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Soldiers in combat can kill without moral injury
- quantified 1y agoI would be surprised if there were any universal sense of moral injury. If the child grows up with warrior morals, they will not worry about opponent's death.
- joseppu 1y agoDesperate 18 y.os needing that cosy salary is enough of an incentive. No need for romanticization like warrior morals or something. War is industrialized enough.
- mmooss 1y ago> If the child grows up with warrior morals, they will not worry about opponent's death. What are 'warrior morals' and what is the basis of your claim? It sounds like science fiction or fantasy.
- suraci 1y ago[flagged]
- jmward01 1y agoTime plays a factor that may not be well controlled for here. As you get older the actions you have taken and the events you have participated in can impact you in new ways.
- SoftTalker 1y agoYep, fairly common to hear about old veterans who will not discuss what they did in combat, one could guess because they don't want to resurface those memories.
- monetus 1y agoMy grandfather was in the Pacific theater during WW2, but only the military knows why he had nightmares.
- kstenerud 1y agoThey won't talk to you about it because you can't understand, and talking to you about it would just make them feel more isolated and alone. Only others like them could understand.
- jmward01 1y agoI think there are a lot of different reasons. The thought that other person may not understand could be one, but also that you just don't understand well enough what to say and the mixed emotion of being proud of doing something at a high level with the changing understanding of what actually resulted from those actions.
- ty6853 1y agoThe risk perhaps not so much moral injury, but that combat and war is almost like a drug. Imagine going back home to a toddler raging about the wrong color cup, a narrow set of civil rules, and flipping burgers after living a life out the back of a pickup truck with nothing but a rifle and your buddies keeping you alive. Fucking boring. But I'm no killer, just a guy who spent a few months in a civil war, and met a lot of people who met the Hemingway quote: "Those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it never care for anything else thereafter."
- vasco 1y agoWhenever you have these feelings, go watch actual real life combat footage. A great recent one is a knife fight to the death where one soldier admits defeat and asks the first one to leave him to die https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/s/tAUwd2MWqT https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/s/tAUwd2MWqT Watch that and tell me if you think it's still cool and normal life is boring. I find that it snaps me right back out of "Hollywood war" thinking and makes my stomach turn.
- ty6853 1y agoA lot of the guys I met in the YPG had seen way more combat than that and still yearned for it. One of them was retired foreign legion that did this as his retirement. When we were getting shot at one of the older guys would get viscerally excited and joyful, and he had seen many dead. Junky is a good description of what they were. They wanted another taste. I can't imagine after 5+ years of that life how you would detox from that, not easily I imagine.
- jwilber 1y agoSee also My War Gone By, I Miss It So - a book about the author’s time as a war correspondent in Bosnia during the Yugoslavian War. After the war, he became addicted to heroin for lack of the excitement that the war brought. https://septemberpublishing.org/product/my-war-gone-by-i-miss-it-so-2/ https://septemberpublishing.org/product/my-war-gone-by-i-mis...
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- nirui 1y agoI don't think it's the time. Morality only exists in people who has it. Some already do, some are growing, some never will. Funny thing is, the individuals who never had morality maybe more mentally healthy than the others, since the consequences of their action never entered their brain. Gankers are happier than the ganked, I guess. Maybe that's why the armies around the world loves to hire dumb people into their ranks, never think, never thought, and thus ruthless and don't cost much.
- readthenotes1 1y ago"commonly-held idea that killing is an 'unnatural' act for humans" Say what? It may be one of the most natural acts for humans as far as history shows
- systemswizard 1y agoIt’s a natural act for pretty much all animals on this planet
- pyfon 1y agoWhat is an unnatural act?
- laurent_du 1y agoDoomscrolling
- mmooss 1y agoPerhaps you mean only for predators?
- esseph 1y agoA horse or squirrel will kill and eat a bird if hungry and given a chance. Sounds pretty violent to me.
- mmooss 1y agoWhy do you mention violence? I've never seen or heard of what you describe. Horses are herbivores; can they digest meat? Can they chew it? Squirrels reputedly eat nuts.
- esseph 1y agoYou have the whole internet in front of you, find some links. If you're still having trouble in 3 minutes, come back and I will provide some. There are tons.
- tbrownaw 1y ago> These findings contradict the commonly-held idea that killing is an 'unnatural' act for humans that inevitably inflicts a moral injury on the individual, the researchers write in Armed Forces and Society. > "There is a widespread belief in society that taking the life of another person goes against human nature, and that this will easily create what psychotraumatology refers to as 'moral injuries'," said Nordstrand in a press release. I had not thought that that belief was anywhere near as common as this seems to suggest.
- zadler 1y agoprepare for war, western man!
- pyeri 1y agoAnother common exception is when the collective herd instinct is invoked. When 10-15 folks congregate at a place and unleash their subliminal thought patterns, it becomes much easier to sanction a kill as it's now part of a collective guilt conscious and no one person has to bear any injury, not even a moral one.
- trhway 1y agoThe kind of soldier matters I think. For example Russia has been specifically recruiting prisoners convicted of very violent crimes.
- heavymetalpoizn 1y ago[dead]
- tehjoker 1y agoIt's kinda crazy how the researchers suggest that we should use this research to make soldiers feel more comfortable with killing when I would characterize nearly every current use of force by western forces as aggression, or in the best case, sneaky bullshit.
- thayne 1y agoWouldn't another possible explanation of these results be that trying to kill someone, or participating in actions with the goal of killing other people causes the same "moral wound" as actually killing someone?
- mmooss 1y agoOr seeing people killed.
- maoberlehner 1y ago> commonly-held idea that killing is an 'unnatural' act for humans People killing people is one of the better-documented aspects of human history. If it's really a commonly-held idea, it's a delusional one. I think what they mean is 'unethical' rather than 'unnatural'.
- Barrin92 1y agoFor individuals killing is incredibly rare. Most people will never take a life, and even historically haven't. It also of course doesn't follow that merely because killing happens it doesn't cause moral injury, it's obviously possible for an event to be both common and traumatic. It is generally accepted that most people will resist to kill and moral injury is very well documented for example in police who have to use deadly force so the result here is actually surprising. Afghanistan might also be an unusual case by historical standards, because close combat was very rare and the fighting much more impersonal.
- maoberlehner 1y agoI agree with your points, and how I interpret "natural" has nothing to do with how often an individual does something. Many humans drive their cars every day. Does this make it a natural thing to do? I can see a definition of the word that makes it so. Still, the way I see it is that driving a car is something very unnatural to do, even if many people do it every day, but killing humans is something very natural, although most humans will never do it. Most people will absolutely kill another human if the circumstances call for it. It's in our nature to do so.
- mmooss 1y ago> Most people will absolutely kill another human if the circumstances call for it. It's in our nature to do so. What do you base that on? In one study of WWII soldiers on D-Day, half didn't shoot their weapons because they didn't want to kill someone (my memory of the study is vague). The military had to develop training to make soldiers more likely to kill.
- genericperson66 1y agoWho the f funds this research?
- newsuser 1y ago> "Original data collection for both studies was funded by the Norwegian Department of Defense; however, data extractions were archival and, hence, not funded."
- WorkerBee28474 1y agoUsually governments, because they want to understand the mental health of their soldiers.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bjornsing 1y agoThe conclusion sounds reasonable and may well be correct. But I’d still be a bit worried about selection effects. The kind of person who signs up for a tour of duty to Afghanistan is probably a bit different than someone who signs up for a UN peacekeeping mission. So an alternative conclusion / title could be: “Moral injury more common among those with high moral standards”.
- kstenerud 1y agoThis was most definitely not the case with my wife. Before Ukraine, she would never have even considered killing another human being. In the war it was very different. Every dead Russian was one step closer to a safe Ukraine.
- monetus 1y agoTalk about your wife some more? The emotional churn when watching russians throw their lives away in belligerent assaults in flattened cities, mined fields and the like, is difficult to convey; righteous fury I've never felt in another context.
- wqaatwt 1y agoThere is a whole Wikipedia article about UN peacekeepers committing atrocities. Not sure if claiming that on average they have “higher moral” standards than people who sign up for the Norwegian Army is fair (and they at least occasionally face repercussions for their actions unlike the “peacekeepers”).. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_abuse_by_UN_peacekeepers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_abuse_by_UN_peacekeep...
- bjornsing 1y agoI don’t think people who signed up for the Norwegian army were randomly sent to Afghanistan. It was most likely a voluntary assignment. Thus the strong selection effect.
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- notorandit 1y agoA life is a life is a life is a life.
- klntsky 1y ago> if combat soldiers are, as a rule, psychologically unharmed by killing an enemy, does this increase the risk that they may be willing to kill captives or civilians who they have come to class as 'the enemy'? It's obviously the opposite: the more traumatized one is, the more likely he is to commit a war crime.
- singularity2001 1y agoOne of the greatest achievements of free speech laws is that in Germany one can write the truth "soldiers are murderers" on T-shirts
- rurban 1y agoThat's why the usual strategy is to dehumanized your enemy by calling them some animal names. The Nazis called them rats, the Hutis in Ruanda called them cockroaches, the Russians and Ukrainians both use the same tactics
- somenameforme 1y agoThere's a major bias in this study. Many of the people most negatively affected by combat have exactly 0 interest in discussing it, even with those close to them or other veterans. This study observed this bias but seems to have made no effort to go beyond acknowledging it: --- Combat Study: ... non-responders had more long-term sick leave and social benefits than the survey responders (p < .001). Accordingly, there was a response bias in terms of study participants being in better health and having less need of government assistance than the non-responders. Moreover, there were significant differences in biological sex and age between responders and non-responders (p < .001) such that women and older veterans had higher response rates. --- Noncombat Study: The responders were significantly older and had significantly lower frequencies of short- and long-term sick leaves, long-term welfare benefits, and sick leave due to mental illness (p < .001). Thus, similar to the trend in the combat-oriented sample, these results show a response bias in terms of responders being in better health and having less need of government assistance than the non-responders. --- It dismissed the need to consider these biases with: "Although the non-responder analysis revealed some response bias, the overall response rate was high in both studies, and the effect size estimates associated with the observed response bias were small." But that seems questionable. The response rate was less than 60% in both studies, and giving an effect size estimate on an unmeasured and "significantly" demographically different population seems to be a textbook example of begging the question.