So Much for “We Support the Troops”

KILLITARY: How America’s Armed Forces Create Serial Killers and Mass Murderers

by liquidman

Thu Jul 19, 2007 at 08:44:39 PM PDT

Cross-posted at In Cold BlogAccording to the July 30, 2007 issue of The Nation magazine, damning photos of a U.S. Soldier using a spoon to literally scoop out the brains of a dead Iraqi and pretending to eat the gray matter were recently acquired.Of course, everyone is appropriately appalled and make all claims of disgust and finger-wagging. Research shows, however, that such unacceptable behavior happens more often than the United States military wants you to know.

When it comes to training killing machines, the military really does create “an Army of one.”

Timothy McVeigh

• liquidman’s diary :: ::

The list of serial killers and mass murderers borne from the military is astounding.Full Metal Jacket‘s proud support of UT Tower sniper Charles Whitman’s marksmanship skills notwithstanding, you just aren’t going to hear a whole lot about the training ground of killers that are bred to slaughter, maim, and torture and then dumped on our streets upon their return.Here are just a few of the more memorable individuals who received the best training in the United States military and returned to prowl our country’s streets and commit terrorist attacks of a different nature:

Charles Whitman – former Marine sniper who killed his wife, mother, and then proceeded to the University of Texas Tower and picked off sixteen people using his sniping skills.

Dean Corll – former Army man and serial killer known as the “Candy Man” who killed at least 27 young boys and buried them in a storage facility in Houston, Texas.

David Berkowitz AKA “The Son of Sam” – New York serial killer and former Army vet who shot and killed at least six people during the 1970s.

Jeffrey Dahmer – former Army vet and Milwaukee cannibal who murdered at least sixteen young boys and men. He performed experiments on some of the victims and ate others.

Timothy McVeigh (pictured above)- Former Gulf War Army vet responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing.

According to The Nation article, written by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian, the brain scooping soldier found his exploits hilarious:

“Take a picture of me and this motherfucker,” a soldier who had been in Sergeant Mejía’s squad said as he put his arm around the corpse. Sergeant Mejía recalls that the shroud covering the body fell away, revealing that the young man was wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest.

“Damn, they really fucked you up, didn’t they?” the soldier laughed.

The scene, Sergeant Mejía said, was witnessed by the dead man’s brothers and cousins.

How does a seemingly normal, everyday, All-American soldier turn into a brain scooping cell phone camera posing beast?

It’s all about the training.

In 2000, CPT Pete Kilner presented his paper, Military Leaders’ Obligation to Justify Killing in War, before the Joint Services Conference on Professional Ethics in Washington D.C. He was there to present his thesis that “the methods that the military currently uses to train and execute combat operations enable soldiers to kill the enemy effectively, but they leave the soldiers liable to post-combat psychological trauma caused by guilt.”

Kilner’s paper discussed how the military’s training changed drastically after World War II. A survey determined that only 25% of all soldiers during the war actually fired their weapons. The main reason cited was that soldiers were more afraid to kill another human being than to be killed.

Needless to say, such mentality does not benefit the military’s main objective: kill the enemy. As a result, a new methodology of training was introduced. Military leaders began to stress the banality of the targets.

One way to achieve this was with pop-up targets on marksmanship ranges. “They enable soldiers to overcome their aversion to killing by conditioning them to act spontaneously to conditions that are combat-like yet morally benign,” according to Kilner.

Other methods, known as “killology,” included shooting at cabbages filled with ketchup to resemble exploding heads and marching to chants of “Kill, kill, kill!”

Soldiers were not shooting at specific human beings. Instead, they were killing people that wanted to kill them. Training methods became less personal.

Apparently, the change in methodology was effective. By the Korean War the percentage of troops that fired their weapons rose to 55%, while by Vietnam it had sky-rocketed to 90%.

Where do we stand today in the Iraq War?

According to the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Vicki Haddock in a 2006 article entitled The Science of Creating Killers, U.S. soldiers’ killing efficiency and coping mechanisms have only “improved.”

Haddock spoke with one American soldier on what it took to kill another human being:

21-year-old West Texas Army Pvt. Steven Green described shooting a man who refused to stop at an Iraqi checkpoint: “It was like nothing. Over here, killing people is like squashing an ant. I mean, you kill somebody, and it’s like, ‘All right, let’s go get some pizza,'” he told the military newspaper Stars & Stripes. “I mean, I thought killing somebody would be this life-changing experience. And then I did it, and I was like, ‘All right, whatever.'”

Green was eventually discharged from the military due to a “personality disorder.” He was also charged with the rape of a teenage Iraqi girl and the slaughter of her entire family, including a five-year old girl.

Haddock spotlighted another soldier and his conditioning:

(T)op Marine sniper Jack Coughlin writes from Iraq: “So far in this war I had fired six shots and had six kills — exactly the right ratio. I considered the ill-trained, poorly led soldiers of Iraq to be hamburger in my scope, practically begging me to kill them, and I was more than ready to grant their wish.”

Such mentality leads to instances such as the Vietnamese Mai Lai massacre where more than 500 unarmed civilians, including women and children, were slaughtered by American soldiers, to the 2005 Haditha massacre in Iraq where 24 unarmed civilians, including women and children, were also slaughtered by U.S. troops.

But what happens when these trained killers retire, leave, or are discharged from the military? Does the military provide a delousing of the mind? Do they attempt to purge the death training from their young impressionable brains?

According to Kilner:

(W)hen soldiers kill because of military training that has effectively undermined their moral autonomy–they conduct their personal moral deliberation of their actions only after the fact. If they are unable to justify what they have done, they often suffer guilt and psychological trauma.

Many soldiers suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, others commit suicide, and still others go on murderous rampages.

According to Kilner, the United States military is doing absolutely nothing to help soldiers deal with the psychological effects of their murderous training. They merely pat them on the back, thank them for a job well done, and pull up the next impressionable young man or woman and stick them in the meat grinder.

To deal with the problem, Kilner suggests justification “because, at least some killing in war is morally justifiable, military leaders have a duty to understand that justification, to train their soldiers to kill only when it is justified, and to explain to their soldiers why it is justified.” In other words, if you give a soldier a supposedly legitimate reason to kill another human being, such as self-defense, it may be easier for the soldier to cope with the outcome of his actions.

That seems a bit simplistic, especially when soldiers are firing randomly at civilians because they believe everyone in Iraq is a “terrorist.” Unfortunately, killing, whether justifable or not, is going to warp the killer’s mind in some fashion, and probably to an unrecoverable point.

Americans should begin to see the effects of the Iraq war veterans’ killing sprees here in our own country very soon. Most serial killers and mass murderers tend to be in their mid 20s to mid 30s.

The newest crop of Charles Whitmans and Jeffrey Dahmers should be prowling our streets any day now — and for many years to come.

Here Are A Few More Not So Good Men:

All served in the military. All went on to become serial killers, mass murderers, or assassins.

John Allen Muhammad (“The Beltway Sniper”), Arthur Shawcross, Lee Harvey Oswald, Randy Kraft, Dennis Rader (“BTK”), Howard Unruh, Robert Lee Yates, Gary Heidnik, Charles Cullen, Charles Ng, Henry Louis Wallace, Julian Knight, Courtney Mathews & David Housler, Daryl Keith Holton, Wayne Adam Ford, Richard Marc Evonitz, etc.

This list is by no means comprehensive and does not include military personnel who murdered their families, loved ones, or friends upon their return from training to kill or war.

Tags: Military Murders, Serial Killers, Mass Murderers, Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Whitman, Son of Sam, Iraq War (all tags)

Like I say, I can’t wait for the denials to start.

BBCT: LGF