On Killing by LtCol Dave Grossman, 2009, Excerpts
Martin Seligman developed the
concept of inoculation from stress from his famous studies of learning in dogs.
He put the dogs in a cage that had an electric shock pass through the floor at
random intervals. Initially the dogs would jump, yelp and scratch pitifully in
their attempts to escape the shocks, but after a time they would fall into a
depressed, hopeless state of apathy and inactivity that Seligman termed
“learned helplessness.” After falling into a state of learned helplessness, the
dogs would not avoid the shocks even when provided with an obvious escape
route.
This process of inoculation is
exactly what occurs in boot camps and in every military school worthy of its
name. When raw recruits are faced with seemingly sadistic abuse and hardship,
they escape through weekend passes and, ultimately, graduation. They are being
inoculated against the stresses of combat. Soldiers are highly rewarded and
recognized [marksmanship badge, three-day pass] for success in this skill and
suffer mild punishment in the form of retraining, peer pressure, and failure to
graduate from boot camp] for failure to quickly and accurately “engage” the
targets – a standard euphemism for “kill”. Today we understand the enormous
power of drill to condition and program a soldier.
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