We live in a country of 350 million people. At any given time, around 1.2 million people serve in the military, or about a third of a percent of the general population. Of that third of a percent, the "tooth to tail" ratio is 8:1 (150k), but "tooth" is combat arms which includes artillery, tankers, cav, engineers etc. Even within the Infantry there are mortarmen, mechanized, anti-tank squads etc. It's hard to say for certain, but the number of dudes in the military whose job it is to kick the doors and shoot the faces is likely no more than 50k at a given time. Of that, only a minority will deploy and a minority of those see combat. In the twenty years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has awarded right about 77k CIBs and 47k Purple Hearts out of 2-3 million total deployed over that time. Obviously, there is some overlap between those awards.
For the uninitiated, the Combat Infantryman Badge is intended to identify those members of the infantry who have actually "close(d) with and destroy the enemy with direct fires.", and the PH is known colloquially as the Enemy Marksmanship Badge. But there are some caveats. For reasons I will explain, the numbers we pull from awards like this are likely a high-end estimate, rather than a minimum, but counting the Marine 0300s and whoever all else could push the numbers up a bit.
The CIB is awarded at the company level, and only in the Army. This means if one dude in an infantry company (~100 men) gets in a firefight, the whole company gets their CIB. Much of the fighting these days is very small unit engagements, so it is quite common for only a few squads or teams in a CIB company to have actually seen the combat. OTOH, more people than infantry get into shooting scrapes, I know a couple cooks with multiple engagements just because they used to volunteer to fill out patrols that were short on people. Given the nature of the conflict, a lot of people who weren't infantry, or even combat arms have seen combat. However, if they do, it's usually because of bad luck or the military ran out of infantry to do that job. It's impossible to say definitively given the data available to me at the moment, but I very much doubt the total number exceeds the number of infantrymen with CIBs. Lots of cav guys saw action as route security, lots of random MOS people got blown up en route or pressed into some role they weren't trained for. But the guys who do the job day in and day out of locating, fixing and killing the enemy is a rather select group.
So too the Purple Heart has gone to a lot of people who don't do that sort of job. Mortars dropped into a FOB can hit anyone, and roadside IEDs don't care if you're on the road to take water to an outpost or heading out on a raid. But they are more common among the people who are in the most dangerous situations more regularly.
Let's bring it all those numbers and assumptions together for a moment, because I'm describing a group of people who are very, very abnormal, and very far out on the distribution tail of the violence bell curve. Let's round up to make the math easy and account for POGs and Marines and call it a hundred thousand men over twenty years (and yes, to the closest approximation, it is all men). It's three ten thousandths of one percent of the general population. That's the high estimate, the real number could be significantly lower still. And the number who deploy multiple times is much, much lower.
When American foreign policy decides some poor dirt farmers on the other side of the globe need some freedom in their lives, maybe one ten thousandth of one percent of the population is who gets sent to do the actual violence of empire. I am one of those men. I have a CIB and a purple heart. Within the rarified community of professional actual soldiers, I am a small fish in a tiny pond. I was not special forces (or, technically I was briefly, but not really). I was a reasonably high-speed infantryman with a penchant for guns who worked himself into a sniper platoon in a fairly trash unit. I made sergeant, ate an IED and got med-boarded out of the military. A short, somewhat spicy but relatively unremarkable military career for an infantryman.
Much of what the general public hears about combat, even "first hand accounts" is not from people who actually do this job. As I have hopefully established, this is a very small, very highly selected and very abnormal group of people. Most of what you read ore hear in war accounts is from the middle classes, which in the military means officers. Officers are not soldiers. They are managers of soldiers. During conscription, it was at least possible for a southern gentleman of letters like Eugene Sledge or a Junker scion like Junger to write an account of actual enlisted combat, if unlikely. In today's volunteer military, this is almost never the case. The venn diagram of actual front-line soldiers and people who can write competently in an educated manner for general consumption is essentially two separate circles. These are not generally guys with college degrees, because if they had one they'd be an officer. There are exceptions, but we'll perhaps get into that at another time.
This hopefully will go some way to explaining my arrogance in writing about the topic. IQ and violent tendencies tend to be negatively correlated, and I am way out on the right tail of of the distribution on both. If that seems self-aggrandizing, rest assured that neither has done me any good.
So who are these men? Who carries the torch of empire into the barbarian wastes of the Korangel? Who sits behind the machine gun of a HMMWV? Who donkey-kicks the doors off their hinges and plunges into the black interior following the blinding light of his Surefire? Who sits in a ditch for three days waiting to shoot a retarded teenager whose dad got paid $200 to have him drop an IED in a pothole?
In short, they're degens. Poor and working class kids, half of which aren't old enough to buy beer. Mostly rural whites and hispanics. Roughly a quarter are from Texas alone. The South more generally provides well over half, maybe two thirds of the total. Most of the rest are from the Midwest and West. They self select. These are guys who asked to be in the Infantry, and survived the training and indoc. Nobody winds up on the pointy end of the spear by accident. It's the worst job in the military, so the people who volunteer for it are driven by very different considerations to most. It's also the highest status within the violence hierarchy.
It's a weird group. There's a lot of immigrants, not all of them hispanic. A surprising number of professional soldiers from other countries come to the US just for the action. If you're just itching for a fight but are born somewhere too peaceful, coming to the US will greatly increase your likelihood of getting into the shit. I've met British Marines, African princes, a German seminarian who dropped out to join the US infantry. There's some tiny minority communities that are heavily overrepresented though still small in total numbers, like Native Americans, the Samoans, the Hmong and the Sikhs. East asians are rare, and black Americans, while overrepresented in the military generally, are underrepresented in this part but still common.
We are united by a few characteristics, most generally the privileging of suffering as a badge of honor, physical violence, and a death wish. One does not join the Infantry to live a quiet life to a ripe old age. Mostly, I think we want to fuck around and find out. Like the movie says, how much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight? I had a lot of reasons for joining up, but I think the most basic was a desire to test myself and find out if I had what it took to face another man in mortal combat. To "see the elephant", or any of the other thousand euphemisms we use for fighting and killing our fellow men. To take the ultimate risk.
A recruit can get all the benefits of military service in a safer and more sustainable career. The infantry chews up men, minds and bodies, training alone eliminates hundreds of thousands. A twenty-five year old infantryman is probably middle management, a thirty-year old is probably out of the field as a platoon sergeant. The incessant road marching ruins feet, ankles and knees. The heavy packs wreck spines and shoulders. The heat, cold, wet and sleep deprivation cull the sensitive and the civilized. The social aggression removes the timid and the hazing removes the bitches.
There's an old glib saying that captures the esprit of the group. "The cowards never started and the weak quit along the way. That just leaves us.".
As a composite character, I give you the US infantryman. He is nineteen or twenty years old, grew up in a trailer park, has a kid or two with women he's not married to, is married to a woman with kids that are not his. He'll be divorced in a year. His family are construction workers, nurses, truck drivers, retail workers, garbage collectors, heavy machine operators, drug dealers, petty criminals, major criminals. He is dumber than average, hated school, has never read a book not assigned in class. He's been in jail multiple times, and probably will be again, mostly for low level stuff like underage drinking, vandalism and fighting. He binge drinks and smokes when in garrison, dips in the field. He gets in fistfights on a regular but extended basis with members of his own unit, in group conflict with other units, or with civilians on liberty. His politics, if he has any, are somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan. He drives a pickup truck, a Mustang, or a heavily riced-out import and is dead broke most of the time. He is, in short, perilously close to the underclass of our society, and there's a lot of crossover. His life is boredom, fear, pain and the brotherhood of those who live in fear and pain. His values are foreign, rude and frightening to those not of his group.
He is the world elite of the violent class. The modern equivalent of a knight, loaded down with many years' wages' worth of technology, weapons and armor. Far better trained, supplied and equipped than his adversaries. The big stick that the world hegemon swings in the anarchic world of international politics. The very tip of the spear. The point of empire.
In our modern peaceful society, that point has become very fine indeed.
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Notes -
I've wondered if my dad is a faker. He'd certainly want to look cool to his son I suppose.
That is interesting and hopeful to hear about the soldiers that hold back. There was some famous account from WWI about them having trouble motivating their soldiers to kill each other.
Is There some sense of morality or honor playing in? For the soldiers in WWI 'i dont want to kill this poor idiot who got drafted into the same dumb war as me'. For a modern soldier, 'I dont want to kill the dumb son of a poor family that got paid $5 to drop off a thing on the side of the road'.
I've always found those accounts hard to believe. Mostly from introspection. I've tried to type out an explanation a few different ways. They all seem wrongish. I'm just gonna go with the summary, take my word for it, all of these sentences are things I have thought through thoroughly:
I don't think I'm a psychopath. I don't want to kill other people. In a war, I think it would be easy for me to kill other people and feel very little remorse. If I had to use violence to kill them, I think it would permanently fuck me up, and I don't think I'd be very good at it.
Modern warfare has done an interesting thing where they have disassociated killing people with violence. A drone pilot can press a button and kill an entire wedding party while seeing only faint black and white outlines of bodies. The kind of man that could go to that same wedding party and cut them down with a blade is a very different person. There is a spectrum between those two people, and I think the infantry is much closer to the second kind of man than they are to the drone pilot. I'd consider myself close to the drone pilot.
It is weird to think that I'm not capable of violence, but I think I'm capable of killing someone.
I've had a similar belief, but I was trying to be generous.
I can't say why it is, but it is. In my limited experience, if it's a firefight, about a third of guys shoot back, a third help out, and a third freeze up or hide. Often not who I thought would be in those categories.
There's usually something that needs doing that a brave man can do in combat that isn't killing someone. Those guys dashing through fire to rescue their wounded buddies are in all likelihood trying to offset their lack of appetite for the fight itself. They discover they can display their courage and suffer with the rest of their buddies without killing. The freezers I feel bad for. They found out something about themselves that will be hard to live with too. Of the three, the second group is probably the most healthy psychologically, and will have the easiest transition back to normal life. But that's pure speculation on my part. It just seems psychologically easier.
If it isn't a firefight, or some direct danger, the firing rates plummet. Half of our sniper teams never fired a shot, and in our AO at the time, that's just crazy. No way were they missing that many opportunities. Haji buffet in those days. And those are the specially selected guys who tried out, went to specialty schools specifically to do that job. It's a hard thing to kill someone who doesn't even know you're there. There's no honor in it, no struggle, no danger. In the context of war it's "ok", but it feels like murder because psychologically it is.
I wish more people who studied moral philosophy could read your experiences.
I've never been in combat. But talking to people who have, and reading up on the subject, makes it clear to me that a lot of what people have in mind when they discuss morality and politics is just a rational justification of these deep urges and hesitations.
When I was younger I always noticed that liberals would allow the killing of fetuses but not criminals, and conservatives would allow the killing of criminals but not fetuses. And there would be arguments and justifications. But very few people seriously thought about applying any of those arguments to warfare. How do you justify killing an enemy combatant who is both fully grown and also hasn't committed any serious crime? Somehow nobody seems to think there's a need. There are a few pacifists around, but I've never met a genuine pacifist. Everyone I've ever talked to about the subject seems to know that, on some level, you must be ready to send someone else to kill people in war, if you're not prepared to do it yourself.
I think there is something to learn from this. What I think is: If you want abortion but not capital punishment, whatever. If you want capital punishment but not abortion, whatever. If you want both, whatever. Probably all of this kind of political arguing is merely the philosophical manifestation of the kind of thing you describe in the field: A third freeze, a third help out, and a third shoot.
Out of curiosity, how would you guess a person could tell what category he is in without actually being in a firefight?
You don't.
That's why you actually have to go do it to find out.
Are you sure? We test a person's intelligence, sociability, emotionality, creativity, and anything else we like using a pencil and paper. Such tests are effective at predicting real world outcomes/ Tests of Neuroticism specifically have been used to predict panic proneness. You don't think that any kind of psychological screening could serve as an effective predictor of who will shoot, who will help, and who will freeze?
The military tried to find this test before, but the only major correlate was number of fights as a child, I believe. Which is sort of hard to control for. Last I knew, they gave up trying.
I suspect you might be able to find such a test, but it would be difficult to create and administer and perhaps even unethical.
If there were a reliable test for aggression in combat, the country that had it would be unstoppable militarily. The fact that no one on earth administers such a test implies that it is difficult if not impossible with current science. They all rely on a mix of private violence, training and hazing to try to weed out the squeamish, with imperfect results.
Hmm. That...I have some ideas, but they are rather torturous and would be considered unethical and barbaric by Western powers. I think that it might be possible with current science if we didn't have any or many ethical restrictions, although in any case it would be expensive. Some ideas:
Man vs. hog combat. Guy gets a Ka-Bar and maybe some chainmail or something and has to kill a hog with it.
Some kind of pain tolerance/threshold test, ice water seems to be a fairly common one. Maybe pair that with something like the Milgram shock experiment, plus or minus some (contrived) medical gore/torture...find a way to make them genuinely believe that they're inflicting pain on another human being. Of course, it's all bullshit special effects, but hopefully they'd believe that.
Maybe starve them for a few days or a week or two and dump them into the woods in winter, with those hogs from before and the knives. The hogs could somehow be handicapped to make them easier to capture and slaughter.
I have heard that combat can be surprising; maybe you could bushwhack people with a simulated hog ambush or something. Or have a classroom or something outdoors...which turns out to just be a test, and you're actually being tested on your ability to react to having a bull poker game sprung on you without warning.
Of course, the hogs and bulls are going to generate casualties and as such this test would be expensive. It could also be considered both barbaric and animal cruelty.
My (peacetime) military officer father told me that the infantry liked people that came from poor backgrounds because they were more aware of their surroundings and accustomed to discomfort and privation - and that middle class guys were too "soft" to make good infantrymen, at least initially. From what he heard, though, war hardened the survivors, soft suburbanites or not.
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It’s seems to me you are saying that the trait is innately psychological. Or is this a cultural trait that is very deeply embedded in American Culture.
The Haji Buffet in the American culture isn’t the other. It’s basically the old political standard here that we disagree because of mistake theory. The Haji planting an IED just has wrong beliefs today and are basically unbaptized. When Bush ordered missile strikes it was missiles wrapped in Democracy and women’s schools. Today the right wing meme would be bullets with pride flags. The dead militant in American psychosis is a future ally. (Funny Noora Bin Laden is full fledged red American loving today).
I wander if the things that you speak of soldiers being hesitant to shoot would be completely different if the culture was different and the guy being killed was just a guy wanting to take your women and land. Israel I am guessing works a bit more on conflict theory.
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