A MARSOC Marine once, in explaining to me how much he enjoyed his work, took an aside to assure me that he did not enjoy killing, of course, but it sure was rewarding to smoke-check a few terrorist hostage-takers in the process of liberating their captives.

Is it wrong to enjoy killing?  Or is it necessary to feel bad about it?  Is it impossible to enjoy killing the enemy without hating the enemy?

It is, and the process is actually quite simple.  The modern Western popular psychology presumes a psyche that never escapes adolescence, and it has produced a population of adolescent psyches in adult bodies, a population of human beings who mature physically but, mentally, stall out in their early teens and never develop farther, even unto their dying days.  An undeveloped psyche perceives things simply.  It can only manage simple, one-dimensional paper cut-outs of any given object, event, or phenomenon.  It treats killing thus: “killing bad.”

If you are forced to kill a person in self-defense, or in the course of righteous battle, that is not, contrary to your adolescent mind’s initial assessment, a single event.  It is in fact a collection of events, each of which merits a different emotional reaction.  You can and should be:

Sad that a human being has died before his time.

Happy to be alive.

Proud that in a moment of mortal combat, you were the better fighter.

Angry that this other human being forced you to take a life.

Angry that this other human being committed whatever acts of predation forced your hand.

Aggrieved for the loss of your brother (whom you have killed), even though you probably did not know him well.  If mankind is a brotherhood, then he was your brother, and you may grieve for his passing.

You can do all of these things.  You can feel all of these things, each feeling a proper reaction to its particular stimulus, each stimulus an aspect of this very complex, multifaceted event of your killing.

There is a name for this power, to treat complex things complexly, to think and feel in more than one dimension.  I hinted at it earlier.  It’s called adulthood.