To violate your conscience is to commit moral suicide.
REV. HERMAN KEIZER JR., Colonel and Chaplain, U.S. Army, Ret.
After we send men and women off to war, how do we bring them home to peace?
Obviously distraught, the three people huddled, whispering to each other while they waited patiently at the end of a long line that had formed after Rita’s lecture on moral injury in Houston, Texas. When the two women and the man finally reached her, they said they were from a United Methodist Church. Their words tumbled out on top of each other: “You don’t know how much your lecture meant to us . . . We didn’t know how to help him . . . The suicide was such a shock . . . The whole church is heartbroken . . . We wish we had known about moral injury . . . It makes so much sense . . . Maybe we could have helped him.”
The group’s distress was raw and urgent. Their description was disjointed, as if their jumbled memories had not come into focus. When they realized that Rita was puzzled, they filled in some of the details. They explained that the suicide of a young veteran, deeply beloved in their church, was unexpected. The whole church community was reeling and struggling to understand how it had failed him. He was a hero to so many, they said, that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) had sent crisis counselors to a national gathering of veterans meeting at the time of the suicide. After the group explained the impact of the suicide on them and their community, one of the women said, “We want to learn more about moral injury. Our community needs this information. We couldn’t save Clay, but maybe we can help save others.”
Within days of Rita’s lecture in April 2011, national media sources reported Clay Warren Hunt’s story. He was a twenty-eight-year-old former marine corporal who earned a Purple Heart serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had been active in a suicide-prevention program for vets. Since 2009, he had been a model to other veterans of a successful return home. He married and started college in California; he advocated for veterans’ rights and worked in disaster relief. He was being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Then, his marriage ended, he left school, went into treatment for depression, and returned to Houston where he got a job and an apartment in Sugar Land, Texas. On March 31, 2011, he bolted himself in that apartment and shot himself. Over a thousand people attended his funeral.1
Veteran suicides average one every eighty minutes, an unprecedented eighteen a day or six thousand a year. They are 20 percent of all U.S. suicides, though veterans of all wars are only about 7 percent of the U.S. population. Between 2005 and 2007, the national suicide rate among veterans under age thirty rose 26 percent. In Texas—home of the largest military base in the world and the third-highest veteran population—rates rose 40 percent between 2006 and 2009. These rates continue, despite required mental health screenings of those leaving the military, more research on PTSD, and better methods for treating it. Veterans are also disproportionately homeless, unemployed, poor, divorced, and imprisoned. The statistics, however, do not disclose the devastating impact of war on veterans’ families and friends, on their communities, and on other veterans.2
The journey home to peace is perilous after war. We can make it less lonely and lethal. The veterans’ stories that unfold in this book describe a wound of war called “moral injury,” the violation of core moral beliefs. The stories reveal the lifelong struggle of veterans to live with its scars, the impact on their families, and the various ways our society can support the recovery of those who experience moral injury.
Moral injury is not PTSD. Many books on veteran healing confuse and conflate them into one thing. It is possible, though, to have moral injury without PTSD. The difference between them is partly physical. PTSD occurs in response to prolonged, extreme trauma and is a fear-victim reaction to danger. It produces hormones that affect the brain’s amygdala and hippocampus, which control responses to fear, as well as regulate emotions and connect fear to memory. A sufferer often has difficulty forming a coherent memory of a traumatic event or may even be unable to recall it. Symptoms include flashbacks, nightmares, hypervigilance, and dissociation.
Our ability to calm or extinguish fear and process emotions is often impaired by trauma, and a previous history of emotional trauma or a brain injury can make a person more susceptible to PTSD. Dissociative episodes can put sufferers back into experiences of terror and make them lose a sense of the present. They can feel unreasonable fear in ordinary situations or startle at sounds that mimic battle. They may experience a compulsive need to retell stories of terror, to reenact them, and to transfer past fear-inducing conditions to the present. With PTSD, memory erupts uncontrollably and retraumatizes the sufferer, which can make retrieving a coherent memory nearly impossible. Clinicians have treatments for PTSD, and such therapies are crucial for those diagnosed with it.
The moral questions emerge after the traumatizing symptoms of PTSD are relieved enough for a person to construct a coherent memory of his or her experience. We organize emotionally intense memories into a story in the brain’s prefrontal cortex, where self-control, planning, reasoning, and decision making occur. The mind creates a pattern from memory fragments stored in various places. Emotions are essential to moral conscience, but until people can construct enough of a coherent narrative to grasp what they did, they cannot evaluate it. The brain organizes experiences and evaluates them, based on people’s capacity to think about moral values and feel empathy at the same time.3
Marine veteran and philosopher Camillo “Mac” Bica used the term moral injury in his war journals from Vietnam, and, from the perspective both of warrior and of moral philosopher, he has explored the agony of this inner judgment against himself. Moral injury is the result of reflection on memories of war or other extreme traumatic conditions. It comes from having transgressed one’s basic moral identity and violated core moral beliefs.
Moral injury names a deep and old dilemma of war. The moral anguish of warriors defines much literature about war from ancient times to the present, such as the Greek Iliad and Indian Bhagavad-Gita, both war epics; the Hebrew Psalms; and modern novels and films, such as Catch-22, The Deer Hunter, or Matterhorn. We see discussions of moral injury in current memoirs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Packing Inferno: The Unmaking of a Marine, Tyler E. Boudreau, a veteran of Iraq and former Marine officer, reflects on the apparent inability of societies to learn from works of art and history about the torture that war inflicts on the souls of veterans. He concludes that societies have understood war only as much as they really wanted to learn about it and its deeper meaning.
Not everyone was so unable or unwilling to understand, Tyler notes. In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf portrayed the suicidal anguish after World War I of Septimus Smith as if she were a veteran herself. Tyler reflects on her perceptive depiction:
Still, not even Tyler could face telling the truth about war. After he left the Corps, he worked as a Casualty Assistance Calls Officer (CACO), which required him to call the parents of wounded Marines. He could not bring himself to call soldiers’ families and report honestly that, among the wounds they suffered, “your boy is coming home with a broken heart.” Never once was he able to say it, and he regrets it still that he did not.5
Moral injury results when soldiers violate their core moral beliefs, and in evaluating their behavior negatively, they feel they no longer live in a reliable, meaningful world and can no longer be regarded as decent human beings. They may feel this even if what they did was warranted and unavoidable. Killing, torturing prisoners, abusing dead bodies, or failing to prevent such acts can elicit moral injury. Handling human remains can be especially difficult; for example, in 2004, Jess Goodell served in the Marine Corps’ first Mortuary Affairs unit in Iraq, which required her to recover and process remains of fallen soldiers, including drawing their outlines where they had fallen, filling in missing parts in black. In her memoir, Shade It Black: Death and After in Iraq, she describes the devastating aftermath of this work of facing death every day. Seeing someone else violate core moral values or feeling betrayed by persons in authority can also lead to a loss of meaning and faith. It can even emerge from witnessing a friend get killed and feeling survivor guilt. In experiencing a moral conflict, soldiers may judge themselves as worthless; they may decide no one can be trusted and isolate themselves from others; and they may abandon the values and beliefs that gave their lives meaning and guided their moral choices. Recently, Veterans Affairs clinicians have begun to conceptualize moral injury as separate from PTSD and as a hidden wound of war.6
The consequences of violating one’s conscience, even if the act was unavoidable or seemed right at the time, can be devastating. Responses include overwhelming depression, guilt, and self-medication through alcohol or drugs. Moral injury can lead veterans to feelings of worthlessness, remorse, and despair; they may feel as if they lost their souls in combat and are no longer who they were. Connecting emotionally to others becomes impossible for those trapped inside the walls of such feelings. When the consequences become overwhelming, the only relief may seem to be to leave this life behind.
The tired truism, “war is hell,” is also true of its aftermath, but the aftermath can be endless. War has a goal and tours of duty that end; its torments are intense and devastating, but they are not perpetual. War offers moral shields of honor and courage. Its camaraderie bonds warriors together around a common purpose and extreme danger. War offers service to a larger cause; it stumbles on despair. On the other hand, moral injury feeds on despair. When the narcotic emotional intensity and tight camaraderie of war are gone, withdrawal can be intense. As memory and reflection deepen, negative self-judgments can torment a soul for a lifetime. Moral injury destroys meaning and forsakes noble cause. It sinks warriors into states of silent, solitary suffering, where bonds of intimacy and care seem impossible. Its torments to the soul can make death a mercy.
The suffering of moral injury is grounded in the basic humanity of warriors. That humanity lies deeper in them than its betrayal in war. They learned their ethical values first from their families, neighbors, schools, and religious and community organizations. Whether people are religious, spiritual, or secular, most of us are trained to respect others, to relate to a world bigger than ourselves, and to feel compassion for those who suffer. For many families, a military career is one way to embody core moral values like love of country and service to others.
When veterans return to our communities after war, we owe it to them and to ourselves to do our best to support their recovery. To do so, however, we must be willing to engage the same intense moral questions that veterans undertake about our own responsibility as a society for having sent them to war. This book is an invitation to accept that transformative process.
The military, which trains people to kill, also teaches moral values to all who serve. Soldiers are instructed in the principles of just war and the legal and ethical conduct of war, including the need to protect noncombatants and to refrain from torturing prisoners. People in the military often understand the principles of just war and international standards better than members of the religious and philosophical traditions that espouse them. Paradoxically, current military regulations require soldiers to fight all wars, regardless of their moral evaluations, which can create profound inner conflicts for them.
Combatants who support a war and serve willingly also experience moral injury because the actual conditions of war are morally anguishing. As every veteran of combat knows, the ideal of war service, the glamour of its heroics, and the training for killing fail to prepare warriors for its true horrors and moral atrocities. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially, present terrible moral dilemmas for engagement because the lines between civilians and combatants are invisible and because the absence of clear battle lines makes every situation potentially lethal. Even women, children, and family pets can be dangerous or used as shields. These category confusions are also moral confusions, and they are aggravated by the reflexive shooting methods the military started teaching after World War II: the training suppresses combatants’ ability to exercise moral discernment before taking action. Many veterans recount with anguish stories about shooting reflexively at unarmed civilians in a split second, without making a conscious decision to take a life. In addition, many soldiers experience repeated exposure to these morally compromising situations through multiple deployments.
War’s lingering phantoms haunt every society. In the bodies and souls of those who experience combat, war always comes home to the rest of us. Veterans’ families and communities, especially, carry these burdens. While the suicide rate is especially high among the veterans of the current wars, suicide still bedevils the eighteen million combat veterans in the United States. For the country has sent its forces into war nearly every year since 1945. During the years of the war in Vietnam, conscription and public resistance to the conflict traumatized the entire generation that reached adulthood between 1964 and 1975.
In many traditional societies, all returning soldiers were required to undergo a period of ritual purification and rehabilitation before re-entering their ordinary lives after war. For example, the Navajo people of the Southwest developed a ceremonial process called ’Anaa ’jí, or “the Enemy Way,” which was used to cure sickness that came from contact with a deceased non-Navajo, participation in war, fatal accidents, and other encounters with death, such as corpses and graves. Some forms of it took almost two weeks to complete. Its adaptation to modern times is used to reintegrate veterans of combat serving in the U.S. armed services and is supported by VA health professionals. In another example, Christian churches in the first millennium required anyone who “shed human blood” to undergo a rehabilitation process that included reverting to the status of someone who had not yet been baptized and was undergoing training in Christian faith. Now long in disuse, this ancient form of quarantine was required because early Christians understood that killing or participating in war, regardless of the reasons, injured the souls of those who fought. Returning soldiers were commonly expected to spend at least a year among the order of penitents.7
Whether we support or oppose a particular war, we contribute to a better, more moral society when we take responsibility for healing the devastating aftermath of combat. To accept responsibility requires people courageous enough to face the moral questions that war raises and people willing to listen compassionately and carefully to the moral anguish of veterans.
As the authors of this book, one an immigrant from Italy and the other an immigrant from Japan, we have been deeply affected by moral injury through combat veterans in our families. While neither of us is a veteran, we, like many millions of people, were born and raised under the shadow of war. As we relate below, we have also been deeply affected by our work with veterans today,
Gabriella grew up in Turin, also the hometown of Primo Levi, who wrote some of the most harrowing accounts of the effects of war on the human spirit. Recently, her cousin, a young southern Italian veteran who had participated in several humanitarian missions abroad, took a leave for depression. While on leave and without warning, he tried to kill his mother and then killed himself. His death was but one tragedy in her family’s long legacy of war.
Gabriella’s maternal family lived near Turin in the Cottian Alps of northern Italy on the border with France, where antifascism and war resistance during World War II were very strong. Three generations of women in her family talked incessantly about “the war.” Some stories were told to all; others were spoken in hushed tones, not for children to hear. The men said less in public, but they often gathered in veterans’ circles.
In 1943, Nazi forces occupied Italy. Gabriella’s grandmother Giulia and her older brother Albert joined the Resistance, motivated both by their Waldensian Protestant faith and their communist beliefs. They were in their mid-twenties and took the combat names of Franca and Ivo. Giulia already had five children; she placed them in different living situations until the end of the war. One of the younger girls was sent to stay with a family in Switzerland. The brothers stayed with Giulia’s mother Rachele and witnessed Nazi soldiers threatening to kill her because she would not disclose where her children were hiding. The Nazis burned their house to the ground. A partially damaged Bible was saved from the fire, which Gabriella’s great-grandmother Rachele gave to her as she was leaving to attend the Waldensian seminary in Rome. Gabriella’s mother was left in an orphanage for two years, and to this day, she claims no one explained what was happening to her or visited her there. Her fears of abandonment and difficulties in social relationships pose a constant challenge for her daughters. Gabriella says,
War was one of the main narratives of my upbringing. Even decades later, I keep discovering untold stories, layers of trauma, and invisible wounds that still inform the complex dynamics of my troubled family history and therefore of who I am today.
In Italy, everyone had direct experience of WWII, even women and children. When I was growing up in the seventies, war stories were still told everywhere: at family reunions, in church, in casual store conversations, in school curricula, in the books we were given to read.
My grandmother Giulia was jailed on a couple of occasions. Her brother Albert was captured in ’44, and in January of 1945, he was sent to the concentration camp of Mauthausen, just months before the end of the war. A political prisoner whose skills as a mechanic were in demand, he survived. He spoke proudly of having been a Partisan, but shared very little about Mauthausen. He used to explain, cryptically and not unlike Primo Levi, that only the worst people survived the camps. No one really dared to ask what he meant.
In spring 2011, Albert shot himself in the head at eighty-eight. He was in good health for his age, had a comfortable financial situation, and good family relationships.
In the hours after hearing about Albert’s death, as I was trying to make some sense of the news, I did a simple search online about him. To my surprise, I found the transcripts of a very long interview that Albert granted in 1982 for an oral history research project for a Resistance archive that had only been publicly available online since 2009.
With the simple and direct language of a man who came from generations of peasants and was never formally educated, Albert shared with his interviewer stories and thoughts that had never circulated in the family. When he started to see glimpses of the atrocities committed in Mauthausen, the full scope of which he fully realized only after the camp was liberated, his first reaction was to consider suicide: he thought about running toward the gates so he could be shot. Then, suddenly, an irresistible desire to live took hold of him. Albert wanted to survive, whatever it took.
One particular story kept haunting me. When the Allied forces were bombing the camp, Albert was regularly sent to hide in some trenches near his barrack because he was considered among the valuable labor force:
They made us go there to find shelter. . . . [I]t’s not that they really wanted to protect us, but only because we were like a machine they needed at that moment. When it rained it got very muddy . . . but then we did not want to go there anymore. . . . [T]hey were throwing ashes in those trenches, and we did not want to go there any longer because we knew that in those ashes there were our comrades that had been killed. They were the ashes from the cremation chambers . . . and the stench, this stench from the cremation chambers, you could smell it.
He had to find shelter, at twenty, awash in the ashes of the thousands who had been exterminated that day. I cannot know for sure what pushed Albert to shoot himself. But I do know that people who witness and fail to prevent atrocities experience moral injury. “The worst survive,” Albert used to tell us. For sure, the guilt and the horror stayed with him for the rest of his life. And we did not dare to ask about it.
Rita was born in 1950 to a Japanese mother in Fukuoka, Japan, a city just two hours from Nagasaki by train. Like other families in occupied Japan, Rita’s natal family struggled to rebuild their lives after the war. Her mother, Ayako Nakashima, gave up her ambition to be a teacher and trained as a nurse with the Red Cross. Rita’s birth father, a Puerto Rican in the U.S. Army, was sent to Korea when Rita was six months old. She was never told about him and did not learn of him until her mother died in 1983. Ayako worked in the U.S. Army hospital in Fukuoka, and, when Rita was two, she met and married Roy Brock, a veteran of World War II, a medic, and a career soldier. Because Rita learned English at the age of six, when Roy was ordered to Fort Riley, Kansas, she came to know him well only after they shared a language. But once they were in the United States, the two became very close as he encouraged her transition to American life, raising her to read great writers, to study art, and to attend Protestant chapel services on the base.
Rita grew up eavesdropping on her father’s card games with other soldiers, which was when they drank beer, smoked Camels, and told stories of World War II. She noticed that Roy’s stories of battles kept changing, as if his memory were faulty or he were making things up and forgot what he’d said. Sometimes he seemed to borrow details from other men’s stories. She suspected he lied much of the time, and, because he was otherwise an honest person, she wondered why he lied.
In 1966, Roy was sent to California’s arid Mojave Desert to train for the soggy jungles of Vietnam. Roy did two tours as the head of a field medical aid station, and throughout his time away, he sent cassette-tape messages to Rita and her mother. In recordings to Rita, he often began a story with, “Don’t tell your mother, I don’t want to worry her.” As if his tales would not worry his sixteen-year-old daughter.
Rita learned that Roy had received a reprimand for refusing to carry a gun. Then, Roy had run into a minefield and carried his wounded commanding officer to safety, which meant he was allowed to remain unarmed with impunity. He also did other unauthorized things, like providing medical services to Vietnamese civilians in the area. He described a young Vietnamese woman, the same age as Rita, whom he recruited to be his guide. She led him through the jungle to villages in the hills whenever he could leave his medic station in the hands of an assistant. Roy passed out antibiotics and painkillers to the sick and treated wounds among the injured. He spoke at length about the young guide’s intelligence, strength, and agility, her capacities for endurance, and her moral character and resolve to help her people.
Roy returned home in the fall of 1968 after his second tour, totally disillusioned and disheartened and a different father from the one who left in 1966. Announcing that “the Army today is not this man’s Army, not what I signed up for,” he retired a year short of thirty years, rather than stay in military service another minute. He became controlling with his children and uncommunicative, preferring to spend hours alone. In his fierce need to curtail Rita’s newfound freedom in college, he and she had a major physical fight that broke their relationship. She refused to live at home after that incident.
Not until many years after Roy died did Rita understand what had happened to him in World War II and Vietnam. She learned from her younger sister that he had been captured early in his time in World War II and was in a POW camp. When he was sent stateside, Walter Reed Hospital doctors gave him electroshock treatments and shipped him home in a near-catatonic state to Caledonia, Mississippi. Roy’s cousin Virginia Ann, who was the person he was closest to growing up, fleshed out this story in detail when Rita visited her in July 2011. The conversation began because Rita was explaining her work on moral injury in veterans:
Virginia Ann told me that when Roy came home from the war, he shook all the time. The family didn’t know what was wrong with him and worried whether he would ever be all right. But, because her mother had epilepsy, she said, “We were kinda used to having someone around who wasn’t all there all the time. We just took care of him and let him be.” It took him over a year to rally, but Virginia Ann suspects he had lost most of his memory. They never got much out of him about his war experience: “Makes you wonder, what happened to him that was so awful.”
But there was another POW in Caledonia, and Virginia Ann had heard him give a talk about his experiences, which she suspects were like Roy’s: “The guy told us that the prisoners were kept in the open, in pens like animals. They wore their uniforms until they rotted off their bodies. The Germans didn’t give them clothes—hell, they hardly even fed them. They were so hungry they’d eat just ’bout anything, grass or tree bark. It was awful. The guy said once he watched two soldiers fighting over a cricket, they were so hungry.”
What Virginia Ann said next shocked me. “You know,” she reflected, “Vietnam was real hard on your daddy, maybe worse than the first war. I don’t think he ever got over what they did to that Vietnamese girl he knew. I think she was like a guide or informant or something like that.”
“What happened to her?” I asked.
Some soldiers had captured her. Then, they tortured, raped, and killed her. Roy found the body. “I know he was pretty broken up inside and disgusted with those men. He never wanted to see them again or stay in the Army. He just couldn’t stand what happened to her,” Virginia Ann told me.
From the time he was eighteen until he was forty-five, Roy served as an enlisted man doing work he found important and meaningful. He served in two wars and survived. And then, his fellow soldiers tortured and murdered a young Asian woman the age of his own Asian daughter, a woman he may have placed in harm’s way by befriending her. He never got over it.
I try to imagine what he might have felt when he found that body, but I know I’ve never experienced anything that devastating. Looking back to when he came home, I understand now why the two of us had such a harrowing struggle over my independence, why he became suddenly so fierce about controlling me. He couldn’t save her, so he had to save me, perhaps. I’ll never know fully why he did what he did, but I have forgiven him, and I regret he died so soon of a heart attack, while we were still estranged.
OUR FAMILY EXPERIENCES have made us especially attuned to the cost of sending people to war, even when fighting may have been necessary. When we met nearly a decade ago, we found we shared a commitment to many ethical issues related to poverty, injustice, and violence. As the Afghanistan and Iraq wars escalated, we wondered how young veterans were coping with the aftermath of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. We knew that the Vatican, most Protestant denominations, moral philosophers, and a number of other religious leaders and groups had declared the war in Iraq unjust and in violation of international laws. We were searching for some approach to moral questions of war that went deeper than the ideologically polarized pro-war versus pacifist positions that characterized many debates about war. In addition, public opinion turned against the war in 2005, and as professors in higher education, we were concerned about the impact of the wars on a new generation of young adults. We believe that most moral decisions are based on relationships and empathy for those affected and that the most difficult decisions happen in morally complex situations with competing demands and contradictory principles. We agreed that protests against the war and moral arguments against it were not enough. We were also concerned about the alarming rates of veteran suicides, especially veterans under thirty years old.
In the winter of 2008, we met with documentary filmmakers, Catherine Ryan and Gary Weimberg of Luna Productions, who had created Soldiers of Conscience, an Emmy-nominated film that had touched us both deeply. It follows eight soldiers who fought in Iraq, four of whom believed they had done the right thing and four who chose to apply for conscientious objector status after their first deployment. In showing how all eight had weighed moral questions, we realized that hearing the moral voices of veterans about their war service was important, not only for nuancing debates about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also for helping the public understand society’s responsibility for them and how soldiers struggle with conscience in war. We learned that it was easy to use our own moral position on a war as a defensive barrier that closed our hearts to the kind of deep listening that transformed us.
We thought that a Truth Commission on Conscience in War (TCCW) might be a helpful approach to putting the moral issues before the public. We each had experiences with previous truth commissions as researchers of their processes and as organizers of them. We believed they opened people to truth in unique ways and enabled a deep quality of listening that is rare in society. In planning the TCCW, we learned that many veterans, regardless of their moral position on the war they fought, struggle with moral conscience after fighting. We heard from veterans who served willingly, believing the wars to be just, and others who opposed the wars. We wanted to encourage conversations about war across lines of difference, so that people might work together to support moral conscience in veterans and those serving in the military.
When we began the two years of work it took to create the Truth Commission, we did not know what would result from testimonies of such a range of combat veterans. In addition to the veterans, we heard from a VA psychiatrist, a legal expert on conscientious objection, three religious leaders—Jewish, Christian, and Muslim—who explained the criteria for the moral conduct of war from their traditions, and a seasoned war correspondent who described the impact of war on soldiers and societies. We invited a wide range of leaders to be commissioners, some of whom affirmed military service, others who were veterans, others who advocated just war and believed it was seldom used adequately before the rush to war, and still others who were pacifists. The public hearing in March 2010 at the Riverside Church in New York presented fourteen witnesses and drew five hundred members of the public.8
As we listened intently to powerful testimonies for three hours, the moral weight of what we heard moved us deeply. On the day following the public hearing, the seventy-five truth commissioners and fourteen testifiers met in private to discuss what we had heard and what we wanted to recommend. As part of the preparation for this meeting, we asked the commissioners to read the new VA research on moral injury, which was extremely helpful to us in understanding the testimony we heard. The testifiers and commissioners recommended unanimously that our communities should learn more about moral injury. In the wake of that recommendation, the two of us and Rev. Herman Keizer Jr., host of the TCCW and in military service for forty years, worked to create a center for soul repair to further research, deepen understanding, and offer education about moral injury. We have received support and encouragement from many others who participated in the Truth Commission. In June 2012, the Soul Repair Center became a reality at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas.
Three years ago, we could not have imagined how much we would learn, where this work would take us, or how far our network of friends would expand. In the following pages, you will find insights about the moral struggle of veterans from some we have come to know through the film and the TCCW. In addition, four of the veterans who testified at the Truth Commission, Camillo “Mac” Bica, Herman Keizer Jr., Pamela Lightsey, and Camilo Mejía have generously offered their stories for this book, so that others might understand more fully the cost of serving in war. In Pamela’s story, we learn what it means to be a military veteran with a son serving in Iraq. We invite you on a journey through these pages that will change your life, as it has changed ours.