Reading #7, Question 2

[Lakey]

Why was it so "automatic" for O'Brien to pull the pin on the grenade
and throw it at the young man? How was he able to kill him withour
thinking about it?

[Scott Cast]

That’s a great question, Lakey; I feel the reason behind the automatic
nature of throwing a grenade comes from the training each soldier gets
from basic training. Soldiers are taught then made to repeat an
action thousands of times, so they go through these violent motions
without the need to think O’Brien shows us the results of this
repetition when he “had already thrown the grenade before telling
[him]self to throw it” (133). The training revokes the choice of
hesitation. Soldiers are brainwashed to be emotionless killing
machines for the purpose of war, as seen in the case of My Lai where
this mentality is the basis for the defense of the monstrosities that
occurred. Although it may be for the best, I believe that it is the
reason we have so many cases of post traumatic stress disorder in the
United States. In short, the reason soldiers do things and feel it
automatic is a simple case of psychological conditioning.

[Ralph Recto]

That's a good point, Scott. I agree. With a soldier's training
ingrained in the recesses of his mind, actions become impulses that
need no conscious thought to be triggered, only danger and the threat
of danger. The price of hesitation in war is death, as bullets travel
in straight lines from barrel to flesh in mere milliseconds. There is
simply no time to think, and besides, as O'Brien says, "there were no
thoughts about killing" (127). One of the core tenets of any military
is having the discipline to execute orders without question, something
that does not lend itself very well to critical thought. When actions
are impulses that are triggered and fired, the soldier cannot think
about the lives he takes, he cannot form personalities or aspirations
for the enemies that he must fight because to do so is to humanize
them, and to kill a human is murder. The soldiers in Vietnam weren't
killing people; they were killing gooks. At least, as they were taught
by their training.
O'Brien was the worst kind of soldier because he had the capacity
for empathy, and I'm sure that many other soldiers felt like he did -
stunned to speechlessness - when they first killed an enemy. Some
soldiers, such as Kiowa, suspended belief in order to survive, but
others seemed to have taken pleasure in killing, to have "laid him
[enemies] out like Shredded f'in Wheat" (119). Kiowa attempts to
rationalize O'Brien's killing of the young man by telling him that
"it's a war. The guy wasn't Heidi - he had a weapon, right?" (120).
O'Brien does not forgive himself. In his description of the young
man's life, from his childhood, to his love of mathematics, to his
fear of violence, to how he met his wife, to how he died on that trail
one foggy morning outside the village of My Khe by a grenade, O'Brien
made the man he killed a person. Someone he knows, someone he could
meet on the street and pass and say hello. Decades after the fact, he
could still the man in his mind "pass within a few yards of me and
suddenly smile at some secret thought and then continue up the
trail..." as if he had never killed him (128).

[Ian McKay]

Those are great points Scott and Ralph.

It was "automatic" for O'brien to throw the grenade at the young man
because he is trained to act on impulse. The military trains these
fine soldiers to kill, and that's all. The training consists of
practicing to kill over and over and over again. After all of this
training, when the soldier is actually out on the battleground,
killing is their only instinct. When there is a man in the opposing
uniform, the soldiers attack him with death. These soldiers do it so
fast, they don't even realize they attacked the man until after he is
already dead. O'Brien was only doing exactly what his basic training
taught him to do, kill the enemy without hesitation. He was well
prepared for this kill; "I reached out and found three grenades and
lined them up in front of me; the pins had already been straightened
for quick throwing" (O'Brien 126). O'Brien was preparing in case he
had to kill an enemy that night, he was one step ahead. When he saw
the young man through the fog, before O'Brien realized what he did, he
"had already thrown the grenade" (O'Brien 127). This is where the
training takes effect. He saw an enemy, and acted without the
slightest pause, and disposed of the threat. Killing for a soldier is
almost involuntary, like how breathing is to a human, they can do it
in their sleep.

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[Jonathan Jackowicz]

That's a great point Ian. The goal of the military training camps is
to dehumanize the soldiers. They don't want their men thinking of the
enemy as actual human beings. Just targets all lined up to be
destroyed as shown by O'Brien. "I did not hate the young man, I did
not see him as the enemy........There were no thoughts about killing.
The grenade was just to make him go away" (126-127). He didn't even
know this man or have any personal grudge. He was just trained to make
the enemy "disappear", so his body did as a trained muscle-reflex.

[Kierra W.]

Scott, Ian and Ralph all made an excellent point for the reason behind
O’Brien’s throwing of the grenade as to being his military training. I
especially agree with Ralph’s opinion on O’Brien being the worst type
of soldier because he felt empathy for the man he killed. The
training camps that the soldiers went through were, as Ian put it,
used to dehumanize the soldiers to kill at the order or in the case of
fear of an enemy attack by making them repeat the same actions over
again until it was imprinted into their mind and body like muscle
memory. They were also taught to think of ways to moralize a kill
afterwards by thinking, “You want to trade places with him? Turn it
all upside down-you want that?”(O’Brien 120). This thought would
definitely make a soldier not want to question or think twice about
killing a soldier on the opposing side because who would want that to
be them. The fact the enemy was tantamount to danger for themselves
also made it easier to want them gone and then their body would match
actions with what their mind wants by making the enemy “disappear”.

On Feb 16, 10:04 pm, Jonathan Jackowicz <jjackowic...@gmail.com>

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