ShootDontTalk wrote:My 2 cents worth. I have personally counseled around 10 officers involved in an OIS. I can say this with certainty. It affects everyone differently.
I distinctly remember two officers who both fired at an actor simultaneously resulting in his death. The veteran (5 years) was sitting in his cruiser and stated he was fine, didn't need to talk about anything. This was his second OIS. I never had occasion to talk to him again. He handled it with no discernible reaction.
The other officer was a 2 year plus man and was quite different. He was sitting in his cruiser with tears streaming down his face and I had to position myself between him and the body just a few yards away. I reassured him that he did the only thing he could have done and to remember that he was going home to his family in a little while. I talked with this officer off and on for a couple of years. He told me all he could see was the actors eyes as the bullets hit him.
The assertion that the vast majority of officers are only worried about legal problems would trouble me if it were true. That the military has a continuing issue with PTSD and my own experiences tell me that that assumption is false. They are humans, not machines. Killing has a very well documented effect on those who must kill. It does affect everyone differently though.
About Col. Grossman. His research covered several decades and many years of conflicts. He is primarily a soldier, not a psychologist. His book has been required reading at the U.S. War College for a long time. If there was nothing to his work, it probably wouldn't be quite as widely read and accepted.
The guy whose blog I linked to is ex SF and killed people in combat so he has some direct experience in the matter. I've never killed anyone, but to me, it seems like at least in part, the psychological reaction would be related to the righteousness of the shoot, assuming the officer's psychological makeup was more sheepdog than sheep. I'm sure there are plenty of officers who aren't true sheepdogs and would be affected differently. I'm sure there are also plenty of people in the military who joined and in spite of their training remain psychologically unprepared for combat.
On this subject I can't help but think of Chris Kyle....he killed lots of people and didn't appear to be particularly troubled about it because he believed he did the right thing. If you lacked that moral certainty I can see how you would be troubled. The assertion you refer to about officer concerns is based on a study (what you're citing is anecdotal) and it doesn't seem unreasonable to me. It also doesn't concern me that someone who did the right thing would be more troubled by being thrown under the bus that by what they did. In fact, anyone who does the right thing, officer or not, but especially a police officer, should be full of righteous indignation at the prospect of being punished for it.
As far as Grossman goes I don't think you can assume that if his work was invalid it wouldn't be widely read and accepted. There has been plenty of work in the field of psychology that has been widely read and accepted only to be discredited and rejected at some point. As I understand it, unlike the police officer who wrote the article, Grossman was never in combat and never pulled the trigger on anyone. He claims to be an Army Ranger and apparently did complete Ranger school but never actually served in a Ranger unit.
A lot of Grossman's work was based on the work of SLA Marshall, and Marshall has been pretty thoroughly debunked and discredited. Grossman has plenty of critics within the military and SF community. They're not saying that he's a bad guy or a fraud, just that he has no actual combat experience and that his conclusions are based on flawed data. Grossman is also famous for wanting to ban first person video games. The SF guy whose blog I linked to praises his sheepdog/sheep/wolf formulation as brilliant and he is generally credited with being a fantastic speaker. Marshall was also widely read and accepted...until he wasn't.
http://www.americanheritage.com/content ... ?page=show
Unfortunately, the fruit of Marshall’s interviews, the astonishing insight, turns out to be a little too good to be true. In fact, it just may be that Samuel Lyman Marshall made the whole thing up.
Of course, a lot of soldiers didn’t believe Marshall at all. Leinbaugh contacted a number of senior commanders: Lt. Gen. Harry O. Kinnard, who participated in every one of the 101st Airborne’s World War Il operations (and who is singled out by Marshall in several books as one of the war’s most distinguished combat leaders), says, “In both World War II and in Vietnam it never came to my attention that failure to fire was a problem at any level.” Gen. Bruce Clarke, who led the defense of St. Vith and served as both commanding general-Europe and commanding general-Continental U.S., put it more strongly. Marshall’s theories, he said, are “ridiculous and dangerous assertions—absolute nonsense.” And Gen. James M. Gavin, who commanded the famous 82nd Airborne Division during World War II, says bluntly that Marshall’s claim “is absolutely false.” According to Gavin, “All of our infantry fired their weapons. I know because I was there and took part.”
Read the entire article. There is plenty of evidence that Marshall flat out lied about his "combat" experience and just made up data to support his assertions, so any work based on or influenced by Marshall is flawed from the outset.
"Journalism, n. A job for people who flunked out of STEM courses, enjoy making up stories, and have no detectable integrity or morals."
From the WeaponsMan blog, weaponsman.com
