‘Kill’ em’ Training Ignores Conscience

The July 18 article, “ ‘Enemy Contact. Kill ‘em, Kill ‘em,’ ” stresses the concern of psychologists on the adverse emotional effects troops trained to kill may experience on their return home.

The concern seems centered on the impediment for a normal life that this trauma could pose for the returning soldier and implicitly the burden he could become for society, so the goal would be to treat the effects of “post-traumatic stress disorder.” If you substitute the fancy name for the more common of “conscience,” it would be obvious that there is no treatment for conscience.

To train a person so killing becomes an automatic behavior is a monstrosity; to try to remove any sense of guilt, anguish, pain, responsibility for what he has done is to remove the sense of decency that makes us human.

Not until we recognize that killing is catastrophic, and has catastrophic consequences for the killer too, can we consider ourselves halfway civilized.

Maruja Powys

Santa Ana

I had to repeatedly catch my breath as I read about what is platitudinously labeled “emotional stress” in U.S. troops fighting in Iraq. To cavalierly send these callow young people across the globe to court death when they have not yet started to live is dastardly. To destroy their souls by teaching them to kill is truly evil. Death on the battlefield would bring with it at least some momentary glory, albeit fleeting as we know from past wars. But those troops who come back will have lost not only their limbs or their innocence. By finding a way to survive the horror, they will have lost their connection to humanity.

Victoria E. Thompson

Sierra Madre