An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare - Softcover

Bourke, Joanna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0465007384 ISBN 13: 9780465007387

Publisher: Basic Books, 2000

Synopsis

The characteristic act of men at war is not dying, but killing. Politicians and military historians may gloss over human slaughter, emphasizing the defense of national honor, but for men in active service, warfare means being - or becoming - efficient killers. In An Intimate History of Killing, historian Joanna Bourke asks: What are the social and psychological dynamics of becoming the best "citizen soldiers?" What kind of men become the best killers? How do they readjust to civilian life? These questions are answered in this groundbreaking new work that won, while still in manuscript, the Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History. Excerpting from letters, diaries, memoirs, and reports of British, American, and Australian veterans of three wars (World War I, World War II, and Vietnam), Bourke concludes that the structure of war encourages pleasure in killing and that perfectly ordinary, gentle human beings can, and often do, become enthusiastic killers without being brutalized. This graphic, unromanticized look at men at war is sure to revise many long-held beliefs about the nature of violence.

About this title

About the Author

Joanna Bourke is a professor of history at Birbeck College in London. Her previous books include Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain, and the Great War.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

An Intimate History of Killing

Face-To-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century WarfareBy Joanna Bourke

Basic Books

Copyright © 2000 Joanna Bourke
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780465007387

Chapter One

The Pleasures
of War

Some day when you are hunting in attic trunks
Or hear your friends boasting of their brave fathers,
I know that all excited you will ask me
To tell war stories. How shall I answer you?

R. L. Barth, `A Letter to My Infant Son', 1987

Stories of combat provide a way of coping with a fundamentaltension of war: although the act of killing another person inbattle may invoke a wave of nauseous distress, it may also incite intensefeelings of pleasure. William Broyles was one of many combatsoldiers who articulated this ambiguity. In 1984, this former Marineand editor of the Texas Monthly and Newsweek explored some of thecontradictions inherent in telling war stories. With the familiar, authoritativevoice of `one-who-has-been-there', Broyles asserted thatwhen combat soldiers were questioned about their war experiencesthey generally said that they did not want to talk about it, implyingthat they `hated it so much, it was so terrible' that they would preferit to remain `buried'. Not so, Broyles continued, `I believe thatmost men who have been to war would have to admit, if they arehonest, that somewhere inside themselves they loved it too.' Howcould that be explained to family and friends, he asked? Evencomrades-in-arms were wary among themselves: veterans' reunionswere awkward occasions precisely because the joyous aspects ofslaughter were difficult to confess in all circumstances. To describecombat as enjoyable was like admitting to being a bloodthirstybrute: to acknowledge that the decisive cease-fire caused as muchanguish as losing a great lover could only inspire shame.

    Yet, Broyles recognized, there were dozens of reasons why combatmight be attractive, even pleasurable. Comradeship, with its bittersweetabsorption of the self within the group, appealed to somefundamental human urge. And then -- in contrast -- there was theawesome power conferred upon individuals by war. For men, combatwas the male equivalent of childbirth: it was the `initiation intothe power of life and death'. Broyles had little to say about the `life'aspect, but argued that the thrill of destruction was irresistible. Abazooka or an M-60 machine gun was a `magic sword' or a `grunt'sExcalibur':

all you do is move that finger so imperceptibly, just a wish flashing across your mind like a shadow, not even a full brain synapse, and poof! in a blast of sound and energy and light a truck or a house or even people disappear, everything flying and settling back into dust.

    In many ways, war did resemble sport -- the most exciting gamein existence, Broyles believed -- which, by pushing men to theirphysical and emotional limits, could provide deep satisfaction (forthe survivors, that is). Broyles likened the happiness generated bythe sport of war to the innocent pleasures of children playing cowboysand Indians, chanting the refrain, `bang bang, you're dead!', orto the seductive suspense adults experience while watching combatmovies as geysers of fake blood splatter the screen and actors fall,massacred.

    There was more to the pleasures of combat than this, said Broyles.Killing had a spiritual resonance and an aesthetic poignancy. Slaughterwas `an affair of great and seductive beauty'. For combat soldiers,there was as much mechanical elegance in an M-60 machine gun asthere was for medieval warriors in decorated swords. Aesthetic tasteswere often highly personal: some Marines favoured the silent omnipotenceof napalm, which made houses vanish `as if by spontaneouscombustion', while others (such as Broyles) preferred whitephosphorous because it `exploded with a fulsome elegance, wreathingits target in intense and billowing smoke, throwing out glowingred comets trailing brilliant white plumes'. The experience seemedto resemble spiritual enlightenment or sexual eroticism: indeed,slaughter could be likened to an orgasmic, charismatic experience.However you looked at it, war was a `turn on'.

    Crucially, in the context of this chapter, Broyles noted that men'sresponses to combat contained an element of the carnivalesque. Toillustrate this point, he described what his men had done to a NorthVietnamese soldier whom they had recently killed. They hadpropped the corpse against some C-rations, placed sunglasses acrosshis eyes and a cigarette in his mouth, and balanced a `large and perfectlyformed' piece of shit on his head. Broyles described his reactionthus:

I pretended to be outraged, since desecrating bodies was frowned on as un-American and counterproductive. But it wasn't outrage I felt. I kept my officer's face on, but inside I was ... laughing. I laughed -- I believe now -- in part because of some subconscious appreciation of this obscene linkage of sex and excrement and death; and in part because of the exultant realization that he -- whoever he had been -- was dead and I -- special, unique me -- was alive.

This joyous celebration of the `material bodily principle', this carnivalesqueinversion of what was sacred, was a most potent combination.

William Broyles was not unique in admitting to feelings of pleasurein combat. The enthusiastic glee expressed by many recruits atthe idea of shedding human blood can, to some extent, be understoodby looking at the complex ways in which martial combat hasbecome an integral part of the modern imagination. Literature andfilms provide scripts more exotic and thrilling than everyday scenariosand, although such narratives do not directly stimulate imitation,the excitement they generate creates an imaginary arenapacked with murderous potential and provides a linguistic structurewithin which aggressive behaviour might legitimately be fantasized.Furthermore, the archetypes of combat are seductiveprecisely because of their unreal quality.

Combat literature and films

Long before any prospect of real combat, boys and girls, men andwomen, created narratives of pleasure around acts of killing. Australianlads imaginatively cleared primitive Aborigines from artificialbushland; American kids fought off wild Indians in suburban backyards;English boys slaughtered beastly blacks on playing fields.Combat literature, martial films, and war games attracted men to thekilling fields. Of course, there was no direct relationship betweenimmersion in combat stories and the urge to kill. Young girls wereobviously also entranced by such fictions, although their pleasure derivedas much from the fate of the heroine-in-love as from the competenceof the hero-in-battle. Any analysis of the diaries, letters, andautobiographies of combatants will reveal the extent to which literaryand cinematic images were adopted (and transformed) by menand women prior to combat. War stories constitute our most democratic`basic training'.

    In the three conflicts to be considered in this book -- the twoworld wars and the conflict in Vietnam -- literary and cinematicmodels for combat spanned a range of diverse styles, from popularcomics and imperial adventure tales, to classics such as Bunyan'sThe Pilgrim's Progress and the Victorian romances of Tennyson andWilliam Morris, to the very graphic war films which dominatedcinematic screens from 1939. This canon has been analysed by innumerablehistorians and literary scholars, but most skilfully in thecontext of both world wars by Paul Fussell in his classic books, TheGreat War and Modern Memory (1975) and Wartime: Understandingand Behavior in the Second World War (1989) and by Jay Winter inSites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (1995). Throughout the twentiethcentury, combat literature remained one of the most buoyantgenres. Movie houses also promoted battle enthusiastically. Morethan one-third of all Hollywood feature films produced between1942 and 1945 were war movies, largely due to the help of the WarDepartment, Navy Department and the Office of War Information.By the time of the Vietnam War, the Department of Defensehad lost its monopoly on wartime images (although they remainedsuccessful in circulating propaganda films to independent and noncommercialstations throughout the country) and television hadtaken combat into everyone's living rooms.

    It is not difficult to see the attraction of combat literature andfilms. Everything, and everyone, appeared as more noble and moreexotic in such stories than in commonplace encounters. Despite theunderstandable emphasis that many historians have placed on theliterature of disillusionment arising out of the ashes of war, patrioticand heroic depictions of combat never lost their attraction. Onceour gaze is turned from a narrow canon represented by poets suchas Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, `highdiction' with its stock phrases (baptisms of fire, transfigured youthand gallant warriors) emerges as the dominant language of war.The same is true if we turn to films. Patriotic romances such asJohn Wayne's The Green Berets (1968) comforted viewers with a familiarsequence of mythical codes and archetypal characters whowere all the more recognizable because they were overblown. InFrancis Ford Coppola's film, Apocalypse Now (1979), with its explorationof the dark fantasies which enabled men to take pleasure incruelty, audiences rejoiced in the invincible Colonel Kilgore filminghis own private John Wayne movie in the midst of battle, Marinessurfing under fire, cosy barbecues on hostile beaches, and Wagnerbooming from combat helicopters. So-called B-movies took suchheroics to even greater lengths. In Cirio H. Santiago's Behind EnemyLines (1987), audiences were supposed to be charmed by supermenmowing down hundreds of enemy soldiers with onemachine-gun and infiltrating enemy camps in daylight. They performedextraordinary feats without pause and never wearied ofkilling, killing, killing.

    Not all these narratives lauded armed prowess or exalted the pleasuresof combat. During and after each war there were strong literaryand cinematic movements against militarism. The horrors ofcombat were most dramatically represented in the literature of the1914-18 conflict and in the cinematic and literary representations ofthe war in Vietnam. In these fictional accounts, there was often littleto `justify' the slaughter and the theme was that of the disillusionmentof individuals, puny in comparison to a technologicallydriven, military imperative. As Michael Cimino, the director of TheDeer Hunter (1978), claimed, `any good picture about war' has to be`anti-war'. However, just like the anti-war protestors who ended upexhorting battle when they chanted `Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh,/ Weshall fight and we shall win', anti-war films simply relocated the conflictand quickly re-entered the romanticized canon of war. TakePhilip Caputo during the Vietnam War. While he was in training,he recalled finding classroom work mind-numbing: `I wanted theromance of war, bayonet charges, and desperate battles against impossibleodds', he explained, `I wanted the sort of thing I had seen inGuadalcanal Diary and Retreat, Hell! and a score of other movies.'Despite the filthy, anti-heroic battle scenes in the films he mentioned,he was entranced by them. Realistic representations of combatare not necessarily pacifist or even pacificistic. It was preciselythe horror which thrilled audiences and readers: gore and abjectionwas the pleasure, subverting any anti-war moral. As the narrator ofLarry Heinemann's Paco's Story (1987) recognized: `Most folks willshell out hard-earned, greenback cash, every time, to see artfully performed,urgently fascinating, grisly and gruesome carnage.'

    Anti-war representations contained an additional ambivalence:while the horror of bloody combat might be meticulously delineated,the enemy remained individual, deeply flawed yet capable ofbeing understood, and thus accorded empathy. Debate was focusedaround good versus bad combatants, rather than about `combatants'.Thus, the atrocities in Roland Emmerich's Universal Soldier (1992)served merely to differentiate between Sergeant Scott (who collectedears) and Private Devreux (who refused to shoot civilians).Both were extremely effective soldiers. Equally, in John Irvin'sHamburger Hill (1987), the poignant opening scenes of the VietnamVeterans' memorial in Washington were utilized simply to justifythe actions of the good servicemen, the dropping of napalm wasportrayed as though its function was purely aesthetic, and the realenemies were the effete men at home and anti-war protestors. TheVietnam veteran, author, and anti-war campaigner Tim O'Briensummed up the dangers of such representation of war by remindinghis readers that, for him,

Vietnam wasn't an unreal experience; it wasn't absurd. It was a cold-blooded, calculated war. Most of the movies about it have been done with this kind of black humorish, Apocalypse Now absurdity: the world's crazy; madman Martin Sheen is out to kill madman Marlon Brando; Robert Duvall is a surfing nut. There's that sense of `well, we're all innocent by reason of insanity'; `the war was crazy, and therefore we're innocent'. That doesn't go down too well.

In merging `the horror, the horror' with a shadowy, oriental or fascistevil, viewers were faced with a familiar motif: the enemy as theultimate `other'.

    So how did the men who are quoted in this book imagine warprior to entering the armed forces? Combat stories were most powerfulwhen recounted by fathers, older brothers, and other closemale friends. And the attraction was not restricted to boys. Younggirls also found the war adventures of their fathers enticing and achief motivation for wanting to become combatants themselves.Vee Robinson, for instance, volunteered to work on an AA (antiaircraft)gun site, downing enemy aeroplanes during the SecondWorld War. She recalled the battle stories told by fathers (in the interwaryears) about their experiences between 1914 and 1918, rememberinghow her school friends would boast about the heroicdeeds carried out by `our Dads'. At times, the desire to fire gunscould be strangely disassociated from the act of destruction. Thiswas the case with Jean Bethke Elshtain when she recalled her desirearound the time of the Korean War to own a gun. She called thisher `Joan of Arc period' and admitted that she had `got the taste forshooting' at a picnic when she turned out to be a better shot thansome of the boys. In her words: `I didn't want to kill anything, savesymbolically. But the idea of being a dead-eye shot and the imageof going outside, rifle in hand: that intrigued.'

    It is clear that fantasies of combat drawn from books and films alsodominated many men's daytime and nighttime dreams, encouragingthem to volunteer in anticipation of being given an opportunity toemulate heroes that they had read about since infancy. Lieutenant-ColonelH. F. N. Jourdain of the Connaught Rangers in the FirstWorld War was one such romantic. In his memoirs (published in1934), he could still conjure up the thrill he felt while reading the warstories of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Lever. These tales promptedhim to join the army, in order to `take part in such stirring times aswere depicted'. He singled out Lever, in particular, for preparing himfor the type of combat which involved charges, wild cheers which`rent the skies', and wholesale bayoneting until the enemy scatteredand the Rangers `halted to recover breath and stayed the slaughter'.

    Similar heroics were imagined by men who signed up in 1939.Eugene B. `Sledgehammer' Sledge had been a sickly child but hadentertained himself by translating Caesar's writings on warfare andhe revered Washington, Audubon, Daniel Boone, and Robert E.Lee (both of his grandfathers had been Confederate officers).Similarly, Audie Murphy had grown up in a poor white family ofsharecroppers in Texas. As a twelve-year-old boy weeding and hoeingthe infertile land, his mind was always on some imaginary battlefieldwhere `bugles blew, banners streamed, and men chargedgallantly across flaming hills'. This was a fantastic battlegroundwhere enemy bullets always missed while the bullets from his`trusty rifle forever hit home'. During each of these conflicts,boys and men devoured the romantic, military literature of the precedingwar. Thus, during the First World War, literature about theimperial wars entranced thousands; at the time of the SecondWorld War, boys spent hours reading The Times History of the GreatWar, in the Vietnam era popular books (such as Fighting the RedDevils) based on Second World War exploits were much in demand.

    By the 1960s, new kinds of media offering narratives of killinghad overtaken the more traditional literary ones. Televisionbrought the joy of slaughter into the living room. Allen Hunt (forinstance) saw himself as a typical son of rural America. Fromsmall-town Maryland, Hunt slipped naturally into the navy andthen the army. He explained becoming a soldier in terms of aneaseful transition:

I liked the Army, as I was trained to do things that I felt comfortable doing. All through my childhood I had roamed the woods, hunting, playing Army and `hide and seek'. From reading and watching Television, I had learnt basic theories of combat. Growing up at home, I had often dreamt about participating in combat; it was an experience that I wanted to acquire.

Ron Kovic's memoir, Born on the Fourth of July (1976), also describedthe excitement of combat films such as To Hell and Back, inwhich Audie Murphy jumped on top of a flaming tank in order toturn a machine gun on to the Germans: `He was so brave I hadchills running up and down my back, wishing it was me up there,'he recalled. Not many years later, he was.

    The poet William D. Ehrhart made a similar observation in anarticle entitled `Why I Did It' (1980) in which he attempted to explainhis reasons for joining the Marines at the age of seventeen. Headmitted that he had an unrealistic idea of what war actually entailed.His image was framed by real and imaginary men like JohnWayne, Audie Murphy, William Holden, Nathan Hale, Alvin York,and Eddie Rickenbacker. His childhood was spent building plasticmodels of bombers and fighter planes, playing cowboys and Indians,and indulging in other war games, and his two most memorablechildhood Christmas presents were a lifesize plastic .30 calibremachine gun and a .45 calibre automatic cap pistol in a leather holsterwith USMC embossed on the military-style cover flap. (`I wasso proud of that pistol that I ran up the street first chance I got toshow it off to Margie Strawser,' he recounted.) Newsreels of troopsreturning home in 1945 and his envy of friends whose fathers had`been heroes' in that war were as fresh in his memory in 1980 asthey had been when he was a child.

    As Ehrhart's memory attested, the industry devoted to the productionof martial toys was immense. This can be illustrated bylooking at one of the most aggressive military units, the SpecialForces or, as they were popularly known, the Green Berets. By thelate 1960s, parents could buy Green Beret dolls, records, comicstrips, bubble gum, puzzles, and books for their children (or themselves).For ten dollars, the Sears catalogue offered a Special Forcesoutpost, complete with machine gun, rifle, hand grenades, rackets,field telephone, and plastic soldiers. For half this price, MontgomeryWard's Christmas catalogue promised to send a GreenBeret uniform and, for an additional six pounds, they would throwin an AR-15 rifle, pistol, flip-top military holster, and a green beret.Adults were catered for not only by Green Beret books but also bya major film, The Green Berets (1968). Children like Kovic andEhrhart played with Matty Mattel machine guns and grenades andcherished miniature soldiers holding guns, bazookas, andflamethrowers. Every Saturday afternoon, Kovic and his friendswould take their plastic battery-generated machine guns, cap pistols,and sticks down to Sally's Wood where they would `set ambushes,then lead gallant attacks, storming over the top, bayoneting andshooting anyone who got in our way'. Afterwards, they would walkout of the woods `like the heroes we knew we would become whenwe were men'. By 1962, imitation guns were the largest categoryof toys for boys with American sales exceeding $100 million annually.Thus civilians were provided with their first clumsy introductionto a technology of combat which could be harnessed in theevent of war.

    When a man was inducted into one of the armed forces, theseimaginary structures became more significant. Indeed, the militaryrecognized that it was crucial to foment such fantasies if combat effectivenesswas to remain high. They acknowledged that the bestcombatants were men who were able to visualize killing as pleasurable.Military authorities frequently financed and encouraged theartistic production of combat narratives. The First World War sawthe creation of film as a new, `modern' weapon of war. The most importantof these films were The Battle of the Somme (1916) and TheBattle of the Ancre (1916), which claimed to show men dying andkilling in defence of England's green fields, but were in fact createdfor propaganda purposes by writers and artists gathering secretly atWellington House. Hundreds of thousands of people flocked to seethese films in their first week. The propaganda machine was evenmore central to military regimes during the Second World War.One American example was the popular Why We Fight (1942), aseries of seven films ordered by the US Army Chief of Staff and directedby Frank Capra. This series combined footage from newsreelsand films captured from the enemy, in combination withnarration and animation. Like other films in this genre, it drewrigid distinctions between good and evil and was shown not only totroops but in cinemas throughout America. During the VietnamWar, the Department of Defense produced other troop indoctrinationfilms, including Why Vietnam? (1965), which played on theneed to rid Vietnam of the Communists. Again, it was shown notonly to troops but also in high schools and colleges. From this pointon, the Department of Defense's films substituted a more subtleethnographic approach for the Second World War's more dramaticHollywood-style films. Attention shifted to the Vietnamese relianceupon American aid, both medically, educationally, and technologically.In films like The Unique War (1966) and VietnameseVillage Reborn (1967), `ordinary' scenes from Vietnamese villageswere presented to viewers. Films aimed at troops about to be postedto Vietnam were more hard-hitting. In Your Tour in Vietnam(1970), the narrator provided his listeners with tough advice andconjured up images of male comradeship, adventure, and the thrillof combat, including the dropping of bombs from `the big B-52s'(the bombs exploded in rhythm with jazz music).

    These propaganda films were also part of training regimes. Inmuch the same way as Second World War films such as Batton(1943) and Guadalcanal Diary (1943) are used by the military establishmenttoday, in the period between 1914 and the end of theVietnam War, combat films were used as much to excite men'simaginations as to reassure them. One recruit who watched TheBattle of the Somme just before going into battle told his comradethat seeing the film had made him aware of what they were goingto face. `If it were left to the imagination you might think all sortsof silly b-- things,' he admitted. During the Second WorldWar, the film The Battle of Britain (1944) was also said to beeffective in making the men who watched it `feel like killing a bunch ofthose sons-of-bitches'. Opinion polls conducted during the SecondWorld War showed that troops who had watched Why WeFight and the bi-weekly newsreels issued by the War Departmentwere more aggressively pro-war than those who had not seen thesefilms.

    Warfare was also reflected through the lens of earlier wars, particularlythat of the American frontier. In Britain and Australia (aswell as in America), the motif of men envisaging themselves asheroic warriors linked modern warfare with historical conflicts inwhich it was almost a duty to conquer another race, all for the sakeof `civilization'. During the First World War, trench raiders weredescribed as slipping over the parapet with the stealth of Red Indians:`No Sioux or Blackfoot Indian straight from the pages of FenimoreCooper ever did it more skilfully,' Robert WilliamMacKenna recounted. In the Second World War, the most virilefighters were frequently slotted into mythical stories of cowboysand Indians. Men like Captain Arthur Wermuth (known as the`one-man-army' after having singlehandedly killed more than onehundred Japanese soldiers) identified strongly with the cowhandson his father's range in South Dakota. He insisted on jumping intotrenches `with a cowboy yell'. The souvenirs which were collectedfrom enemy corpses were described as being so intimate that theywould have `curled the scalplock of Pontiac'. One catalogue ofover 600 Vietnam war films provides innumerable examples of theimportance of `cowboys and Indians', ranging from Nam Angels(1988) in which the hero wore a cowboy hat and swung a lasso,Montagnards hooted like Indians and bikers charged as thoughthey were on horses not motorbikes, to John Wayne's The GreenBerets, released twenty years earlier. This was really a western in disguise,with the Vietcong playing the Indians and the quip `Dueprocess is a bullet' being substituted for `the only good Vietcong isa dead one'. The film Little Big Man (1970) even explicitly linkedthe genocide of the Indians in the American West with the war inVietnam.

    In the `Indian country' of Vietnam, `The Duke', or John Wayne,was the hero most emulated. Indeed, in July 1971, the MarineCorps League named him the man `who best exemplifie[d] the word"American"'. He had become the most popular actor on televisionand men like the ace pilot Lieutenant Randy Cunningham (who confessedto enjoying downing North Vietnamese MIGs) was proud thathis tactical sign was `Duke', after John Wayne, because (he said) `I respecthis American Ideals'. Philip Caputo imagined himself chargingup a beachhead, like John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), andthis led him to join the Marines to fight in Vietnam. More than anyother branch of the armed services during the war in Vietnam, theSpecial Forces modelled themselves after the cinematic heroics ofJohn Wayne, despite the fact that Second World War assault tacticswere not appropriate in a guerrilla war. Even women were attracted bythis myth: Carol McCutchean, for instance, joined the WomenMarines because she was thrilled by John Wayne movies.

    Not surprisingly, therefore, combatants interpreted their battlegroundexperiences through the lens of an imaginary camera. Oftenthe real thing did not live up to its representation in the cinema. Thetwenty-year-old Australian officer Gary McKay was slightly disappointedby the way his victims acted when hit by his bullets: it `wasn'tlike one normally expected after watching television and war movies.There was no great scream from the wounded but simply a gruntand then an uncontrolled collapse to the ground', he observed morosely.Or, as the fighter pilot Hugh Dundas admitted, his `nasty,sickening' introduction to combat was in stark contrast to the way hehad imagined it would be. Others were happier with the match betweenfictional representation and their own experience: a submarine,for example, could sink just like it would in Hollywoodpictures. The explosion of an aeroplane during the war in Koreacould make a pilot `so damned excited' because it was `like somethingyou see in the movies'. Nineteen-year-old Geoffry R. Jones experiencedcombat in Vietnam as an extension of the movies or playingcowboys and Indians as he had done only a few years before. Thepilot of a spotter plane in Vietnam who accurately directed artilleryfire `yipp[ed] like a cowboy' every time they hit the enemy.

    Killing itself was likened to film-making. In one instance duringthe First World War, a Royal Fusilier ordered machine gunners entrenchedin a farm house to `cinematograph the grey devils' and topretend that it was Coronation Day by `tak[ing] as many pictures aspossible'. He continued:

The picture witnessed from the farm on the `living screen' by the canal bridge was one that will not easily be forgotten. The `grey devils' dropped down in hundreds. Again and again they came on only to get more machine murder.

In 1918, one sergeant quoted in the magazine The Stars and Stripessaid that battle was `like a movie' with the infantry making a `serene,unchecked advance ... their ranks unbroken, their jaunty trot unslackened'.`A movie man would have died of joy at the opportunity,'another sergeant exclaimed. An unnamed Canadian informantduring the Second World War agreed. He described training hismachine gun on thirty Germans aboard a submarine as `like one ofthose movies when you see troops coming at the camera and justbefore they meet it, hit it, you see them going off to the left andright, left and right'. In Nam. The Vietnam War in the Words of theMen and Women Who Fought There (1982), an eighteen-year-old radiomanconfessed that he

loved to just sit in the ditch and watch people die. As bad as that sounds, I just liked to watch no matter what happened, sitting back with my homemade cup of hot chocolate. It was like a big movie.

Or, as Philip Caputo put it, killing Viet Cong was enjoyable becauseit was like watching a movie: `One part of me was doingsomething while the other part watched from a distance.' Instead offocusing on mangled corpses, soldiers who could imagine themselvesas movie heroes felt themselves to be effective warriors.Such forms of disassociation were psychologically useful. By imaginingthemselves as participating in a fantasy, men could find a languagewhich avoided facing the unspeakable horror not only ofdying but of meting out death.

    As already implied in many of the quotations, films created, as wellas represented, combat performance. So powerful were cinematic imagesof battle that soldiers acted as though they were on the screen.During the Second World War, William Manchester was stunned bythe way soldiers in the Pacific imitated Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., ErrolFlynn, Victor McLagle, John Wayne and Gary Cooper. During theVietnam War, the journalist Michael Herr commented on the performanceof `grunts' when they knew that there was a camera crewnearby: `they were actually making war movies in their heads, doinglittle guts-and-glory Leatherneck tap dances under fire, getting theirpimples shot off for the network ... doing numbers for the cameras'.Even in Grenada in 1983, American soldiers charged intobattle playing Wagner, in imitation of Robert Duvall, the brigadecommander in Apocalypse Now (1979).

    Of course, such antics often had a short life. Josh Cruze, whojoined the Marines at the age of seventeen and served in Vietnam,had this to say:

The John Wayne flicks. We were invincible. So when we were taken into ... war, everyone went in with the attitude, `Hey, we're going to wipe them out. Nothing's going to happen to us.' Until they saw the realities and they couldn't deal with it. `This isn't supposed to happen. It isn't in the script. What's going on? This guy's really bleeding all over me, and he's screaming his head off.'

Even worse, such fantasies could get a man killed. The combat engineerHarold `Light Bulb' Bryant remembered a man with thenickname of Okie who had the `John Wayne Syndrome'. He wasitching to get into action. During his first battle, their unit waspinned down by machine guns and Okie `tried to do the JohnWayne thing'. He attempted to charge the machine gun and wasimmediately mowed down. Films, then, provided both pleasurable,and deathly, scripts.

    In training camps, miles from the frontlines, men wondered `howmuch resemblance there would be between the imagination and reality,between war as [we] rehearsed it day after day on the Sussexdowns ... and the real war of the trenches'. Inexperienced infantrymenswapped thoughts about what it would feel like to `run aman through with a bayonet' and swore (as did one Texan during theFirst World War) that they were so keen for intimate struggle thatthey were willing to go over the top with a penknife. Like AlfredE. Bland on 30 January 1916, soldiers wrote long letters to theirfamilies describing this yearning for battle, enthusing about the`change about to come -- real business with real Germans in front ofus. Oh! I do hope I shall visibly kill a few.' When asked why theyjoined the corps, they would simply write: `To Kill'. Airmen interviewedby Roy R. Grinker and John P. Spiegel in Men Under Stress(1945) also expressed `eager-beaver' reactions prior to going overseas.They were so wrought up that men who were prevented at the lastmoment from embarking burst into tears. Such keenness betrayed ablinkered view of reality. `The men seldom have any real, concretenotions of what combat is like,' Grinker and Spiegel continued,

[t]heir minds are full of romanticized, Hollywood versions of their future activity in combat, colored with vague ideas of being a hero and winning ribbons and decorations.

If they were told more realistic stories about what to expect `theywould not believe them'. Emotions ran so high that even whennot in battle, pilots acted as though they were constantly engaged inthe clash of arms. Every time they `took the air', fighter pilots were`'symbolically going into action with the enemy'. Consequently, theyflew wildly, executing tight turns as they approached the runway,and did aerobatics too close to the ground. This was (according toone observer) `seldom deliberate exhibitionism'. More to the point,they were simply demonstrating to themselves their `capacities asfighting men'. Actual aerial combat was often `a cruel awakening'.

    Immediately prior to the first `kill', more poignant musingsmight be substituted for such fantastical skylarking. RichardHillary, the famous Second World War pilot mentioned later, recalledthe `empty feeling of suspense' in the pit of his stomach whenhe climbed into the cockpit of his plane for the first time in a `real'combat situation. `For one second', he recounted,

time seemed to stand still and I stared blankly in front of me. I knew that that morning I was to kill for the first time ... I wondered idly what he was like, this man I would kill. Was he young, was he fat, would he die with the Fuehrer's name on his lips, or would he die alone, in that last moment conscious of himself as a man?

Neither Hillary nor any other combatant would ever discover theanswer to these questions: but combat itself would provide themwith an opportunity for infusing such daydreams with a new, morefrenzied passion.

Joyful slaughter

Did actual combat dent the pleasures of imaginative violence? Formost combatants, the answer must be `no'. Time and time again, inthe writings of combatants from all three wars, we read of men's(and women's) enjoyment of killing. This book contains innumerableexamples of men like the shy and sensitive First World Warsoldier who recounted that the first time he stuck a German withhis bayonet was `gorgeously satisfying ... exultant satisfaction'.Second Lieutenant F. R. Darrow found that bayoneting Prussianswas `beautiful work'. `Sickening yet exhilarating butchery' was reportedto be `joy unspeakable' by a New Zealand sapper. Generalswere praised if they managed to maintain a spirit of the `joy ofslaughter' in their troops, even if it meant arming night patrollerswith spiked clubs to intimidate and bash the Huns. In the wordsof Henry de Man:

I had thought myself more or less immune from this intoxication until, as trench mortar officer, I was given command over what is probably the most murderous instrument in modern warfare.... One day ... I secured a direct hit on an enemy encampment, saw bodies or parts of bodies go up in the air, and heard the desperate yelling of the wounded or the runaways. I had to confess to myself that it was one of the happiest moments of my life.

He admitted that he had yelled aloud `with delight' and `could havewept with joy'. `What' (he asked) were `the satisfactions of scientificresearch, of a successful public activity, of authority, of love, comparedwith this ecstatic minute?'

    More than fifty years later, in the Vietnam conflict, combat soldiersconfessed to similarly exhilarating emotions. Like WilliamBroyles, Philip Caputo admitted that he never told the truth whenpeople asked him how he felt going into combat because the truthwould have labelled him a `war-lover'. For Caputo, going into battlemade him feel `happier than [he] ever had'. Similarly, althoughthe twenty-year-old Australian officer Gary McKay had killed lotsof Vietnamese, he clearly recalled the sensation of actually seeinghis bullets hit a man. For him, the `terrible power of effect of theweapon when it hit the target' overwhelmed him with `awe'.When another soldier in Vietnam went berserk and massacredmany of the enemy, he remembered feeling suffused with joy: `I feltlike a god, this power flowing through me ... I was untouchable.'James Hebron, a scout-sniper in the Marines, also described the incrediblesense of power he felt in combat:

That sense of power, of looking down the barrel of a rifle at somebody and saying, `Wow, I can drill this guy.' Doing it is something else too. You don't necessarily feel bad; you feel proud, especially if it's one on one, he has a chance. It's the throw of the hat. It's the thrill of the hunt.

Killing was intrinsically `glamorous'. It was like `getting screwed thefirst time' and gave men `an ache as profound as the ache of orgasm'.In the words of a black Muslim Marine, `I enjoyed the shooting andthe killing. I was literally turned on when I saw a gook get shot.'

    Semi-autobiographical accounts tell a similar tale. For example,in one place in James Jones's The Thin Red Line (1962), Doll hadjust butchered his first Japanese. This `kill' pleased him, in part becausehe felt proud at accurately shooting `dirty little yellow Japbastards'. It was, he believed, like `getting screwed the first time'.More interestingly, however, Doll's pleasure resided in his guilt. Hehad committed the most horrendous crime -- worse, he believed,than rape -- but that was where the heartfelt allure of killingresided. It made him feel immune from any outside power. Nobodywas going to persecute him for this action. He had -- literally-- `gotten by with murder', and the thought filled him with an urge togiggle: he felt so `stupid and cruel and mean and vastly superior'.People could take an immense delight in breaking the highestmoral law.

    As we shall see in Chapter 2, airmen were particularly liable tobe enraptured by homicidal violence. In Winged Warfare. HuntingHuns in the Air (1918), Major William Avery Bishop thought it`great fun' to train his machine gun on Germans because he `loved'to watch them running away `like so many rats'. Even a pilot'smechanic might take some of the reflected glory, bragging how`his' pilot had `got a Hun' while another mechanic's pilot had not.During the Second World War, `Bob' described himself as being`elated' when he shot down a German plane, mainly because thismeant that his `score' had improved. `Life wasn't too bad after all,'he reflected. After a kill, pilots admitted that they `all felt muchbetter' and there would be `a good deal of smacking on the backand screaming of delight'. Although the sight of mutilated anddead Germans staining the rear cockpit of their planes might bedescribed as `sad and beastly', airmen admitted that they had felt`elated then'. The sense of power in the air could be exhilarating,attested a fighter pilot known as `Durex'. With great earnestness,he enthused:

I opened fire, the bullets roared out over the noise of the engine. They don't rattle like an ordinary Army Vickers gun. No, sir! When the 8 Brownings open fire -- what a thrill! The smoke whips back into the cockpit and sends a thrill running down your spine.

Continues...

Excerpted from An Intimate History of Killingby Joanna Bourke Copyright © 2000 by Joanna Bourke. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0465007384
• ISBN 13: 9780465007387
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 509