Why do Wars Produce My Lai's and Haditha's?

By Moin Rahman

On March 16, 1968, Charlie Company, a unit of the Americal Division’s 11th Light Infantry Brigade
systematically murdered over 400 civilians in an undefended village in Quang Ngai Province in the
Republic of Vietnam. This came to be known as the My Lai massacre.

On November 19, 2005, Kilo Company, a unit of the First Marines, third battalion killed 24 civilians in
Haditha when their convoy was hit by an IED instantly killing a fellow Marine, Lance Cpl. Miguel
Terrazas. This incident is now referred as Iraq’s My Lai.

Both these incidents, similar in scope (guerilla warfare) but different in magnitude, have traumatized the
nation’s psyche.

It has now become routine for leaders, who commit a nation to war and its soldiers to battle, to squarely
blame the few bad apples when atrocities, such as Haditha or My Lai, are brought to light. In fact, there is
more to this than the eye can see and the mind can grapple.

The savage nature of war and the adrenalin fueled psychology of the warrior in combat combine to form a
lethal symbiosis, a tsunami of violence, which can maim both men and their minds. This phenomenon is
poorly understood, particularly by civilian leaders who have never been in combat.

Consider the warrior who is sent into battle. From the time he enters the service, he is taught how to kill
and he is desensitized to his own death. He learns that scores on the battlefield are kept in body counts
and kill ratios. Physically he is hardened and psychologically he is primed to go for the kill.

The journalist and ex-marine Philip Caputo1 posited “that war, by its nature, can arouse a
psychopathic violence in men of seemingly normal impulses.” In the heat of combat, and in the
quest to survive, the warrior’s perception of the world is altered unconsciously, which influences
his behavior without his knowledge or explicit intent.

Why does this happen?

When faced with danger, humans and animals are emotionally aroused. Emotional arousal is an
adaptation – a mechanism put forth by evolution – to prop up the primordial urge to sustain life
when exposed to life threatening situations2. Emotional arousal enables an organism make
lifesaving decisions – effortlessly, automatically and quickly – whether to fight, flee or freeze.
As time is of essence in these types of situations, the premium is on action and not deliberation.

In these fleeting moments, emotion saves lives by reprioritizing thoughts and actions – it moves
life sustaining actions to the top and downgrades non-life sustaining activities to the bottom.
Although emotion saves lives, it has its downside, too: Intense emotional arousal impairs
cognition. For instance, the brain may lose the capacity to recall the laws of land warfare and the
Geneva conventions. Furthermore, danger induced emotion biases subsequent cognition3. This
biased cognition known as autovigilance4 makes humans see threats in everything and
everywhere, right after being exposed to danger, in their immediate environment. In other
words, chances of survival are enhanced by the mechanism that operates on the principle that it

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is safer to err – i.e., to mistakenly assume a harmless rustle made by the wind to be caused by a
hidden enemy – than be sorry later.

Lt. Col. Hal Moore5 who commanded a battalion in the first major campaign (Battle of Ia Drang) of the
Vietnam War describes succinctly the altered and narrowly focused state of mind while in combat: “In
battle our world shrank to the man on our left and the man on our right and the enemy all
around.” Even rigorous training may not completely break this evolutionarily ingrained and
emotionally fueled program of self preservation, which is hardwired into every organism – a crude and
complex reflex to shoot first and think later.

In the social context, the brain’s ability to process information is also impaired by the nature of warfare,
as we will see next.

Conventional warfare usually follows a set-piece battle. These are classic engagements between opposing
armies arranged in battle formations. However, an insurgency takes the form of asymmetric warfare due
to its lopsided nature that gives insurgents the upper hand. This is because insurgents meld-in and filter-
out of a civilian population – using them as cover – to attack and recoup at will. There is never a clean
fight with this type of diffused enemy, which at once is not there and everywhere. This frustrates a
traditional army as the enemy doesn’t play by generally accepted rules of engagement.

Asymmetric warfare discombobulates the soldiers’ mind when they have to battle an ambiguous enemy,
which inflicts a high toll in life and limbs. When elements amongst the civilian population feed and clothe
the enemy and provide recruits, the entire populace becomes the enemy in the eyes of a mentally fatigued
occupying force. Insurgencies thus shake the moral compass of an army and pave the way to the My Lai's
and the Haditha's.

The biggest mistake of the Iraq war was to allow an insurgency to take root and flourish.

The Iraq war was encumbered with a faulty strategy, right from the get-go, because it had no post-conflict
stability plan. After the capture of Baghdad, Iraq was allowed to spiral into a state of lawlessness. This
made the environment fertile for an insurgency to emerge. Seeds of the insurgency were planted when
the American leadership disbanded the Iraqi army providing manpower for the insurgency. The
insurgency was then nurtured by the de-Bathification process, which provided the intellectual capital to
rally and recruit the disaffected. To add to these woes, repeated deployments of marines to Iraq
physically and emotionally exhausted them, inured them to violence, and thus, impaired their judgment
and decision making skills. (Many marines implicated in the Haditha incident were in their second and
even third tour of duty.) Finally, all of the above were catalyzed by the absence of a systems approach,
which would have specified clearly the rules of engagement, including the unequivocal application of the
Geneva conventions, and related training.

If not for the insurgency, there would have been no Haditha. If not for the failure in American
leadership there wouldn’t have been an insurgency in the first place.

What do we do now?

Tactically, we should fight the insurgents by turning the asymmetric warfare, into a symmetrical one.
Today, a patrol a day takes a life away, when soldiers venture out of green zones and forward operating
bases. One way of doing this is by embedding our soldiers in the civilian population where they live and
work side-by-side with the Iraqis. That is, to be diffused like the enemy and to become intimate with both
the people and the urban terrain. This may require a new corps of soldier-statesmen types. This will

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provide us the badly needed human intelligence by building trust with the populace and to also starve the
insurgency of its support from the civilian population. Strategically speaking we should seek ways to end
the “occupancy” of Iraq, through diplomacy ASAP, as it feeds the insurgency.

The intent of this article is to demonstrate that emotions triggered off in combat or by the nature
of a conflict can skew judgment and decision making of a combatant. This should not be
misconstrued as an attempt to justify or condone such violence – e.g., Haditha and My Lai
massacres – but to lay the facts bare from the cognitive and affective sciences point of view.

It is important to acknowledge that moral dykes will not contain violence – and reserve it for
purely legally sanctioned uses as per the laws of warfare – once it is set into motion by a war.

NOTES

1. Philip Caputo. A Rumor of War (New York,
NY: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1977).
2. Joseph LeDoux. The Emotional Brain: The
Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life
(New York: Touchstone, 1998).
3. J.R. Gray, “Integration of Emotion and
Cognitive Control.” Current Directions in
Psychological Science (2004): 13
4. R. J. Larsen, “Emotion and Cognition: The
Case of Automatic Vigilance,”
Psychological Science Agenda (2004): 18
5. Hal G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway, We
were Soldiers Once...And Young: Ia Drang--
The Battle That Changed The War In
Vietnam. (New York, N.Y.: Random House,
1992).

Moin Rahman is a Principal Human Factors Engineer at a

telecommunication company. He researches human performance,
including the emotional modulation of cognition in mission critical
domains. He received a B.S. from the PSG College of Technology
(India) and a M.S. from the State University of New York.