This might be because W is an intelligent Brit who enlisted as a private solider.

Grossman is an intelligent American who accepted a commission.

Different experiences, different cultures.

Maybe read LTC Dave Grossman's standard book _On Killing_. http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Psychological-Cost-Learning-So...

The best analysis I've seen about the combatant are the works of LCol. Grossman. On Combat and On Killing are outstanding pieces of work that say pretty much the exact opposite of W here.

On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Dave Grossman

Quote From Wikipedia

The book is based on SLA Marshall's studies from World War II, which proposed that contrary to popular perception,[1] the majority of soldiers in war do not ever fire their weapons and that this is due to an innate resistance to killing. Based on Marshall's studies the military instituted training measures to break down this resistance and successfully raised soldiers' firing rates to over ninety percent during the war in Vietnam.[2]

Below quote from
http://www.warchronicle.com/us/combat_historians_wwii/marsha...

Emphasis not in original

This calculation assumes, however, that of all the questions Marshall might ask the soldiers of a rifle company during his interviews, he would unfailingly want to know who had fired his weapon and who had not. Such a question, posed interview after interview, would have signalled that Marshall was on a particular line of inquiry, and that regardless of the other information Marshall might discover, he was devoted to investigating this facet of combat performance. John Westover, usually in attendance during Marshall's sessions with the troops, does not recall Marshall's ever asking this question. Nor does Westover recall Marshall ever talking about ratios of weapons usage in their many private conversations. Marshall's own personal correspondence leaves no hint that he was ever collecting statistics. His surviving field notebooks show no signs of statistical compilations that would have been necessary to deduce a ratio as precise as Marshall reported later in Men Against Fire. The "systematic collection of data" that made Marshall's ratio of fire so authoritative appears to have been an invention.

Read "On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society." The author, Dave Grossman, is an Army Ranger and a Psychology professor at West Point. He lays down an argument that most people have a strong, instinctual resistance to killing. In WWI, only about 20% on the front lines even fired their weapons. That rose during WWII and Korea until during Vietnam, it was closer to 95%. He attributes the change to modern training methods which are basically operant conditioning.

(He also has fascinating interviews with veterans about their experiences. But the book sometimes feels like someone's dissertation, and at the end, he tries to make the same claim with violent media, which I don't think holds. Watching something is very different from doing something.)

This tendency obviously ran counter to the goals of the generals, so after WWII the military devised ways to make the soldiers comfortable with aiming at people.

That's just to say - even among active-duty soldiers, there is a spectrum of those willing to kill or not.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Killing-Psychological-Cost-Learning-S...

Grossman is a Psychology professor at West Point (or was when he wrote this), and a former Army Ranger, although he never saw combat. His conclusion is actually similar to the author of this piece. First, he argues, with evidence, that humans have a pretty high disposition to not kill each other unless there is an immediate threat to themselves or loved ones. The evidence he uses to support that claim are the no-fire rates among front line soldiers in World War I and II. I think the stat he found was only about 20% of infantry in trenches shot their weapons. The fire rate among infantry by the Vietnam era was about 95%, and it had steadily increased up to that point. He claims that modern infantry training are responsible for this firing rate, that one of main points of modern infantry training is to get a solider to fire their weapon when instructed.

He also talks about PTSD, and that the amount of people who do not get some form of PTSD from front-line combat is about the same amount of people who have sociopathic tendencies. He then posits that these are the same people who tend to seek out special forces. And the author of the linked piece was, I think, talking mostly about special forces.

In the end, Grossman makes some extrapolations to media, and causation between violent media and actual violence. I don't think he supports that claim well. But if you've ever heard his name before, it was because of those claims. He was a whipping boy in the videogame press because of it, but I think his other work is interesting.

> historical events that could've completely changed the course of history

The battle of Teutoburg Forest [1][2] is another one. Had the Roman general Varius not fallen in to Arminius ambush, things might have been vastly different. The Romans never again had a solid footing beyond the Rhine and the battle was used again and again to forge German identity.

> One thing he notes is that the closer someone is to someone, the harder it is for them to (psychologically) kill them.

This same effect is discussed extensively in the book On Killing [3] and similar conclusions can be drawn from the Milgram Experiment [4]. On Killing also mentions that stabbing weapons are psychologically harder to use than slashing weapons. It specifically mentions the Roman Gladius.

0 - https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

1 - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000f69q

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest

3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Killing

4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.L.A._Marshall

Some veterans and historians have cast doubt on Marshall's research methods.[15] Professor Roger J. Spiller (Deputy Director of the Combat Studies Institute, US Army Command and General Staff College) argues in his 1988 article, "S. L. A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire" (RUSI Journal, Winter 1988, pages 63–71), that Marshall had not actually conducted the research upon which he based his ratio-of-fire theory. "The 'systematic collection of data' appears to have been an invention."[16] This revelation has called into question the authenticity of some of Marshall's other books and has lent academic weight to doubts about his integrity that had been raised in military circles even decades earlier.[17]

In his 1989 memoir, About Face, David H. Hackworth described his initial elation at an assignment with a man he idolized, and how that elation turned to disillusion after seeing Marshall's character and methods firsthand. Hackworth described Marshall as a "voyeur warrior", for whom "the truth never got in the way of a good story", and went so far as to say, "Veterans of many of the actions he 'documented' in his books have complained bitterly over the years of his inaccuracy or blatant bias".[18][19]

- The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

- Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

- Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda

- Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

- On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in
War and Society

- The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

- The Yiddish Policeman's Union

Each of those titles tells you the contents of the book. The only one that perhaps does not is "The Yiddish Policeman's Union," but it's clearly fiction, and it is in fact about a Jewish policeman.

Maybe what you said applies to bad books.