by Charley Reese

I heard a lecture by an Army psychologist who contended that after 90 days of combat, the casualty rate was 98 percent. Those not wounded physically were wounded psychologically. The other 2 percent were psychopaths.

His passing remark about the psychopaths was interesting. A psychopath is a defective human being, almost a bionic robot. Psychopaths can be intelligent and manipulative, but they lack totally the capability of feeling any emotion for or attachment to other human beings. They are without conscience, without remorse, without regret, without compassion. They can feel rage when frustrated. They commit a lot of the crime and in prisons usually run the inmates.

A close friend who led a Ranger platoon in heavy fighting during World War II said the only member of his outfit who didn’t get a scratch was a psychopath, a convicted murderer paroled into the Army. This man loved to kill and often exposed himself to enemy fire just to hurl insults at the Germans. He and a Choctaw Indian would have long arguments over whether the knife or the hatchet was the best tool for killing a sentry. The psychopath favored the hatchet, using it to deliver a blow to the back of neck and sever the spinal cord.

War is both brutal and brutalizing, and so it is good to see that more and more Americans are beginning to realize the war in Iraq was a mistake. Wars are nearly always a mistake, because even if you win them, you lose so much. A man who ought to know, William Sherman, told some cadets that war is hell. Another combat veteran described it as being eye-deep in hell.

What we need to come to grips with is that war, as old as the human race, has become too dangerous to practice. Today we have people – not very different from people 5,000 years ago – who command weapons that can literally destroy life on Earth. History tells us that war corrupts even good people. It didn’t take long in World War II before the strategic-bombing advocates were saying cities needed to be carpet-bombed without regard for civilian casualties. That culminated in dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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