I’m talking about mental health problems in people who want to join or become soldiers, not the ones who have already seen combat and developed problems with anxiety or PTSD.
As an example, sociopaths seem like they’d be drawn to military special forces. Sociopaths don’t feel fear or empathy, they crave stimulation and novelty and they generally crave a legal outlet for their urges.
At the same time, I have known a few SF soldiers who seemed like they were trying to overcompensate for something bad in their past. That doesn’t prove anything though.
Does the military exclude sociopaths from this field or actively seek them out?
I don’t know if I see the connection Wesley Clark but you should know that better than most anyone because you were a General right :)? The military is incredibly structured and rule based. The last thing they want is for a group of people using the military as an excuse to abuse and kill people. One bad incident can lead straight to the nightly news and back to the Pentagon and the White House.
It takes a lot of talent of several different types to make it into the special forces at all and it is incredibly demanding. My younger brother graduated from the Coast Guard Officer Training School less than a year ago. He was a police officer before that and came about two seconds from raising his hand and asking to leave because he could barely take what they were putting him through but that is the point of the whole exercise to begin with. The various special forces units get even more demanding training than that.
I think the term you are looking for is more similar to ‘authoritarian’ than ‘sociopathic’. True sociopaths try to bullshit and manipulate people for their own gain and pleasure. The military is more immune to that than say Corporate America by design. Thrill seeking and grandiose thoughts about their abilities may be another but the training is designed to show once and for all if that is an accurate self-judgment. Many of them are just extreme patriots that want an interesting job that pushes them to the limits.
how would you go about finding out? Army policy prohibits enlistment of people who were treated for mental problems in the past. As far as the sociopaths go, can you diagnose that with the kind of a checklist that could be used in interviews with veterans or active service members for research purposes?
Also, how much “stimulation” really is the service in special forces? The primary admissions criteria seem to be excellence in military training rather than demonstrated lack of empathy. Charm/charisma wouldn’t cut it either since everything is heavily regimented. So it seems like a life of intense training drudgery rather than of excitement.
I’ve known plenty of special ops (or sayeret, as they’re called here) types, and they’re largely stable, if somewhat arrogant guys. That’s because their selection and training emphasizes self-confidence, self-control, leadership ability and most importantly, being a team player. It’s the latter that largely precludes sociopaths from joining - the way the military sees it, an elite soldier’s most important skill is his ability to work with his squadmates.
I have also heard, no cite, that special forces types are far less likely to suffer from things like PTSD, due to the fact that they are all volunteers and are self-selected for mental toughness.
All of the special forces people that I know reflect the experiences posted above; they tend to be stable team workers with a little bit of cockiness and a good dose of realism vis a vis their job.
To add to the anecdotal evidence on this thread I concur that someone who can not be 100% dedicated to his team would never make it in the special forces.
I worked with a special ops team as a civilian contractor in a technical support role and they seamed to be the most level headed and dedicated group of people I have ever met.
Full disclosure I “washed out” from that job due to my inability do deal with the mundane, but I was just fixing their stuff.
I personally went to school with two “sociopaths” who tried to go into the military to try to get a grip on life and they didn’t even make it through basic. Narcissism and socially deviancy are not compatible with a military lifestyle.
In On Killing and On Combat, Dave Grossman states that there appear to be about 2% of combat soldiers who are sociopaths. And–I don’t have them handy–but I believe he also states that more of these folks gravitate toward Special Forces.
Now, mind you, they may be sociopaths, but the phrase “mental health problems” may not exactly apply. They are simply people that have almost no difficulty in killing other people (unlike the rest of us, for whom killing another human being is very nearly impossible, despite what we’d like to think about ourselves). Now, if they don’t exercise that ability outside of the combat zone, you wouldn’t say that they had a mental health problem.
I saw a documentary about the SAS a while ago (pre-9/11) and the ex-SAS members they interviewed were fairly evenly split between those who had prospered, and done well in later life, and those who had real problems and gone of the rails pretty badly. My take was yes are more psychologically tough than your run of the mill grunt, but the stuff they encounter, day-in day-out, is far worse than what your average grunt would.
What I wonder is who gives counselling/psychiatric to these people. If they are involved in some of the most secret stuff the government does (SAS members cannot even reveal the fact they are SAS members). Do they just say “Well there was that time I was in an undisclosed location doing something I can’t talk about but which was very traumatic” ? Or are their a set of special psychiatrists who have special security clearance for this reason ?
I don’t buy this. If by kill you mean murder in cold blood, sure. If you mean “shoot back at the guy shooting at you”, I’d wager that most people wouldn’t have much trouble. A lot of WWII and Vietnam memoirs talk about being worried about shooting someone, which usually lasts until the precise moment when the soldier realizes that other person is trying to kill him.
I don’t put much stock in the idea that most soldiers try not to actually hit the enemy, and PTSD, despite the press, is overdiagnosed (sleeplessness, drinking more than a few drinks per week, irritability are all symptoms). Severe PTSD appears to be fairly rare as well (1-5%). There is also the meme that basic training is all about teaching people to kill, which is misguided at best.
Add in people like police officers who are able to kill others, and you either have a lot of sociopaths, a lot of people who are overcoming the “nearly impossible”, or you have overestimated the psychological difficulty with killing people, especially in stressful situations. I’m going with the latter.
Police officers and modern soldiers have modern combat conditioning. Even simply training with a human-being-shaped target has a huge impact on firing rates over training with a circular bullseye. Officers and soldiers today are not merely being trained how to aim, they are being psychologically conditioned so that they shoot back when they need to. None of this really happened until after WWII. Firing rates in Korea were in the 50-60% range, and firing rates in Vietnam were up to modern standards (90%+).
I encourage you to read the book. There are huge numbers of people that fail to fire even at THAT point. For a lot of men, it often took a shouted direct order from a nearby superior officer to fire, despite the fact that they were looking right at the barrel of the enemy’s gun.
I haven’t read Grossman, but several months ago I read an article that mentioned some of Grossman’s work
And one thing they mention is how a tiny minority (around 2-4%) do half of the killing. They claim sociopaths are among that 2-4%, and that they should be selected for.
However sociopaths, since they have no real sense of loyalty, aren’t going to function as a team. They’d be willing to let their teammates die w/o blinking.
So it seems with SF soldiers you need someone who has no remorse or empathy for the military enemy but who will fight to the death to protect his friends. That kind of mental compartmentalization doesn’t sound healthy or even very realistic.
Don’t most people, whether in the military or not, have that same trait? True friends and family should be willing to defend you under almost any circumstances short of something like a murder or child molestation within the family. It usually doesn’t come down to death or even physical violence but pack mentality is a human trait too. Special Forces soldiers are trained to be tightly knit as a team against someone that they have probably never met. It isn’t a U.S. courtroom where both sides should be treated as equals by the judge until proven otherwise. Even fraternal organizations exploit that psychological trait that almost everyone has.
I once attended a lecture on Antisocial Personality Disorder by the director of a large State-owned hospital who made the statement that the majority of decorated war heros were probably sociopaths.
To put that into perspective sociopathic personalities have always served a purpose in society. They are people who are able to withstand the kinds of stress which would be damaging to others of different (healthy) personality types. They are among our surgeons, ministers, emergency room workers, ambulance drivers, um, politicians.
And it’s good to keep in mind that there are degrees of sociopathy. I’ve known a number of them that have learned impulse control and make persuasive and effective leaders.
So their background makes a difference. Those who have been raised with a good values system may not necessarily give a damn about what that means to others but are capable of aligning themselves with it as suits their purpose.
The idea that they are incapable of loyalty may be a misconception. In fact they often have odd and persistant loyalties to their dawgs and their mothers! Sometimes to a close friend.
Are they apt to go all dysfunctional on you if you get in their way? Yup. Can they be efficient workers? Oh, yes.
No they don’t, not from what I know. I don’t think you really can’t ask someone to have a high degree of empathy for person X but no empathy for person Y.
You can feed them propaganda about what a horrible person person Y is, but I think many would see through that.
The article I posted earlier showed most regular soldiers have trouble killing people. The reason is basically empathy. I would assume SF soldiers generally have the same problem on some level.
I can understand how in the heat of battle you defend your teammates. But not everything SF soldiers do is in the heat of battle. A sniper operation may take several days and never really put the SF soldiers in any serious risk. I thought that was a risk of sniper operations, you spend several days observing someone eating, having recreation, sleeping, etc. then you are expected to kill him on a moments notice but have trouble because you’ve started to see him as a person.
All in all, the concept that people can be trained to have high degrees of loyalty and empathy to individual/group X but zero loyalty and empathy to individual/group Y seems confusing to me. Esp when you consider that in some situations, individual Y is just some involuntary conscript with a family and not an inhuman monster.
You don’t have to feed soldiers propaganda. Once they see enough of their buddies blown up, they will want to kill the enemy. Hate for the enemy comes natural when they are trying to kill you.
I don’t feel that it is unnatural to feel connected to my allies, but feel zero sympathy for killing the enemy.
And let’s get past the idea that a soldier is only “returning” fire. In combat, if you see them first, you kill them. You don’t wait for them to shoot at you.
The last sentence was not directed at Wesley Clark, it was for ivn and anyone only thinking that soldiering involves shooting in self defense. It also involves shooting first.
Originally posted by Wesley Clark:
“sociopaths seem like they’d be drawn to military special forces. Sociopaths don’t feel fear or empathy, they crave stimulation and novelty and they generally crave a legal outlet for their urges.”
I am reminded of a story from my Aunt Barbara, who was in the British Military in WWII but was loaned to the US Army.
One operative left a note on someones desk in France that he had left them a present on the window sill.
When they looked on the window sill they found a jar with liquid nerve gas. (Yes , I know the Germans didn’t use nerve gas in WW 2) Their assumption was that the operative had poured the liquid nerve gas from an unused artillery shell into the jar(with no protection).
This operative’s normal method of operation after coming to the rear area was to steal a jeep and break into a DP (displaced persons) camp and rape some women and then return behind enemy lines to get back to work. He wanted to go back to work. Work was behind enemy lines.
Aunt Barbara got involved because she spoke French and English and her task was to call all the check points between the window sill and the front lines and describe the operative and his probable symptoms from exposure to the nerve gas and try to find him.
I don’t think the military (Army,Navy, etc) has a place for the mentally imbalanced but I do think that ***above *** the military, there are governmental organizations which are quite willing to use people with unusual proclivities.
Uh, I don’t think that people wait to fire in war, you misunderstood my point. I think the studies about “2% of soldiers do all the killing” are bullshit, frankly, especially in modern combat situations.
There is obviously quite a bit of ground between being completely remorseless and being completely unwilling to kill. I suspect most soldiers fall in the middle ground. Historical warfare also shows that the idea that most people can’t kill even in war is silly; when fighting toe to toe with melee weapons, you can’t really just stand there and let that one guy do all the killing.
My statement earlier was that even if someone went to war thinking they just couldn’t shoot anyone, they were usually pretty quickly convinced otherwise when coming under fire, not that soldiers only shoot back. That would negate the entire idea of aircraft strikes, artillery, stand off weaponry, and ambushes, as well as being just plain stupid.
That’s one reason modern infantry doctrine emphasizes movement. If you’re just lying there and shooting you may hesitate to kill, or even to raise your head from behind cover; but if you’re constantly advancing, moving from cover to cover, throwing grenades and charging… *someone *has to be dead at the end of the process, and most people prefer it not be them or their friends.