I cannot recommend this book to anyone. I hoped I would find in it a well-documented, well-thought-out treatment of the subject matter. To my surprise, I found instead a sensationalized polemic advocating the censorship of violent video games.
The author was unconvincing in his arguments. It is clear from his cherry-picking of statistics that he wants us to believe that we live in a society of ever-increasing violence. Unfortunately for Grossman, US Department of Justice statistics contradict this assertion. According to DOJ numbers easily found through a Google search, violent crime rates (including homicide)in America skyrocketed from about 1960 to the early 1990s, but have been falling steadily since then. Would anyone argue that the use of violent video games in the US is falling steadily as well? He also fails to mention that certain societies with arguably even more violent video games than the US have much lower rates of violent crime than we do, for example Japan.
The author seems to rely heavily on a few secondary sources, particularly John Keegan's Face of Battle and Richard Holmes' Acts of War. His few primary sources include articles from Soldier of Fortune magazine; he appears to take them at face value that they are true, accurate first-person accounts of combat experiences. He claims that he himself conducted several hundred interviews of combat veterans, but didn't seem to use their accounts as sources.
His personal bias in on display here, but he seems unaware of it. He lionizes the American soldier. I served as an American soldier for two decades before retiring in 2001. I came to view my fellow soldiers as ordinary fallen beings sometimes performing unpleasant tasks in unpleasant places. Hero worship is a poor tool when one seeks the truth.
Most troubling is Grossman's frequent citing of controversial assertions by Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall. Marshall, better known as SLA Marshall, or SLAM, a newspaper columnist and US Army officer, claimed to conduct hundreds of interviews with US combat veterans in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. His claimed insights about the reticence of men in combat to fire their weapons were influential in how the US Army shaped its training in the latter half of the 20th Century. As an enthusiastic young Army officer in the 1980s, I eagerly read his works.
In the early to mid 1990s, several people began to re-examine Marshall's assertions (google Roger J. Spiller and Harold Leinbaugh). Attempts to confirm Marshall's claims of how he conducted his research have cast serious doubts on the accuracy of his assertions. First-person accounts of people who were present during his claimed interviews in WWII and Korea differed dramatically from SLAM's accounts of how many interviews were conducted, how they were conducted, what subjects were discussed, etc. Attempts to confirm SLAM's accounts with physical evidence have been unsuccessful. At some point, he claimed to have filled about 800 notebooks with the results of his interviews, but only two of his notebooks have surfaced, despite the fact that his voluminous personal and professional papers are in the possession of the University of Texas at El Paso library, and have been extensively searched.
Marshall established a reputation for exaggerating his personal accomplishments, including those in wartime. He claimed to have won a battlefield commission in WWI but records indicate he was commissioned in 1919, after the war ended. He claimed to have been an infantryman leading other infantrymen in combat in WWI, but records indicate that he was instead a sergeant of engineers, attached to the 90th Infantry Division, doing construction and repair work on roads.
In the Introduction to the June 2009 edition of On Killing, Grossman quickly addresses the controversy over Marshall and simply dismisses it out of hand. This suggests much about Grossman's mindset. An objective writer simply seeking the truth might have been hesitant to continue to rely heavily on a figure such as Marshall whose credibility had been so called into question. Instead Grossman charges forward, continuing to rely on Marshall, despite the serious doubts about his credibility
