'Enemy Contact. Kill 'em, Kill 'em.' - MILITARY training reinforces

[LittleApple81]

remorseless killing...
THIS IS A MUST READ ARTICLE (on LBN already). I wonder how these soldiers are going to react when they return to their communities. Apparently, the military want a repeat of the 50% Vietnman veterans with emotional, psychological trauma... only worse.

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'Enemy Contact. Kill 'em, Kill 'em.'
Sun Jul 18, 7:55 AM ET Add Top Stories - Los Angeles Times to My Yahoo!

By Charles Duhigg Times Staff Writer

NAJAF, Iraq (news - web sites) — Tucked behind a gleaming machine gun, Sgt. Joseph Hall grins at his two companions in the Humvee.

"I want to know if I killed that guy yesterday," Hall says. "I saw blood spurt from his leg, but I want to be sure I killed him."

snip...

Soldiers are untrained, experts say, for the trauma of killing. Forty years after lessons learned about combat stress in Vietnam, experts charge that avoidable psychological damage goes unchecked because military officials don't include emotional preparation in basic training.


Troops, returning home with untreated and little-understood mental health issues, put themselves and their families at risk for suicide and domestic violence, experts say. Twenty-three U.S. troops in Iraq took their lives last year, according to the Defense Department — an unusually high number, one official acknowledged.

On patrol, however, all that is available is talk.

"Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill," Hall says. "It's like it pounds at my brain. I'll figure out how to deal with it when I get home."

Home is the wrong place for soldiers to deal with combat experiences, some experts say.

Much more at link:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2026&ncid=2026&e=12&u=/latimests/20040718/ts_latimes/enemycontactkillemkillem

[InkAddict]

1. Manual here!

http://www.bragg.army.mil/528CSC/FM22-51Contents.htm

[LittleApple81]

2. Thanks... I cannot read that... When we talk about killing (and I agree

if I feel that I, my family, or the country is attacked, I must defend it to the death) I get very nervous when we want to remove ALL FILLING FROM PEOPLE TO CONVERT THEM INTO KILLING ROBOTS.

[gratuitous]

3. "I'll deal with it when I get home"

No you won't. Your spouse and your loved ones will be dealing with that. And some bleeding heart liberal touchy-feely psychiatrist will have to work overtime without pay trying to turn you back into the human being you were before going into the military.

And despite the lack of care and help, despite the cutting of funding and benefits, you will still vote Republican, and these bastards will do the same thing to your son in a few years.

[LittleApple81]

4. I overhead soldiers who came from Gulf War when riding the shuttle

from the airport. They were saying that they loved the experience of BURNING IRAQIS TO A CRISP and burying them in the sand. They were sorry they did not have the opportunity to kill more. I was terrified...

[MadHound]

5. This type of brainwashing has been going on since WWII

And brainwashing is exactly what it is.

A little history. During the thirties, the brain trust heading up the armed forces was worried. What worried them was the low kill to expended rounds ratio. Too many soldiers were shooting to miss. It was a historical fact that even in combat situations, most humans have a hard wired adversion to killing fellow humans. In the Civil War, Spanish American War, and WWI, it was found the well over fifty percent of the ammunition fired was deliberately(albeit subconciously) fired to miss, over the enemys' head, off to the side, short, etc.

It seems that mankind had developed a serious, deep-seated inablity to kill other humans. After much study, socioligists and psychiatrists developed a program to break down recruits and desensitize them to the point where they could efficiently kill other humans. This is now the program that every military recruit first goes through, Basic Training. Yet the ongoing problem is what happens to the recruit once the slaughter stops, and they go home. This concern wasn't addressed, or even recognized until the Vietnam war. And apparently nothing has been done in the interim period to help vetrans deal with the after effects. Hopefully something is done soon, otherwise we will have another generation of trained killers at war with themselves once they come home.

[LittleApple81]

6. They mention that in the article. They said in WWII only 15% aimed

to kill. That is why their training changed to make the killing easier.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

7. An interesting bit of history.

After the Battle of the Bulge in WWII, a study was made by the army. It found that 50% of the American soldiers never fired their rifles. When questioned, the soldiers said that they just couldn't bring themselves to kill other people.

As a result the American military has pursued a policy of dehumanizing the "enemy" by never referring to them as people in training. "The enemy", "Targets", "Communists", "Terrorists", etc.

The troops fill in their own discriptions to justify the killing. "Gook", "Slopes", "Ragheads", "Camel Jockeys", etc.

In boot camp, in the marines, we were told that we should be eager to kill Cubans (the threat of the week) because they were "Communists" and because Castro had a smelly beard and they were coming to rape our sisters.

[LittleApple81]

8. Wow... I have a friend that (when you still could (BB before Bush))

Would go to the military recruiting tables at our University and say: I want to see real dead bodies, torn limbs, burns and guts in your posters. Otherwise, this is false advertising..... Boy, did they get pissed. If he were to do this now (he left the USA some years ago) he would be in prison.