of a frightened human being. "
"The traditional horrors of combat were magnified by modern
conditioning techniques, and this combined with societal
condemnation to create a circumstance that resulted in 0.5 to 1.5
million cases of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in Vietnam
veterans. The mass incidence of psychiatric disorders among Vietnam
veterans resulted in the "discovery" of PTSD, a condition that we
now know traditionally occurred as a result of warfare, but never
in such quantity."
just seeking some opinion. . .
