This post is part of a series in which I describe the twenty-four books I read in 2017 for Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge.
Task: Read a book about war.
“Looking another human being in the eye, making an independent decision to kill him, and watching as he dies due to your action combine to form one of the most basic, important, primal, and potentially traumatic occurrences of war.” (Loc 883)
Well, this one was about as much fun as it sounds. I really wanted to just read Grunt by Mary Roach, but I accepted the mandate to read things that challenged me, and so I wound up with this book-length study of what killing someone does to a person – On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and in Society by Dave Grossman.
There were a number of things I appreciated about this book. Grossman is a former lieutenant colonel and West Point instructor, and this stuff is not theoretical for him. He writes with deep sympathy for the men and women who carry out violent orders (as well as for soldiers who are unable to do so) and recognizes the immense physical and psychological distance between the people giving those orders and the soldiers carrying them out.