Leadership, devotion to duty, decisiveness and perseverance under stress appeared to be four significant characteristics dominant among the personalities of 77 Israel Defense Force soldiers who received decorations for bravery following the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
This evaluation, reported in the December issue of Psychology Today magaine, was made by Reuven Gal, then chief psychologist of the IDF and currently director of the Israeli Institute of Military Studies. He presented his paper in Albany, N.Y. at the North-east Regional Conference of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society.
Gal compared the average scores of the 77 soldiers on seven characteristics with those of 273 others who had not won medals. All had received personality evaluations prior to the conflict. Gal and three experienced military psychologists sought to determine when the heroic acts occurred. The battles were categorized according to 12 variables. It was concluded that 70 percent of the heroic acts occurred within four basic situations, which Gal labeled in the soldier’s own terms:
* With the back to the wall — 28 percent. A group of soldiers is surrounded, outnumbered with the heroic act performed by the leader of the group or in his presence with the help of others.
* The last remnant — 18 percent. A soldier assumes leadership of a group to save his fellows’ lives as well as his own.
* Fighting to the last bullet — 14 percent. A single soldier or crew keeps fighting alone to accomplish an assigned mission. Typically the fight ends with death.
* Self-sacrificing — 10 percent. A small unit is encircled. One soldier acts heroically to save the unit, usually at the cost of his own life.
Gal, according to the magazine, noted that many of the medal winners doubted “whether they had been more worthy of the medals than some of their peers in the same unit.” On the question of heroic personality or a hero-producing situation, Gal offered this conclusion:
“In many of the given cases it was predominantly the specific constellation of the situational circumstances that evoked the exceptional behavior, while the determination of the particular individual who would accomplish this behavior was almost by chance.”
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