George Paine at Warblogging finds a good reason to long for the days of Victory Gardens and Private Ryan:
- An in-depth study recently released into the public domain shows that in World War II — this nation’s “good war” or “best war” — only about 15% of American combat soldiers actually tried to kill someone. Those thousands upon thousands of Americans under combat arms, they could not bring themselves to kill other human beings — even Nazis, even Imperial Japanese soldiers willing to kill themselves to kill Americans.
Chris Floyd has written in the Moscow Times that this has changed. When the Pentagon learned that so many of its soldiers failed to fire at the enemy it saw this as a problem to be solved… and solved it. Now the mantra “Kill, kill, kill, kill…” is ingrained in young Americans in Basic Training. Eighteen and nineteen year olds are taught rhymes like “This is my weapon, this is my gun…” Now 95% of soldiers fire at the enemy.
Floyd writes:
“Today, in the quagmire of occupied Iraq, the brutalizing beat goes on. ‘Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, it’s like it pounds in my brain,’ a U.S. soldier told the Los Angeles Times last week. Another shrugged at the sight of freshly killed bodies. ‘It doesn’t bother me at all,’ he said. ‘I’m a warrior.’ Said a third: ‘We talk about killing all the time. I never used to be this way … but it’s like I can’t stop. I’m worried what I’ll be like when I get home.’ A few military officials are beginning to worry, too, noting the high rates of suicide, mental damage and emotional torment among combat veterans.”
Back here on the Home Front we hear of Iraqi families being eviscerated at checkpoints. We hear stories from people like Lamea Hassan, a 36-year-old pregnant mother. “I saw the heads of my two little girls come off… My girls – I watched their heads come off their bodies. My son is dead,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald.
Read it. It’s enough to make a cynical young punk like me indulge in Greatest Generation nostalgia.
Your so-called “study” is not new, in fact right after WWII, historian SLA Marshall made a similar claim, that only about 15-20% of soldiers fired their rifles. It was later proved by a number historians that Marshall did not do any scientific study, he based on conversations with a about a 100 soldiers, out of the the millions who served in combat. It has also been proven wrong, but many, to include Roger Spiller and combat veterans Harold P. Lienbaugh David Hackworth.
“Professor Roger J. Spiller (Deputy Director of the Combat Studies Institute, US Army Command and General Staff College) demonstrated in his 1988 article “S.L.A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire” (The RUSI Journal, Winter 1988, pages 63–71) that Marshall had not actually conducted the research upon which he based his ratio of fire theory. “The ‘systematic collection of data’ that made Marshall’s ratio of fire so authoritative appears to have been an invention.” [1] This revelation called into question the authenticity of some of Marshall’s other books, and lent academic weight to doubts about his integrity that had been raised in military circles even decades earlier.”
Bottom line, the facts are that soldiers do fire the weapons and not because they are taught “kill, kill, kill”, that display a complete lack of knowledge about the military.