Or is it like in the movies, they just keep fighting as if nothing happenend?
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If you are thinking of the movie trope about “confirmed kills”, know that that’s only really a thing for snipers and pilots.
Snipers have logbooks (and spotters), because a sniper’s primary job isn’t necessarily even sniping. It’s scouting. They’re reporting enemy activity they saw, to include anyone they killed. Especially those of higher consequence (ie, high ranking).
Pilots keep track of air to air kills because they’re extremely rare, since the last real peer to peer fight we had with an enemy air force was in Vietnam. Five kills makes you an “ace”, and there hasn’t been one of those since Vietnam.
Normal soldiers/Marines may keep track personally of how many or who they’ve killed, but it’s not an official statistic. It will absolutely be mentioned and tracked as part of a larger after action report after any enemy contact, because that plays into the larger intelligence picture on enemy activity. But it doesn’t work like a tally sheet, where PVT Ramirez has 13 confirmed kills and the most in the platoon.
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