On Killing by LtCol Dave Grossman, 2009, Excerpts
The impact of true physical
exhaustion is impossible to communicate to those who have not experienced it.
We were beginning week eight of the eight-week U.S. Army Ranger School, and my
peers and I had endured physical deprivation for seven weeks. I had not eaten
or slept for five days. We were handpicked officers and sergeants in the finest
possible condition upon the beginning of the course, by this time most of us
had lost well over twenty pounds of body tissue. Sunken cheeked and hollow
eyed, we were in a state of total starvation-enhanced exhaustion that caused
many of us to have repeated hallucinations, incredibly vivid dreams that we
would experience while wide-awake, usually about food. The mind teetered on the
brink of madness.
The point of such remarkable
exercises in self-flagellations is to introduce the combat leader to an intense
degree of stress and thereby inoculate him against psychological trauma. While
soldiers may become exhausted and enter into a dazed condition in which all
sharpness is lost, they can still function like cells in a military organism,
doing what is expected of them because it has become automatic.
Exhaustion, memory defects, apathy,
hopelessness, and all the rest of these are precise descriptions of clinical
depression. “Fortitude” rather than “courage” is the proper word to describe
what is occurring. The opposite of courage is cowardice, but the opposite of
fortitude is exhaustion. When the soldier’s well is dry, his very soul is dry.
Depletion of fortitude can be seen in entire units as well as individuals. The
fortitude of a unit is no more than the aggregate of the fortitude of its
members. And when the individuals are drained to a husk, the whole is nothing
more than an aggregate of exhausted men. A great military leader has an ability
to draw from the tremendous depths of fortitude within his own well, and in
doing so he is fortifying his own men by permitting them to draw from his well.
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