RE: Psychology of combat, was Re: Vietnam and modern combat

G'day,

> In a related vein, I'm reading a book called "On Killing" by a former
> US Army Ranger, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, who also taught psychology at
> West Point), examining why soldiers do (or don't) choose to kill, and
> the psychological effects on the soldiers. Worth taking a look at the
> reviews on Amazon.

If you can get you hands on any of the papers on evolutionary
psychology. For instance across a broad range of types of "soldier" (a
fairly loose term in the literatures hands), from conventional military
to terrorists, some basic principles hold out (actually they hold even
beyond that, but the most research has been in these areas). So
groups/nations that rely on nonkin (nonfamily) altruistic behaviour
amongst their members are most effective if they manipulate cues humans
use to define family (living in the same spot, looking alike, using
affectionate terms etc). The theory goes that's why training tends to
keep recruits with each other and their instructors (and usually away
from real kin, so that training isn't weakened), provides them with
pseudo phenotypic matches (e.g. uniforms and distinctive hairstyles...
and informally via tattoos, songs, and bonding ceremonies) and encourage
use of terms usually associated with families (not sure if that's true
of conventional mi!
 litary, but is true of cults/terrorist cells where the lead guy is
often painted a s a big brother/father etc). All this is much easier
with younger people as they are still fairly imprintbale (we all tend to
get rather fixed in our ways and more cantankerous with age) so young,
impressionable recruits are preferred.

Its an interesting topic.

Cheers

Beth