The Impact of Killing & How to Prepare the Soldier

PBS has a series of excellent interviews with mental health professionals and soldiers about the psychological consequences of war.

I think it is a very important thing to understand that when your friends are wounded or dead, it’s a real loss. It’s a loss of your friend that you trusted and you loved in a very intense way. When you personally take another life and you go up to that lifeless body with a hole in it and you look down on it, and you say, “I did that,” I think it is a loss of yourself at the same time. And I think that [once] they understand that, they can’t go back again. They can’t say that it didn’t happen, or [that] maybe somebody else did it.