Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times Highlight

Proximity can easily be overcome by indoctrination, a lesson not only the Nazis understood. During World War II, a study by a team of U.S. researchers found that no more than 15 to 20 percent of American infantry soldiers on the front lines actually shot at the enemy. “The average and normally healthy individual—the man who can endure the mental and physical stresses of combat—still has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance toward killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility,” Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall, the lead author of the study, concluded. “At the vital point, he becomes a conscientious objector.” In the decades that followed, the U.S. Army set about changing this, both by training soldiers to fire reflexively at “pop-up” targets and by convincing them that their opponents were not people but “inferior forms of life,” as Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, a former professor of psychology at West Point, has observed. The creation of such “cultural” and “moral” distance reached its peak at places such as My Lai during the Vietnam War, when U.S. soldiers took aim at “gooks,” “Commies,” “rats,” “Charlie”—and where the firing rate rose to 90 percent.