“Thank you for the question. I believe that you are asking me and the group if there is a fundamental difference between people who can and do kill and people who cannot or do not. Firers versus nonfirers, so to speak. The simplistic answer is that there is very little innate difference – remember that only 15 to 20 percent of soldiers actually fired their weapons during the Waterfall Wars, but that by the time of the recent Lightning Civil War, that number went to almost 90 percent. Clearly, in the intervening years, the entire composition of the Imperial Army, Imperial Navy, and Kumogakure Shinobi Corps did not just become ‘natural born killers’. Rather, what happened was that armies realized how to identify and exploit environmental, cultural, and situational factors to turn more nonfirers into firers.
“Some of those factors were: the demands of authority, the absolution of the group, the distance from the victim, and the predisposition of the killer. All of these factors provide a powerful set of tools to bypass or overcome the soldier’s natural resistance to killing. However, as we will see later, the higher the resistance bypassed, the higher the trauma that must be overcome in the subsequent rationalization process.
“Before we go further, however, I noticed that most of you who responded to me earlier have not killed another human being in close combat before. Also, one of you asked me if the fact that he was enjoying combat and the prospect of killing was normal or not. I think this is important point to discuss what it actually feels like to kill, and what some of the normal responses actually are.
“About thirty years ago, a mednin psychiatrist published some famous research on death which revealed that when people are dying they often go through a series of emotional stages, including denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance. From my interviews with veterans over the last two decades as well as from many historical narratives I have read, I have found a similar series of emotional response stages to killing in combat.
“The basic stages are: 1) concern about killing 2) the actual kill 3) exhilaration 4) remorse, and 5) rationalization and acceptance. These stages are generally sequential but not necessarily universal. Some individuals may skip certain stages or blend them, or pass through them so fleetingly that they do not even acknowledge their presence. Many veteran soldiers actually tell me that this process is similar to, but much more powerful than that experienced by first-time hunters.
“One of the soldier’s first emotional responses to killing is a concern as to, whether at the moment of truth, he will be able to kill the enemy or will ‘freeze up’ and ‘let his buddies down.’ All of my interviews and research verify that these are deep and sincere concerns that exist on the part of most soldiers, and it must be remembered that only 15 to 20 percent of Lightning Country Imperial Army soldiers went beyond the first stage.
“As far as the actual killing stage, it is usually completed in the heat of the moment, and for the modern, properly conditioned shinobi soldier, killing in such a circumstance is most often completed reflexively, without conscious thought. It is as though a human being is a weapon. As an ANBU operator named Asazaki Enma wrote, ‘Two shots. Bam Bam. Just like we had been trained in the Academy. When I killed, I did it just like that. Just like I’d been trained. Without even thinking.’
“It is not unusual for soldiers to immediately feel some sense of exhilaration or euphoria, even after a kill in close combat. In fact, combat adrenaline and the pleasure and satisfaction gained from dropping a target can make deadly combat actually quite an enjoyable experience. When the Raikage Aion fought in the Waterfall Wars against Wind Country tribesmen in the western theater he shot and killed a charging enemy on the first day of the campaign. ‘I suppose it is brutal,’ he wrote, ‘but I had a feeling of the most intense satisfaction as the wretched Turk went spinning down.’ Aion the Dawnbringer’s words are echoed by many combat veterans, who tell me again and again that fighting brings ‘satisfaction.’
“There are a few individuals who fixate on the exhilaration stage and seek more experiences in combat, and more kills. However, for the vast majority of soldiers in combat, everyone associated with killing in combat eventually reaps a bitter harvest of guilt. The media and propagandists’ depiction of violence tries to tell us that men can easily throw off the moral inhibitions of a lifetime – and whatever other instinctive restraint exists – and kill casually and guiltlessly in combat. However, the men and women who have killed, and who will talk about it, tell a different tale:
“Finally, the next stage in a soldier’s emotional response to killing is a lifelong process in which the killer attempts to rationalize and accept what he has done. In some cases, this process may never truly be completed. The killer never completely leaves all remorse and guilt behind, but he can usually come to accept that what he has done was necessary and right. A stunning example of this can actually be seen in the collected journal entries of one of Cloud’s most famous rogue shinobi, Yukimura Enishi. Here he writes about his first deployment to suppress a rebellion in one of the Lightning Colonies in the sea of Kirigakure:
“Yukimura was able to overcome and rationalize his experience, and it formed the basis for much of his view on killing and fighting for the rest of his career in Kumogakure. For many others, it is not as easy, and a common, recurring trouble that many shinobi tell me about is that their dreams are full of people they have killed,” he said, sipping the cooling coffee.
“So with all of this resistance toward killing, and knowing the emotions and costs associated with it, you’d think that no one would ever be killed in war, or that two percent of all soldiers and shinobi actually perform a hundred percent of the killing. But as I have told you, there are ways in which the resistance to killing can be overcome, and all military organizations exploit these processes in order to gain a tactical edge over their enemies. So what are they?
“First, numerous studies have concluded that men in combat are usually motivated to fight not by ideology or hate or fear, but by group pressures and processes involving 1) regard for their comrades, 2) respect for their leaders 3) concern for their own reputation with both and 4) an urge to contribute toward the success of the group.
“Repeatedly, we see combat veterans describe the powerful bonds that men forge in combat as stronger than those of husband and wife. Tagiushi Moro, current Regent Commander of the ANBU, described it this way:
“This bonding is so intense that it is fear of failing these comrades that preoccupies most combatants. Countless sociological and psychological studies, the personal narrative of numerous veterans, and the interviews I have conducted clearly indicate the strength of a soldier’s concern for failing his or her buddies. The guilt and trauma associated with failing to fully support men and women who are bonded with friendship and camaraderie on this magnitude is profoundly intense. Yet every soldier and every leader feels this guilt to one degree or another. For those who know they have not fired while their friends died around them, the guilty can be traumatic.
“In turn, the responsibilities of a combat leader represent a remarkable paradox. To be truly good at what he does, he must love his men and be bonded to them with powerful links of mutual responsibility and affection. And then he must ultimately be willing to give orders that may kill them.
“To a significant degree, the social barrier between officer and enlisted man, and between sergeant and private, or in our case, Sennin and Jounin, and Chuunin and Genin, exists to enable the superior officer to send his men into mortal danger and to shield him from the inevitable guilt associated with their deaths. Even the best leaders make some mistakes that will weigh forever on their consciences. Every good combat leader thinks, at some level, that if he had just done something different, that perhaps the men under his command might not have died. However, this is a deadly, dangerous line of thought for leaders, and the honors and decorations that are traditionally heaped on military leaders at all levels are vitally important for their mental health in the years that follow. These decorations, medals, mentions in dispatches, and other forms of recognition represent a powerful affirmation from society, telling him that he did well, he did the right thing, and that no one blames him for the lives lost in doing his duty.”
Bii-Ryu sipped from his cooling coffee once more, as he paced around the room.
“Besides the expectations and dynamics of the group, another extremely important factor in enabling killing is simple distance.
“The link between distance and ease of aggression is not a new discovery. It has long been understood that there is a direct relationship between the empathetic and physical proximity of the victim, and the resultant difficulty and trauma of the kill. This concept has fascinated and concerned soldiers, poets, philosophers, anthropologists, and psychologists alike.
“At the far end of the spectrum are artillery and long-range jutsu, which are often used to illustrate the relative ease of long-range killing. As we draw to the near end of the spectrum, we begin to realize that the resistance to killing becomes increasingly more intense. This process culminates at the close end of the spectrum, when the resistance to bayoneting or stabbing becomes tremendously intense, and killing with bare hands through common jutsu such as crushing the throat with a blow or gouging a thumb through the eye and into brain become almost unthinkable.
“Throughout the recent Lightning Civil War, arbalestillery crews and shinobi killed thousands of people at maximum range. Women, children, and elderly people, no different from their own wives, children, and parents. These individuals were able to bring themselves to kill these civilians primarily through the mental leverage provided to them by the application of distance. Intellectually, they understood the horror of what they were doing. Emotionally, the distance involved allowed them to deny it. From a distance, you don’t look like a friend. From a distance, I can deny your humanity.
“Indeed, many an arbalestillery man who has destroyed large numbers of terrified noncombatants has never felt any need for repentance or regret. And numerous historians note that there has never been any difficulty in getting arbalestillery men or Imperial Navy men to kill. It is the intervention of distance and machinery beween them and the enemy. They can pretend they are not killing human beings.
“The next level of distance is ‘long range,’ which is defined at the range at which the average soldier may be able to see the enemy, but is unable to kill him without some form of special weaponry – sniper weapons, anti-armor jutsu, or bombardment from war-wagons. Takagi Masao tells of a Kagoshiman Conflict Lightning sniper recalling how, after shooting a Kagoshiman insurgent, ‘ a queer thrill shot through me, it was a different feeling to that which I had when I shot my first wolf as a boy. For an instant I felt sick and faint, but the feeling soon passed.’
“Note that here we begin to see some disturbance at the act of killing, but snipers doctrinally operate as teams, and like maximum-range killers they are protected by the same potent combination of group absolution, mechanical distance (the sniper scope), and physical distance. Their observations and the accounts of their kills are strangely depersonalized and different from those we will see at closer ranges.
“Next, we will call ‘midrange’ that range at which the soldier can see and engage the enemy with bolter fire or intermediate-range jutsu while still unable to perceive the extent of the wounds inflicted or the sounds and facial expressions of the victim when he is hit. In fact, at this range a soldier can still deny that it was he who killed the enemy. When asked about his experiences, one Waterfall War veteran told me that ‘there were so many guys firing, you can never be sure it was you. You shoot, you see a guy fall, and anyone could have been the one that hit him.’
“Most of the above applies to to grenade or explosive note range, which can be anywhere from a few meters to as many as thirty or forty meters. Again, the main factor is that killers do not have to see their victims as they die – in fact, if you are within visual range of an explosive note, you may become a victim of it. However, if soldiers proceed to look at their victims of either bolter or mid-range jutsu fire, then they risk incurring a significant amount of psychiatric trauma. Especially for the aftermath of grenade use.
“At close range, which is less than a few meters, the euphoria stage we discussed earlier still appears to be experienced in some form by most soldiers. Most combat veterans I have interviewed will admit to having experiences a brief feeling of elation upon succeeding in killing the enemy. Usually, however, this euphoria stage is almost instantly overwhelmed by the guilt stage as the soldier is faced with the undeniable evidence of what he has done, and the guilt stage is often so strong as to result in physical revulsion or vomiting.
“A soldier killing at close range is by its very nature an intensely vivid and personal matter. Saito Akira, a former ANBU Sennin and veteran of the October Rebellion, vividly described his own psychological response to a close-range kill.
“Often times, the death inflicted on the enemy during a close-range kill is not instant, and the killer finds himself in the position of comforting his victim in his last moments. During the Demon Invasion of Cloud, there were a significant number of human adversaries from the ranks of the Cabal, who also attempted to invade Cloud during the Hitokage’s campaign. Masashiku Tama, a Cloud ANBU at the time, tells of a remarkable incident that happened during a raid.
“A Jounin commando who was a veteran of the Civil War once put it this way when describing combat to me: ‘When you get up close and personal,’ he drawled while chewing a cud of tobacco in his cheek, ‘where you can hear ‘em scream and see ‘em die,’ and here he spit the tobacco for emphasis, ‘it’s a bitch.’
“Finally, as we bring the physical distance spectrum to its culmination point, we must realize that killing with a knife is significantly more difficult than killing with a spear, sword, or bayonet attached to a bolter. Many knife kills are performed from behind, and are less traumatic than a kill performed from the front, since the face and all its messages and contortions are not seen. But what is felt at the bucking and shuddering of a victim’s body and the warm sticky blood gushing out, and what is heard is the final breath hissing out.
“We in Cloud, along with armies in other nations, train our shinobi to execute a knife kill from the rear by plunging the knife through the lower back and into the kidney. Such a blow is so remarkably painful that its effect is to completely paralyse the victim as he quickly dies, resulting in a silent kill.
“This kidney strike is contrary to the natural inclination of most soldiers, who – if they have thought about the matter at all – would prefer to slit the throat while holding a hand over the victim’s mouth. This option, although psychologically and culturally more desirable (it is a slashing rather than thrusting blow), has far less potential for silence, since an improperly slit throat is capable of making considerable noise and holding a hand over someone’s mouth is not always an easy thing to do. The victim has a capacity to bite, and many experienced shinobi had told me of accidentally cutting their own hands while trying to cut an enemy’s throat in the dark.
“So far, however, we have been talking about only mechanical distance. There are in actuality many more types if distance that are utilized by militaries to further enable killing, even from close physical distance. These include:
“Cultural distance, such as racial and ethnic differences, which permit the killer to dehumanize the victim; Moral distance, which takes into consideration the kind of intense belief in moral superiority and vengeful/vigilante actions associated with many civil wars; and finally Social distance, which considers the impact of a lifetime of practice in thinking of a particular class as less than human in a socially stratified environment.
Bii-Ryu did not even bother with the coffee anymore. It had cooled beyond recognition.
“In addition to distance, another key factor in overcoming resistance to killing is the presence and demands of authority. Medical Sennin Taji Yuki’s experiments in a controlled laboratory environment cound that more than 65 percent of her subjects could be manipulated into inflicting a seemingly lethal electric charge on a total stranger. Subjects sincerely believed that they were causing great physical pain, but despite their victim’s pitiful pleas for them to stop, 65 percent continued to obey orders, increase the voltage, and inflict the shocks until long after the screams stopped and there could be little doubt the victim was dead. Prior to her experiment, Taji asked a group of mednin and psychologists to predict how many of her subjects would use the maximum voltage on the victim. They estimated that a fraction of 1 percent would do so. They, like most people, really didn’t have a clue.
“Many underestimate the influence of authority and leadership in enabling killing on the battlefield, but those who have been there know better. A study by Isaki Kushin investigated the factors that would make a soldier fire. He found that the individuals who had no combat experience assumed that ‘being fired upon’ would be the critical factor in making them fire. However, veterans listed ‘being told to fire’ as the most critical factor.
“A tremendous volume of research also indicates that another primary factor that motivates a soldier to do the things that no sane person wants to do in combat (that is, killing and dying), is not the force of self-preservation, but a powerful sense of accountability to his comrades on the battlefield. Among soldiers who are bonded together so intensely, there is a powerful process of peer pressure in which the individual cares so deeply about his comrades and what they think of him that he would rather die than let them down.
“In addition to creating a sense of accountability, groups also enable killing through developing in their members a sense of anonymity that contributes to further violence. In some circumstances, this process of group anonymity seems to facilitate a kind of atavistic killing hysteria as can be seen in the horrendous mass-murders that took place in Water Country. This can also be seen in the animal kingdom. Kaguya Daisuke’s research describes scenes from the animal kingdom that show that senseless and wanton killing does occur. These include the slaughter of gazelles by hyenas, in quantities way beyond their need or capacity to eat, or the destruction of gulls that could not fly in a stormy night and thus were ‘sitting ducks’ for foxes that proceeded to kill them beyond any possible need for food. He points out that ‘such senseless violence in the animal kingdom is shown by groups rather than by individuals.’
“A profound diffusion of responsibility can be caused by the anonymity created in a crowd. It has been demonstrated by dozens of studies that bystanders will be less likely to interfere in a situation in direct relationship to the numbers who are witnessing the circumstance. Thus, in large crowds, horrendous crimes can occur but the likelihood of a bystander interfering is quite low. However, the bystander is alone and is faced with a circumstance in which there is no one else to diffuse the responsibility to, then the probability of intervention is very high. In the same way, groups provide a diffusion of responsibility that will enable individuals in mobs and soldiers in military units to commit acts that they would never dream of doing as individuals. Acts such as lynching someone because of the color of his skin or shooting someone because of the color of his uniform.
“Now, of course, these are the mechanisms by which the vast majority of humans are enabled to kill. Armies have spent centuries developing and reinforcing these mechanisms. However, Takagi and Nakamura’s study of the Waterfall Wars noted the existence of 2 percent of combat soldiers who are predisposed to be ‘aggressive psychopaths’ and apparently do not experience the normal resistance to killing and the resultant psychiatric casualties associated with extended periods of combat. However, the negative connotations associated with the term ‘psychopath’ are inappropriate here, since this behavior is a generally desirable one for soldiers in combat.
“There is strong evidence that there exists a genetic predisposition for aggression. In all species the best hunter, the best fighter, the most aggressive male, survives to pass his biological predispositions on to his descendants. There are also environmental processes that can fully develop this predisposition toward aggression; when we combine this genetic predisposition with environmental development we get a killer. But there is another factor: the presence or absence of empathy for others. Again, there may be biological or environmental causes for this empathic process, but whatever its origin, there is undoubtedly a division in humanity between those who can feel and understand the pain and suffering of others, and those who cannot. The presence of aggression, combined with the absence of empathy, results in sociopathy. The presence of aggression, combined with the presence of empathy, results in a completely different kind of individual from the sociopath.
“A veteran shinobi I interviewed told me that he thought of most of the world as sheep: gentle, decent, kindly creatures who are essentially incapable of true aggression. In this veteran’s mind there is another human subspecies (of which he is a member) that is kind of a dog: faithful, vigilant creatures who are very much capable of aggression when circumstances require. But, according to his model, there are wolves (sociopaths) and packs of wild dogs (gangs and aggressive armies) abroad in the land, and the sheepdogs (the soldiers and policemen of the world) are environmentally and biologically predisposed to be the ones who confront these predators.
“Some experts in the psychiatric community think that these men are simply sociopaths and that the above view of killers is a romanticization – at worst, it can cause needless deaths in peaceful society when those who view themselves as ‘sheepdogs’ attempt to enthusiastically and violently intervene in a situation when a more restrained approach would have sufficed.
“Personally, I believe that there are individuals out there, specifically prominent shinobi such as the Raikage Hayata, who are armed and vigilant, but would not misuse or misdirect their aggression any more than a sheepdog would turn on his flock. But in their hearts, many of them yearn for a righteous battle, a wolf upon whom to legitimately and lawfully turn their skills. Historian Nakamura Akihiko speaks of this yearning:
“As far as whether this viewpoint represents a gallant desire to protect others or is merely a disguise for childish thuggery, I leave it up to you to interpret,” said Bii-Ryu.
“Are there any questions so far?”
