(October 18, 2021 at 12:10 am)Rev. Rye Wrote: As a fan of Black Mirror, I remember that one episode (“Men Against Fire”) was inspired by a very relevant fact, form a book of the same name by S.L.A. Marshall: of all the Allied infantry soldiers in World War II, only 25% actually fired their weapons at the enemy. Why? Marshall claims that they were conditioned by civilian norms against taking human lives. Apparently, many of his ideas were incorporated in training and more soldiers fired their weapons in ‘Nam. I don’t have much info on how drill sergeants did things in the WW2 era, but I suspect that this is why Gunny in Full Metal Jacket put such emphasis on killing and being a killer.
The fact is that, even when shooting bad people is your fucking job, even when you’re fighting an enemy who’s not only bad, but considered a special kind of evil (the Nazis/Wehrmacht were pretty self-explanatory, and the Japanese were working at a level of brutality that I don’t think any of America’s previous adversaries were fighting at, mostly because they were convinced that either they had to fight that hard and dirtily or the Japanese nation would no longer exist), most people are going to be too paralyzed by civilian norms to pull the trigger.
Uhhhhh,
1. I find that hard to believe since most of allied infantry during WWII were Soviet, and more than 25% of all Soviet infantry died in battle.
2. I do not believe most of the infantry that had chance to fire effectively at the enemy but didn’t, refrained out of civilian norms. I suspect majority of them refrained out of reluctance to exposed themselves in the manner required to actually acquire a line of sight to an enemy, or make a bang the enemy can hear and perspectively trace back to them.
