The psychological impact of having to take a life. Interesting read regarding combat as we discuss arming teachers.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/heart/themes/prep.html
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.
The enormous fire power that we are currently expending in our modern wars, from Vietnam onward, blurs the line considerably. Because if there's a massed fire and 2,000 rounds are going out at one time, who knows who shot who? But all we know is there's a lot of people in front of us that are dead. That absolves you of the responsibility of looking at that lifeless body and [seeing that] some mother, some son, some father, some uncle, is now dead.
And that's different than not knowing. Knowing, I think, is the Rubicon. And they talk about it with sadness. It's not something that they're prideful of, it's a profound sadness.