Dave Grossman - On Killing

After reading quite a few books relating to military matters (including some which glorify the whole business a bit -- say, "No easy day" or "American sniper"), it seemed good to look a bit deeper into the minds of soldiers -- "On Killing" is all about what goes through the heads of men whose job it is to kill.

An interesting fact seems to be that at most 20% or so of American WW2 soldiers fired at the enemy; and this number seems to be consistent with other armies / history (there is no hard evidence, but some indications). Reason for this seems to be a mental barrier most people have against killing. Another interesting observation is that Skinnerian operant conditioning has raised that number to ~ 90% in the Vietnam war. Useful for the war effort, but, as the book suggests, killing comes back to haunt the killer after the war (and esp. in the Vietnam conflict it was made worse by the way the troops returned -- this explains many of the psychological problems veterans face).

Interesting read -- the last part about violent movies / video games seemed a bit redundant, and it'd be interesting to see an update on this '95 book.