Masters of Death: The American Soldier's Path to Atrocities at War and at Home
By Ezekiel Goodman
Introduction
In their finest moments soldiers are often said to have gone above and beyond the call of duty. This refers not only to the heroism of their actions, but to their commitment to their mission, their proficiency at war. This is the ideal image of the American soldier, but what happens when soldiers “go beyond” in a different way? How do these professional killers come to no longer differentiate soldiers from civilians, battlefields from suburbs?
This paper will explore the American soldier’s journey to atrocities, and link those committed on the battlefield to those committed at home. Recent, notable examples of random violence by current and former soldiers have increased dramatically during the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such acts have brought considerable attention to the trauma inflicted on soldiers by war from the media, policy makers, and the medical community. Soldier’s dissociative and antisocial behaviors have been attributed to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. When used to refer to soldiers, its symptoms are said to materialize as the invasion of the battlefield into everyday life. How does this distinction break down? What about soldiering leads to these expressions of violence and trauma? When war becomes part of a job description, for many, violence and the emotions surrounding it are a consistent state of existence, rather than isolated incidents. Then it is not so surprising that massacres and atrocities have pervaded war throughout history. What becomes more disconcerting is how the massacres of the battlefield find their way to the homefront. Acts of violence at home and abroad are symptoms of the same problem. The war atrocities (all will be referred to as such) that this paper will focus on are the My Lai Massacre of the Vietnam War and use of violence against civilians in Afghanistan. Further, I will seek to identify the processes that connect these wars to a number of mass shootings around military bases in the United States, particularly those occurring at Fort Hood in Texas.
The soldiers’ habituation to violence is necessary for their survival on the battlefield. However, brutality presents dangerous prospects for soldiers’ psyches and the lives of those around them. It may be that mass killings are the inevitable conclusion of war for soldiers. The human story that leads to that conclusion, though, is a difficult one to tell. War both humanizes and dehumanizes. It simultaneously brings participants close to mortality, and removes them from their previous emotional ties to the world. War turns young men and women into professional killers. The trouble seems to begin when they like their jobs.
The Rules of Engagement
Narratives of massacres in the contemporary United States often focus on their departure from the order and rationality that supposedly govern war’s conduct. Dates marking the start and end to hostilities are assigned, results documented, the number of soldiers and, often less accurately, civilians, killed, maimed, or missing in action are calculated. However, many of the real effects of a war are lost in these recordings. The image of the selfless soldier, of the duty bound hero, is not consistent with that of the machine-like killer. Perhaps this is because to believe that American fighting men and women are criminals is to believe that the wars they fight are criminal themselves. Rather than face this reality, atrocities are given their own sub-category in the public consciousness. They are thought of as something that perhaps happened within a war, but outside of its supposed rules and boundaries. In Making War at Fort Hood, Kenneth MacLeish writes:
"War’s productive and destructive violence—the empowerment, construction, and shaping of the soldier, his wearing down, injury, and death, and the terrorizing, maiming, and extermination of civilians— is the exception rather than the rule. All harm that comes with war is cast as tragedy or side effect, as something that should not have happened."[1]
Though this is the popular depiction of such events, there is a different way to think about the uglier side of war. From a historical perspective it seems that atrocities are part and parcel of war itself. They show, if nothing else, that the direct result of prolonged, organized violence is a dissent into chaotic destruction. The great illusion of war is that its violence is confined to recognized battles and actors. Moreover, the assumption is that those who act in wars are accountable to, and seek to follow, the rules presented to the public.
The symbiotic nature of war’s order and brutal chaos is identifiable even in small events. In a recording of a Vietnam veterans’ group therapy session from Allan Young’s The Harmony of Illusions, stories do not just highlight the horrors soldiers were both exposed to and committed, they display the nature of army life amidst violence. At one less heated moment of conversation, a veteran named Henry tells an anecdote about one of the men in his unit, “a guy in my outfit threw some ears on the lieutenant’s table. The ears were still wet with blood, and the lieutenant got pissed off, because he had to begin his report over again: his paper was bloody.”[2] The lieutenant’s anger was not brought on by the desecration his soldier had committed, but rather by the inconvenience it brought to his bureaucratic task. It is within reason to say that among the many “after action” reports officers write there is little to no mention of any desecration or cruelty to the enemy beyond mere killing. If anything is obvious from the few reports of illegal violence that surface during war, it is that there are two realities, one of which is crafted with greater care than the other. There is the reality of the battle reports, and there is the reality of the battlefield.
That narrative of war’s legality has been challenged by unearthed reports of crimes time and time again. One such event, arguably the most significant of any American war crime, was the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War. Seymour Hersh, the reporter who broke the story, (and who may be most recently remembered for his investigation of the Bin Laden assassination) interviewed the soldiers of Charlie Company, revealing an aspect of the war that had previously been unknown to many Americans, and spurred a change in public opinion. On a recent trip to Vietnam, he sought to recall and make sense of the events surrounding My Lai nearly fifty years later, writing:
"The victims of the massacre that day were not only in My Lai (also known as My Lai 4) but also in a sister settlement known to the Americans My Khe 4… what happened at My Lai 4 was not singular, not an aberration; it was replicated, in lesser numbers, by Bravo company. The assaults were by far the most important operation carried out that day by any combat unit… The division’s senior leadership, including its commander, Major General Samuel Koster, flew in and out of the area throughout the day to check its progress."[3]
Any evidence of strict boundaries that dictated soldiers’ conduct in Vietnam is clearly absent in this case. The chain of command was not just present, but closely observed. Soldiers throughout the war were often directed by their officers to fire on civilians. Lieutenant Calley was the officer directly responsible for the operation, and has been identified as the main culprit of the crime. Hersh writes on Private Paul Meadlo’s recollection of how the massacre unfolded, “’There was supposed to be some Viet Cong [in My Lai]… Once we got there we began gathering up people… started putting them in big mobs’… Calley as he recalled, came back ten minutes later and told him, ‘Get with it. I want them dead… I started to shoot them… We all were under orders,’ he said. ‘We all thought we were doing the right thing.’”[4] The soldier’s duty, first and foremost, is to follow the orders of his superiors. Obedience is vital to the effective completion of missions, and often for the safety of a military unit’s members. Understanding such a statement as a reflection of a soldier’s lack of agency is too simple. Rather, it is vital to understand that soldier have a vested interest in following orders; they have been told that it will not only keep them alive, but result in success. For the soldier, the ultimate success is to kill whoever the enemy may be; it’s at the core of the job.
A recent investigation into an incident in Afghanistan has demonstrated how little has changed since My Lai. Another enthusiastic, aggressive officer, Lieutenant Clint Lorrance, ordered his men to fire on two adolescents riding a motorcycle. He has since been sentenced to 19 years in prison for second-degree murder, representing, “one of the few times an American soldier has been convicted of a crime for actions in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.”[5] Prior to this, he routinely ordered his men to ignore the distinction between combatants and civilians in their hunt for insurgents. In one engagement, “Lieutenant Lorrance then ordered the sharpshooter to aim near the women and children in a grapefield next to the outpost. The sharpshooter, Specialist Matthew Rush, refused… Lietenant Lorrance told the soldiers the next morning that the Army’s rules of engagement, governing when they could use deadly force, had changed and that they were now allowed to fired on any motorcycle they saw. Soldiers testified that they were shocked but did not argue.”[6] The soldier identifies enemies based on the direction and definitions of his leaders. If that enemy is dictated to be civilians, it is clear how the rules of engagement disintegrate in war’s everyday action. The line is blurred by loyalties, duties, and the situational factors of combat itself.
In all these acts of violence against civilians, particularly My Lai, the action was completed in an ordered manner, with a high degree of oversight, and followed the chain of command. One might question whether soldiers are, in fact, as a few of the My Lai veterans have claimed, coerced into atrocity. While this may be true, the sheer number of massacres seems to suggest otherwise. The solution then is not just to see what violence in general does to the character of the soldier, but to identify what about these wars, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, has unleashed the capacity for unmitigated violence in once normal civilians.
Collateral Damage
Even if civilians do not represent the direct target of US military operations, they have routinely been placed directly in the line of fire. All the conflicts considered in this paper are counter-insurgencies. During the Vietnam War, the US fought the Viet Cong (VC), which waged a guerilla war in the South Vietnam, along with the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). In Iraq, the US Army’s main opponents after the fall of Saddam’s government were terror groups such as Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Islamic State in Iraq. In Afghanistan, the US faced yet another guerilla war from the Taliban after they fell from power. The nature of these conflicts were such that rather than fighting standing, regular armies at clear fronts of battle, soldiers encountered smaller engagements every day from a force embedded in the population they were said to be protecting and liberating. This, undoubtedly, made for highly chaotic operations, ones in which soldiers were often not sure of the true identity of their enemy.
The navigation of interactions with civilians can provide a multitude of obstacles and frustrations to soldiers. These complexities are exhibited in the films Restrepo and Korengal, parts of a series of documentaries directed by Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger. In them, the filmmakers accompany a group of soldiers on their deployment in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan, often called the most dangerous place in the war. In one of his first meetings with a group of local elders, Captain Dan Kearney tells them, “help us provide you guys with that security, and I’ll flood this whole place with money and projects and with healthcare and everything.”[7] The soldiers, Captain Kearney in particular, see their mission as one to help the people of the region, to, as Kearney puts it to the camera, “bring them into the 20th, or 21st, century.”[8] At the same time, the associations between civilians and the insurgents is often very strong. Captain Kearney remarks that, “getting these people to push out the insurgency and basically push out their family members is going to be the hard part.”[9] As the company’s deployment continues, however, the soldiers on the ground begin to feel an increasing contempt for a local population they see as disingenuous and fundamentally immoral. One soldier remarks:
"This whole going in there and acting like their friend thing doesn’t work… hearts and minds is not the window when you see the guy shooting at you and then he puts his wife and kids in front of him knowing full well that we won’t shoot back. Or the guy that shakes our hand, takes the ten bags of rice we give him for his family… and then immediately walks up the mountain and shoots an RPG at us, walks back down and smiles at us the next morning when he’s walking his goats. You know, fuck his heart, fuck his mind."[10]
Other soldiers express similar feelings, including the desire to, “beat the shit,” out of some of the village elders.[11] In wars like the one in Afghanistan, the duties of soldiers in combat extend to many parts of their everyday lives in the conflict zone. In addition to having to deal with an enemy attacking them, soldiers must be prepared for attacks from the very people they have been told they are protecting. Thus, in addition to the family ties Captain Kearney speaks of, civilians become inextricable from the enemy. They are another actor, perhaps not as overtly as aggressive as the enemy, but profoundly separate from the soldier and his comrades. They are either aiding the enemy in some way, or providing an obstacle to the completion of the soldier’s task.
Soldiers make a clear separation between themselves and everyone else, and as a result, they lump civilians and combatants together as one entity. The soldier becomes set against all of them, able to rely only on his comrades in arms. This kind of language of distinction is at the center of how soldiers view themselves, both in combat and once they return home. In one of the therapy sessions from The Harmony of Illusions, a soldier named Martin details his aggressiveness in combat, “you get orders to burn a village, and a gook tries to put the fire out while you’re trying to burn his hooch. He fucks with you, and you show him that you can fuck with him. You can push him away, or you can kick his ass, or you can do what we usually did: shoot him.”[12] The therapist then responds that, “The word ‘gook’ is a good example of how we depersonalize people, turn them into objects.”[13] This kind of language exhibits the basic results of the soldier’s experience with civilian populations. The use of labels is at the core of how individuals perceive groups of people, as Didier Fassin points out in his analysis of French police officers. Of their use of the term “bastards” to refer to youth of African origin, Fassin writes, “The term contaminates not only the image and those using it have of the individuals concerned (a ‘bastard’ is not quite a youngster like any other) but also the practices that are permissible in relation to them…”[14] Martin’s use of the epithet is clearly indicates his view of civilians. It not only makes them something less than human, it associates them with the enemy, whom he refers to in the same terms. They are, to him, one and the same, deserving of the same kind of treatment and violence.
The acts of violence soldiers commit once they have returned home bear striking similarities to those committed abroad. Soldiers have been set against the outside world, ordered to kill anyone not wearing a uniform. If PTSD exhibits itself in soldiers as the continuation of a combat existence, then their attitude towards civilians would seem to continue as well. In 2014, Specialist Ivan Lopez killed three people and wounded 16 with a handgun before taking his own life.[15] In February 2015, just a few months ago, Specialist Atase Giffa shot four people, killing three, including his wife, and wounding one, before committing suicide as well.[16] Both soldiers were stationed at Fort Hood in Texas. Lopez was a veteran of the Iraq War and Giffa had been deployed to Afghanistan. Lopez was, at the time, being treated for PTSD. These represent just two of multiple acts of violence committed by soldiers at army bases around the country. These men undoubtedly faced many of the same situations described by their fellow soldiers, brutal events that have proven to be far more common than might be thought.
American soldiers often remark on their home country’s civilians’ inability to understand them or their experience of war.[17] They feel connected to their fellow soldiers above all else. Their attitudes are no longer compatible with those of society. Lewis, a member of one group therapy session recorded in The Harmony of Illusions, describes the conflict presented by combat aggression, “One of the jobs of combat training is to remove some of the conflict over aggression. In wars like World War II, society helped remove this conflict… When the war’s over, society welcomes them home. But that’s not what happened in the Vietnam War.”[18] This situation applies to veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan just as well. Their violent behavior follows them. Their existence becomes one of violence, and when the target of that violence has frequently been civilians, the difficult transition from the battlefield to home is far more understandable.
That same lack of affiliation with even American civilians can also express itself in contemptuous terms, as Henry, the same soldier who told the anecdote about the mutilation in The Harmony of Illusions, describes, “My aggression is against Americans: against the smug, sanctimonious, hypocritical, silent majority of Americans. My fantasy is to release a black plague on them, if I could do that, then maybe I’d have some satisfaction.”[19] This sentiment is remarkably similar to that expressed by the soldiers serving in the Korengal Valley and to Martin’s use of the term “gook” to refer to both civilians and VC. In this case, Henry uses the term Americans to refer to those who didn’t serve; those he came back from the war to. To him, they are disingenuous, and their betrayal merits extreme punishment. This precisely in line with the Korengal soldier’s opinion of the local population, which he describes as two-faced. Henry may be from the same country as the people he describes, but he does not see himself as one of them. They are not soldiers, and it is likely precisely for this reason that he wishes for their death.
Masters of Death
In war and at home the soldier faces unfamiliar, frightening environments that threaten his or her identity. When interviewing one soldier, Kenneth MacLeish writes, “it is only on contact with the civilian world that the experience of soldiering is made to seem crazy… it is the experience of diagnosis and therapy that makes you crazy, both fitting you with the label and upending your own felt sense of normalcy.”[20] This level of disassociation from the civilian world is vital to understanding how soldiers come to commit atrocities both in war and at home. However, to chalk up event such as the ones at Fort Hood, and the many others, to PTSD or other mental illness is insufficient. It ignores the complete and destructive transformation the soldier goes through in war.
It is not just that the civilian is slaughtered or tortured. War builds soldiers from the killings of civilians. It arms soldiers with weapons and protection, it provides them with comrades and pay. It creates them, giving them the power, and duty, to kill with impunity. To wield and deal death as a facet of daily life is a uniquely powerful and alien task to be responsible for. At the same time, soldiers are the intended victims of war. MacLeish identifies the precarious nature of soldiers as, “the agents and instruments of sovereign violence, but also its objects: equipped and trained to kill, kept alive in extreme circumstances, and placed deliberately in harm’s way.”[21] This is part of war’s simultaneous humanization and dehumanization. It puts soldiers in a contradictory position: on the one hand, they are masters of life and death, representing both themselves and the entity of the state they serve. On the other, the soldier is sent into the most dangerous, mortal situations of their life, ones in which they or their comrades will certainly die. The soldiers’ task in war, then, seems to be acquiring a mastery over inevitable death.
Conclusion
The situation of the soldier is not merely one of surviving amidst the chaos. The conflict is one between the ability to control surroundings through killing and the loss of some part of humanity. They have learned, and, in fact, been ordered, to meet fear with violence, to trust no one but themselves and the soldiers by their sides. Myrtle, the mother of Paul Meadlo, the soldier who participated in My Lai, told Seymour Hersh,“I sent them a good boy and they made him a murderer.”[22] In setting soldiers against civilians, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq have created criminals. More than that though, these wars have, in the process of arming soldiers, stripped them of their connections to life outside of combat and soldiering. It has made everything and everyone else seem inhuman, merely threats and targets and bodies. Once that reality, the soldiers’ former civilian reality, is replaced with one of death, the conclusion is inevitable. For a large number of American veterans of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, it is not that mortality and immortality are woven together in a battling existence; it is that the violence of killing and dying in war become the only reality. That has been proven to them through the coercion of war, the absence of any laws of combat they thought were legitimate, and the constant destruction of the world around them. Their connection to the world and to their own lives and identities disintegrates once they fully realize their capacity to commit acts they never thought possible.
Endnotes
[1]Salinger, Tobias “Fort Hood soldier kills himself, three others during apparent murder suicide in Killeen, Texas.” New York Daily News, February 2001.
[2] Young, Allan. The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Print.
[3] Hersh. “The Scene of The Crime,” The New Yorker, March 2015.
[4] Hersh, “The Scene of The Crime,” The New Yorker, March 2015.
[5] Phillips, “Cause Célèbre, Scorned by Troops,” The New York Times, February 2015
[6] Phillips, “Cause Célèbre, Scorned by Troops,” The New York Times, February 2015
[7] Restrepo. Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger. National Geographic Entertainment, 2010. Film.
[8] Korengal. Sebastian Junger. Saboteur Media, 2014. Film[9] Restrepo. Hetherington and Junger, 2010
[10] Korengal. Junger, 2014[11] Korengal. Junger, 2014.
[12] Young, The Harmony of Illusions, 244.
[13] Young, The Harmony of Illusions, 244.
[14] Fassin, Didier. “Interactions.” Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing, 99
[15] Sanchez and Brumfield, “Fort Hood shooter was Iraq vet being treated for mental health issues.” CNN, April 2014
[16] Salinger, “Fort Hood soldier kills himself, three others during apparent murder suicide in Killeen, Texas.” New York Daily News, February 2015
[17] Korengal, Junger, 2014.
[18] Young, The Harmony of Illusions, 247.
[19] Young, The Harmony of Illusions, 244.
[20] MacLeish, Making War at Fort Hood, 122.
[21] MacLeish, Making War at Fort Hood, 54.
[22] Hersh. “The Scene of The Crime,” The New Yorker, March 2015.