Apache helicopter gunners talk good game 'so the people don't seem real'

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The soldiers joke and jeer as they shoot: "Look at those dead bastards," one helicopter pilot says. Another replies: "Nice . . . good shootin'."

Reports yesterday said many veterans who viewed the footage made the point that soldiers cannot do their jobs without creating psychological distance from the enemy. One reason that the soldiers seemed as if they were playing a video game is that, in a morbid but necessary sense, they were, experts told The New York Times.

"You don't want combat soldiers to be foolish or to jump the gun, but their job is to destroy the enemy, and one way they're able to do that is to see it as a game, so that the people don't seem real," Bret A. Moore, a former US army psychologist and co-author of the forthcoming book Wheels Down: Adjusting to Life After Deployment, told the newspaper.

Military training is fundamentally an exercise in overcoming a fear of killing another human, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, author of the book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, told the paper.

Combat training "is the only technique that will reliably influence the primitive, midbrain processing of a frightened human being" to take another life, the colonel writes. "Conditioning in flight simulators enables pilots to respond reflexively to emergency situations even when frightened."
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