by Dave Grossman

I honestly don’t remember where I first heard about On Killing, but it sure intrigued me at the time. Grossman’s book is about the conditioning employed by modern militaries in order to persuade reluctant soldiers into effectively killing, the emotional and psychiatric toll killing has on soldiers, and––I didn’t realize this, then––how we’re effectively conditioning members of society to become murderers through violent media. To be perfectly frank, I likely would not have searched far and wide for the book had I known that last bit was part and parcel of the text, but search far and wide I did, eventually tracking it down at some obscure Toronto used book store. And so, after it lived on my shelf for some time, I undertook what turned out to be the hefty task of reading it.

Don’t get me wrong: I tried to give On Killing a chance, as much as it may be hard to believe after an introduction like that. And the author presents compelling concepts throughout, gleaning important, first-hand information from veterans of combat, but he not only brings up the same quotations and figures time and time again, he also hammers out points and examples long past any semblance of necessity for clarity’s sake. This effectively takes what feels like an essay’s worth of information and extends it into a long-winded, repetitive chore. And Grossman comes across as constantly being on the cusp of understanding as we move along, but his text is marred with numerous oversimplifications. He too often examines concepts through too narrow a lens and seems to attribute things to either the wrong cause or an erroneously singular cause, and I can’t tell if this is done knowingly––narrowing discussions in an attempt to give his argument more weight––or if he actually sees the world from such a limited perspective. Most memorable to me now is when psychiatric trauma for Holocaust victims was attributed to the up-close, personal nature of their tormentors, while I’ve been led to believe from reading other, reliable texts on the subject that this is undoubtedly only a small part of it. Oversimplification here comes across as callousness toward victims of such atrocities in the name of his militaristic and nationalistic exercise––as does simply defining atrocity as “the killing of a noncombatant.”

By the end, I struggled to understand why On Killing seems to be held on such a lofty pedestal by so many, but then I became reminded of Lee Strobel here, that Grossman’s probably preaching to an audience that really, really, really wants to believe what he’s selling. (Though, it’s probably unfair to compare Grossman to Strobel, as I have no real reason to doubt Grossman’s sincerity here, even if I find his arguments to often be misinformed.) But it’s not all bad. I found the section on PTSD in returning Vietnam veterans to be most enlightening––particularly when standing beside his discussion on violence in the media. (The latter actually got to be so preachy, I started to think I was reading Robert Heinlein for a minute there.)