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Burak Anıl Bulut
Comm 102, Sec 2
Research Paper, Final Draft
May 25, 2010
Psychology of “Killing Machines”: Regret Do “killing machines” of wars care about the lives of people? Do they regret that they kill countless of people in those cataclysms? If these machines are made of bones and flesh, yes they do. Although they are given to be “killing machines” during wars, many of them are not pleased for what they have done in battlefield, but they continue what they are doing even if their hearts scream to them, and this is not that easy to be ignored. They need to create or to be taught some methods to ignore this. The teacher of this ignorance is generally military. With these methods, they continue killing with all they have. However, after their military services, they start to realize and think independently on what they have done, and this situation causes psychological trauma. Therefore, many soldiers regret what they do in battlefield after war because they later realize that their minds work like “killing machines.” There were less collateral damage in some of wars in the history, but there were huge ones with millions of collateral damage. Since there was collateral damage with military losses, it causes questions to be asked like “If we say soldiers kill soldiers of opposite sides to protect their lives, why are there many dead civilians?” However, there should be a problem because nobody wants to kill anyone they don’t know without any reason. Then, new questions are raised: “What are the reasons behind civilian killings?”, or “Do they actually have any reason?” To understand this situation, military background of the soldiers should be investigated. Generally, militaries are like closed boxes because nobody really knows what are inside them. Therefore, they are many rumors about them. One of them is that soldiers are brain-washed during their military services to make them to be able to fight in battlefield without any hesitation. This also



Bibliography: Holbrook, James. “Reflections on War and Killing.” Legal Studies Forum 31.2 (2007): 547- 548. Academic Research Complete. EBSCOhost. Istanbul, 24 April 2010. <http://0-web.ebscohost.com> Jastrow, Joseph. “The Psychology of Conviction.” The Scientific Monthly 5.6 (1917): 523- 544. JSTOR. Istanbul, 24 April 2010. <http://0-www.jstor.org.libunix.ku.edu.tr> Keene, Jennifer Diane. “Intelligence and Morale in the Army of a Democracy: The Genesis of Military Psychology During the First World War.” Military Psychology 6.4 (1994): 235-254. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. EBSCOhost. Istanbul, 24 April 2010. < http://0-search.ebscohost.com> Lendering, Jane. “Censor” Articles on Ancient History. Livius. Istanbul, 25 May 2010. <http://www.livius.org/cb-cf/censor/censor.html> Nelson, Robert L. “Soldier Newspapers: A Useful Source in the Social and Cultural History of the First World War and Beyond.” War in History 17.2 (2010): 167-191. SAGE. Istanbul, 24 April 2010. < http://0-wih.sagepub.com.libunix.ku.edu.tr> O’Brien, Tim. “The Things They Carried.” The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. 7th Edition. Ed. Ann Charters. Boston: Bedfort, 2007. 990-1003.

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