The Rise of the Chemical Soldier

Sunday 30 March 2003 1:00PM

The Vietnam War was played out in front of the television cameras and for the first time we saw the horrors of combat every night from the safety of our lounge rooms. The enduring legacy for our military at that time is Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. What if soldiers could pop a pill and erase all guilt and remorse? And why, despite being banned in 1992, are American Airforce Pilots still taking speed before flying? Is this the age of a chemically enhanced soldier? Sue Clark reports.


Relevant links and references at the end of the transcript

Natasha Mitchell: Hello, Natasha Mitchell with you for All in the Mind and as we witness the war in Iraq on our TV screens at the moment today Sue Clark contemplates the use of chemical warfare. Not the sort you're used to hearing about though - this chemical battle is the one that the military is waging on themselves.

Soldiers throughout wars have taken drugs like amphetamines to sustain combat and you'll hear stories from WW11 vets who still recall the little white pills that kept them going for days. But at the turn of the 21st Century military research is focused on creating a very different beast, a chemically enhanced fighter if you like who can go without sleep or even food for up to a week. They call it metabolic dominance.

The US army has in fact had a long history of experimentation with drugs. You might recall the long running Project MK-ULTRA the name given to the CIA's behavioural research testing psychedelic substances like LSD on soldiers. Their cue was taken from intelligence that the Soviets were using mind control to shatter the human psyche during interrogation.

In Vietnam soldiers took heroin and smoked copious quantities of pot and hash. And it was after Vietnam that people really began to challenge the expectation that soldiers could return to a normal life after combat. The question is - could synthetic drugs be the answer to the horrors of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after a war like Vietnam, an anti-remorse pill perhaps?

So joining Sue Clark to consider the ethical dilemmas of such a possibility is Lt.Col. Dave Grossman very famous for his work on the psychology of killing and also Melbourne based philosopher David Neil.

Sue Clark: After every war there are soldiers who have difficulty in accepting or understanding what they did and what was done to them. Vietnam was a very different experience. As well as the more traditional theatre of war here soldiers killed and were killed by men, women and even children who weren't in uniform. But did this conflict change the way we look at combat situations and the condition we now know as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD.

David Neil is from the Centre for Public Philosophy at Monash University where he's been studying the ethics of war.

David Neil: I think the Vietnam War both changed the way we understand combat situations. It also very much changed the way that the military understands combat situations. The Vietnam War was the first television war, it was the first war that people in their lounge rooms at home could see what was going on in theatres of war and I think had an appreciation for the horrors of war that we didn't have access to in previous conflicts unless you happened to be unfortunate enough to live there. And the military have also drawn a lesson from the Vietnam War that they must control the appearance of war, that they have to contain a very tight sort of lid of media representation of stress.

I think that what it's shown us is the degree, the sheer inhumanity of wartime situations and the fact that the human psyche is really not adapted, really not capable of coping with that kind of stress.

Dave Grossman: We know that there has been a post traumatic stress through history and we know that especially in the 20th Century the nature of continuous warfare, day and night warfare for months on end without the opportunity to sit around the campfire and debrief every night, we know it's been happening throughout history and especially in the 20th Century. But Vietnam was a profound experience in which there was such a massive occurrence of post traumatic response that we had to identify what it is, we had to find out what it is and we had to begin to learn how to deal with it.

There has been a systematic change in play, my book On Killing is one of the premier books, it's really been used to look at the psychology of the battlefield. I trained our 10th Mountain Division before the deployed to Afghanistan just two weeks ago, I trained our 2nd Marine Division and talked about the psychology of the battlefield. And I trained our 5th Special Forces Group when they got back from Afghanistan and one old Green Beret said you know, this was talking about how to live with killing, how to live with the battlefield, one old Green Beret said you know, the army has spent 20 years and millions of dollars teaching me how to kill and this is the first time anybody's taught how to live with it afterward.

Sue Clark: Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, now retired from the United States Army he's Director of the Killology Research Group and author of "On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society".

The 21st Century soldier is a different kind of soldier, today the military believes that they're equipped to increase the prospect of victory and decrease the prospect of injury, both physical and psychological. A soldier primed in this way is considered more lethal and possibly less likely to suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. But is this a realistic expectation?

David Neil: I don't believe it is a realistic expectation, I think what actually happens is that potentially we might be able to produce a solider, I say we - the Department of Defence might be able to produce a soldier, who is able to operate in ways that soldiers previously haven't. What this shows is that I think that the military is thinking more and more of the soldier, less as a human being who carries weapons in fights, but as a piece of equipment, the soldier is more of an it, in which the human characteristics of the soldier need to be suppressed when they don't make you a good fighting machine.

Dave Grossman: What we've tried to do today and we're hoping that maybe it's the right thing to do and I think we have data to believe it is, is to do what you do very dispassionately almost in sorrow. You do kill another human being, you've been conditioned to do it but you don't do it in hatred you do it with an understanding that you're doing the right thing, you've been enabled, you've been prepared. The United States army after Me Lie is the first army in history to teach its soldiers how to disobey orders, that this is an illegal order to obey this order is a criminal act, and here's some mechanisms you go about disobeying an illegal order.

There's a higher standard, they are held to the same standard that police officers are to a large degree and that's not a bad thing because you have to live with what you've done afterwards. And so we have turned killing into a conditioned reflex, on the one hand but on the other hand we have made a cognitive process to making sure that they're doing the right thing. We've really drawn closer to the law enforcement model. The things that are traumatic we know there's powerful data that shows that of all the actions you could take, the one most likely to result in a post traumatic response is to commit an atrocity or a criminal act. PTSD is a gift that keeps on giving, it impacts not just you but your spouse, and your children in years to come and one of the things that we work very hard to do is to let people know that you know, the moment of truth, the desire to seek vengeance, an enemy soldier has surrendered, the desire to seek vengeance is a very powerful thing but we must strive for justice not vengeance, we must play this game by the rules and to give way to the urge for vengeance is really to set yourself up to pay a profound tragic price in years to come.

Sue Clark: The modern soldier is also a chemical soldier and this came crashing into the public eye in April 2002. Four Canadian soldiers were killed and eight others were wounded in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan. The two United States Air Force pilots involved claimed that they were on speed but they had no choice but to take the drugs on offer.

David Neil: It's well known that one of the effects of speed is that it reduces your capacity to take that extra second to think about what's going on and think about what you're doing. It produces a kind of immediate drive to act, so it's quite plausible that their judgement was impaired by the drug that they were on. What's really serious about this is that the modern soldier and the modern pilot has a degree of ordinance at their fingertips which is historically unprecedented - their capacity to deliver destruction is enormous. They are armed to the teeth with weapons with immense destructive potential so when they press the button what happens after that is tremendously final. And to the extent that soldiers are capable of delivering far more destruction far more quickly we should demand a far higher level of judgement from then about the correct application of that. Because when you make a mistake, when the target that you fire your bomb at is not who it was intended for the possibility of doing a great deal of damage in a very, very short space of time. So to hear that on the one hand soldiers are being sent into battle with an extraordinary capacity for destruction and at the same time been given a substance which actually reduces them is likely to reduce their capacity to think about what they're doing to make line ball calls, to understand the consequences of their decisions. This is a recipe for catastrophe.

Dave Grossman: It is so tempting to call on the psycho-pharmacological cornucopia of drugs to keep us going and to my mind that's extremely dangerous. There are so many variables in the package that can go wrong, you put men under enormous stress and then you add these few ingredients of these drugs and you add stress and you really don't know what's going to happen. This is almost a management issue and when we throw the drugs into this toxic equation you've really created quite a wild card that has far greater probability to do harm than it does good afterward.

Sue Clark: There's no doubt that stimulants like the speed taken by the pilots in Afghanistan have a powerful affect on the brain and that's something we'll be talking about in a future program. And drugs in the military is not a new story but did you know that the use of amphetamines in the United States Air Force was banned in 1992 by the then Chief of Staff, General Merril McPeak. They've quietly slipped back into use. The air force argues that the amphetamines or go pills are needed so the pilots can stay alert and be focussed. When they return to the base they're given sleeping pills or no go pills to help induce sleep. The military has defended the practice and has said that they are essential for combat pilots in situations like Iraq. They say it's a voluntary decision but they also point out that those who don't take them could be considered unfit to fly.

Dave Neil: I think it's not a choice at all, I think that what's happening is that they're going through the motions of informed consent but there's really no possibility for informed consent. I think it's not reasonable to treat the position of a service person in the military as one in which they're entitled to simply openly defy their superiors and say no, I don't want to take this. I think that the consequences for them are so severe it's not reasonable for that sort of little caveat printed on a bit of paper to count as giving informed consent.

Dave Grossman: There's all the difference in the world between taking a drug in a clinical trial and taking a drug with a human body in the horrendous physiological affects of the theatre of combat where people are trying to kill you. We cannot replicate in a controlled clinical study what happens in the body when human beings try to kill you. I mean there's no ethical, moral way to replicate this so what we're doing is we're doing an experiment with no control in which we're applying these drugs, we have no idea what they're going to do, we have no control measure in place and if it means life and death and we say people will die if we don't run this sortie then OK maybe we have to do that. In reality it's a management issue, we say we want to put maximum steel on target and therefore we're going to push our people. But in reality we could say, you know, just one aircraft with a well rested pilot in many ways can be as good for us as two aircrafts with pilots on drugs. Do you understand? It is indeed a management issue in which we want to have everything, we want to have our cake and eat it too.

Sue Clark: Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, author of "On Killing" and you're listening to All in the Mind with me Sue Clark on ABC Radio National, Radio Australia and the world wide web.

Speed is only one drug in the kitbag of the modern military; possibly more disturbing is the development of an anti-remorse pill which could potentially be taken in a combat situation. All reports indicate that this drug will not be available to troops currently in Iraq, however, US federally funded research is taking place on such a pill. It's hoped that it will reduce feelings of regret, remorse and guilt, which are all core to the experience of Post Traumatic Stress.

It's a move that greatly concerns philosophy David Neil.

Dave Neil: I believe the way that these drugs would work is that they inhibit memory formation after a trauma and what you can't remember, can't continue to traumatise you. Absolution is a matter for the victims I think and the victims will be just as dead even if the perpetrators can't remember. This I think is a very dangerous track to go down because remorse is not a pathology, remorse, guilt is part of what we would regard as the normal spectrum of feelings of a moral agent. And when I say a moral agent I mean a person capable of making moral decisions and capable of placing moral limits on their behaviour.

This means for a person to be a moral agent a minimal condition is that you have to be able to appreciate harm to others and you have to be affected by harm to others. It is in fact a pathology when someone fails and the sociopath is the person who understand that others are harmed but harm to others does give him reason not to do anything. That's just not a consideration, they don't get moved by it. I think there's also another problem here wich is a little bit more subtle but of more historical importance and that is if you look at historical reactions to great atrocities or great wrongs and I'm thinking primarily of the Jewish reaction to the Holocaust, one of its most consistent themes is memory. Is that minimally what you owe the victims is to remember and that memory has to be cultivated to the extent that if we do not remember, we run the risk of repeating history.

So drugs that eliminate memory after the fact of things that we are actually ethically obliged to remember both as individuals and as a community are very dangerous.

Sue Clark: David Neil. But could the armed forces be tempted to use their soldiers as guinea pigs and trial an undeveloped drug such as the anti-remorse pill in a combat situation like Iraq. Lt.Col Dave Grossman.

Dave Grossman: The risk is there, the threat is there, that people will always try to do it and to my mind it has to be avoided at absolutely all costs. Again there is no way to assess what's going to happen inside the mind of a human being under these toxic conditions when people try to kill you. You are doing an experiment with no control group, with real human beings and they come back and they kill people and people die, they fail on the battlefield. What we've got to do is find a way to get greater control of our own minds rather than reach for some magical drug to make it happen and we have the tools, breathing exercises, the stress inoculation, the proper management tools, the prior training mechanisms, that's what I do, that's what I try to do and I truly believe that in the end when we create the next generation of warriors we will do it through stretching the outer limit of the human ability as an athlete does it, without the drugs.

Sue Clark: Can we ask our armed forces to ingest or inject things that will possibly change them forever? Ultimately who takes responsibility for the damage that may be done?

Dave Neil: Oh, it's absolutely the responsibility of those military agencies that put them in that position in the first place. And unless responsibility of that kind can be brought home in the right kind of way, unless in a sense the consequences of past bad decisions, the military is made to bear and to face up to the costs of these kinds of experiments of these kinds of decisions, then we won't see any slow down in the kinds of things we're talking about today that we're worried about.

Dave Grossman: I think you've put your finger right on it, to ask men to go to a distant land and participate in this horrendous, brutal, toxic environment of combat is bad enough and to ask them to be, if you will, guinea pigs with untested drugs is not the right answer. What's acceptable is to train them, equip them, bring them up to their personal best without relying on these incredible mind altering, body twisting mechanisms.

Dave Neil. I do think you're quite right in thinking that there have to be limits to what we regard a person is signing up for when they sign up for military duty. They do not sign up to become guinea pigs, and they do not sign up for untested and potentially unethical psychological experiments to manipulate their psychological reactions in ways that would be considered bizarre by ordinary human standards.

Sue Clark: What will the future be for the chemically enhanced soldier? The Pentagon's Futurist In Chief, Andrew Marshall and his colleagues joke that a future intelligence problem is going to be knowing what drugs the other guys are on.

Dave Grossman: It has the capacity to be quite frightening, we should handle this stuff with great caution. People become experts in their field. If all you have in your tool box is a hammer the whole world looks like a nail. These people are experts at psycho-pharmacology, they're good men, they believe they have found the great pill, the great tool that will make people capable of achieving these great things. In reality all they are is one more tool in the tool box and it is a tool that probably needs to be used with great caution, needs to be tested very carefully and you have to ask yourself do we ever really need this sledge hammer of a tool in the delicate operation that we're trying to put together?

Dave Neil: When there's an event that allows these activities to spill over into the public view in some ways such as a friendly fire incident, I think this would have to be part of a much more general question about what kind of military secrecy the public should tolerate and what kind of military secrecy we should think is compatible with a democratic community. Because I think that that allowing these kinds of activities to go ahead without anything remotely like a debate in the public sphere is a fundamental threat to democracy and to the possibility of a free and democratic society because we have in a sense the decisions that we think are socially important, get short circuited, they get taken by people who never had to ask our permission, never even had to tell us what they were doing. So I think that little quotes like that are often a frightening window into a very large dark room in which there by monsters.

Sue Clark: And what affect would these monsters have on the armed forces? Could they help us to answer the perennial question of whether you can be an efficient killer one day and a responsible citizen the next? David Neil from the Centre for Public Philosophy at Monash University.

Dave Neil: I think there's a lot of historical evidence to show that people who have been trained as good efficient killers and then have been put into a war situation where they have to act as good efficient killers have a great deal of difficulty readjusting to become good citizens and when we produce that kind of individual we potentially create an enormous social problem for ourselves with what we do with those individuals afterwards. Individuals who I think we do have moral obligations to, to the extent that they've been in a certain sense socially produced.

Sue Clark: At what about Lt. Col Dave Grossman, can soldiers ever expect to pick up the threads of their civilian life after the horrors or war?

Dave Grossman: Absolutely. We did it in WW1, we did it in WW11, we sent boys off to horrific, horrific battle fields. They came home and they were less likely to commit a violent crime than a non-veteran of the same age and same sex. They were superior members of society, they built a great nation, the vast majority of them were just fine. There were some PTSD problems, they do need to be dealt with, we want to do a better job of dealing with that and yet the truth is that under ordinary circumstances it is completely possible to send men to do these things and to bring them back and to hold them to the highest standards of citizenship. When we add the wild card of adding these toxic chemicals to them we don't know if we can do it anymore. When we add this new ingredient to say golly, we're going to find a way to make you do a better job, then we've thrown a wild card into something that has worked well across the millennia and it is not done lightly. It must be done, if at all, with great caution and quite frankly, you know if it ain't broke, don't fix it. We want to find a way to make these boys come back and do a better job and we do that with support structures, we do that with counselling, we do that with critical incident debriefings. To do that with drugs, the magic pill, we're a world full of people who want quick answers and the magic pill is the answer for everybody and the truth is we should approach it with great caution.

Sue Clark: Are you comfortable that all of the things have been set up for those that return from the conflict that we're facing at the moment will be OK, that there is enough de-stresses about, enough counsellors about?

Dave Grossman: You can never do enough, we're learning how to do a better job every day, we must do a better job, we are doing a better job and yet we've got to do better. We have to improve our medical technology, it must advance, it must progress and we have to improve our psychological support technology, it must improve, it must advance and we owe those warriors that we send to a distant land no less, no less than to give him the state of the art technological dynamic. And the truth is the medical technology to save the boys life on the battle field when he's taken a bullet can never be good enough, we must strive for better resources. The psychological technology to enable him to live with what we've made him do can never be good enough, we must constantly strive to do a better job.

Sue Clark: And should we constantly strive to make sure that when they come home their minds, their bodies, their souls have not been forever damaged by as you said before, uncontrolled experiments?

Dave Grossman: Absolutely, well said dear lady, amen.

Natasha Mitchell: Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, author of "On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society". And he's director of the Killology Research Group. Before him, Dave Neil from the Centre for Public Philosophy at Monash University and Sue Clark prepared that report.

Now, you can grab transcripts of the show off the net at just click on All in the Mind under the program list and there you will find audio for the last four shows as well. You can also email us, we always love to hear from you and Thanks today to Steven Tilley for technical production. I'm Natasha Mitchell, bye for now.


David Neil
Centre for Human Bioethics
Department of Philosophy
Faculty of Arts
Monash University
Lt Col Dave Grossman
Director, Killology Reseach Group


D. Grossman
Little, Brown and Co, 1995 (hardback), 1996 (paperback, in 9th printing as of October 1999)
A Bulletproof Mind
Peter Maass
New York Times (10 November 2002)

Further Information

Killology Research Group
Research Group headed by Lt Col Dave Grossman investigating "the psychological cost of learning to kill".
David Neil's website at Monash University
The Australian Centre for Posttraumatic Mental Health
Research, policy and information about trauma, in particular PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder)
Killology (A lecture by Lt Col Dave Grossman)
Broadcast on ABC Radio National's weekly investigative documentary program, Background Briefing (2 May 1999)
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
The central research and development organization for the USA Department of Defense (DoD).


Sue Clark / Natasha Mitchell