Blood Sport

It is doubtless in execrable taste to mar the jubilation attending the millennium by noting that despite contemporary achievements in public health, speedy transportation and technical education, the 20th century has distinguished itself by outbreaks of violence and cruelty not experienced since the Middle Ages. We have prosecuted wars of unique magnitude and horror, featuring such atrocities as carpet bombing and atomic wipeouts, and we have experienced such novelties as “school shootings,” motor-vehicle killings (both accidental and drive-by), mass suicides and Soviet and Nazi exterminations, aped by those in Cambodia, Rwanda, Kosovo and Bosnia. If you allow yourself to think steadily about the situation, no amount of Disney can cheer you up. It is well to have constant reminders of what front-line as well as social killing is really like.

English poet Edmund Blunden, thoroughly acquainted with military brutality from World War I, commented as World War II began: “I still regard murder as murder no matter how boldly hidden up in steel helmets and rolls of honour.” Contemplating the facts of World War II a few weeks before his own brains were blown out by a Japanese sniper, correspondent Ernie Pyle wrote a summary of the war which he intended to turn into a Victory Day column:

“There are many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedges throughout the world.

“Dead men by mass production--in one country after another--month after month and year after year.

“Dead men in winter and dead men in summer.

“Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous.

“Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them.”

For all its pretenses of civilization and culture, killing will remain the hallmark of our century, and Joanna Bourke’s “An Intimate History of Killing” might constitute a timely counterweight to the current optimism. But valuable as her book is in parts, it shares something with Niall Ferguson’s recent, over-celebrated “The Pity of War” (Bourke calls it a “momentous book”). Bourke’s is too thick, too heavy, too inclusive and repetitive and too imprecisely focused. Where Ferguson invoked bond prices to shed light on events at the front line, Bourke violates the purity of her subtitle

by dashing off in pursuit of women’s suffrage, “the militarization of the Medical Corps” and the institution of military chaplains--all of doubtful or at least remote relevance to the topic. But in this occasionally amateurish catchall, she gets off some useful points.

One of the most refreshing is her first sentence: “The characteristic act of men at war is not dying, it is killing. . . . For the man on active service, warfare is concerned with the lawful killing of other people.” Her book, she says, “claims to put killing back into military history.” And not only killing but the attitude of the troops toward the killing required of them.

Some men, we are told, have felt guilty. But in my experience as a World War II infantryman, I never met one of these. A powerful preventive of guilt was hatred, and it was natural to hate enemy soldiers, conscripted and innocent though most of them actually were, who could be seen as representatives of those who had instigated the war, assisted the official, organized torment of the Jews and brought about the destruction of Europe. Another strategy that made killing morally uncomplicated for the combat soldier, brought up as a boy to venerate success, was technique and the joy of doing supremely well what one has learned to do--namely hit a target accurately. For a psychologically well-adjusted infantryman, the enemy consisted not of men and boys but of targets. And the exercise of skill respected by others remains a pleasure even when a soldier is tired, scared and fed up. Further, the profound relief at not being killed oneself in a dangerous close encounter is easily felt as lasting elation.

Much of Bourke’s book depends on the assumption that war can be seemly, honest, chaste and decent like other high-class social institutions. Killing in war, however, belongs in a context of national madness and criminality. Hemingway put it correctly when he said that it must never be forgotten that no matter how apparently necessary and nobly conceived, war is a crime and those implicated in it are criminals, but fortunately unindicted and even highly respected socially. Thus it would seem that Bourke’s thorough analysis of military crimes, like the use of napalm and white phosphorous, and killing prisoners and civilians, may be wide of the mark: The way to avoid such undoubted vileness is to abjure the institution that necessitates it. There seems to lurk a logical embarrassment in Bourke’s phrase, “unnecessary brutality.”

Considering the postwar guilt said to afflict Vietnam combat soldiers, Bourke quotes Louis Heren: “The major guilt surely rests with the then-Secretary of Defense who decided that the war would be fought with indiscriminate firepower of megaton proportions and inhuman practices such as free-fire zones and body counts.”

No wonder a Vietnam veteran in 1972 tried to drown Robert McNamara by throwing him off the Nantucket ferry. (Journalist Paul Hendrickson deals brilliantly with this interesting event in his 1996 book, “The Living and the Dead”). But despite noticing the special wickedness of the Vietnam War, Bourke tends not to be interested in what a given war is about. More political understanding and discrimination would be welcome. All wars are nasty, but some are more foolish than others, and a rural revolution is different from an attempted total extermination of the Slavic and Jewish character.

*

Military killing is one thing, social another. The causes and cures of civilian killing occupy Richard Rhodes’ responsible attention in “Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist.” The maverick in question is not Rhodes, as that subtitle might suggest, but Lonnie H. Athens, an odd social scientist Rhodes venerates and whose achievement he hopes to publicize. Athens has made a career of interviewing murderous felons to learn what he can of their backgrounds and feelings. His personal oddity has made it hard for him to pursue a normal pattern of professional sociological study, although he did manage to earn a doctorate in sociology at UC Berkeley and produce two scholarly books, “The Creation of Dangerous Violent Criminals” (1992) and “Violent Criminal Acts and Actors Revisited” (1997). Impediments to his success have been his resemblance to a ‘60s hippie, with shoulder-length hair secured by a headband, his wearing of jeans and boots and exhibiting his fluency with obscene terms in conversations with his felons. In dealing with prison officials, thesis directors and scholarly editors, Athens has been quarrelsome, tactless and self-righteous. Research grants and solid, tenured academic positions tend not to flow toward such people, no matter how original or worthy, and he lives by teaching criminology at a minor Catholic university in New Jersey.

But despite his virtual rustication, his “discoveries” are worth considering seriously. His conclusions about the motivations of murderers might be summed up in Auden’s lines:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

The evil that Athens uncovers is violent physical abuse in childhood (he is a survivor of this, and so is Rhodes) and this sadism reverberates in clearly defined stages of adult development. It is hardly news that violent adolescents may grow more violent as they become older, but Athens’ originality lies in his analyzing four discernible stages uniformly followed as the violent personality develops. He notes that social intervention is possible at each of these apparently mechanical stage-points. His fondness for numeration and heavy jargon perhaps betrays his system, for he finds that there are only four stages of violent progress, and that these are readily identifiable. He designates them as periods of brutalization, belligerency, violent performances and virulence. “Each stage,” he insists, “describes the social experiences which people must completely undergo before they can enter the next higher stage of violent development.” Athens’ copious case histories, accumulated by devoted interviewing, have been arranged to bear out his quadripartite theory.

One way to test it would be to probe the childhood of Mark O. Barton, the Atlanta day-trader whose killing rampage at his stockbroker’s office last August has puzzled everyone. Was the cause adult greed frustrated or early childhood physical torment? Or even, perhaps, as some might conclude, unanalyzable wickedness?

It must be noticed also that Athens’ hypothesis seems to shed light, if it does, mainly on one-on-one violence. But how about events like the Columbine High School killings of dozens of adolescents and enemies, some personal, some simply ex officio? Another gap in Athens’ theory is his neglect of the powerful military-fantasy model--all those camouflage coveralls favored by gun-wielders.

Perry Smith, hanged for his part in the famous killing of the Clutter family presented in Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” declared of his utter lack of compassion and guilt: “Why? Soldiers don’t lose much sleep. They murder, and get medals for doing it.” Yes, but in doing it, they invite the enemy to do it to them. A big difference.