Reddit reviews An American Soldier in Vietnam

Althogh it's a completely diffrent war and different motivation, I'm reminded of something I heard on the radio a few months ago.

They had an author on the show who had written a book about the casual cruelty soldiers often display in war. I've unsuccessfully tried to find the book just now, it may be An American Soldier in Vietnam. The book started with an anecdote by the author.

He recounted that he was in vietnam and soldiers had been ordered to search a group of huts for vietcong. An elderly vietnamese woman had protested them entering a hut, and the American Soldier had thrown her to the ground, struck her in the face with his rifle butt, and then laughed about it to his buddies.

He then recounts that the American soldier in that story had been him. He recounted that he "woke up" after that and it changed his perspective about the kind of person he'd become.

While the context of Wehrmacht soldiers is very different, human psychology isn't all that different, and it's not really that difficult to imagine that like soldiers in many other wars, they went a significant way toward dehumanizing their foes, which changes the way they think and act.