What Soldiers Know

Angry. Rush, Boehner, McConnell, Cruz, Republicans.

Anyone who spends time on the Historyporn website sees enough images of bodies stacked up at concentration camps, laughing soldiers posing in front of a woman or a man hanging behind them and one might wonder: How do people get to be so thoroughly depraved?

Where did all that anger come from, which resulted in the stacks of bodies, the hanging bodies?

The fact is, you can be trained, not just to hate, but to function dispassionately.  In fact, you have to learn to be able to do this do do surgery, to be a medical intern.  We learned, step by step, how to resuscitate a patient, how to slip an endotracheal tube into his open mouth and into the trachea, how to find a vein and to  cannulate and catheterize the vein, how to apply the "paddles" and shock the patient. All things, which, to the untrained eye, might look like a gross violation of the patient's body. But, in the end, it was, we were trained to believe, in the patient's best interest. We did these things to save a life.

 And if  the "code" ended unsuccessfully, you stepped back and watched the nurses wrap the body and while they were doing it, you might be checking your watch to see if the cafeteria had closed. 

At Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases, so many patients died so frequently, you hardly noticed, after a while. Just move on,  and keep doing rounds. 

But beyond desensitization, training could allow you to function, step by step despite great distraction.  One dark night on call,  a nurse who still had freckles and could have passed for a sixth grader dragged me down the hall to see a man who was literally frothing at the mouth. Great yellow brown bubbles were gurgling out of his mouth; his eyes bulged and he struggled to gasp for each breath. At a glance, I knew, from training, he was in pulmonary edema. I told the nurse what I had been taught to do: Get the rotating tourniquets and the syringes of morphine and  Lasix. When those did not work, I asked for the vacuum bottles. I had never actually used these bottles, but I had been instructed. Plunging the business end of the connecting tube into the femoral artery, I watched the bottles suck off 500 cc of blood in less than twenty seconds. And the man took a deep breath and said, "Oh, better." 

There was nobody there to help us--it was 2 AM and no cardiac team could have reached us in time. It was just me and the sixth grader, who in fact, behaved very well, because she had  been trained. The whole thing took five minutes, max.  It was the first time either of us had treated acute pulmonary edema, but we had been taught, and we did what we were taught and it worked.  We did not have time for feelings, for shrinking back, for anything but action. 

The next time, we'd be more removed, and less terrified, and the time after that it would be just another day  at the office. 

Listening to members of the 101st airborne on "Band of Brothers" you hear the same thing. People are getting body parts blown off around you and you just do what you have been trained to do, and do it and don't think about what most human beings would think about. Shut out all other thoughts and do what you have been told to do.

And that, likely, is what happened to those concentration camp soldiers, to those grinning troops who had just hanged someone. It had all become routine. They were told how to act, and they acted, and when nothing bad happened to them, in fact when they were congratulated, after a while they did not even think about the woman whose body hung behind them. Just a day at the office.

That's why it's so important who guides behavior and why, from the top. Once the course is set, that's the direction the ship sails. 

"I was just following orders," became the infamous excuse at the Nuremberg trials and that was dismissed outright.  Now privates are taught, there is a line you cannot cross, even if ordered. But, there is a conflict here, and I'm not sure it's really been resolved. Certainly, those grinning American soldiers who had stripped their prisoners naked at Abu Gharib prison and made them form a human pyramid, crossed that line when they dehumanized their prisoners. But once you buy into the mentality of group think, be a team player, where does that end?

When you have a bunch of angry men in Congress, they will send along instructions and the sergeants and privates down the line will just do what they've been trained to do and follow orders and get validated,  no matter what. It will take the exceptional private to say, "Hey, wait a minute, this is a kid you're telling me to throw overboard."