[lit-ideas] Re: Seriously/SLAM
- From: John Wager <jwager@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2010 16:38:51 -0500
David Ritchie wrote:
. . .historical monograph titled 'SLAM, the influence of S.L.A.
Marshall on the United States Army,' strongly defends Marshall's
observations." There's no explanation of "SLAM."
He's so famous that he gets his own acronym: S-L-A-Marshall, or SLAM.
Past these obstacles, I find the first conclusion clear--armies and
other forces who are training with guns have given up shooting at
bulls-eye targets because these do not help humans overcome their
reluctance to fire at other humans. From Vietnam onwards studies show
much higher firing rates. These, the author immediately assumes, come
as a result of this difference of training.
This is at least partly true. I recall firing at bulls-eye targets in
ROTC target practice in college, but as a draftee we shot at silhouette
targets, trying to knock them down. At first this was on a really long
range rifle range, with M-14 rifles (with a heavy cartridge like the M-1
of WWII days), but in advanced infantry training, when we got M-16
rifles, we were taught to shoot from the hip, aiming at what we were
looking at without bringing the rifle up to our eye. We were also
taught to fire on automatic in 2-4 round bursts, but most guys fired
more rounds than that. (Rifles in WWII were semi-automatic; one pull of
trigger fired one round. The M-16 is full auto or semi-auto; you can
empty a 16 round magazine with one trigger pull on full auto.) Just by
itself, the M-16 on automatic would account for a far higher number of
rounds fired than anything else.
It seems to me that counting bullets is no good way of discovering
who is firing *at* the enemy. If there was a change of
doctrine--laying down a field of fire, rather than picking individual
targets--you could easily account for increased expenditure of
ammunition without needing any causative psychological change in the
explanation.
In WWII, the true machine guns were tasked with laying down fields of
fire. 30 caliber machine guns would fire belts of ammo along fixed lines
prepared in advance. This continued with the M-60 machine gun (and I'm
guessing the SAW later as well, but only guessing).
M-16 gunners were not taught to lay down this kind of fire, but we were
taught to achieve
"fire superiority" by sending more bullets in the general direction of
the enemy than the enemy was sending in our direction, so this probably
also accounted in part for the more recent higher rates of fire.
I remember lots of times in Vietnam when our whole platoon was firing
like crazy, just because someone said that it sounded to them like we
had gotten fired on from the left. So we all aimed "left" and opened up
on full auto, going through 3-4 magazines, just because we wanted
whoever fired at us to keep their heads down and quit firing. Nobody
really expected to hit anybody; it was just our way of saying "please stop."
Then we leap to how the media are changing people all over the world,
causing youth to suffer from "Violence Immune Deficiency." It's
violence on television and in video games that is causing an increased
willingness to kill. Now I'm started I'll have to read further, but I
wonder if I've wasted $15.99--yes that's the cost of the paperback.
I think I read the book a couple of years ago. It did seem a bit
simplistic, but I don't remember exact details. Certainly Vietnam was a
very different war than Iraq, in part because of the lack of a draft and
in part because of computers and video games and technology in general.
Just one other quick comment on the difference: I had a camera with me
in Vietnam, and my assumption (which generally proved true) was that if
everybody knew crazy sergeant Wager was taking photos of everything,
they would be a little bit more careful about what they did. I was
absolutely flabbergasted by the photos of prisoner abuses in Iraq; I
realized that the whole point of photography must have changed 180
degrees. Now it seems the point is to document how bad you are, how much
of a "jackass" (recent TV show) you are.
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