War Has Always Been Nasty

A well meaning woman who was personally scarred by the aftermath of the War in Vietnam by the suicide of her veteran husband, Penny Coleman, has written a screed in today's Alternet. She alleges that "new" methods of "operant conditioning" used during the "past fifty years" have turned normal American men into disinhibited killers. As a result, she claims, atrocities litter the landscape of American wars in an unprecedented fashion.

To read the article, here's the link. http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/60297/

Ms Coleman needs to get a grip. So, the Geek infers, do the editors (and perhaps many readers) of Alternet.

The Geek takes this position because he is a military historian. For much of his life, the Geekmeister has waded through the long, dismal history of war as a human experience. There's nothing like a trip through five thousand years of killing, most of it ultimately senseless and without beneficial result, to do two things--induce cynicism and give an understanding as to the processes by which men change from civilians to soldiers, from homebodies to warriors.

Another reality has been brought forcibly to the Geek's attention. Civilians, people who have had the good fortune never to experience war up close and personal--a situation that obtains with the vast majority of Americans all the time--fear the returning warrior and the presumed effects of disinhibition brought about by the experience of combat.

As guys of Ms Coleman's (and my) generation were returning from Southeast Asia and trying to become civilians again, various individuals and groups warned that the dudes from the bush of Vietnam had become so psychologically warped that they could not be trusted in society again. Think back, those of you old enough, to the TV shows of the Seventies. No cop drama was complete without the crazed Vietnam vet going a bit funny and gunning down hundreds. (OK, I exaggerate).

A few years later, when Reagan was in the White House, the popular magazine, Psychology Today, using the operant conditioning argument along with the well known human capacity to hate the "Other" as if that Other were of another species, opined that Vietnam vets, particularly those who had served in special or black operations forces, would never be normal again.

All of this was nothing new. At the end of World War II, sober and respectable journals, magazines, and academic papers predicted a breakdown of law and order as the guys, particularly those from the South Pacific islands, came home. It was alleged by otherwise well moored "experts" that the experience of war, particularly the atrocity riddled war with the Japanese, would be so habituate the grunts to violence and killing that many should be segregated from society permanently for the safety of the public.

Even that wasn't the first excrudescence of fear and loathing directed at returning combat vets. After the War Between the States, religious publications in particular, but secular ones as well, took the view that the boys would march home, take off their uniforms, and start committing heedless, violent crime. Civilians were warned not to take chances--particularly with their wives and daughters.

Get a grip on this. The threats so darkly warned against after these and other American wars never happened.

Get a grip on this. Men can switch roles from civilian to soldier and back without elaborate conditioning by batteries of psychiatrically astute personnel.

Get a grip on this. Research by legions of academics and practitioners of war alike from World War II though the Vietnam War shows time after tedious time that the majority of men in combat do not fire their weapons with effect. This is true regardless of training methods.

Ms Coleman starts her pitch with a recapitulation of the worst atrocity of the Vietnam War, the massacre of hundreds of civilians by US troops at Mai Lai. She avers (correctly) that there were many other atrocities committed by Americans during that war. She also alleges that Americans have committed atrocities in Iraq. The Geek does not disagree.

The Geek disagrees completely with her notion of cause and effect. Ms Coleman imputes the result, atrocities, to the cause, the particular training systems developed and used by the US military during the past fifty years.

She is as wrong as a soup sandwich in her argument.

The blunt, damning fact is that atrocities have been committed by all belligerents in all wars at all times. Atrocious behavior is inherent to the nature of war. If I had the time and inclination, I could list literally thousands of atrocities large and small, unofficial and official, committed by the armed forces of every nation over the past hundred or so years.

What Ms Coleman ignores in her indictment is simply that the vast majority of documentable atrocities committed by US personnel have been the result of failures of command and control at the tactical level. The Geek is reasonably proud of the fact that US forces during the past several wars have been aware of the propensity for men in very high stress situations (which combat is by definition) to forget such niceties as the law of land warfare or the basic requirements of humanity. Training and leadership both have made more than simply reasonable efforts to be proactive, to prevent counterproductive, immoral, illegal conduct.

After the fact, the US military has been zealous in investigating allegations of troop misconduct and, if the facts can be developed, prosecuting offenders. From the Great War through the current actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US had made extraordinary efforts to prevent atrocities or, failing that, to punish those who commit them.

Reasonable people can disagree as to the effectiveness of our prevention efforts or the justice of the after the fact punishments. It is even possible to present a rational argument that some US military doctrines such as those which emphasize the use of indirect fire or air delivered fire constitute atrocious conduct as it is these approaches that deny any chance to discriminate between combatants and civilians.

What is not possible to do with accuracy or fairness is to make the argument that Ms Colemant does. US military personnel are not the subjects of training designed to make them disinhibited, wanton killers without the ability to parse the difference between legitimate targets and anyone who seems to be of the same "pseudo-species" as the enemy.

Give our troops a little more credit than you have, Ms Coleman; we make the transition to and from the horrors and joys of combat without needing operant conditioning at either end of the process. We fight our country's war without any overwhelming blood lust. We tend to be reluctant killers and hope only to get the job done. Come home in one piece.

And have a life.