This piece is dedicated to all those I have hurt in the past 23 years of my life. I wish I could go back and take everything I did and said all back. I only hope that the scars I left can heal, and have healed.
How does the military train a human being to become a killer? This question has been asked by many military leadership structures throughout history, and for good reason. While it is quite known that a sufficiently ideologically motivated person will seek out violent resolution themselves, in many of the great wars that are existentially threatening to the reigning orders of history the defense of the nation has ultimately depended on the peasant or the citizen. If you think about it, depending on a population of random individuals from your nation to make what is most often the greatest moral decision one can conceive - to take away the life of another - in your favour is extremely dodgy at best. Even in the best of times, your military men who have been trained in a military culture all their lives may turn tail and run. This much was observed in particular during the 100 Years' War between England and France; although French chivalric culture sought to instill in their warrior class a sense of honor and duty in battle, flight in battle was so common that English soldiers would often be caught off-guard by the odd French knight who did not flee the battle (Isaac, 2006). Given how comparatively brutal medieval European culture was to contemporary global culture, it is quite likely that soldiers today would be confronted with an even more conflicted emotional state in battle. So, how do you take a few thousand people randomly off the streets, and turn them all into people who will carry out your political will without question? If you're interested, a pop-history YouTuber named Lindybeige has a 25-minute video on this exact topic. There's always someone who can probably explain what I want to explain better, but in summary, the ideal soldier is one who is able to kill without mentally processing it in their minds. Militaries therefore seek to drill their soldiers into becoming tools for the purpose of reducing the ability of the enemy to wage war, by killing their soldiers.
Answering this question can be a little bit heated, and difficult. There is no clear way to obtain statistical data to test our hypotheses on combat psychology. As a result, people in the field tend to cite the works of two individuals: Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall, and Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman. B.G. Marshall (ostensibly) conducted multiple mass interviews over the course of the great wars fought by the United States over the course of the 20th Century, and consolidates this data in the book Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in 1947. Marshall is most famous for making the claim in this book that over the course of WW2, in any given battle, only 15-25% of an American infantry troop would have actually fired their weapon at the enemy, with the actual tactical conditions of the battle making no significant impact. According to him, this is not necessarily attributable to the fear of death that would typically grip people in a combat zone - he observes that morale and the feeling of support comes not from an individual acting on the orders of their commander, but rather from the mere sight of one's comrades beside one another. People are unable to shoot because even if you can compel an infantryman to shoot a target on the range, and they are willing to do so without hesitation, that force does not necessarily translate to a situation in which he must knowingly take someone's life. Marshall attributes this to American society in particular.
"He is what his home, his religion, his schooling, and the moral code and ideals of his society have made him. The Army cannot unmake him. I t must reckon with the fact that he comes from a civilization in which aggression, connected with the taking of life, is prohibited and unacceptable. The teaching and the ideals of that civilization are against killing, against taking advantage. The fear of aggression has been expressed to him so strongly and absorbed by him so deeply and pervadingly - practically with his mother's milk - that it is part of the normal man's emotional make-up. This is his great handicap when he enters combat. It stays his trigger finger even though he is hardly conscious that it is a restraint upon him. Because it is an emotional and not an intellectual handicap, it is not removable by intellectual reasoning, such as: 'Kill or be killed.'"
While Marshall's methodology and legitimacy has come under question over the past decades, his conclusions have been borne out by other similar studies of combat personnel in wartime. In response to his findings, the US Army began replacing range targets from simple target boards to targets that resembled human silhouettes. These silhouette targets, which move across the firing range and go down when hit like what one would expect from shooting a real person, were found to better translate soldiers' range experiences to the battlefield, and as such Grossman observes in On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society that this has led to a rise in accurate fire being placed against enemies in war (55% in the Korean War, 90% in the Vietnam War). However, Grossman also states that the silhouette train-fire programmes implemented in the US military has also led to a rise in trauma after soldiers return home from the battlefield. The core assertion is that these train-fire programmes effectively train soldiers to shoot human targets instinctively, without thinking, and that the confrontation of that moral act can therefore only come for the infantryman after it has already been committed. After the military has gotten you to shoot, it is no longer any of their business what happens to you.
Alternative hypotheses have been proposed over the past decade; in The Pity of War, Niall Ferguson asserts the alternative hypothesis that soldiers in fact find the experience of killing in war pleasurable, and Joanna Burke suggests in An Intimate History of Killing that more men suffer psychological damage in war because they were not put in the position where they had the opportunity to kill, thus denying them an outlet for their aggression. The Marshall-Grossman thesis remains, however, the most widely-accepted thesis, and it is important to understand because the implications of this thesis are stark. The Marshall-Grossman thesis suggests that militaries, in a bid to turn their soldiers into effective fighters, essentially turn them into machines of violence against whoever they are ordered to, and do not care very much about the psychological damage that can occur as a result in the aftermath of combat experience. Men are turned into tools of violence, with no care given to their mental state in the future.
I chose Violet Evergarden to round off this mini-series on how anime deals with trauma because it is quite easily one of the best, if not the best, shows on the market to demonstrate how one can undergo the healing process after trauma. Steins;Gate shows how one can develop trauma and react to it in the short-term, and Banana Fish shows how one behaves having lived in the spectre of trauma for basically all their lives. Violet Evergarden experiences the most extreme interpretation one can have of veteran PTSD - she is literally trained as an emotionless tool for the sole purpose of inflicting death on whomever she is pointed at, and is visibly scarred, with the loss of her arms reflecting the scars of war in her heart. Her prosthetic arms are one of the main avenues of initial conflict whenever she meets someone new, as they stare in a myriad of complex emotions whenever she unveils her metal hands to type a letter. Unlike what the militaries of the world would like to propagate about prosthetic limbs for soldiers being no big deal or, in fact, a demonstration of perseverance, adjusting to living on prosthetic limbs can be one of the most emotionally challenging experiences for individuals. This emotional conflict arises from a phantom pain of sorts - missing the limb that is no longer there, and having to realize again and again that your body is no longer whole. Simple tasks like walking become difficult for those with leg prostheses. Nothing can truly replace what was lost, and it is this fact that makes veteran with prostheses a universal symbol of the human shattered by war and violence.
Violet Evergarden chooses to address one very simple question to encapsulate her entire traumatic experience: what is love? I'm going to take a crack at this question myself on Christmas, primarily because somehow I have as little knowledge as to the answer to this very simple question as Violet does, but it's important to note that every recuperative experience on Violet's journey to rediscover her humanity revolves around this single question. We don't actually know very much about Violet's background - although we know that she was a child during the in-universe war, we don't know anything about how she was born, or her circumstances prior to being taken in by the military. When Gilbert Bougainvillea is transferred possession/command of Violet from his older brother Dietfried, she seems almost feral. Violet doesn't speak, she doesn't sleep on a bed, and she is completely hostile to any human touch. She operates purely on animalistic instinct, and it is with this animalistic instinct that she kills in the battlefield without hesitation. This is the primary reason she is reviled and feared by soldiers not just on the enemy side, but also in her own army. It's difficult to speculate on exactly what she experienced during the course of being trained as a child soldier to turn her into a human attack dog, but it's stark and sufficient enough to note that who she was during the war and who she is after are two almost completely different people.
For many individuals, including myself, there is no one single inciting incident that causes trauma; rather, it is the accumulation of an extended period of traumatic experiences that one stews in, blind to the fact that their self has been fractured until they are lead to this realization. In the psychological community, a new understanding is being created on a new condition called complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), because individuals who experience trauma over a long period of time display markedly different behavior from those who simply suffer from a single inciting incident. Particularly, C-PTSD individuals are observed to typically suffer from 3 additional symptomatic identifiers: (i) emotional processing and affect (dys)regulation; (ii) self-organization, exemplified by persistent negative self-concept, guilt, and dissociation; and (iii) relational security. In other words, if PTSD can be considered to be a simple hairline fracture of the self, C-PTSD is by comparison a complex fracturing of the self, where . In fact, psychologists who study C-PTSD note that if one separates these two forms of PTSD, one sees a higher comorbidity of C-PTSD with other personality disorders, especially borderline personality disorder (BPD), where the impaired decision making, unstable sense of self, and emotional instability really shines. It's quite easy to see that at the start of the show, Violet has nearly no sense of self. She is a doll through and through.
The term Auto Memories Doll, in fact, is quite confusing to viewers who may not fully realize what Violet's life experiences entails. I feel like this term was chosen very carefully, as while the occupation of transcribing peoples' words into letters during a time where enough of the population was illiterate existed, it never carried the level of romanticism which is implied in the show. They still exist, in fact; we call them ghostwriters, hardly the most romantic name for an occupation. While a show about a typist may have been incredibly boring, every single assignment on which Violet was sent amounted to Violet assisting people with regrets and deep melancholy in sorting out their memories and looking at them differently, or sometimes reliving them, thus giving them solace and allowing them to find the words to then put to paper. Invariably, all these people she talks to are dealing with their own sense of loss, one of the most profound and tragic experiences that most people tend to face in their lives. Thus, she is a doll, but this time in the course of helping others come to terms with their memories, she comes to terms with hers: an Auto Memories Doll. The Japanese write it as 自動手記人形, or automatic note-taking doll, and the Germans translate it as Autonome Korrespondenz-Assistin, or autonomous correspondence assistance, but we'll chalk that up to a lack of imagination on their parts. We know that Violet is not a mere copywriter, because as the show suggests, writing enables a person to put into words feelings that would otherwise be left unsaid, and that is her primary function to the clients we see. A letter for her classmate, who lost her brother to anger, alcohol, guilt, and trauma after the war. A screenplay for a father broken by the loss of his daughter to disease. 50 years' worth of letters for a mother who would herself be lost to sickness soon and wished for her daughter to continue feeling loved in her absence. Through the process of helping her clients navigate through their broken memories and fractured selves, she slowly learns enough humanity that it begins to hurt.
When Violet is first adopted into the care of Claudia Hodgins, she asks him why he isn't disposing of her, as a tool of war no longer has use in peace. She calmly demonstrates her prosthetic hand to the matron of the Evergarden family, completely unaware that this is something horrifying and uncomfortable for regular people. Implicitly, we know what this scene means. She speaks about her tales of war completely normally and without candor, without recognition of the fact that it is a significantly stressful event. Hodgins tells her, "You've been in the army ever since you were a child. You've spent your life fulfilling your duties. You're going to learn a lot of things. But it might be easier to keep living if you didn't know them. You don't realize that your body is on fire and burning up because of the things you did." The question is, then, how do we know that incidents are in fact traumatic for Violet when she doesn't appear to recognize them as such? Are we supposed to operate simply off the words of those around her? Is it possible that he's simply horribly misguided in projecting his own discomfort of her onto her?
In his section on how trauma imprints itself onto the minds of children, van der Kolk speaks about the importance of the messaging we internalize as children. He writes, "As children, we start off at the center of our own universe, where we interpret everything that happens from an egocentric vantage point. If our parents or grandparents keep telling us we’re the cutest, most delicious thing in the world, we don’t question their judgment—we must be exactly that. And deep down, no matter what else we learn about ourselves, we will carry that sense with us: that we are basically adorable. As a result, if we later hook up with somebody who treats us badly, we will be outraged. It won’t feel right: It’s not familiar; it’s not like home. But if we are abused or ignored in childhood, or grow up in a family where sexuality is treated with disgust, our inner map contains a different message. Our sense of our self is marked by contempt and humiliation, and we are more likely to think 'he (or she) has my number' and fail to protest if we are mistreated." Oftentimes, when you encounter individuals who you have radical disagreements with, it is quite likely because of this, and having grown up trained to believe that the proper relationship between a parent and child should be marked by fear and absolute obeisance, it was quite a shock the first time I went to my friend's house and witnessed him speaking at anything louder than three-quarters of the volume of his mother. When I informed my friends that anything louder than that would have gotten me beaten as a child, or that walking with footsteps louder than a whisper after getting reprimanded would get me drawn back and the situation worsened, or that my mom would force me to smile after I had been beaten because crying was only allowed for when she was dead, they were all completely flabbergasted. For me, it was the most natural thing in the world - watching my friend treat his parent as an equal, on the other hand, induced such intense stress in me that it was apparently visible on my face and in my actions. I was 22 years old when I finally realized that the vast majority of my childhood experiences were abnormal.
This is the true importance of Violet's occupation, and the humanity-building experiences she undergoes over the course of the show - her quest to fill in the gaps of herself, and to create a person that is whole in spite of her scarred body. It is particularly difficult for Violet, as she has no frame of reference for what it feels like to be an individual of value beyond her instrumental utility - no idea of what it feels like to be loved, let alone to love. Van der Kolk suggests a method of creating some semblance of resolution and filling these gaps - rescripting one's past into an alternative setting where one has the capability to be human and express their humanity. This allows the individual to tap on the basis of understanding of love and care that is essential to our functioning, and to begin to rewrite the imprint that is made upon them. It is this change that is clearly visible in Violet's responses to Dietfried and her war guilt. When we first meet Dietfried, he casts disdain on her new life as an Auto Memory Doll; she wordlessly, blankly accepts, and internalizes his disgust towards her for her actions during the war.
It is inevitable that over the course of Violet's journey she has to confront the damage she has done as a tool of war. The pain of her loss of Gilbert, combined with a growing understanding of the widespread loss suffered everywhere as a result of the war, eventually leads her to begin to comprehend the sheer weight of all the broken ties which she has left behind for innumerable people. When one's mind and body completely reorganizes itself for the sole sake of survival, especially in a wartime setting, one becomes incredibly hypersensitive to danger, and under these circumstances is compelled to action by irrational, intense, barely controllable urges. What specific actions these urges dictates varies, but for someone trained as a weapon of war, the instinct would invariably be to eliminate whatever threat was detected as quickly as possible. A stranger to herself, Violet is barely cognizant of what she is doing as she slices through the enemy without hesitation. The army has trained her to operate on instinct and kill, without regard for her mental well-being, focusing only on the immediate task of gaining a tactical advantage over the enemy.
When we talk about trauma for war veterans, there tends to be only one brand of trauma that is socially acceptable to speak about. We only talk about the kind of trauma suffered by war veterans if they come under attack by a vicious enemy, or watch their friend die in battle, or engaged in some self-sacrificial act. Rarely is the fact that the soldier in the course of combat experience invariably engages in the act of killing, either in performing or abetting it, mentioned. This is primarily because of how respect for the soldier is predicated on the three pillars of their injury, innocence, and heroism, as a way of distancing us, the public showing them gratitude, for their participation in war. Significantly, this approach was codified in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, because public knowledge of the mass atrocities and brutalities being committed on a daily basis made the civilian population of the US uncomfortable to attribute these things for veterans. It is difficult to pity a man who has probably engaged in completely inhumane acts over the past few years, and as a result difficult to believe that they could have trauma with all the damage they inflicted. While many fondly remember veterans of World War 2 in media as the "Greatest Generation", and stories about them abound in the amount of humanity they attribute to the soldiers involved (particularly on the Allied side), veterans of the Vietnam War are almost universally reviled, commonly portrayed in the media as bitter and prone to explosive anger. This difference is most starkly shown in the two famous HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, which reverently follows a company of heroes from the 101st Airborne Division and their struggles in WW2, and Generation: Kill, which very irreverently shows the inhumanity and absurdity of modern warfare through the eyes of the 1st Marines Reconnaissance Battalion during the Iraq War. I would like to present one of my favorite clips from Generation: Kill to show just how irreverently they portray these soldiers. I would like to request that you keep in mind the image of the idealized WW2 hero charging through Nazi machine gun fire on the beaches of Normandy while you watch this, to fully effect a powerful contrast.
On 16th September 2007, 5 individuals from the Blackwater Private Military & Security Company (PMSC) killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square, Baghdad. Two explanations would be delivered in court for the Nisour Square Massacre. The first explanation that took popular opinion by storm was that these 5 men were intent on behaving like cowboys, and the massacre was a wanton act of killing to demonstrate to one another their militarised masculinities. Iraqi witnesses discredited the statements provided by the Blackwater private military contractors (PMCs), stating that the team was "bent on destruction", and that the suggestion that they were threatened under sworn testimony was complete fiction. The second explanation, which was offered by mainstream media in order to soften the image of the PMCs, focused on the central figure of the controversy, Paul Slough. The New York Times notably focused on Slough's spotless military record, as well as his childhood experience of growing up with an alcoholic father, thus assigning to Slough the persona of the frazzled, brave, sensitive, and reliable military operator: a true hero of the United States. Completely left out of the discussion was how whether or not Slough's testimony that he had really suspected that the white Kia he first shot was actually a car bomb was immaterial; even if we do believe him, he had been trained by the military to fire without hesitation at threats in a hostile environment. The situation is much more complex than this; I believe that Paul Slough was neither a hero of war nor an outright war criminal, but rather a tool of war that fulfilled his function.
We as a society of onlookers are unprepared to deal with the kind of harm our men and women in uniform deal out as part of their duty to protect us from the enemy. We are unprepared to give any pity to those who are exposed in the line, committing atrocities. We are, therefore, unwilling to recognize that soldiers in a combat zone may also experience the same force of traumatic compellence to perform horrific acts upon the enemy. Dietfried cannot see a victim in Violet because he is all to familiar with the level of death and destruction that she is able to dish out. The Violet we see is different from the Violet Dietfried sees. If the show had been titled Dietfried Bougainvillea instead, with him as the main character, we would be unable to sympathize with Violet. The only reason we are able to do so is because the focus of Violet Evergarden lays much heavier on her suffering, and I do not believe that this is the case. Discussing the morality of a soldier's acts is always difficult, but I find it difficult to stomach the sort of absolute moral condemnation that is laid on soldiers that clearly performed these acts while under a state of extreme duress. Both our view and Dietfried's views of Violet are necessarily imperfect and absolutist, and that is why her defense of herself to Dietfried is a clear demonstration that she has rewritten her own memories to make sense of them. She no longer needs Dietfried to condemn her, nor us to pity her; as she is in the process of becoming whole, she can now take responsibility for the acts she commits, no matter how heinous.
This process is invariably painful. The first time Violet has to come to terms with this realization, the pain of remembering and recognizing the horrors she inflicts, combined with her grief at being unable to protect Gilbert, drives her to attempt to atone for her mistakes through death. Unfortunately, for a great many veterans and individuals afflicted with trauma, this is where their story ends. It is only through the acceptance of the evils she has committed as her former self, and recognition of the happiness she can bring to others in her current capacity, that allows her to begin to work through this guilt and grief. When she defends herself to Dietfried atop the train for her actions, she has come to terms with her guilt, and resolved to do better - that conviction is what drives the budding sense of agency we feel in Violet.
Violet Evergarden is probably one of the few stories that I can say truly reframes the world and how I see myself. We all harm other people over the course of living, for that is the fate outlined for us in the Hedgehog's Dilemma, but most of the time the damage we inflict on other people is at least mendable, if not reparable. I know for a fact that over my 23 years of life, living in the throes of my inability to comprehend even the most basic of human needs and experiences, I have inflicted at least a few deep wounds upon others. I cannot describe in words the amount of intense guilt and regret I feel every day for the mistakes I made, that I never even knew were mistakes until relatively recently in my life. I'm still very shakily trying to figure out exactly how to be a human - how to be a good friend, how to be a good sister, how to be a good partner. Although this process is mostly feeling one's way through the dark, I have the fortune of only beginning to have the means to try and feel things out for myself nearly a quarter into my life. A third, if the alcoholism brought on by my dark moments of uncontrollable and unidentifiable rage and grief has already done a number on my liver. It's not much, but I'm trying.
At the time of writing this, the Violet Evergarden movie is currently screening in theaters. I don't know anything about it other than that Gilbert is actually alive, and the plot presumably revolves around her renewed search for him, the final resolution of her journey to discover what love means, and the beginning of a new journey of trying to love. Maybe back in 2018, when I first watched Violet Evergarden on its release, I would have said that it was a bad decision. I would have said that for Gilbert to be alive and for Violet to rediscover him would be a violation of her whole character journey and render it entirely moot, because then nothing would stop Violet from reverting to her previous identity where her unitary purpose in life was to follow his every command, to seek out his orders. I didn't believe that a character who had suffered so much deserved that happiness, and I didn't believe that I deserved that happiness, because it was almost an article of faith that suffering has to happen for a reason, and to remove it makes it all meaningless. I'm sure that Violet would have believed the same thing at the start of her journey.
It's been about 2.5 years since Violet Evergarden rocked the world of anime, and today I think that I'm ready to see Violet return to Gilbert. I'm sure he'd be proud of the new person he sees. I'm sure that although Violet is still learning, she's come a long way since the moment she finally realized she was on fire. I think it's time to see her be happy. I think it's time to step out and be happy.
References
Adelman, Rebecca A. “Economies of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Brain Injury.” In Figuring Violence: Affective Investments in Perpetual War. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv75d9qp.8.
Chu, James A. Rebuilding Shattered Lives: Treating Complex PTSD and Other Dissociative Disorders. 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2011.
Cohen, Emily. “War Without End: Technology and the Injured Body.” Anthropology Now 2, no. 2 (September 2010): 70–75.
Ford, Julian D, and Christine A Courtois. “Complex PTSD, Affect Dysregulation, and Borderline Personality Disorder.” Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation 1 (July 9, 2014). https://doi.org/10.1186/2051-6673-1-9.
Grossman, David. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. New York, NY: Back Bay Books, 1996.
Higate, Paul. “Mercenary Killer or Embodied Veteran? The Case of Paul Slough and the Nisour Square Massacre.” Working Paper. Bristol, UK: University of Bristol, 2013. http://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/spais/migrated/documents/higate-09-11.pdf.
Isaac, Steven. “Cowardice and Fear Management: The 1173–74 Conflict as a Case Study.” In Journal of Medieval Military History, edited by Clifford T. Rogers, Kelly DeVries, and John France, 4:50–64. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2006. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt81ntp.6.
Jones, Edgar. “The Psychology of Killing: The Combat Experience of British Soldiers during the First World War.” Journal of Contemporary History 41, no. 2 (2006): 229–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022009406062055.
Jowett, Sally, Thanos Karatzias, and Idit Albert. “Multiple and Interpersonal Trauma Are Risk Factors for Both Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder: A Systematic Review on the Traumatic Backgrounds and Clinical Characteristics of Comorbid Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder/Borderline Personality Disorder Groups versus Single-Disorder Groups.” Psychology and Psychotherapy 93, no. 3 (September 2020): 621–38. https://doi.org/10.1111/papt.12248.
Kolk, Bessel van der. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York, NY: Penguin Group, 2014.
Marshall, S. L. A. Men Against Fire: The Problems of Battle Command. University of Oklahoma Press 1st. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000.
Snukal, Katia, and Emily Gilbert. “War, Law, Jurisdiction, and Juridical Othering: Private Military Security Contractors and the Nisour Square Massacre:” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33, no. 4 (August 14, 2015). https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775815598077.