Posted in another thread
Why Iraq Was a Mistake

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

QUOTE
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."
UNQUOTE

QUOTE
Soldiers and marines were taught to observe rules of engagement, and throughout the video those in the helicopter call base for permission to shoot. But at a more primal level, fighters in a war zone must think of themselves as predators first, not bait, the report said. That frame of mind affects not only how a person thinks, but what he sees and hears, especially in the presence of imminent danger, it said. The fighters in the helicopter say over the radio that they are sure they see a "weapon", even though the Reuters photographer, Noor-Eldeen, is carrying a camera.

"It's tragic that this all begins with the apparent mistaking of a camera" for a weapon, David A. Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, told the paper. "But it's perfectly understandable with what we know now about context and vision. Take the same image and put it in a bathroom, and you swear it's a hair dryer; put it in a workshop, and you swear it's a power drill."

To a soldier or a pilot, it can look like life or death. "I worked with medivac pilots, and vulnerability is a huge issue for them," Dr Moore told the paper.
UNQUOTE