Realistic Combat that's Simple(ish)

[Argyle King]

I used to be security at a huge dance club in NYC and it was a real drag because every night you knew you would get in a fight; I mean, that was the job. After a while it became like an instinct to know who to watch out for, so not get a bottle broken over your head, which happened frequently. I have seen people in expert martial arts stances get floored. Part of it isn't rational, you just do it, attack, kill or die.

I can relate to that. Once upon a time, I did some moonlighting in a gentleman's club.

Grossman never served in combat. DoD studies put the increase down to the end of the draft, and combat optics; even as far back as the Marshal study, a big issue for infantry was an inability to see what they were shooting at. One motivation for the adoption of the M-16 was that the Marshal study found that BAR gunners fired far more than riflemen, because even if the target was obscured, the act of full-auto fire gave them confidence. The selective-fire M-14 was not a great success.

With modern optics and better-motivated troops, the willingness to engage has risen. Being regulars intensively trained as a unit before deployment has raised the understanding of suppressive and covering fire as well.

But it still fails. I saw a Staff Sergeant crack up and have to be hospitalized after he killed a guy. He had been in the Infantry with its 'Kill, Kill' mantra for six years, extensive pre-deployment training, and he utterly flaked out. At the core of it, was somehow he never believed that he was going to kill anyone. They ended up having to boot him out.

Optics, IMO, depersonalize the target. While you can see what you are shooting at, the optics make it much more sterile.

Oddly, I saw guys struggling with the fact that killing someone didn't bother them. They had been hyped up by Hollywood that it was a big emotional event, only to discover that in a firefight, things happen so fast that often you don't realize what you had done until after its over and you have time to detox.

The other thing that bothered guys was that unlike Hollywood, people don't usually just drop and go limp; there's often a lot of screaming and thrashing involved, which can get on your nerves.

Could be.

I can't say that I feel the choice of optics made much difference to me, but others may feel differently.

I can somewhat relate to something you said toward the end. After one of my tours, I was voluntold to talk to some sort of counselor as part of [whatever acronym and buzzwords they were using for post deployment stuff at the time]. He asked if I ever felt bad about anything. I said, "I don't feel bad, but sometimes I feel bad that I don't feel bad."