How Do You Un-Train a Soldier?

By Dale Short There are only a few commercials these days that make me yell at the TV set, and they're not even about politics. In one of the ads, a group of good-looking young men and women, in crisp military uniforms, are hard at work in a darkened, high-tech room that looks like a studio set from the movie "War Games." As dramatic music rises, they confer with one another and frantically type commands into their computers. Suddenly, on the big monitor, there's the shape of an explosion. The young soldiers cheer at this, high-five one another, and call it a day. Apparently it's Miller Time. As a recruiting spiel, I think this ad is unmatched. I mean, who wouldn't want a job like that? Except for the fact that we're never told how many deaths, and where, that happy flash of pixels represents. Which is why I refer to these kinds of ads as "war porn." And if not for the teachings of Jesus, I would fervently hope the commercials' creators someday find themselves on the business end of one of those missiles in the real world. Everybody I know who has actually been in a war understands that the process is basically about killing people. And after you've done that, you need something a lot stronger than a beer. Contrary to popular belief, the hardest part of military training is not marksmanship, physical conditioning, strategic thinking, etc. The hardest part is switching off every trainee's basic revulsion toward killing another human being. Which is why I was so surprised last week when a high-ranking officer told the media, in regard to the massacre of civilians in an Afghan village by a rogue American soldier, "This kind of thing only happens very rarely." Like, only since the beginning of history. It was the autumn of 1970, the latter days of the Vietnam War, when I got home from a college class and opened the dreaded letter from the U.S. government telling me my student deferment had just ended. I was sent to Montgomery to take an Army physical, anddespite a lifetime as a sickly kid, plus being legally blind in one eyethey declared me a perfect 1-A specimen. By Christmas I had my free airline ticket to Fort Leonard Wood in Rolla, Missouri, to begin basic training just after the holidays . I was a miserable soldier, in both senses of the word. The ground stayed frozen for days at a time, and the wind was merciless. The drill sergeant screamed at me by name so many times I became the company joke.

Then, strange things started to happen. My formerly fumbling fingers became decent at cleaning an M-16 rifle. My scores at the range (shooting enemy soldiers made of cardboard) increased so quickly that the instructor singled me out for praise. Most surprisingly, despite having two left feet and no sense of rhythm, I even became successful (meaning, invisible) at marching in formation with the platoon. Then came a day that's haunted me, ever since. Late one afternoon as we were marching on the parade ground as practice for our graduation, out of nowhere came an intense sleet-storm. But despite the misery of sleet in our faces, one by one all the marchers started laughing and even the drill sergeant joined in. We were marching perfectly, better than perfectly, and Mother Nature was not going to stop us. It felt to me like a spiritual experience. After a childhood as an outcast and loner, suddenly I was somebody. Or more accurately, I was nobody. I had disappeared into something larger and stronger than myself. It was a much larger rush than alcohol or a drug, because there was no grogginess or edginess in the feeling. It was as clean as sunshine, and as warming. Problem was, until that point in my life I had convinced myself deep in my little pacifist heart that if I were put into what people euphemistically call harm's way, I would somehow manage to get out of it without the death of a fellow human being on my conscience. Within the next week, I used up my whole life allotment of prayer and good fortune: I was hospitalized with an acute respiratory infection, my childhood asthma came back with a vengeance, and I was eventually given an honorary discharge and a free plane ticket back to Birmingham. But at that long-ago moment on the parade ground, all bets were off. And still are. And for anybody with the power to send people to war, the episode of a soldier on his fourth tour of an impossible duty suddenly finding himself at the center of a bloody nightmare should be the boldest possible handwriting on the wall: The process of turning off a human being's natural reluctance to kill is the easy part. The hard part is turning it back on. # # #

(Dale Short is a native of Walker County. His books, columns, and radio features are available on his website, carrolldaleshort.com)