Bii-Ryu casually noted the presence of the Raikage in a back corner, somewhat near a hyperactive-looking boy who seemed to have trouble sitting still, and a smudgy-looking girl with a generously-sized mouth. It was actually not unusual for Shin to attend various lectures occasionally – he was after all, a scholar at heart. And the old mednin knew that if there was anything the Raikage disliked more than anything else, it was to have classes interrupted on his behalf. So he got right back to resuming the lecture and answering questions.
The young man with the Shinbatsu-hued skin was the first to respond and to ask a question. The insignia he wore marked him as an ANBU trainee, and he looked around 14 or 15 years of age. If he had followed the normal training schedule, he might have already been farmed out by Sileo Command to one or more conflicts around the world. And he had a question as well.
“Thank you for your response, ANBU trainee. To answer your question, there are very significant differences between mental ages from 15 to 25, and killing affects the younger in different and insidious ways than it does adults. Although this cannot be proven for sure, there are many who believe that early exposure to death and violence, especially in a deliberate, regulated, and graduated fashion, actually may help break down the normal human resistance to taking life and thus condition future soldiers to kill more easily than adults without the same exposure. However, as we have seen from studies of returning Water Country-conflict veterans, the psychological aftermath of actually performing the deed is not mitigated by early exposure and in truth may be more devastating in the end for the young. I will actually talk more about this process in the third and fourth parts of the lecture, so keep thinking about this,” he said to Saizo.
Another one, a female student who sat in the front row and had the appearance and subtle markings of an indentured clan servitor, responded that yes, she had killed someone before. But whether it was due to gaps in her memory or deliberate reticence, she did not seem willing to disclose more.
“And thank you too, for being willing to respond. While I will not pressure you to talk about it if you do not want to, I would like to ask you some more about your experience later, so that the entire class may benefit. Also, unlike your mast- sorry,
employer, you are not required to obey me, and I want to emphasize that fact, okay?” said Bii-Ryu to Shimete, reassuringly. Part of him recoiled inwardly in disgust at her situation. Blood-slavery was a distasteful relic of the past, and something that had been on its way out even before he was born. The last time he had seen one of her kind in public had been when he was five years old. She had been an old woman in her seventies, who, it had been whispered, was once a Santaru patriarch’s personal property. He would have to speak to the Raikage about this girl’s situation, if it were as bad as he feared.
Finally, another student near the front, a dark-haired, plain-looking boy, responded with a rather interesting statement. That he had been in a violent spar, but that it had pleased him greatly.
“Thank you for raising that interesting point,” he said to Junko. “I can tell that you censored yourself so as not to appear to the others as some sort of ‘bloodthirsty maniac’. However, as I will cover in the later lecture, your response to violence is not actually abnormal, nor does it necessarily imply that you have psychopathic tendencies. In fact, many soldiers and shinobi, even those who have become psychiatric casualties as a direct result of violent conflict, tell me the same thing: fighting is fun. But we will cover that later,” he said, nodding to Junko. He now turned to the rest of the class.
“Our first step in the study of killing is to understand the existence, extent, and nature of the average human’s resistance to killing his fellow human. It has always been assumed that the average soldier, and I use soldier as a broad term which includes shinobi, would kill in combat simply because his country and his leaders had told him to do so, and because it was essential to defend his own life and the life of his friends. When the point came that he didn’t kill, it was assumed that he panicked and ran.
“In the aftermath of the Waterfall Wars over fifty years ago, an Imperial Army Brigadier General by the name of S. L. A. Marusha asked these average soldiers what it was they did in battle. His singularly unexpected discovery was that, of ever hundred men along the line of fire during a period of an encounter, an average of only 15 to 20 ‘would take any part with their weapons.’ This was consistently true ‘whether the action was spread over a day, or two days or three.’
“General Marusha was an Imperial Army historian and had a team of historians working for him, and they conducted interviews with Imperial Army and Navy troops immediately after they had been in close combat with enemy troops. The results were consistently the same: only 15 to 20 percent of the Imperial soldiers in combat during the Waterfall Wars would fire at the enemy. Those who would not fire did not run or hide (in many cases they were willing to risk greater danger to rescue comrades, get ammunition, or run messages), but they simply would not fire their weapons at the enemy, even when faced with repeated waves of infantry charges.
“The question is why. Why did these men fail to fire? The answer is that there exists in most men and women an intense resistance to killing their fellow man. A resistance so strong that in many circumstances, soldiers on the battlefield will die before they can overcome it.
“To some, this makes obvious sense. Many people say ‘I would never kill someone’ or ‘I could never bring myself to do it.’ But they are wrong. With proper conditioning and proper circumstances, it appears that almost anyone can and will kill. Others might say ‘any man will kill in combat when he is faced with someone who is trying to kill him.’ And they would be even more wrong, for we have observed that throughout history the majority of men on the battlefield would
not attempt to kill the enemy, even to save their own lives or the lives of their friends.”
Then I cautiously raised the upper half of my body into the tunnel until I was lying flat on my stomach. When I felt comfortable, I placed my Santaru & Wesuton .38 caliber snub-nosed handbolter (sent to me by my father for tunnel work) beside the flashlight and switched on the light, illuminating the tunnel.
There, not more than three meters away, sat a Marsh soldier eating a handful of rice from a pouch on his lap. We looked at each other for what seemed to be an eternity, but in fact was probably only a few seconds.
Maybe it was the surprise of actually finding someone else there, or maybe it was just the absolute innocence of the situation, but neither one of us reacted.
After a moment, he put his pouch of rice on the floor of the tunnel beside him, turned his back to me and slowly started crawling away. I, in turn, switched off my flashlight, before slipping back into the lower tunnel and making my way back to the entrance. About 20 minutes later, we received word that another squad had killed a Marsh soldier emerging from a tunnel 500 meters away.
I never doubted who that soldier was. To this day, I firmly believe that grunt and I could have ended the war sooner over a beer in Port Cirrus than Kagetsu Kiyo ever could by attending the peace talks.
-Musashi Jou, Genin.
“The ‘fight or flight’ model has often been used to explain some of the stresses of combat. However, the fight or flight model is an appropriate set of choices for any creature faced with danger
other than that which comes from its own species. When we examine the responses of creatures confronted with aggression from their own species, the set of options expands to include posturing and submission.
“The first decision point in an intraspecies conflict usually involves the decision between fleeing or posturing. A threatened baboon or rooster who elects to stand its ground does not respond to aggression from one of his own kind by leaping instantly to the enemy’s throat. Instead, both creatures instinctively go through a series of posturing actions that, while intimidating, are
almost always harmless. These actions are designed to convince an opponent that the posturer is a dangerous and frightening adversary.
“When the posturer has failed to dissuade an intraspecies opponent, the options then become fight, flight, or submission. And when the fight option is utilized, it is
almost never to the death. Piranhas and rattlesnakes will bite almost anything, but among themselves piranhas fight with raps of their tails, and rattlesnakes wrestle. Somewhere during the course of such highly constrained and nonlethal fights, one of these intraspecies combatants will usually become daunted by the ferocity and prowess of its opponent, and its only options become submission or flight. Submission is a surprisingly common response, usually taking the form of fawning and exposing some vulnerable portion of anatomy to the victor, in the instinctive knowledge that the opponent will not kill or further harm one of its own kind once it has surrendered. The posturing, mock battle, and submission process is vital to the survival of the species. It prevents needless deaths and ensures that a young male will live through early confrontations when his opponents are bigger and better prepared. Having been outpostured by his opponent, he can then submit and live to mate, passing on his genes in later years.
“There is a clear distinction between actual violence and posturing. This is true in Port Cirrus street gangs, it is true in ‘so-called primitive tribesman and warriors,’ and it is true in almost any culture in the world. All have the same ‘patterns of aggression’ and all have ‘very orchestrated, highly ritualized’ patterns of posturing, mock battle, and submission. These rituals restrain and focus the violence on relatively harmless posturing and display. What is created is a ‘perfect illusion of violence.’ Aggression, yes. Competitiveness, yes. But only a tiny level of actual violence. ‘There is,’ concludes Imperial Historian Takagi Masao, ‘the occasional psychopath who really wants to slice people open,’ but most of the participants are really interested in ‘status, display, profit, and damage limitation.’ For the kids who have fought in close combat throughout history (and it is children whom most societies traditionally send off to do their fighting), killing the enemy is the very least of their intentions. In war, as in gang warfare, posturing is the name of the game.
“An example of this is seen in the battle of Chipyong-Ni during the Bear-Marsh War.”
The [Marsh] soldiers formed a hundred or two hundred meters in front of the small hill which the Bear occupied, then launched their attack, blowing whistles and bugles, and running with bayonets fixed. When this noise started, the Bear soldiers began cranking a hand siren they had, and one squad started running toward the Marsh, yelling and throwing grenades to the front and to the side. When the two forces were within twenty meters of each other the Marsh suddenly turned and ran in the opposite direction. It was all over within a minute.
“Here we see an incident in which posturing (involving sirens, explosions, and charging bayonets) by a small force was sufficient to cause a numerically superior enemy to hastily select the flight option.
“And with the advent of gas-assisted bolters, the soldier has been provided with one of the finest possible means of posturing. ‘Time and time again,’ says Historian Countess Oishi Bakunin, ‘we read of regiments [in the Lightning Country Civil War] blazing away uncontrollably, once started, and continuing until all ammunition was gone or enthusiasm spent. Firing was such a positive act, and gave the men such a physical release for their emotions, that instincts easily took over from training and from the exhortations of officers.’
“Before the advent of the Tenouzan gas-assisted cocking system for bolters, all projectile weapons had to be cranked or pulled back by hand, and the discharge of such a weapon was relatively silent. However, modern bolters which utilize tetraethyl dithiopyrophosphate gas, or in lay terms, 'Ryoma's farts' to assist in their operation, have a distinctly loud cracking or booming sound associated with their discharge, as well as an occasional gout of flame which emerges from the barrel. The modern bolter’s superior noise and posturing ability made it ascendant on the battlefield. After all, we would still be using the longbow in modern conflicts if the raw mathematics of killing effectiveness was all that mattered. But a frightened soldier thinking with his midbrain and going ‘ploink ploink’ with his longbow doesn’t stand a chance against an equally frightened man going ‘BANG BANG’ with a modern crossbolter.
“Firing a bolter or utilizing a loud or disruptive jutsu clearly fills the deep-seated need to posture, and it even meets the requirements of being relatively harmless when we consider the consistent historical occurrences of firing over the enemy’s head, and the remarkable ineffectiveness of such fire. This can be seen in Takagi Masao’s account of an almost bloodless nighttime firefight during the Civil War in BS ’01. ‘It seems strange,’ wrote Takagi, ‘that a company of men can fire volley after volley at a like number of men at not over a distance of fifteen steps and not cause a single casualty. Yet such was the facts in this instance.’ Now, arbalestillery fire, is an entirely different matter, sometimes accounting for more than 50 percent of the casualties on battlefields, and long-range, wide-area jutsu has consistently accounted for the majority of shinobi combat casualities for the last hundred years. This is largely due to group processes at work, which I will address in detail later.
“In addition, missing a target does not necessarily involve firing obviously high, and two decades of experience on the academy bolter range have taught me that a soldier must fire unusually high for it to be obvious to an observer. In other words, the intentional miss can be a very subtle form of disobedience. An excellent example of soldiers exercising their right to miss is one ANBU’s account of going with a unit of Cloud shinobi on an ambush of a civilian river launch in Fire Country.
“I’ll never forget [Jounin-Commander] Ringo’s words as he told the entire formation: ‘If you kill a woman, you’re killing a rabid bitch! If you kill a child, you’re killing a diseased rat!’ And off we went to kill women and children.
Once again I was part of the 10 men who would actually perform the ambush. We cleared our fields of fire and settled back to await the arrival of women and children and whatever other civilian passengers there might be on this launch. Each man was alone with his thoughts. Not a word was spoken among us regarding the nature of our mission. Ringo paced back and forth nervously some yards behind us in the protection of the jungle.
...the loud throb of the powerful diesels of the [evacuation boat] preceded its arrival by a good two minutes. The signal to commence firing was given as it appeared in front of us and I watched the plasma jutsu arc over the boat and into the jungle on the opposite bank. The machine-ballista opened up, I rattled off a 20-bolt burst from my ST-15. Brass was flying as thick as jungle insects as our squad emptied their magazines. Every bolt and jutsu sailed harmlessly over the civilian craft.
When Ringo realized what was happening he came running out of the jungle cursing violently and firing his weapon at the disappearing launch. We Cloud shinobi are mean bastards and tough soldiers. But we’re not murderers. I laughed aloud in relief and pride as we packed up and prepared to move out.
-Kaguya Dashi, ANBU.
“Even more remarkable than instances of posturing, and equally indisputable, is the fact that a significant number of soldiers in combat elect to not even fire at all. In this respect their actions very much resemble the actions of those members of the animal kingdom who ‘submit’ passively to the aggression and determination of their opponent rather than fleeing, fighting, or posturing. General Marusha noted that even in situations where there were several boltermen together in position facing an advancing enemy, only one was likely to fire while the others would tend to such ‘vital’ tasks as running messages, providing ammunition, tending wounded, and spotting targets. Marusha makes it clear that in most cases the firers were aware of the large body of nonfirers around them. The inaction of these passive individuals did not seem to have a demoralizing effect on the actual firers. To the contrary, the presence of nonfirers seemed to enable the firers to keep going.
“So this all begs the question: Why Can’t Shinji Kill?
"Marusha studied this issue during the entire period of the Waterfall War, and came up with this conclusion:
It is therefore reasonable to believe that the average and healthy individual – the man or woman who can entire the mental and physical stresses of combat – still has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance towards killing a fellow human being that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility. At that vital point, he becomes a conscientious objector.
“He understood, more than anyone else, the mechanics and emotions of combat. ‘I well recall,’ he said, ‘the great sense of relief that came to [Waterfall War troops] when they were passed to a quiet sector.’ And he believed that this was ‘due not so much to the realization that things were safer there as to the blessed knowledge that for a time they were
not under the compulsion to take life.’ In his experience the philosophy of the Waterfall War was ‘Let ‘em go; we’ll get ‘em some other time.’
“Even after General Marusha’s revelations, the subject of nonfirers is still uncomfortable for the Lightning Country military as well as for Cloud Village leadership. When he was Vice Commander of the ANBU, Takaki Masao complained that ‘thinking back to my many years of service, I cannot remember a single official lecture or class discussion of how to assure that your men will fire.’
“So where does this resistance to killing one’s fellow man come from? Is it learned, instinctive, rational, environmental, hereditary, cultural, or social? Some combination of all of the above? No one knows for sure, but there is a hypothesis that at some gut level, each person understands that all humanity is inextricably interdependent and that to harm any part is to harm the whole. Raikage Kagetsu Kiyo the First understood this even as she consolidated Cloud Village into the potent military force it is today. ‘Every individual dispensation is one of the causes of the prosperity, success, and even survival of That which administers the universe. To break off any particle, no matter how small, from the continuous concatenation – whether of causes or of any other elements – is to injure the whole,’ she wrote. Raikage Santaru Ryuuto, one of the greatest military minds in Cloud’s history, noted that some of the men under his command in the Colony Wars near Water Country had reached a point of reflection after battle in which they ‘came to see the young Natives they had killed as allies in a bigger war of individual existence, as young men with whom they were united throughout their lives against the impersonal ‘thems’ of the world,’ and made the powerful perception that ‘in killing the grunts of Water Country, the grunts of Lightning Country had killed a part of themselves.’
“There can be no doubt that this resistance to killing one’s fellow man is there, and that it exists as a result of a powerful combination of instinctive, rational, environmental, hereditary, cultural, and social factors. It is there, it is strong, and it gives us cause to believe that there just may be hope for humankind after all.”
Bii-Ryu stopped to take another sip of his coffee. Hopefully the students hadn’t nodded off at this point.
“Are there any questions so far? And perhaps for some of the older shinobi this room, does this match your experiences in battle?”
