They did when they killed their brothers in arms, though.

Their brothers, their cousins, etc.

in the war. You know, in a situation like that, I don't trust myself to *not* do questionable things.

War does things to people, and denying that is retarded.

You kill a man, the most atrocious thing you can ever do. And you keep doing it. Over, and over, and over again until your clothes are stained with blood. Eventually you dehumanize the enemy as your own men fall over, dead. The last thing you care for is the woman you left at home, and you have to keep killing to return to her.

You become a madman eventually.

A sacrifice.

Usually you can't really see enemy soldiers that well. They're at such a distance that they don't look like people, and if you did kill them, they will remove the bodies anyway so you never know

Historically, German and American soldiers didn't even aim at each other usually. Nobody wanted to kill anyone. Note that two thirds of US soldiers were conscripts

What do you mean they didn't aim at each other?

"On Killing" by the legend David Grossman

And "Men Against Fire" by Sam Marshall, fought in WW1 and was an official military historian in 2 and Korea

On Killing is the SS Soldier, yeah?

Postwar he interviewed over 200 German officers

No

The SS man is "Black Edelweiss" by Johann Voss

I believe it's a pseudonym

The other two books talk about how soldiers didn't usually shoot directly at enemy soldiers before Vietnam

Soo...

They never shot directly at each other?

have you guys seen the trade deal

Ragnarok, dm me these books

I'm going to forget

and I need to get the SS one before it gets banned and hard to get.

For the most part no, they would just shoot in a general direction, mag dump, or not fire at all. Crew served machine guns, artillery, and airstrikes did most of the killing

I have the SS one as an eBook on my computer, thought it was on my phone too but I guess not

Does it cost money to get?

I don't like reading on technology, I like to sit beside a warm lamp with the smell of a book.

Call me old fashioned, but it's how I read and I don't want to change that. I love that golden light and the smell of paper.

Brings life to the book.

Yeah you'd have to buy a paper copy, otherwise I just have the PDF

Compatible with Kindle though

I've heard of that but do they have a specific on what troops shot only in the general direction? Personally I've only had to hold someone at gun point twice but I was definitely trying to rationalize when I MUST pull the trigger while pointed directly at them. To me killing in the Army was something I would be forced to do not especially a personal choice .

Even in simunition practice no one ever shot at a non combatant in the infantry. You would think with the dirt low test scores there would be some discrepancies but there was only ever 1 person I ever distrusted and everyone felt the same way.

You must distrust me then, because I could kill a religious terrorist and it wouldn't bother me. Same with drug cartel members. It doesn't bother me to rid that kind of evil from this world.

Maybe I'm jaded, or maybe I care about the ones I love so much that I don't want those monsters anywhere near them.

Killing someone with no ill effects afterward is much easier said than done. Killing someone takes a heavy toll on your mental health. Even a justified killing, like a pedophile, haunts you for the rest of your life.

On the study about WW2 accuracy... What Ragnarok is talking about I’ve read before. Most people don’t want to kill anyone. So even during war time they would aim “near” the enemy and fire.

The average shot was fired over hundreds of yards, so you could just fire away without actually knowing if you killed anyone. The trouble with the Middle East engagements is that you’re sort of close and there’s much more urban fighting. So that trigger pull shows results in your face. Not to say there isn’t plenty of sniper fire from the mountains. It just seems to me like there’s a lot more urban/house to house fighting in our current Middle East engagements.

"Historically, German and American soldiers didn't even aim at each other usually. Nobody wanted to kill anyone."

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