"killer games"

[Darth Rotor]

I love all the stories about Desensation in the Military.
I served back in the 80's, in the US Army Artillery and the nearest I came was some video tapes with gruesome footage of the aftermath of accidental explosions in the "This is what could happen if you don't take safety producers seriously" vein.
I am informed the Navy has the most gruesome of all : Of various accidents that can happen aboard Air Craft Carriers to get across to the new Swabbies that the flight deck of an Aircraft Carrier when launching operations are underway is a very Dangerous place to be.

Forrestal and Oriskany films of fire on board ship are still standard fare.

Cautions worth emphasizing. Fire at sea is bad news.

DR

 

[dudalb]

I was thinking more of the footage of Heads and Limbs being lopped off when some careless sailor gets in the way of a jet, but you are right, fire at sea is VERY bad news.

 

[Euromutt]

I haven't seen a light gun game in a while, do they still make them? In any case, how is that different from, say, kids playing cowboys and indians?

It's sort of making a comeback with the Wii Zapper attachment for the Wii. Then there's the Big Buck Hunter series of arcade games (fairly popular in bars in my part of the world).

Speaking as a former infantryman (Royal Netherlands Army, conscripted 1993-1994), though, I have to say that sort of thing is of sod-all use for any kind of training purposes. The "light guns" aren't anywhere near as cumbersome as a real firearm (in weight, and for shoulder-fired weapons, in length as well), there's no reloading drill, the weapon doesn't get uncomfortably hot in certain areas, electronic triggers don't have the same feel as mechanical ones, and of course, there's no muzzle blast and recoil. And there's that small point that "light gun"-type games are rail shooters at best, whereas combat takes place in a 360-degree in three axes environment. Paintball and MILES come a lot closer to the real thing as far as weapons handling is concerned, though even then you don't get OPFOR displaying visible wounds, collapsing and screaming, and what have you.

It's a strange fact that killing a helpless enemy is easier for most men than killing an actively resisting one. Grossman's book "On killing" documents this weird phenomenon quite well.

I'll take as read you mean psychologically easier, since it's fairly self-evident that it's physically much easier. But even so, I have to wonder about the role played by psychological conditioning prior to entering combat. It's probably easier to mentally dehumanize your enemy when his discipline has broken and he's running; after all, you're not, so he's just gone from being a worthy adversary to an unworthy one. But that does require that you are able to tell yourself that the other guy had a fighting chance to resist you, because otherwise you're just participating in a mass murder. (And there's still the minor detail that you have to get the other side to turn tail first.)

And I'll allow for the possibility that that's not as difficult as we think, but if so, Gross's claims that we have a very high inhibition to overcome before we can bring ourselves to kill another human being would have the rug pulled out from under it. If we're naturally so averse to killing another human, why should we have less compunction about killing someone who is running away and thus no longer presents an immediate threat, than about killing someone who may kill us unless we kill him first?

The military perfected conditioning prior to Vietnam - hence why firing rates went from 10% in WW2 to 98% in Vietnam. They solved the non-firer problem years before computer games.

I'm very skeptical of Grossman's explanation there. (As an aside, Marshall claimed it was 15-20% of riflemen, not 10%.) Vietnam was a very different kind of war than WWII, especially in ETO (a point that was frequently lost on the American military leadership in Vietnam). In particular, the PAVN (People's Army of Viet Nam, aka the NVA), faced with the massive artillery and air support available to American infantry, quickly developed a tactic known as "holding the enemy by the belt," i.e. keeping the engagement distance too short for the Americans to safely call in artillery. With the fighting getting that up close and personal, one would expect a higher percentage of troops to fire their weapons.

Another factor is that much of infantry combat operations in Vietnam consisted of troops being dropped into an LZ by helicopter and then spending days patrolling on foot, with only opportunities for helicopter-borne resupply and casevac being restricted by terrain (especially thick tree cover). As a result, the average grunt was loaded down with a ridiculous amount of gear; Roland Spector in After Tet lists the stuff riflemen of one battalion in the 1st US Infantry Division were expected to hump on operations, which included something along the lines of full webbing gear with extra canteens, M16A1, helmet, flak vest, entrenching tool, poncho, two bandoliers of 20 M16 magazines each (in addition to those carried in the ammo pouches), a 100-round belt of 7.62mm for the M60s, four M26 frag grenades, two smoke grenades, one WP grenade, two trip flares, two M18A1 claymore mines, and an M72 LAW. The obvious solution to being loaded down with such a ridiculous amount of ordnance in the near-equatorial heat of southern Vietnam was to lighten the load by "lighting up" any target of opportunity, real or imagined (which frequently caused problems if the enemy was subsequently encountered). That sort of thing would tend to skew the averages, as every man would have fired his weapon while on operation.

Add to that that Marshall's claim of 15-20% of riflemen actually firing their weapons at the enemy, along with many of his other claims, have been strongly disputed at the very least, and Gross's claims begin to become quite untenable. Not least because he makes other claims without considering alternative interpretations. In "Trained to Kill" he asserts:

At the Battle of Gettysburg, of the 27,000 muskets picked up from the dead and dying after the battle, 90 percent were loaded.

This is an anomaly, because it took 95 percent of their time to load muskets and only 5 percent to fire. But even more amazingly, of the thousands of loaded muskets, over half had multiple loads in the barrel--one with 23 loads in the barrel.

In reality, the average man would load his musket and bring it to his shoulder, but he could not bring himself to kill. He would be brave, he would stand shoulder to shoulder, he would do what he was trained to do; but at the moment of truth, he could not bring himself to pull the trigger. And so he lowered the weapon and loaded it again. Of those who did fire, only a tiny percentage fired to hit. The vast majority fired over the enemy's head.

A simpler explanation for the condition of the weapons recovered at Gettysburg is that training tends to go to pieces under stress of battle, and the more complex the drills required, the more likely it is that something will go wrong.

The standard-issue infantry weapon of the American Civil War was the muzzle-loading percussion rifle musket, and it has quite a complex loading procedure. First, you have to open the part of the cartridge containing the powder, pour it down the barrel, and tamp it down with the ramrod. Then you have to drop the bullet into the barrel, and tamp that down with the ramrod. Then, after replacing the ramrod under the barrel, you have to (half-)cock the hammer and place the percussion cap (primer) on the nipple under the hammer. If you have half-cocked the hammer, you have to pull it back to fully cocked and only then is the weapon ready to fire.

There is any number of things that can go wrong that will cause the weapon to not fire. You could drop the bullet in before the powder, in which case the primer would fail to set off the powder charge, and subsequent reloads would not go off either. You could forget to place the percussion cap, in which case the powder charge would not be set off when the hammer fell, so that even if you pulled the trigger while actually aiming at an enemy, the weapon wouldn't fire. Chances are, you wouldn't notice with all the other weapons going off, and you'd unwittingly start reloading a still-loaded weapon. Ditto if you forgot to pull back the hammer from the half-cock position before you pulled the trigger (guns are proverbially not meant to go off half-cocked). These are all possible explanations for why a weapon might be recovered form the battlefield essentially unfired, even loaded multiple times, even though the rifleman might have been earnestly trying to kill enemies.

Supporting this explanation is the fact that other mistakes were made in loading and firing drills which are not explicable by a reluctance to kill. Such as soldiers forgetting to take the ramrod out of the barrel before firing. After both Fredericksburg and Gettysburg, people were finding ramrods caught in trees or stuck in the ground years afterward.

Even with cartridge rifles, these kinds of problems occur. Many deer hunters experience something known as "buck fever" in the early days of hunting season, when, faced with a deer, all their theoretical knowledge goes to pot. One way "buck fever" can manifest is by messing up your loading and firing drill with a bolt- or lever-action rifle, namely by forgetting the minor detail of actually pulling the trigger. So the guy's working the action on his rifle, wondering why he isn't hitting the deer, until he empties his rifle and the deer's gotten away, and he looks down and notices that all the ejected cases at his feet are, in fact, unfired.

Frankly, I thought "Trained to Kill" was riddled with tenuous connections, unsupported assumptions, and above all a failure to entertain, let alone refute, explanations for observed phenomena other than those which support his hypothesis. If this is representative of Gross's work, it can be safely ignored. One example:

After the Jonesboro shootings, one of the high-school teachers told me how her students reacted when she told them about the shootings at the middle school. "They laughed," she told me with dismay. A similar reaction happens all the time in movie theaters when there is bloody violence. The young people laugh and cheer and keep right on eating popcorn and drinking pop. We have raised a generation of barbarians who have learned to associate violence with pleasure, like the Romans cheering and snacking as the Christians were slaughtered in the Colosseum.

Let me counter with some of my own experiences. I spent over three years working for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. This began, note, about three years after I was demobilized from the army. My first job at ICTY was taking apart victim and witness statements--basically looking for Who was Where and When and did What to Whom--and entering that information into an investigations database. Forty hours a week reading about beating, forced sex, rapes, killings and ethnic cleansing. Did my co-workers and I laugh? Hell, yes. We made jokes about it all the time. For example, one statement was by a soldier who had been captured, and in the detention camp, a guard forced the prisoner to suck him off; I commented that, given that the prisoner had previously been complaining about how badly they were fed, he'd have welcomed the extra protein. You get the idea.

But at the same time, plenty of us (myself included) were hitting the sauce every weeknight, just to be able to sleep. The jokes were a psychological self-defense mechanism, because if you let it all get to you, you're going to develop problems. Come to think of, I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder last year, and while I don't think that job caused it, it certainly contributed.

I strongly suspect the initial reaction of the students described was of a very similar nature. Wow, another school shooting. It might have been you. Next time it might even be you. Why would you laugh it off? Because if you let it get to you, you're going to go to pieces can cease to function as a human being.

As for the movies; we know the movies aren't real, and in many flicks, the level of violence can reach the point of ridiculousness. But when a friend and co-worker of mine went to see Saving Private Ryan, even after several months of that job, we were still cringing in our seats at the opening scenes. We handled it more calmly than our friends who had different jobs, but we weren't "laugh[ing] and cheer[ing]."

Frankly, Gross's piece reads like an extended "what is with kids today, well, I'll tell you," blithely ignoring that violent crime predates television and computer games. Most modern people, reading an account of the First Crusade, or the Albigensian Crusade, will be quite shocked at the savagery of the participants. Or horse people incursions into western Europe in the Dark Ages, or Cossacks harrying Napoleon's army. And how exactly did those Romans supposedly get so desensitized to violence that gladiatorial combat was a spectator sport, despite the lack of motion pictures, television and video games for the next two millennia?

And if you're going to coin a term like "killology," the least you can do is look up the Greek for "to kill" and use that.

 

[Cuddles]

Paintball... you don't get OPFOR displaying visible wounds, collapsing and screaming, and what have you.

You're doing it wrong.

 

[Father Dagon]

Does the Jack Thompsons of the world differentiate between computer games? I would say that System Shock 1&2 or Manhunt makes you a better killer than some over-the-top FPS.

 

[dudalb]

How about the Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator?
Is shooting down Me 109"s in your Spitfire as bad as gunning somebody down in Half Life 2?

 

[theMark]

(sorry, ranting...)
Following the German news is nothing short of frustrating these days. Populistic display of concernment everywhere, legislative action for action's sake... but how do you protect someone from the blind (bad) luck of a one-in-umpty-million chance? It's like the time of the asbestos panic, where moving whole schools to different buildings meant that more people would be at risk from death in traffic than from death by asbestos...
Ugh. And on top of that, the rampant hypocrisy. Next weekend, a video game convention at Stuttgart will not happen (how dare they, in the wake of the school shooting at Winnenden?) while the short firearms contests on the same weekend continue. Yeah, right. No difference between these two activities at all... one means being able to punch a keyboard really, really fast, while the other teaches people how to hit the center of a conventiently face-sized cardboard with a real gun and real ammunition at twenty paces.
(Yeah, false dichotomy, so sue me

Don't even get me started on constant wail of "won't someone think of the children". Sorry, I'm just not inclined to think of the children. Yuck. The very idea! Do these parasites of concernment realize how many priests got into trouble because they couldn't stop thinking of the children...?
(end rant)

 

[Father Dagon]

I'm very skeptical of Grossman's explanation there. (As an aside, Marshall claimed it was 15-20% of riflemen, not 10%.) Vietnam was a very different kind of war than WWII, especially in ETO (a point that was frequently lost on the American military leadership in Vietnam). In particular, the PAVN (People's Army of Viet Nam, aka the NVA), faced with the massive artillery and air support available to American infantry, quickly developed a tactic known as "holding the enemy by the belt," i.e. keeping the engagement distance too short for the Americans to safely call in artillery. With the fighting getting that up close and personal, one would expect a higher percentage of troops to fire their weapons.

It was also a way to neutralize the M-16s advantage of higher accuracy.

And BTW, I'll say that the AK-47 was constructed after sounder principles. Kalashnikov studied the statistics of the small-arms fire fights during WW2 and came to the conclusion that most fire fights took place at ranges up to 400 meters. Having a greater accuracy than that for the standard fire arm would be pointless. You can always add a marksman. But the M-16 was created to live up to the "one shot-one kill" legends of the american war of independence.