The author argues that killing is more difficult than dying. In the Civil War, it was often brother against brother or friend against friend. Theoretically, it was more difficult to kill someone the solider is familiar with than a faceless, nameless enemy. Supporting this thesis is the idea that the Sixth of the Ten Commandments that Moses delivered from the heights of Mount Sinai forbade people from killing one another. Yet the political needs trumped the religious teachings, as leaders of political, military, and even religious stripes found justification for killing soldiers on the opposing side in a “just cause,” one that God would surely embrace. The same Old Testament that contains those Ten Commandments has more than one episode that reflects this narrative. For example, the God of the Israelites is on their side and will lead them to victory—if not in person than in spirit—and in some cases by influencing events in the lives of the Israelites’ opponents.

Policymakers in both the North and South found parts of their religious teachings that justified whatever narrative they advanced. Southerners beholden to slavery trotted out a White supremacist misinterpretation of the Curse of Ham to advance the idea that Black Americans were “different, inferior” and pledged their lives in support of their cause. Northerners committed to emancipation embraced the Golden Rule, even allowing for the inherent contradiction in killing one set of people in order to save another. Faust writes that “[s]uch arguments offered permission to kill, or at least softened deeply held prohibitions against it” (700).

In the same way that certain skills can be developed and tasks achieved by repetition, the killing of another human being, once done, could be done again, an example that for many, by the end of the war, was desensitizing to the reality of what they were doing. For those lucky enough to survive, this desensitization would come in handy after the war, when they tried to forget all they saw, heard, and felt.

Many of the soldiers who survived the Civil War long abandoned upholding the Commandment not to kill, seeing that the gun-wielding warrior charging straight at him already did the same. It was the most basic and oldest of struggles: kill or be killed. Faust writes, “Once the constraints of conscience and custom loosened, some soldiers, especially in the heat of combat, could seem almost possessed by the urge to kill” (735).

Many soldiers’ families who held out hope that their sons, fathers, husbands, and cousins would come back to them wholly intact did not recognize the hardened survivors who returned home. Those survivors had to commit dark deeds in order to come home. Some found that they enjoyed killing, for these men considered themselves the hammer of God. Faust writes, “Vengeance was simply a form of justice, the mutilated bodies equivalent to the biblical eye and tooth of retribution” (754).

The military reinforced the need to kill. Prevailing narratives suggest that Union General George McClellan spent so much time training his men that he came to look fondly on them and couldn’t bear to send them into battle. The Union’s last commanding general, Ulysses S. Grant, had no such trouble. Both generals drilled into their men how to fire their weapons and how to keep fighting as those around them died. They practiced marching and firing in formation so many times before the battle began that many performed admirably under live fire. However, as in every other war fought, the Civil War had a large share of participants who eventually abandoned post and set aside directives from commanders. As the war dragged on, the preponderance of raw recruits climbed steadily. There were also any number of men who, faced with such adversity, simply ran; the army had various ways of dealing with these deserters.

Despite all of the new technology, the range of the weapons was such that many soldiers were still able to see the faces of the men they targeted. This would have been the case on Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg, as Confederate defenders mowed down Union attackers, and on Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, where Union soldiers killed their Southern counterparts en masse.

The ability to see the enemy was not always a deterrent to inflicting harm, especially if that enemy was a prisoner or, worse, African American. Confederate soldiers who captured or otherwise encountered Black soldiers were especially vengeful in meting out punishment. Faust states that “[k]illing was not simply justified but almost required, even when such action demanded suspension of fundamental rules of war and humanity” (902-03).

Faust goes on to highlight the absurdity of the idea that, in the words of noted  African American scholar W.E.B. DuBois, “only murder makes men” (921). This is yet another function of war: it determines how masculine a man is and how worthy of his humanity and adulation he is, whether he survives the war or not. This was true of White and Black soldiers alike. Intertwined with that was the idea that African Americans were willing to endure suffering—in war and out of war—in order to forestall even more suffering, in the form of slavery. Faust writes, “Slavery gave the war’s killing and dying a special meaning for Black Americans; the conflict was a moment for both divine and human retribution, as well as an opportunity to become the agent rather than the victim of violence” (1020).

The chapter ends on a philosophical note, as “lucky” survivors contemplate their fate and wonder whether they deserved to survive, especially when confronted with the decimated bodies of their comrades. One way to stop thinking such thoughts was to try to forget. That was the practice of many who survived—to not tell anyone what they did and saw.