I worked an office job once, surrounded by people who had done the hard-charging combat arms stuff. There were guys who carried horrible guilt, and there were guys who acted like they loved killing. But if you actually talked to them, they didn’t really love the killing. They loved the fight.
They loved the camaraderie, the fact that every single second felt meaningful. Acting like they enjoyed the killing was just a coping mechanism. Most people didn’t feel much either way. It was just the mission, and they were going to make it home, damn it.
I had a close friend who was infantry. When he came back from Iraq, he confessed to me that he enjoyed killing the enemy. He said it was a rush, just knowing that the person he just killed would never kill one of his friends. That made him feel amazing.
He also said that when he was in a fight, it was the only time he wasn’t afraid, because of the adrenaline. Every other second he was in country, he was terrified, and he just couldn’t shut the fear off. Now, as a civilian back in the States, he’s struggling. He feels guilty, not about the killing, but about how much he misses it.
How much he wants to go fight again. He’s on a lot of meds for anxiety and depression, and I know he’s self-medicating too. He’s told me he can’t ever shut the fear off because it’s so quiet here, and he’s frustrated all the time. I really worry about him.
He’s not the same guy he was before. He has a hair-trigger temper now, and he goes into funks a lot. I just sit with him and let him talk, because he says it helps. I’ve been trying to push him toward vet support groups, but he says the VA services are useless, that all they want to do is up his meds.
I’ve never been in combat, so I feel like maybe talking to people who actually understand would help. But my friend says he enjoyed it, and yet it has clearly left him damaged. Short answer: yes, there are certainly people who enjoy killing. But most other people just see it as something that needed to be done.
I currently serve in a non-combat role, which means I don’t really see much action. There’s this one guy I went to high school with who would go on about how much he would enjoy killing people once he joined the military. He’s currently serving in a light infantry regiment and cannot wait for a combat deployment. It’s hard to explain the mentality if you’ve never been there, but I’ll do my best.
My drill sergeant described the Army’s essential mission like this: we kill people and blow stuff up. That’s pretty much the truth. You are programmed to seek out the enemy and ruin his day. That leads to a culture where killing is celebrated and joked about.
From the outside, I imagine it looks like we’re all bloodthirsty psychopaths. But nobody I served with was actually happy about killing outside the heat of the moment. I saw a guy empty a magazine into an already dead body after an hours-long firefight, and I don’t blame him. I wanted to beat someone to a bloody pulp too.
But that was in the moment. Outside of that, the only soldiers I’ve ever heard talking fondly about killing are the POGs or the boots who have no idea what they’re talking about. I was field artillery in a fairly quiet area of Afghanistan in 2012. Quiet enough that nobody really took potshots at us, but there were plenty of bombs in the roads.
I think what you’re asking about is more in line with the slathering monster who can’t wait to fix bayonets and rip someone apart up close. I never met anyone like that. But after seeing the carnage the locals dealt with from those bastards planting explosives in the roads, and after losing some friends to IEDs, you bet your ass there was some cheering when the shadow captured footage of some guys burying bombs in a road at two in the morning and then catching an Excalibur. I was Marine infantry and fought in Afghanistan in 2009 to 2010.
I would say, without a fraction of a doubt, that everyone I served with liked fighting. The killing aspect, I can’t say none of us ever had trouble sleeping about it. I feel kind of neutral about it. Most of us had the blackest humor imaginable about the whole situation, but I feel like you kind of have to.
The actual fighting portion was the most fun I’d ever had in my life. I watch documentaries like Restrepo, or movies like Lone Survivor, or just YouTube videos and my own videos and pictures. Nothing more than just pics of being in country, and I miss it. There are videos of us in a fight, laughing our asses off because it was just fun.
I can’t describe why. Unfortunately, the fun stops when someone dies or gets seriously injured. I never lost anyone in my squad, but knowing a nineteen-year-old I went to boot camp with just stepped on an IED really shakes you. The fun factor is still there, but you remember this is a war, and it’s scary.
It comes to a point where killing isn’t done for anger or for country, but for the pragmatic reason of staying alive and keeping other people alive. To that end, I hate saying it’s enjoyable, but there is a sense of satisfaction. I killed him, and now he can’t kill me or my friends. When I was a young man in 1985, I fought against the communists in Afghanistan as part of the Islamic Revolution movement.
In my squad was a man from Nuristan province named Daya, not his real name. Daya was the most zealous man I’ve ever met, and not in a good way. He believed it was his righteous duty to kill every socialist in the country, and he enjoyed it. I was scared to fight, and I don’t believe I ever killed anyone.
If I did, it was maybe one enemy. But Daya had killed a few, and he was happier than I’ve ever seen a man be on a battlefield. Some brothers were happy fighting, or at least were fine with the fact that he was in love with it. Daya died to two Russian planes, though.
His quest to kill every communist did not work out too well. My stepdad was probably the only guy who liked being in Vietnam. He’s told me some pretty messed up stories, and I’m one hundred percent sure he enjoyed what he did. He’s not a huge guy, but I’ve seen a couple drunk guys try to fight him at a bar one time.
Bad idea. He doesn’t fight. He’s a killer. He punched both guys right in the throat, and a group had to stop him from stomping them to death.
The messed up part is that he’s a super nice guy. He’s shown me pictures of him sawing off people’s heads. He burned villages. He shot people.
He’s stabbed people to death. He’s killed people in unorthodox methods that go way beyond what the military should do. As far as my personal opinion on him, and the fact that I grew up with a trained killer as a role model, it’s just strange. I could never imagine myself doing the things he’s done.
I look at criminals who murder with disgust, but when I hear him talking about it, I don’t think like that. I listen intently, as if I’m learning something important, like someday it might save my life in a fight-or-flight situation. Just listening to this guy talk about killing people. War is messed up.
I’ve been in the Army for four years now, and yes, you meet a few people like that. I recently posted a story about a tank commander my old platoon sergeant had. Long story short, he used the severed arm of a suicide bomber to slap his driver silly. I’m sure he falls in the category you’re asking about.
I’ve had more experienced soldiers drop little bits of wisdom, like use infrared when you’re shooting. They look less like people, and it’s a lot easier to live with afterwards. In regards to gunning on a Bradley, I’ve heard pride in voices when they talk about taking a city or town. I know one guy who took part in revenge killings after getting blown up, after hitting an IED earlier.
When he returned from the hospital, he wasn’t thrilled about it. He didn’t revel in it. He just stated it as a hard fact. As the other posts have said, usually the guys who say they want to shoot people in the face haven’t actually done it.
Part of it is getting into the mindset so that when the time comes, you’re already mentally there. Part of it is innocence and bravado and not wanting to seem like a coward to your buddies. And I think some people do genuinely enjoy it, though they are not as common as you think. Generally, if the dude at the bar is happily talking about all the people he killed, he’s a dirty liar.
For Reddit credit, the responses have been pretty respectful. For me, I think the only guy I saw who just loved killing was Sergeant Michael. I don’t remember his full name. That guy was very discreet, but he had no code of ethics.
He would kill anyone, anywhere. Children, animals, old people, didn’t matter. The last time I saw him, he downed his whiskey, stood up from the bar, and said, while patting my shoulder, here I go killing again. I’ll be honest here.
I was a Marine grunt, and my experience was that it’s different for everyone. Some guys hated killing and it bothered them. Other guys would pick up body parts and play with them. I had a squadmate wave hello with the blown-off hand of an enemy combatant because he saw it in a movie or something and thought it would be funny.
At the time, it was pretty funny in country. It’s not hard to kill. That’s your job, and they are trying to kill you or your friends, so it comes easy. It’s when you get home and you have all this time to start thinking about it that really messes you up.
Should we have even been there? Was that guy really a bad person? Wouldn’t I have done the same thing if someone invaded my country? I can’t justify my actions in my head anymore, and I don’t feel like I fit in with normal people.
If I told someone that I laughed at a dead person’s hand being waved at me, they would probably think I’m a sick piece of work. Am I? Sometimes I really think I am, and I don’t deserve to live. I try to make friends and stuff now, but I just don’t feel right around other people.
I’ve done this horrible thing that they will never understand. The smell, the way the corpse feels, bright red blood bubbling up from huge holes in people. I felt brain, for crying out loud. The intense fear.
All of that is at the front of my mind every day of my life. It’s been a decade now, and I think about it every day. I really just don’t know what to think sometimes. Sometimes I want to eat a bullet.
Other times I want to fit in. Some days I wish I was back in combat. I was in a class about addiction counseling in college. There was only one man in the class, and he was much older than the rest of the students and the professor.
He had served during Vietnam, I know for sure, and he might have been in other wars too. I know he was involved in the military by choice. He had a job working with veterans and was taking the class to get some extra insight. One particular class period, we were discussing PTSD among soldiers.
His mentality was that when there was a draft, there were just guys who couldn’t handle combat, and people who joined the military by choice could always pick out the guys who were forced in by the draft. He didn’t think PTSD was real. He just thought certain guys were tougher and more fit than others. He said there were plenty of sane people who enjoyed combat.
His example in defense was a guy who liked to go through villages and rape women and kill villagers and children for no reason. Apparently, otherwise he was a completely normal guy who the man in my class felt safe around. His justification for why this was normal: the guy only targeted Asians, so white people didn’t have to feel scared around him. He considered this guy sane and the people who came back with PTSD as crazies who were like that to begin with, because they were too wimpy for combat.
I’m sure ideas within the military have shifted since that guy was active, but that story always sticks out in my mind. Just gonna throw this out there, but you do know only about eight percent of enlisted personnel will ever be given an assignment that is expected to see combat, right? And on top of that, a lot of that is shooting at each other from across the valley or from two hundred meters away. Very little of that is breach and clear, close-quarters combat, or the type of situation where you will consciously be killing, or be able to tell the difference between combatants and non-combatants.
Even taking the time to check whether or not they are combatants is a good way to lose a quick draw. My brother trained with a guy who hoped upon deployments to be able to abduct an Iraqi girl, he used a much cruder term, and keep her tied up under his bed to be his mate whenever he wanted. He also apparently believed he had the soul of a direwolf and plotted in his diary how to get some little bits of dead insurgents to eat. I never found out what happened with him.
I just hope he got some serious help. Former infantry squad leader with tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan here. Nobody, except for sociopaths, enjoys the taking of another human life. The unfortunate truth, though, is that you are trained from the get-go to desensitize yourself to the idea of killing and to dehumanize your enemy.
Ever wonder why every American generation of wartime soldiers has a generic, if not completely dehumanizing, nickname for the enemy? Most recently, terrorists or Hajji. Gooks for Vietnam. Jerry in World War Two.
And if I skip to the very beginning for brevity’s sake, Lobsterback back in the Revolutionary War. This process of conditioning continues through and beyond the actual act of pulling that trigger. And this process is unfortunately utterly necessary. Without it, many more soldiers could not conscionably accomplish their mission when that mission involves killing the enemy.
Obligatory not a soldier here, but I had a friend when I was a teenager whose father was a door gunner on Black Hawk helicopters. In his spare time, he built weapons for Accuracy International. He did five tours over the course of the earlier years of the war, and I know he loved to kill. He rarely spoke about it.
He would quickly tell you his job and what he did, how many tours he went on, and nearly everything else. Except when asking about him killing anyone. He would always just stare at you. On very rare occasions, usually when drunk, he would admit to it, but never go into detail.
We were fairly young teenagers at the beginning, but nearing his fourth tour, his son and myself were approaching sixteen and seventeen years old respectively. We both were considering joining the military for different reasons. That’s around the time he started becoming more vocal. I can’t recall specific conversations, but the underlying enjoyment and pride he felt was very obvious when he was talking about his crew and mowing down buildings infested with baddies.
His son and I walked into his shop one day and caught him watching videos of combat based out of a helicopter. He quickly shut it down and didn’t say much. I’ve always been good at hacking stuff, so at the first opportunity, his son and I hacked his computer in his workshop. The shop was behind their home, and there was a folder that contained hundreds of videos of him and various helmet cam videos of his crew.
And they were all videos of kills. Hundreds upon hundreds of them. I don’t know the legality of him owning those videos, but he had them, and he clearly kept them as mementos. Very shortly before his last tour, fifteen thousand dollars in cash was stolen from their home.
It was their daughter’s college fund. His father was understandably livid and suspected everyone. The look he gave me the day he told me, if you ever step on my property again, I will split you from groin to head and no one will ever find your body, made me absolutely believe him. I also remember a later statement saying that he couldn’t wait to get back to relieve some stress.
He clearly meant his next tour, which was fast approaching, and his urge to kill someone. Kind of an afterthought, I always got the impression that he treated it as the ultimate game of adrenaline and thrill. He loved the danger of it. He used to be an avid hunter, and he always encouraged his son and me to hunt frequently, but he quickly lost interest in it after his first two tours.
I remember one day I asked him why he didn’t hunt with us anymore. His response was, after hunting something that can shoot back, it kind of loses its appeal.