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coaching (to prompt violent conduct, people whom the novice perceives to be or to have been authentically violent instruct the novice in how to conduct himself when confronted with conflict, emphasizing that he has an inescapable personal responsibility to physically attack people who provoke him).
    Many people today identify these three conjoined experiences with child abuse, but they have been the common lot of children throughout most of human history and continue to be the common lot of children in much of the world today: domination with violence or the threat of violence by parents, adult relatives and older siblings; witnessing the domination of mothers and siblings; coaching, especially of boys, that physical violence is an expected and appropriate way to settle disputes. Certainly brutalization was the common lot of most children in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is also the standard boot camp experience of military recruits: real or threatened violent subjugation by drill instructors, witnessing drill instructors similarly subjugating barracksmates, coaching in combat responsibilities. Military training imposes on recruits both violent coaching in Athens’s sense and specific instruction in weapons and tactics, and brutalization may continue beyond basic training. “Harsh military discipline had a long tradition in Germany,” the historian Omer Bartov reports in Hitler’s Army. “. . . The strict obedience demanded from the troops, and the draconian punishments meted to offenders, doubtlessly played a major role in maintaining unit cohesion under the most adverse combat conditions.” SS training as Himmler organized it was known for its brutality; training in the Totenkopf divisions that supplied guards for concentration camps was even more brutal. Even ordinary police training before the war in German-speaking Europe was brutalizing: Fritz Stangl, later to be commandant of the death camp at Treblinka, told writer Gitta Sereny of his police academy experience in Austria, “They called it the ‘Vienna School.’ . . . They were a sadistic lot. They drilled the feeling into us that everyone was against us: that all men were rotten.”
    Brutalization “is an odious and traumatic experience,” Athens observes. It leaves the novice shaken, “dejected by the events that have transpired in his life,” deeply troubled and confused. “Why did all this happen to me?” he begins to ask himself. The onset of this emotional turbulence signals the beginning of the second stage of violent socialization, belligerency.
    Like other social traumas people suffer in life that expose them to challenges their previous experience has not prepared them to master — serious illness, a natural disaster, physical disfigurement, the death of a loved one — the trauma of brutalization shatters the novice’s identity. Breaking down a recruit’s identity is the purpose of military basic training, of course, part of an institutional process that military organizations have evolved by trial and error over hundreds of years to turn a civilian into a soldier.
    Moving into belligerency, the novice questions his previous values, which failed to encompass brutalization. Brooding over his brutalization experiences, he comes to focus on his personal performance and responsibility, finally identifying the specific question he has to answer: What can I do to stop other people from violently subjugating me and people I value? Expressed differently, his problem is to find a way to reorganize himself into someone who can successfully survive further encounters with the kind of traumatic experience that has shattered his former identity.
    When people have undergone social trauma and fragmentation, they seek guidance from others who have successfully overcome comparable experiences. The belligerent subject has a fund of advice at hand on how to deal with violent subjugation—the stories and ridicule and threats and