The Guilt-Free Soldier: “On the eve of a messy 21st-century war, university researchers are probing ways to unlearn fear. Erik Baard dissects the uses of the amygdala.” The Village Voice However speculative, the article’s major assumptions don’t make much sense to me. First of all, while PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) researchers point to the role of amygdaloid fear in encoding certain traumatic memories in a distinct form that cannot be integrated, this doesn’t have much to do with run-of-the-mill guilt or regret. Rather, the sense of self-reproachful responsibility victims of abuse feel for their plight is a mental trick to ward off the sense of uncontrollability of what had happened to them — if only I had done something differently, I could have avoided my pain, it is as if they are telling themselves for some perverse reassurance. But it is merely an artifact of the lumping together of research on traumatic abuse PTSD and combat PTSD to think that the benefits of blocking amygdaloid fear in the former cases would extrapolate to the latter. Not to mention that, if memories of the horrors of combat were encoded rationally and accessibly, rather than traumatically, this might lead soldiers to a more thorough realistic moral assessment that would make them less, rather than more, likely to do their masters’ bidding, more rather than less devastated by the terrible realities of what they have seen and what they have done. Traumatic remorse isn’t, as the author suggests, “a check on our own worst impulses” as more rational remorse is. Fortunately, we cannot block the latter pharmacologically.