However—and this is the key point—psychological distancing is not what we witness in the Apache video. Instead, we hear soldiers celebrating the shooting of a wounded, crawling, defenseless man; joking about a Bradley fighting vehicle running over a dying body; and glibly dismissing the gunning of children. Far from coolly detached, the American soldiers in the video are in a state of juvenile excitement about scoring points in their all-too-real X-box game.

According to Carey's experts, military training teaches the soldier to see combat as a video game:

One reason that the soldiers seemed as if they were playing a video game is that, in a morbid but necessary sense, they were.

"You don't want combat soldiers to be foolish or to jump the gun, but their job is to destroy the enemy, and one way they're able to do that is to see it as a game, so that the people don't seem real," said Bret A. Moore, a former Army psychologist and co-author of the forthcoming book "Wheels Down: Adjusting to Life After Deployment."

Granted, there's some truth to this. However, since combat, especially in an urban setting during a counterinsurgency operation, is decidedly not a game, soldiers must also be trained to be just as detached from their own chauvinistic, violent feelings as they are from the other psychological distractions. Allowing such impulses to lead to the slaughter of innocents is as mistaken an outcome as allowing fear to prevent one from adopting the proper course.

The most disingenuous part of Carey's piece occurs near the end, in its discussion of the pair of children in the van that arrives to save one of the wounded. "Well, it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle," one of the soldiers says.

Here's how Carey suggests we understand it:

Here again, psychologists say, when people are intensely focused on observing some specific feature of the landscape, they may not even see what is obvious to another observer. The classic demonstration of this is a video in which people toss around a basketball; viewers told to count the number of passes rarely see a person in a gorilla suit who strolls into the picture, stops and faces the camera, and strolls out.

The soldiers were looking for combatants; experts say it is not clear they would have seen children, even if they should have.

This is, of course, utter nonsense, given that the soldiers themselves see the children and comment about them. The problem is, rather, that the perception of children does not make its proper psychological impact on the firing soldier.

Carey concludes with a warning that we not prematurely judge the soldiers in the video:

In recent studies, researchers have shown that such distance tempts people to script how they would act in the same place, and overestimate the force of their own professed moral principles.

"We don't express our better angels as much as we'd like to think, especially when strong emotions are involved," Dr. Dunning said. He added, "What another person does in that situation should stand as forewarning for what we would do ourselves."

I have no idea what it's like to be in combat, and I certainly don't mean to imply I'd act differently than the soldiers in the video; I really have no idea. But we can all agree, I hope, that we would want to behave differently. Let us not allow Carey's rejoinders to confuse us about the core issue: the "psychological distancing" that soldiers must be trained to achieve requires just as much a distancing from bloodthirsty impulses as from other distracting feelings.

UPDATE: Edward offers the following rebuttal in the comments section:

I read your article with interest, but i don't see how

"Here again, psychologists say, when people are intensely focused on observing some specific feature of the landscape, they may not even see what is obvious to another observer. The classic demonstration of this is a video in which people toss around a basketball; viewers told to count the number of passes rarely see a person in a gorilla suit who strolls into the picture, stops and faces the camera, and strolls out.

The soldiers were looking for combatants; experts say it is not clear they would have seen children, even if they should have."

is non sense.

I mean, i know they saw the childrens and commented about them when the dismounted forces discovered them : so they did it after the engagement. They did not see them before or during the engagement, which i think is the point of the quote you commented.

My response: If the debate concerns the psychological reactions of the soldiers—which is what I am focusing on and which Carey's article seems to be about—then Carey's point is irrelevant. The soldiers on the video see that there were children involved in the incident, but they show no remorse.

If we want to debate about whether the soldiers should have seen the children before firing and refrained from pulling the trigger, I don't think we have a firm basis to make an ultimate judgment. But on this score, Carey's point is incredibly weak. When helicopter pilots are flying over an urban area in a counterinsurgency operation, they are trained (or at the very least damn well should be trained) to focus on combatant/civilian distinctions. Thus, Carey's analogy does not apply: the pilots, in failing to see the children, aren't "missing the gorilla"; they're missing basketball passes.