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. . .
