When we began our work on moral injury in 2009, we found a way to understand both the veterans in our families and the men and women who have become our friends through our work on the Truth Commission. Veterans who appear in this book, as well as many others we have met during talks on moral injury, have challenged us to think more carefully about the moral complexities of military service and about civilian responsibility for reintegrating veterans into our society. The process of working with veterans on their struggles with their conscience and with moral injury profoundly changed how we feel and think about soldiers and how we approach moral issues of war and peace.
Through the process of listening, we have become less absolute in our personal opposition to war, and we have come to understand how moral conscience is deeply important for those who choose military service. Because of the humanity of those who serve, we believe a society must never rush to war, but challenge its leaders to explain why it is the only alternative. And through our friendship with veterans of war who so generously helped us with this book, we have come to understand our own lives differently.
One early morning in June 2009, I was reading the Italian news on Repubblica Online when a simple headline on a sidebar caught my attention. Clicking on the link, I found a story about the southern city of Trani, Puglia, a town of fifty-five thousand people. A young veteran had attacked his mother with a knife and then killed himself. No names were mentioned. Though my cousin Giuseppe and my aunt Nietta lived in Trani, I had no reason to think the story was about them. Yet, as soon as I read the headline, I “knew.” I searched for additional details, which were just emerging: the unnamed veteran had been on leave for depression and unspecified mental issues and was living with his mother, a retired nurse. They lived in a storefront apartment. The thirty-year-old man, who apparently had never given signs of violent behavior before, had stabbed his mother fifteen times. The sixty-six-year-old woman, left for dead by the son, managed to crawl to the door and under the shutter to the street outside, crying out for help. The first thing she asked her rescuers was to help her son first.
Had I not worked closely with veterans and learned that PTSD and moral injury can lead to terrible tragedies in any family, I would not have made the connection so quickly, but the details in the news were eerily familiar. My aunt had been a nurse and she lived for a long time in a storefront apartment. I called my sister in Italy and I begged her to call my uncle Angelo to check on my intuition. When she did so, my uncle had just received a notification call from the police. He learned that my aunt Nietta was still alive but in critical condition. The first thing she asked when she regained consciousness was if her son was still alive.
I was living in California, but I understood that the headline in Repubblica was about us before my family in Italy received the news—even before the police were able to notify the next of kin. I was grateful that my father had not lived to witness that day. When he had passed away two years earlier, his sister in Trani had not traveled to Turin for the funeral. Her excuse was that her son Giuseppe was not well emotionally and she could not leave him alone. My sister and I were a bit hurt by our aunt’s decision. Couldn’t he be left alone for a couple of days, we wondered? And why couldn’t he travel to the funeral himself? After all, my father had been very kind to him through the years. We thought they were just coming up with excuses, and we could not understand their absence.
I had a similar reaction when Giuseppe decided to stay in the army after completing his year of conscription. I was surprised, since I knew he was not enthusiastic about military service. I attributed it to economic pressures and the high unemployment rate, but still, I thought, he could have made a better choice if he only tried harder. My father distrusted the military and was upset by his nephew’s choice; I was similarly distressed by it. I grew up in a post–World War II culture that feared the Cold War could end in nuclear annihilation. As part of my Waldensian church youth group, I trained as a peace educator and offered free workshops on nonviolent transformation of conflicts. When most of my male friends faced a year of conscription after they turned eighteen, they applied for conscientious objector status, which required a rather punitive two-year program of community service. I admired them. While as a young woman, I did not have to face the draft, I was judgmental about people like my cousin who did not take a stronger stance for a culture of peace. Today, after having listened to so many veterans’ stories about the complex reasons they joined the army, I am able to see my cousin’s choice differently. Some people join the military because they feel they have no alternatives. I think this was my cousin’s situation.
Giuseppe was born and raised in Puglia, in the South, whereas I grew up in the more affluent northern part of Italy. My father traveled to the North from Puglia when he was a teenager, along with millions of others seeking a better life. When Italy was “reconstructed” after World War II, the North was the main focus of development, but those who migrated to the factories of Milan or Turin were treated like second-class citizens. While Giuseppe and I came from the same economic background, we had access to very different public services and to different life options. My sister and I were the first in our family to go to college and graduate school; Giuseppe and his brother only completed high school. My rather patronizing attitude about Giuseppe’s choice to join the military was to think my cousin did not have adequate critical tools to realize how misguided his choice was. Years later, when he was sent on “peacekeeping” missions around the world, I was more worried for the people at the receiving end of the Italian help than for those who delivered it. I did not try to understand what going to war zones might have meant for him.
In the days following Giuseppe’s death, most papers reported the story using almost the same words. A few defined the attempted murder and suicide as “a tragedy caused by loneliness and social malaise.” No one linked it to the fact that my cousin had been sent on multiple “peace missions” abroad or commented that such peace missions are an Orwellian euphemism for going to war, since the Italian Constitution forbids any war unless Italy is directly attacked.
On that tragic day in June two years ago, I had been immersed in my work with the Truth Commission on Conscience in War and moral injury. After hearing so many stories from veterans and their families, I was shocked by the news, but I could also make some sense of it. Earlier in my life, I might have felt ashamed that my family was in the newspaper as a “classic” example of the sad life of the poor and socially maladjusted: seminary professors and ministers usually are not associated with grisly murders and handwringing in the national press. But I knew those news commentaries were no more than convenient explanations that hid the complex truth about Italian “peace missions” and the outrageous lack of proper mental health care for Italian veterans. I read the story, not as an isolated case of madness, but as part of a larger and pressing problem involving veterans and their families. I passed the news articles around to my closest friends and colleagues, both in Italy and the United States, to make them more aware of veterans’ issues. I also realized that speaking about the cost of war was not only about my family’s past, but still about my very present. I was never speaking and writing about “them,” but always also about “us,” even when I did not fully know it.
In the spring of 2011, when my mother called to say that my uncle Albert shot himself at age eighty-eight, I was deeply grieved and yet not totally surprised. By then, I had a deeper understanding about the lifetime of anguish suffered by many people who have experienced war and atrocities. I had often felt that after coming back from Mauthausen, my uncle had been tormented, even if he hid it very well. He became an aggressively successful businessman, he vacationed around the world, and he maintained close ties with his friends from the Resistance who were still alive. He always seemed to have a very close relationship with his wife, a remarkably beautiful woman even as she aged. She was the one who found him still barely breathing in a pool of blood.
I confess that while I admired my uncle’s moral courage in joining the Resistance and facing deportation to a concentration camp, I was always afraid of him as a child and did not like him much. I felt guilty for feeling that way, but I sensed a deep and violent anger simmering under the surface that terrified me. My mother confessed she had the same feelings about him. Years later, my cousin Edy, Albert’s daughter, told me that he used to punish her teenage infractions by forcing her naked under a cold shower and whipping her with his belt. When Edy decided to visit Mauthausen, she was surprised her father did not want to go along. But after that visit, she understood his reluctance and much more about him. While Edy became progressively estranged from her father because of his treatment of her, she knew that his behavior had roots in an experience of atrocities beyond her comprehension. While she was still angry at him and she no longer accepted any abuse from him, she felt she really could not judge him.
As I mourned my uncle’s death, I felt that my old fear and anger toward him were transformed into deep sadness and compassion. And from that compassion, I felt an even greater resolve to keep addressing the costs of war.
From 1968 until his death in 1976, I was estranged from my father. He had been a loving parent who had helped me transition to life in the United States when I was six. I even entered college with the aspiration to become a medical doctor because he’d been a medic in the U.S. Army. But the father who returned in the summer of 1968 from his second tour of duty in Vietnam was not the father who raised me.
Unlike most people I knew in college, who were worried about the draft and demonstrating against the Vietnam War, I entered college the daughter of a veteran of the war, whose father had returned deeply changed. When he began to try to monitor my activities and friends the summer before I left for college, his cold, controlling behavior was a shock; he was dramatically different from the father who had warmly welcomed my friends into our home, trusted me to use good sense when I went out, and encouraged me to try new things. I decided not to live at home with my family anymore because I did not want to be in the same house with him. In refusing to capitulate to his constricting demands, I lost a major emotional support system, just as I was living away from home for the first time and entering the strange world of American college, a world both alienating and exciting.
The antiwar movement enabled me to move as far away from my father as possible. I became an antiwar activist without a deep understanding of why it was such a bad war—that understanding would take a long time to come. All through college, I lived a kind of double life with two very different, unintegrated parts. Many demonstrators demonized anyone in military service, and I was active in that movement and dated such activists. At the same time, I had a different circle of friends that included several veteran enlisted men who had fought in Vietnam. Though we never really discussed the details of their time there, the veterans were like many of the GIs I’d met and dated growing up on military bases. I liked their seriousness of purpose, their sense of honor and integrity, their sardonic humor, and their bluntness and lack of intellectual pretensions.
Until I immersed myself in trying to understand moral injury, I had not known the shocking events my father experienced in Vietnam that had changed him so much, events he could not possibly have explained to a teenage daughter. Though I had read books about the war, they did not help me understand the puzzle of why my father had changed. Only after I began this project on Soul Repair did I discuss his behavior with a cousin in Mississippi who had been close to my father. After she told me about what had happened to him near the end of his time in Vietnam, I started putting pieces together.
In the early years of the Vietnam War, my father was sent to work at the Landstuhl Army Medical Center in Germany, which is still the largest U.S. military facility outside the country. From 1963 until 1966, our family was stationed there, and both my father and I worked in the hospital where serious U.S. medical casualties from Vietnam were sent. My father worked as a professional medic; I worked as a volunteer “candy striper”; the name came from the pastel-striped, starched uniforms we wore. At the time, I thought I was having an exciting grown-up adventure that would prepare me for a career; I don’t think I even knew there was a war going on. But my father must have known, and he must have learned a great deal about treating war wounds. In 1966, he got orders to report to Fort Irwin, California, to train for Vietnam.
I was shocked that my father had to go to war. He was so much older than the other soldiers, nearly forty-five—too old to be in a war. But my feelings about war were mixed with the excitement of moving to California, which we only knew from Hollywood movies. My father left for Vietnam in 1966, after the huge surge in troops began in 1965, to run a field medical aid station. We had gotten my father a portable cassette tape recorder and a box of blank tapes, so we could send messages back and forth. It was the last thing he packed the night before he left, and he made me promise to send him messages.
Tapes from my father arrived about every two weeks. As soon as I came home from school, I would check the dining table to see if one had arrived. Usually, there was one for me and one for my mother. We listened to the tapes privately in our own rooms, and then recorded over them with our messages. It saved money to reuse the tapes, but now I realize I have nothing left of the many messages my father sent me. I only have what I can remember and a few photographs. I know he once had to do an emergency appendectomy. We received a large envelope full of photos when he took his rest and recuperation (R&R) break in Japan with my mother’s family. My teenaged male cousins, who had been toddlers when we left, thought he was cool, and the photos show them wearing his military hat and shirt, while he is in civilian clothes. He looked relaxed and happy, and he spoke warmly about his time there.
Now, I ponder what it meant for him, as a war veteran sent to occupied Japan, to marry a Japanese woman with a two-year-old daughter, who had been abandoned by the father of her child. I know he had a deep commitment to our well-being and was both a good father and husband. I wonder if he and many of his fellow veterans married Japanese nationals as a way to repair something the war had broken in them. Perhaps they sought some basic humanity that got lost in the demonization of Japanese people and the horrors of war. My Japanese grandfather liked Roy Brock a great deal and believed “he had a good heart,” which might be one way to describe a war veteran with moral injury.
When my father returned home after a year in Vietnam, he decided to volunteer for a second tour, which infuriated my mother. She could not understand why he wanted to return to the war. He was in his twenty-eighth year of military service, and he had been planning to retire after thirty years of service. She did not want him to take the risk of being killed when he’d done his duty and was so close to getting out. Today, I understand why he went back—for his unit, his men.
His second tour began just before the Tet Offensive in January 1968, which was a turning point in the war. Six weeks later, CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite announced it was an unwinnable war. My father’s tapes told me about a young Vietnamese woman, close to my age. In his spare time, my father filled his pack with medical supplies and hiked to Vietnamese villages to offer medical help. The young woman acted as his guide and as his interpreter in the villages. He described treating festering wounds, giving out penicillin and aspirin, doing some minor surgical procedures, and splinting broken limbs.
When I received those tapes, I just thought my father was being nice, doing a little extra to save a few more lives. Because he described a young woman who was also Asian, I imagined that she looked like me. Somehow, I found it comforting that he had her company there. I now have a better understanding of what it meant for him to be taking care of Vietnamese civilians, who might have been suspected insurgents. Like Kevin Benderman and Camilo Mejía, he made a decision to see the people in country as human beings and perhaps, in my father’s case, human beings who looked like his own family at home. When a soldier starts to see the humanity of his enemies, he starts to pull away from the emotional cohesion of his unit and its aggression against the enemy, but this act of conscience can have unintended consequences. In my father’s case, he may have put a young woman at risk by bringing her in regular proximity to his unit. I cannot imagine what he felt when he found the young woman’s tortured body: perhaps guilt that he might have put her in harm’s way, disgust and fury at the men who tortured and killed her, grief and shame at everything that had been destroyed.
I do not believe he ever recovered. He refused to stay in the military when he got home, but he returned to a family that had changed and moved on with life without him, so little of his old life remained. He made a huge effort to reconstruct a life, but I did not make that easy for him. Like him, I left and refused to look back, even when my father tried to apologize for his behavior to our family one Christmas. In 1976, he died of a heart attack while I was living in Switzerland. I think he died of a broken heart.
The past two years of work on moral injury have forced me to look back with new eyes. I now see in my father what I have seen in the many veterans I have worked with since we started this work, not just those we discuss but also many other men and women who testified in New York, attended our lectures and workshops on moral injury, and wrote to us. I see in them and in my father remarkable human beings with good hearts who sought a better life and a life of purpose beyond their immediate world. They are people who sustained moral conscience within a system designed to compromise and even destroy it. My father was able to reach across the walls of socially constructed enmity and to offer love to people he had been taught to hate. I see in myself and in my moral commitments much of him, and I miss him now very much.
KEVIN BENDERMAN WONDERED why he was carrying a gun around in the Garden of Eden, and Joshua Casteel realized he was wearing Caesar’s body armor and carrying an M-16 in Iraq, while denying he had been sent to kill people. Kevin had been in the area between the Tigris and Euphrates in Iraq, and a part-time preacher stationed with U.S. Defense staff told him that the area had once been the site of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and even perhaps the original location of the Garden of Eden. Kevin noticed how lush and green the land was, how even stray kernels of corn accidentally scattered on the ground grew thick and tall in the fertile soil. He thought if any place
could be the original Eden, Iraq might be it.
The Garden of Eden story describes human life as companionship between male and female in a well-watered, fertile garden. Situated on earth near four great rivers, including the Tigris and Euphrates of Iraq, the Garden of Eden also contained the dangers of evil inherent in life on earth. To guard against those dangers, clear boundaries were set for the still-naïve, first humans: they were not to touch or eat of the tree of knowledge about good and evil. By eating of that forbidden tree, they wanted knowledge they could not handle, like young soldiers who go to war imagining it as a personal test of their prowess, a video game, or a movie. When their eyes are opened by the knowledge they sought, Adam and Eve realize they are naked in their foolishness, and aware of their failure, they try to hide from the consequences. When called to account, they seek to dodge responsibility by claiming they are victims of trickery. Adam blames Eve, and she blames the serpent, but the damage is done. They have failed the test of moral discernment and responsibility. They are cursed with enmity and hardship and cast out of the garden to fend for themselves, because, lacking wisdom and unable to take responsibility for their power, they have become a danger to life itself. To prohibit their return to the Garden, an angel with a flaming sword guards the gate. Outside that gate are fratricide, war, empire, slavery, misogyny, and myriad forms of oppression.
When we violate our core moral values and fail to take responsibility, our moral conscience takes up that fierce flaming sword and guards what is left of our moral identity. To reenter the Garden, humanity must face that fierce angel. Unless the struggle is attempted, there is no way back and no way to know what remains in the garden behind the gate. The attempt to regain entry requires accepting responsibility for what we have done, but doing so may cost people their lives if they have to go back alone. Societies that launch wars, believing that weapons of death and destruction are noble, good, and lifesaving, or that wars are holy, do so dishonestly, without wisdom or the capacity to take moral responsibility for the harm they do, not just to their enemies, but to all they send into the maws of killing. We should not expect those who return to have to face that angel alone.
Few major social institutions teach moral integrity, courage, personal discipline, humility, a sense of purpose and responsibility, and commitment to the lives of others better than the armed services. And none works so thoroughly to compromise, deny, dismantle, and destroy the very values it teaches. This is the paradox of war. The human beings we know and care about volunteer for military service. We send them off to war, and they return morally injured. They still belong to us, they are still the people we love, and we cannot build a different humanity or different world without facing that fierce angel of moral injury together.
Veterans need each other, and they may never share with the rest of us what they share with each other. But they also need the civilians in their lives, those of us with whom they must learn to live again. To listen to veterans requires patience with their silence and with the confusion, grief, anger, and shame it carries. We must be willing to listen carefully without judgment and without a personal agenda. We must understand that respect for veterans requires us not to patronize them by trying to be their therapists—we do not hold the key to their redemption. It is not for us to forgive them but to help them find ways to forgive themselves and to let them know their lives mean something to us and to others. Finally, we must be willing to engage their moral and theological questions with openness and to journey with them as we are mutually transformed in the process.
Many religious communities have historical traditions that have long understood the suffering of soldiers and the moral transgressions that threaten souls, not just in the individual but also in the whole community. Traditions too focused on judgment and punishment of wrong doers or too facile in answering core questions about evil offer little and can even aggravate moral injury. But people of faith who are willing to wade into the complex moral questions of war and social responsibility and discern the meaning of spiritual life after war can engage the conversations that matter deeply and, in doing so, save lives.
Through our work on moral injury and the friendship of many veterans, we understand much more clearly and deeply how war has affected our lives, but we hope this book will not just make things in the past clearer. We seek a society that can understand that war and its aftermaths belong to all of us and are our responsibility. We believe that understanding moral injury can move our society into a different future. We seek a future that sustains our society’s soul, the empathy and moral conscience that sustain our humanity. We seek a society that faces danger by holding sacred the difficult assembling of meaning, the respect for truth, the alliance of heart and mind, and the construction of life-sustaining relationships so injured by war. And we know that with the help and commitment of many, we can face the fierce angel and make this future possible.