The Army needs its Soldiers to kill without thinking too much about the moral implications before or after pulling the trigger.
—Paul D. Fritts, Major and Chaplain, U.S. Army
Broad shouldered and lean at six foot two, Nikki Rudolph, an affable sandy-haired Californian, was twenty-two years old when he was sent as a marine infantryman to Afghanistan, where he shot and killed a young boy. This was not uncommon in the murderous confusion of our recent wars, where farmers and mothers and young kids might seize a weapon and shape-shift in a moment into a combatant and back again to an innocent civilian, and young Americans peering into the murk would have a moment to decide: kill or not. This time, an exhausting firefight with Taliban insurgents had dragged on for hours across the superheated desert wastes and tree-lined irrigation canals of Helmand Province. Late that afternoon, Nik saw from the corner of his eye someone darting around the corner of an adobe wall, spraying bullets from an assault rifle held against his small hips. Nik swiveled his M4 carbine, tightened his finger on the trigger, and saw that it was a boy of maybe twelve or thirteen. Then he fired.
According to the military’s exacting legal principles and rules, it was a justifiable kill, even laudable, an action taken against an enemy combatant in defense of Nik himself and his fellow marines. But now Nik is back home in civilian life, where killing a child violates the bedrock moral ideals we all hold. His action that day, righteous in combat, nonetheless is a bruise on his soul, a painful violation of the simple understanding of right and wrong that he and all of us carry subconsciously through life.
Those two emotions, pride in having prevailed in a firefight and the dark shadow of wrongdoing, together illustrate the baffling and sometimes cruel paradox that so often dominates the lives of those we send into war. Duty and honor, and self-preservation, define Nik’s decision to pull the trigger. At home, strangers thank him for his service, and politicians celebrate him and other combat veterans as heroes. And Nik carries on his conscience a child’s death.
Americans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan are coming to understand Nik’s lingering pain as a moral injury, a trauma as real as a flesh wound. In its most simple and profound sense, moral injury is a jagged disconnect from our understanding of who we are and what we and others ought to do and ought not to do. Experiences that are common in war—inflicting purposeful violence, witnessing the sudden violent maiming of a loved buddy, the suffering of civilians—challenge and often shatter our understanding of the world as a good place where good things should happen to us, the foundational beliefs we learn as infants. The broader loss of trust, loss of faith, loss of innocence, can have enduring psychological, spiritual, social, and behavioral impact.
Each of us, of course, has experienced at least a twinge of moral regret and sometimes deeper and lasting moral injury. History is marked by immense human calamities and periods of unspeakable moral violation. Yet the moral jeopardy of war, especially in the wars the United States began and fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, is different. These wars demanded the intense and prolonged participation of a tiny fraction of the nation’s youth in sustained campaigns built on the intentional violation of the ancient sanctions against killing. Those who returned did so without the healing rituals of cleansing and forgiveness practiced by past generations. Threads of anger and betrayal run through their stories: violations of their sense of “what’s right” by the Afghan and Iraqi civilians who turned violently against them, by an American public that turned its back on the war, and by the lack of clear victories in Iraq and Afghanistan that might have justified their sacrifices.
In my experience, to be in war is to be exposed to moral injury. Almost all return with some sense of unease about what we’ve seen and done, about how well we and others have lived up to our own standards. Most of us are unprepared to disentangle the emotions of anger, sorrow, shame, or remorse that can result. It is common, researchers say, for those who have experienced a moral wound to react with cynicism or bitterness; to distrust authority; to be more prone to anxiety, depression; perhaps to seek comfort in isolation or the self-medication of drugs, alcohol, or overwork. Most common, to never talk about the war.
Trauma experts such as Brett Litz, a psychologist who is pioneering moral injury research at Boston University and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Boston Healthcare System, also reference as symptoms of moral injury terms with which I was unfamiliar—dysphoria (severe distress), for one, and anhedonia (the inability to experience pleasure). But despite impressive advances in the understanding of moral injury and some breakthrough therapies that hold the promise of helping those most afflicted, my sense is that many veterans, like Nik, carry their regret and sorrow and heartache on into life and rarely speak of it. In that sense, moral injury is the enduring if hidden signature wound of our most recent, and longest, wars.
It is important to understand that while some veterans cannot find peace after a moral injury, most of those who have felt morally injured are not disabled, are not broken or dangerous, do not fit the insulting stereotype of combat vets as lunatic unemployed, homeless, drug-addled criminals.
Nor does moral injury necessarily describe legal wrongdoing. Moral injury does not imply that an atrocity or a war crime has been committed, simply that an individual’s ethos has been violated. “War is vile. There are some things that are more vile, and that’s why we fight, but that vileness affects you down to your core,” David Sutherland once told me. A soldier for thirty years, Sutherland commanded the twelve thousand men and women of the Third Brigade Combat Team task force of the First Cavalry Division. For fifteen months in 2006 and 2007 in Iraq, they fought day and night. Sutherland had vowed to personally honor every one of his badly wounded and dead troops, and he did that, visiting hospitals and morgues, putting his hand on the body bag or head of each one and praying. It nearly broke him. “Guilt, shame, sorrow, bereavement [are] normal human reactions, but as commander I couldn’t shut down. I was in a battle every single day. I’d wake up to an IED [improvised explosive device] exploding and go to bed with an IED exploding.”
Staff Sergeant Donnie D. Dixon was part of Sutherland’s security detail as they traveled the battlefields, and on September 29, 2007, Dixon was shot and killed. He was thirty-seven and left a wife and four children. “When Sergeant Dixon was killed, that affected all seventeen members of my security detachment, and some of us more than others: we were standing right by him when it happened,” Sutherland told me. “How do you not believe this is a moral injury?”
For many of us, such war-related moral injuries are invisible because we are so disconnected from the lives of the men and women who serve in the military. Almost two million of them are home from Iraq or Afghanistan, proud of their difficult and demanding service and profoundly affected by their experiences at war. Most of it was lived in vivid extremes far removed from the ordinary: there were dazzling highs and depressing, boring, and sometimes despairing lows; the burning devotion of small-unit brotherhood, the adrenaline rush of danger. The pride of service, the thrill of raw power. The brutal ecstasy of life on the edge and the deep grief of loss. Nik Rudolph thinks of it as “the worst, best experience of my life.”
But war is an alternate moral universe where many of the rules and values we grew up with are revoked. Do unto others, suspended. An alien world in which complex moral puzzles, like confronting a child combatant, demand instant decisions by those who are least fit to make them, for reasons of incomplete neurological development and life experience. An environment for which the United States has trained its warriors exhaustively in physical fitness and military tactics but left them psychologically and spiritually unprepared. An environment from which they return to find their new understanding of the world and who they have become fits awkwardly or not at all into their old lives in peacetime America. They return to a civilian public whose sporadic attention to veterans largely fails to comprehend or acknowledge the experiences they have absorbed on our behalf.
This is the dark truth of war, a secret we are all complicit in keeping. We know, though we rarely acknowledge it, that war imposes terrible costs on human beings and that, while some are strengthened by the experience, others buckle. We understand at some level why combat veterans shrink from sharing their stories: we don’t want to know them. In our sometimes-frenzied veneration of war heroes, we are too eager to rush past the shadowed doorway where lurks what the poet Peter Marin calls “the terrible and demanding wisdom” of war. In the lofty discussions about putting “boots on the ground” among Washington’s strategists and national security experts, those in government service or awaiting their turn in the city’s comfortable think tanks, there is little room for considering the inevitable cost, the well-being of those men and women we will send next.
But out there, it will get worse. The brutal new conflicts that tempt American intervention as we move deeper into the twenty-first century pose intense new moral challenges. The old signposts of morally acceptable behavior, the laws of war, the Geneva Conventions, the just war doctrine, seem increasingly irrelevant in a world of drone killings, the beheading of hostages, and the deliberate massacre of schoolchildren by Islamist extremists. Traditional ideas about “victory” over these groups are obsolete, battered relics of a bygone age, given their ability to inspire disaffected youth and the wildfire spread of weapons technology that has enabled them to armor their utter ruthlessness with the killing power once reserved for nations. Moral challenges face us as well back home as we continue to recruit, train, and dispatch a tiny number of our youth for military actions about which we are deeply skeptical and for battlefield risks we ourselves are not willing to take.
What we know of this latest generation of veterans, and what we fear of the future, demand that we finally pay urgent attention to the moral dimension of war. As we consider committing more young Americans to twenty-first-century warfare, we must do so with full knowledge and acceptance of the price they will pay on our behalf.
I crossed paths with Lance Corporal Nik Rudolph and his fellow marines when I deployed to Afghanistan as an embedded journalist with his unit, the First Battalion, Sixth Marine Regiment, or One-Six. Nik is the kind of marine who always wanted to be a marine. His dad was a marine, an artillery spotter and a recon scout. As a toddler Nik wore the Marine Corps T-shirts his dad would bring home after being away on long field exercises. Nik graduated to playing with GI Joe action figures and building forts. After high school he studied auto mechanics, but there were no jobs in the downturn of 2008; even car dealerships were closing. So Nik did what he’d always yearned to do: he enlisted and was soon on his way to boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina.
I spent months with the marines of One-Six on their first tour in Afghanistan. But it would be a few years before we could sit down and sort through all that had gone on during their second deployment, in 2010, and in particular on the February day when the marines of One-Six and the Taliban were locked in that firefight, a fury of reckless rage and exhaustion that went on for nine hours. The battle had erupted, as the marines later understood it, after Taliban insurgents castrated a young boy in a nearby village, knowing his family would summon marines for help and the marines would come, walking into a deadly ambush that would ignite the firefight. Then there comes that instant, an eternity Nik has replayed over and over in his mind, when he has to choose to kill or not. He squeezes the trigger, and the boy’s body spasms and hits the ground. Now what? “We just collected up that weapon and kept moving,” Nik explained. “Going from compound to compound, trying to find them [the insurgents]. Eventually they hopped in a car and drove off into the desert.”
There was a long silence after Nik finished the story. He’s lived with it for years, yet the telling still catches in his throat. Eventually, he sighed. “He was just a kid. But I’m sorry, I’m trying not to get shot and I don’t want any of my brothers getting hurt, so when you are put in that kind of situation… it’s shitty that you have to, like… shoot him. You know it’s wrong. But… you have no choice.
“Thank God he didn’t know how to fuckin’ aim,” he added morosely.
Nik is not crushed by this experience. He has a quick laugh and a life he enjoys. He dresses carefully and is polite and deferential. The regret, confusion, and sorrow he brought back from Afghanistan remain beneath his skin. But they break the surface now and again, at first leading him into heavy drinking and an effort to see a civilian therapist. He knows his demons are there. I asked him once if he found that moral injuries like killing a child heal over time, the bruise eventually fading. No, he said. “It will all be there.”
Two years after Nik Rudolph came home from Afghanistan, Shira Maguen, a clinical psychologist at the San Francisco VA Health Care System and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, published another in a series of research papers on the psychological impact of wartime killing. In her study of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans who had killed in combat, just over half had killed only enemy combatants; the rest had killed both enemy combatants and at least one noncombatant, a male civilian, a woman or child, or an elder. All those who had killed were twice as likely to develop frequent and severe psychological symptoms as those who had not. Those who had killed a noncombatant, she found, were the most likely to carry home the depression, anger, shame, and guilt of moral injury.
You don’t have to go to war, of course, to feel depressed, anxious, or regretful. All of us carry the nicks and bruises of everyday experiences, and some, the deeper wounds of sorrow, grief, and guilt. But the raw, toxic violence of war can wound the soul more deeply, in ways that combat veterans know and rarely can describe to outsiders. Many have felt the crushing weight of helplessness as they are thrust into situations where they seem to have no moral agency, and any decision will feel wrong.
In recent years, we have begun to recognize that the psychological damage suffered in war far exceeds physical injury. That many of those who were caught up in war struggle during and after their service with the mysterious, troubling emotional storms that often afflict them. We have come to group all these psychological injuries under the label “PTSD.” That’s wrong.
Post-traumatic stress disorder is biology. It is the body’s involuntary physical reaction as we relive the intense fear of a life-threatening event and the scalding emotional responses that follow: terror and a debilitating sense of helplessness. Our response to threats, to danger, is a primitive involuntary mechanism developed for survival by earth’s earliest life forms. For us, fear triggers an alarm system set deep in the amygdala, in the oldest part of our brain. The alarm causes adrenaline and the steroid cortisol to spurt into the bloodstream, making us hyperalert, breathing hard with muscles tensed, eyes wide, pulse racing, ready for “fight or flight.” That’s a necessary response to danger, whether it’s an imminent head-on collision or a battlefield ambush, and in war, people can experience it repeatedly. What’s not appropriate is when that response is triggered by a false alarm. The amygdala picks up what it identifies as a sign of danger and goes into action, not knowing it’s no longer in Afghanistan, and a veteran suddenly is cowering from fireworks or a car alarm. Understandably, he or she will try to avoid situations that might trigger those reactions, an effort that can lead to isolation. But avoidance isn’t always possible. A vet may be sauntering happily into Walmart and involuntarily recoil from the sudden onrush of chaos and noise and light in the vast bustling space. Instantly and involuntarily, he is in a full-blown danger response. He flushes bright red, sweat runs down his back, and gasping for breath he runs out of Walmart and smacks his fist into a fence post and yells at his kids. He’s depressed for the rest of the day—What’s happening to me?—and sleepless and anxious at night lest the nightmares come. Next day he’s irritable at work because he hasn’t slept, then snaps at his wife because he can’t explain what’s wrong. Even he doesn’t understand it.
Clinically, this is described as “fear-circuitry dysregulation,” but mental health professionals themselves disagree on the causes and precise parameters of PTSD. The official definition, written and sanctified by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), has shifted four times since it was first adopted in 1980. PTSD is real, and I have seen it among the combat vets of Iraq and Afghanistan and previous wars. The mechanism of PTSD is well understood: perceived threat and automatic response. It’s simple enough that the VA has hired IBM to set up a computerized “clinical reasoning” database to assist physicians in making faster diagnoses of PTSD and to accelerate the process of selecting the right treatment plan.
Although battlefield PTSD and moral injury can occur together, Nik Rudolph doesn’t have PTSD. What Nik struggles with is not the involuntary recurrence of fear. He’s okay with the crowds at Walmart. He doesn’t startle at loud noises. In contrast with veterans who’ve experienced PTSD, Nik didn’t feel the pain of his moral injury at the moment of the incident. It was only later, well after he’d pulled the trigger, that the implications of what he’d done began to weigh on him. Moral injury occurs “when a person has time to reflect on a traumatic experience,” Major Paul D. Fritts wrote in a paper at Yale Divinity School, which he attended after serving two army combat tours in Iraq.
That’s Nik. He is bothered with the memory of that Afghan boy and with questions about what he did that day. Like all of us, Nik had always thought of himself as a good person. But does a good person kill a child? Follow that line of thinking, and it quickly becomes No, a good person doesn’t kill a child, therefore I must be a bad person. And think of all the other bad things I’ve done. Left unattended, a moral injury that began as a bruise on the soul can continue to disrupt life. If I killed a child, could I ever be a trustworthy father? The symptoms can be similar to those of PTSD: anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, anger. But sorrow, remorse, grief, shame, bitterness, and moral confusion—What is right?—signal moral injury, while flashbacks, loss of memory, fear, and a startle complex seem to characterize PTSD.
Most of us, like Nik, have a firm and deeply personal understanding of life’s moral rules, of justice and injustice, right and wrong. That sense, our inner compass, is built on beliefs we begin to acquire as infants. Being fed and cared for and loved, the psychologist Ronnie Janoff-Bulman wrote, teaches us that the world is a benevolent and meaningful place, that we can expect good things to happen. Infants begin to develop a sense of self-worth and trust—I’m being cuddled and fed and kept warm, so I must be a good person to deserve this. That dawning awareness is what the philosopher and psychologist William James called “our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means.” These earliest learned beliefs are extremely powerful, buttressed by later experience into a sense of cautious optimism “that things will work out as well as can reasonably be expected,” as psychologist Aaron Antonovsky has written. Most of us, through experience and over time, modify that sunny view. The world is not always benevolent; some people are jerks; some leaders are despicable.
Still, I think most of us like to believe that we act in good faith. We know we should follow the Golden Rule even if most of the time we don’t, and we get angry when others treat us ill. Against evidence to the contrary, I still hope that our leaders are somewhat competent and honest and act in our best interest. Like most people, I want my life to go well. We all want the best for those we love, spouse or child or battle buddy. If bad things happen, we hope they won’t happen to us.
But war, by its very nature, tends to suddenly and violently upend these remaining moral beliefs. Things don’t go well in war, whose very purpose demands death and destruction. Innocents and those we love will suffer and die; some leaders will make bad decisions that put ourselves and our friends in peril. Thou shalt not kill hardly applies when your job is to kill people. Army Lieutenant Colonel Doug Etter says it most simply. He is a National Guard chaplain with two combat tours in Iraq. It was Etter, a Presbyterian minister, who led the ceremony of the burning of regrets in the stone baptismal font in Habbaniyah. War, Etter said, “is a sin.”
PTSD has little to do with sin. It is a psychological wound caused by something done to you. Someone with PTSD is a victim. A moral injury is a self-accusation, prompted by something you did, something you failed to do, as well as something done to you. Combat veterans may feel a moral injury from being unintentionally responsible for the death of a civilian. Some may feel regret and sorrow for not having spotted the sniper who wounded a buddy. A flight medic may feel guilt and shame for failing to save a mortally wounded soldier; a young woman who enlisted to help Iraqis build a new country and found only destruction and death may feel bitter and betrayed by her leaders and may become deeply cynical about public service. Military families, too, absorb moral injury, living with loneliness and fear and perhaps emotions of anger and betrayal along with their pride of service and sacrifice.
The loss of a warrior’s moral guideposts can be as devastating as a hiker losing the trail in a blizzard. Where so much is wrong, discovering and holding on to your own morally comfortable bearings can be difficult. Stress, exhaustion, loneliness, and the peer pressure of small units at war can make such reflection impossible. Guilt, the recognition that I did a bad thing or I failed, can harden into shame: I’m a bad person. Mild or severe depression and anxiety can follow, along with anger and bitterness. Alcohol and drugs can seem like an easy way to ease the pain. Shame can lead to risky acts of indiscipline, such as drunk driving, brawling, or mouthing off to superiors. That’s behavior that could result in a bad-conduct discharge, which bars a veteran from receiving the services of the VA, a growing problem among Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans.
The moral pain of warfighters is reason enough for us to pay close attention, but there are practical considerations as well. Disillusioned, angry, or bitter soldiers can become a military-readiness issue by dropping out or underperforming. Once out of the service, veterans may find it difficult to reconcile their wartime actions with the moral standards and expectations of home. Unable or unwilling to share the emotions of moral injury, some veterans choose isolation, depriving their families, colleagues, and communities of their presence, their skills, and their insights—a loss for all of us.
The U.S. involvement in Vietnam was a watershed in our understanding of war trauma, and even though it took almost a decade for the mental health profession to officially recognize PTSD, tens of thousands of combat veterans eventually found some relief through psychotherapy. But because several of the indicators of PTSD—anxiety, depression, anger, isolation, insomnia, self-medication—are shared with moral injury, it took time for therapists and researchers to unbraid the two. Jonathan Shay, a former staff psychiatrist at the VA medical center in Boston, worked for years with Vietnam combat veterans diagnosed with PTSD before he could see the scope of the war trauma he described in his breakthrough 1994 book, Achilles in Vietnam. To fully capture that facet of war trauma he felt was not PTSD, Shay coined the phrase “moral injury.” Cleanly differentiating it from PTSD, Shay wrote: “Moral injury is an essential part of any combat trauma that leads to lifelong psychological injury. Veterans can usually recover from horror, fear, and grief once they return to civilian life, so long as ‘what’s right’ has not also been violated.” Despite such leaps in understanding war trauma, the U.S. government’s response to moral injury is light-years behind its ability to recruit, arm, and deploy young men and women into combat. “In the military and the VA, moral injury is a uniquely and significantly unaddressed war zone harm,” says psychologist Litz.
Litz’s colleague William Nash also has explored this wartime clash of moral values as his lifework. Nash is a combat psychiatrist, a groundbreaking researcher whose academic work is enriched by his battlefield experience: he was awarded a Bronze Star in combat with marines in Falluja. He holds a medical degree from the University of Illinois College of Medicine and did his residency in psychiatry at the Naval Medical Center San Diego. During thirty years’ active duty in the navy, he established programs on combat stress and trauma and produced a long list of academic research papers—all aimed at understanding war trauma and moral injury and helping young warriors cope. In 2015 he was named director of mental health for the Marine Corps.
Nash is one of a growing circle of researchers and mental health practitioners who are defining the scope of moral injury and experimenting with promising new forms of therapy. Among these experts are Litz, Shira Maguen, and Amy Amidon at the Naval Medical Center San Diego, where the therapy group is the only government-sanctioned treatment for moral injury that I have found.
Over hours of conversation, Nash asserted that the moral values we learn early in life, and those that are reinforced in basic military training, represent the best of humanity’s ideals. “It’s these values that give you some chance of doing something good in a war and limiting collateral damage,” he told me. “The problem is that war will break these values.
“There’s an inherent contradiction between the warrior code, how these guys define themselves, what they expect of themselves—to be heroes, the selfless servants who fight for the rest of us—and the impossibility in war of ever living up to those ideals. It cannot be done. Not by anybody there,” Nash told me one day. “So how do they forgive themselves, forgive others, for failing to live up to the ideals without abandoning the ideals?” Not easily. When they come home, he said, “something is damaged, broken. They wonder, in their little sphere of influence, How well did I or didn’t I live up to those ideals? Very often, the answer is what kills them. They feel betrayed; they don’t trust in these values and ideals anymore.”
A military chaplain, Army Captain Bryan Coggins, once told me of a soldier who had come to him in great mental anguish. Months earlier he had been in a firefight and had his rifle sight trained on an insurgent, but instead of firing at the man’s chest—the “center of mass” that troops are taught to aim for—he consciously lowered his weapon and shot him in the stomach, knowing that would cause a lingering and painful death. As an army medic worked to save the man, the soldier and his squad members gathered around and watched the man die in agony. “Then the guilt rushed in, about the reality of what he’d done and the decision he had made,” Coggins said. “He had killed before—he was infantry—he never told me the exact number he had killed, but none of the others had been issues for him. Until he realized, ‘I’m not just killing because I have to, but because I want this to be a suffering,’” and he knew that to be wrong. A painful violation of his own moral values. Coggins counseled him at a VA medical center where the soldier was a mental health patient being treated for drug addiction. “The drugs were a coping mechanism,” Coggins said. “His heart wasn’t as dark as his action in that moment when he shot. He didn’t set out that day to make someone suffer. He just made the decision in an instant. And he was seeking forgiveness.”
As the soldier was talking about it, Coggins asked him, What if the insurgent had survived? What if the medic was able to save him? What would you say to him? Let me be him, Coggins said. Talk to me as if I were this man. And he did. “A lot of it was an apology, and there was a level of self-forgiveness to it,” Coggins said. “He wasn’t religious, but he was spiritual enough so that he felt some concept of God forgiving him for this.”
But in American society and especially within the military, there is no ready mechanism for acknowledgment of moral injury or forgiveness, and even self-forgiveness can be a hard concept to nail down. Nik Rudolph came home to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, in January 2012 after three deployments, a total of sixteen months in combat, and he was sinking in a downward spiral. Drinking so heavily that he picked up a DUI and got busted a rank, losing his prized position as a squad leader. Seeking help, he sneaked off post to see a civilian therapist. When I asked him what prompted him to do that, he shrugged. “Not being able to… not make sense of things in my head, like, feeling bad about certain things that happened and things that I couldn’t prevent. I didn’t want to do this on a marine base,” he said. “They’ve got group sessions and you’d get all these angry fuckin’ marines in one room, they’re like ‘Take a number,’ and I just didn’t want it to be a pissing contest. I wanted to talk to somebody one-on-one.” The therapist prescribed sleeping pills, and Nik slept through morning formation twice, getting slapped with two charges of unauthorized absence. All these demerits added up to what the Marine Corps considers a “pattern of misconduct.”
At war, Nik had been exposed to IED blasts six times and shot once, while he was manning a machine gun in a firefight. He’d risked his life, led men he loved in combat, and seen some of them brutally killed. And now that he’d come home sick at heart, the Marine Corps, which he also loved, meant to kick him out. And it did, handing him an honorable discharge in return for Nik’s promise to leave immediately. He signed the papers, hopped gleefully into his ’68 Ford-100 pickup, and accelerated to sixty miles per hour down Holcomb Boulevard, so fast that his hubcap popped off as he tore around the curve just after the Burger King. Fuck it, he thought to himself, Lejeune can have it.
He lived for a time with a marine buddy in Philadelphia and worked as a bodyguard for a security firm. Then he headed back to California, where he studied to be a firefighter and EMT. The physical wounds he collected in Afghanistan have healed. But he can’t leave the war behind. Like many veterans, Nik has found the routine of civilian life flat after the adrenaline rush and urgency of war. And the child he shot weighs on his mind. The images break his concentration and disturb his sleep; he’s often mildly depressed. It’s hard to see the point of anything, he said. He trusts no one except his marine buddies. “It’s just everything I’ve seen, things I had to do,” he tried to explain. Now twenty-seven, Nik is likable and, at least outwardly, seems content. His manner is careful and deliberate. He jokes that he’s accident-prone and places his feet precisely when he walks. He speaks the same way, choosing his words guardedly, and when he comes back around to the child-shooting incident, his speech slows. “I really didn’t hesitate. I knew it had to be done, so I just turned, pivoted… fuckin’… I had to shoot him.”
Small wonder that combat veterans are reluctant to try to explain all this to civilians. Especially when they are called heroes and celebrated as a new Greatest Generation. One of Nik Rudolph’s marine buddies from Afghanistan is Stephen Canty. When he was growing up near Charlottesville, Virginia, Stephen would occasionally ask his grandfather about his combat experiences. But Grandpa, a marine who fought in the Pacific in World War II, rarely talked about what he’d seen and done. Stephen was a thoughtful and articulate kid. He read widely, attracted girls with his mop of brown hair and lopsided smile, and whizzed through the advanced academics of the elite Blue Ridge Governor’s School. “He was born carrying a briefcase and an encyclopedia,” his mother, Micheline, proudly told me.
But Stephen itched to go to war. One day he came home and announced he was enlisting in the marines and going to Afghanistan. He was seventeen at the time and had never realized there was pain behind Grandpa’s grumpy refusal to talk about his wartime service. Never realized why Grandpa had other unexplained personality quirks. One was his outright refusal to eat pork chops. At his grandfather’s funeral recently, Stephen finally heard the story from one of Grandpa’s war buddies. Grandpa Canty and another scout-sniper had gotten trapped behind Japanese lines and concealed themselves in an abandoned foxhole beneath the bodies of Japanese dead. They could hear Japanese soldiers prowling around, probing for the two Americans, and every so often they’d get up and sprint, ducking fusillades of fire. Running and hiding, they lasted for thirty days scavenging for food and water but finally made their way back to friendly lines, where Grandpa Canty, having shrunk to ninety-nine pounds, devoured stacks of pork chops. Afterward, he could never eat another one. And he never mentioned the trauma of hiding beneath enemy bodies or his terror of being suddenly bayoneted.
Now his grandson was intent on signing up for war, too. “Don’t do it,” he pleaded. “You’re too goddamn smart, boy.”
But Stephen went.
Like the soldiers of the Pennsylvania National Guard who burned their secrets and regrets in Habbaniyah before they returned home, Canty was struggling to become a civilian again when I caught up with him. After we’d talked several times, he invited me to meet with some of his marine buddies. Stephen was learning to make documentaries and had been meeting methodically with the marines of Charlie Company, One-Six, men who’d fought together during two tours in Afghanistan. Canty was asking them to talk on videotape about their experiences in Afghanistan and their awkward and painful transitions back to civilian life. Canty and Nik Rudolph and others met with me several times, in hotel rooms in Philadelphia and New Jersey. I set out beer and my tape recorder, and for hours they talked, we drank, and I listened.
A lot of killing had taken place during their deployments, Afghans the marines killed and marines who were killed there. Canty was a SAW gunner, carrying the squad automatic weapon, a light (twenty-one pounds, with a two-hundred-round magazine) machine gun. That second deployment was spent almost entirely in the Helmand Province town of Marjah, where the marines in 2010 met unexpectedly stiff resistance from Taliban fighters. Canty and several other marines were living in an abandoned dirt-floored shop front, trying one day to rig a tarp for shade when semiautomatic rifle shots kicked up dust in the street outside and an Afghan policeman and a six-year-old boy fell. More shots followed as several children and another Afghan cop scurried for shelter. The marines sprinted out to help, past the child lying facedown in the dirt, Canty lugging his combat first-aid kit—he’d had a weeklong course in trauma first aid—and into a stifling room where he found one of the wounded policemen writhing on a blanket, moaning and bleeding, the smell of blood and sweat overpowering.
Canty yanked out his latex gloves, but they’d melted together in the summer heat. Throwing them aside, he tore open a tourniquet and leaned in and strapped it around the man’s upper thigh, above the bullet hole from which blood was pumping. Cinched it tight. The man gasped in pain. “I encouraged him to pray, and began it for him in broken Arabic,” Canty wrote later, in an essay he called “A Sunny Afternoon.”
The man nodded, but the gesture made him again writhe in pain. He begged for water, and someone brought it in a cup. When Canty straightened up, he noticed the three terrified children huddled in a corner of the room. He asked a policeman to get them water, then handed one of the children a string of prayer beads he kept in his pocket. To reassure the children, he wrote, “I smiled a tired smile.”
Outside the firefight had intensified, marines and Afghan police exchanging shots from doorways and windows. With his SAW, Canty “fired bursts at anything that seemed appropriate, like ominous doorways and bushes.” Then he remembered the boy who’d been shot. “Peering out into the street from around a corner, I saw the boy in a pool of blood, his face caked in mud… the boy was shot through the back of the head, his eye blown out.” An Afghan policeman named Khan ran and retrieved the body and brought him inside. “I checked his radial pulse, the hole in his head not registering. His pulse was weak, and for some reason I thought he might have a chance.” Canty lifted the child and cradled him in his arms and ran with Khan toward an open patch of land where the medevac helicopters would land. They loped past a white van stopped in the street; the driver, an elderly man dressed in white, cried out and began sobbing when he saw the mangled face of his son. Canty knelt and rechecked the boy’s pulse. He found it, but it was very weak. By the time they got to the landing zone, the boy was dead.
The firefight died away as dusk settled. The old man came to get the body of his son. Canty trudged back to his room and collapsed beside another marine on an old wooden bed they used as a couch. “I took off my helmet and ran a hand through my matted, sweaty hair,” he wrote. “Someone gave me a cigarette. We were mostly quiet, the comedown from the adrenaline hitting us and exhaustion setting in. We had seen truly innocent people, even kids, get hurt before, but it is a hard callus to form. I still remember the smell of that stale tobacco and the coppery, almost-metallic, tang of blood.”
There’s never time in war to absorb experiences like that. Not long afterward came another firefight. This time, Canty told me, “I hit this guy a couple of times with the SAW, and one of the bullets bounced off his spinal cord and came out his eyeball.” Canty wasn’t boasting; he seemed slightly puzzled that such a thing had really happened. The man was brought into the marines’ outpost in a wheelbarrow, still breathing. “He’s laying there like, you know, clinging to the last seconds of his life looking up at me with one of his eyes and just like pulp in the other, and I was like twenty years old at the time.”
It’s a terrible image. But Canty said he’s just numb to it, insisting that he felt nothing. “I just stared at him. And just walked away. And I never felt anything about that. I literally just don’t care whatsoever,” he said.
For a guy who claims never to feel anything about killing, Canty constantly monitors and analyzes his feelings about war, rubbing together his thoughts about duty and murder and morality like worry beads. It turned out later that the man he’d killed might not have been a Taliban after all, maybe just a local farmer. But he’d been acting suspiciously, seemingly signaling to the Taliban when the marines came and went from their base. “My thought was, You did what you had to. But did I really? I saw him running and I lit him up. It’s the right thing to do in war, but in every other circumstance it’s the most wrong thing you could do,” he said. “Once you go to war you realize you do what you have to do to survive, when you wouldn’t have done that before. Once you learn to push past immoral behavior, it becomes easier.
“Moral injury is a learned behavior, learning to accept the things you know are wrong.”
But what kind of person, he wondered, would have no qualms about killing? “Are you some kind of sociopath that you can just look at a dude you shot three or four times and just kind of walk away? I think I even smiled, not in an evil way, but just like What a fucked-up world we live in: you’re a forty-year-old dude and you probably got kids at home and stuff, and you just got smoked by some dumb twenty-year-old.”
Canty once had a dream that children were being held in cages by an evil headmaster, and Canty shot him in the face, a tiny hole appearing in his cheek, and then shot him again, in the forehead. “I could feel it, smell it… and you wake up and realize you have done things like that.
“You learn to kill, and you kill people, and it’s like I don’t care. I’ve seen people get shot, I’ve seen little kids get shot. You see a kid and his father sitting together and he gets shot and I give a zero fuck. And once you’re able to do that, what is morally right anymore? How good is your value system if you train people to kill another human being, the one thing we are taught not to do? When you create an organization based around the one taboo that all societies have?”
Hard questions, but ones that the young men and women we recruit for war must act on in a heartbeat and whose answers they must live with for the rest of their lives. Yet we know that many of them, barely out of their teens, are insufficiently prepared for high-stress, critical decision-making because adolescents’ brains are not fully developed. Not until teens reach their midtwenties do their brains reach full maturity. Until then, as parents of teenagers are well aware, they tend to be excitable, easily swayed by peer pressure, and not so good at anticipating the consequences of their actions.
But that’s who we send. In 2005, with American troops in desperate fights across Afghanistan and Iraq, 29 percent of enlisted marines on active duty hadn’t yet celebrated their twenty-first birthdays. Include those who just turned twenty-one, and the share of the young rises to 43 percent in the Marine Corps and 24 percent in the army. By 2007, with the wars demanding more manpower, the military services enlisted 7,558 seventeen-year-olds, including Stephen Canty. The Pentagon’s total intake of seventeen-to twenty-year-olds that year was 86,072—more than half of all the men and women it recruited. And they finish at a young age: in 2010, for instance, half of marines and a quarter of army troops completed their enlistment term after serving four years. As under-twenty-five-year-olds with no experience as adult civilians, they returned to face daunting problems that would frustrate anyone with decades more wisdom and maturity: how to fit in, how to form stable relationships, how to find a career, how to manage the psychological and moral demons that returned with them.
Canty was twenty when he killed that Afghan, who was a farmer or a Taliban or both, with the SAW. Nik Rudolph was twenty-two when he confronted the boy with an assault rifle. Darren Doss also enlisted at age seventeen, served two combat tours in Afghanistan with Nik and Stephen Canty in One-Six, and was back home in Schenectady, New York, at age twenty-two, morally bruised and aged far beyond his high-school pals.
The experiences of these marines were in some ways not unlike those of the young Americans who fought in past wars. As Eric T. Dean Jr. writes in Shook Over Hell, Civil War veterans suffered widely from “elements of depression, anxiety, social numbing, reexperiencing, fear, dread of calamity, and cognitive disorders.” Along with their families, they “often lived in a kind of private hell involving physical pain, the torment of fear, and memories of killing and death.”
The World War II GIs of Easy Company of the 101st Airborne are portrayed in the TV series Band of Brothers as the combat heroes they were. Less well known are their postwar struggles with alcoholism, nightmares, and family abuse, chronicled in the book A Company of Heroes, based on interviews with the surviving family members of those soldiers.
But the moral injuries of our longest wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, are on the whole different, perhaps deeper and more profound, than in past wars. These were our first major conflicts fought entirely with an “all-volunteer” military, which was born of the widespread antidraft movement during the Vietnam War. Richard Nixon’s decision to replace the draft with an expensive professional force in 1973 had far-reaching effects unforeseen at the time. Exchanging a citizen army for a hired professional military meant that those who chose to stay home mostly remained ignorant of who served and why and were prone to ricochet between lazy indifference to the warfighting and overwrought hero-worship of returning troops. At a dinner party among liberal elites during the 1990s, I was describing some rugged army training I’d attended, and a woman asked with disdain, “Why in the world would the army train for war?” General ignorance of the military extended into Congress and the White House, where politicians tended to exaggerate what the military could accomplish and at what cost. Brent Scowcroft, a retired air force officer, senior White House adviser, and éminence grise of Washington’s national security community, once told me how few people at high levels of power understood the risks of military action: “Only if you’ve served in the military,” he said, “can you understand how quickly things can get screwed up.” As the war years ground on, the gap between military and civilian seemed to widen. One evening at a remote combat outpost in northern Afghanistan, an army captain told me he’d recently gone home during a brief leave from the war. As they drove to a dinner party, his wife asked him please not to talk about the war; nobody really wanted to hear about it. “I don’t have anything else to talk about,” he told her sadly.
The few who did choose to join the military sometimes grew to resent the stay-behinds. “There are times I think about all my [marine] friends who got killed and that sucks; it makes me bitter and sad,” Darren Doss, the slender, black-haired young man who served with Stephen Canty and Nik Rudolph, once told me. “I understand the fact that people [at home] don’t give a shit, I can’t change that, but sometimes it makes me really fucking mad. It’s one thing if they don’t care. But they don’t even realize the shit that goes on over there.”
Others turned resentment into a kind of superiority. In early 2006, then major Doug Etter, the Army National Guard chaplain, gave a memorial tribute to his best friend, Lieutenant Colonel Michael McLaughlin, who had been killed in combat in Iraq. “We are a band of brothers,” he said, referring to his fellow troopers of the Pennsylvania National Guard, then fighting in Iraq. “And those who are in their beds, those who chose not to fight this fight, should, if they have a drop of courage, a pint of common sense, they should think themselves lesser men.” An air force fighter pilot once boasted to me, as he stood beside the bullet-riddled A-10 attack jet he had nursed home to Kuwait after a mission over Iraq, “You can’t do what I do.” In western Afghanistan, an army colonel commanding a helicopter regiment told me that he sees “a tremendous amount of guilt in civilian society for not having participated in this war. People thank us, but there is an awkwardness that has increased over time; they don’t really know what we do.” As he pondered the growing rift he saw between the military and civilian Americans, he added, “There are two kinds of people: those who serve, and those who expect to be served. Those who serve,” he said, “are pretty noble.”
Chuck Newton, one of the marines of One-Six, felt his service in Afghanistan with Nik Rudolph and Stephen Canty and Darren Doss had gained him membership in an elite and ancient brotherhood of arms. After a couple of beers late one night, he told me, “I always feel that me and the other guys would have been Spartans marching from Thermopylae knowing they were gonna die. We would have been in World War One, World War Two, it’s just the same kind of people. We would have been in the Civil War: all my friends in Florida would have been fighting against the Union.”
And, I said, you all would have paid the price for what you did. “Yeah,” Chuck said. “Everybody does.”
The cost of raising and sustaining this professional military, including salaries, health care, and decent housing for military families, meant the Pentagon in the 1990s couldn’t afford the hundreds of thousands of troops that strategists said would be required for two wars. A smaller military was the result. When after 9/11 the two wars did come, young men and women were sent on long deployments—and then sent again and again, separated by a few months at home, time that the generals warned was too short for an adequate physical and mental recovery. “We are not big enough today to meet the demand on a sustained basis,” General George Casey, then army chief of staff, told reporters in 2010. “We’ve done studies that show you really need two to three years to fully recover from a combat deployment.” At the time, the army was sending soldiers back to battle after eighteen months at home. Badly needed specialists were sent at an even more relentless pace. A marine bomb-disposal technician told me he was injured in an IED blast in September 2004, and by another blast the following January that lodged shrapnel in his eye socket and the back of his head. Although he was awarded two Purple Hearts for combat wounds, he was sent back a year later, in 2006, with shrapnel still in his head. But he was deployed again, then once more in 2007. Finally, he was diagnosed with traumatic brain injury (TBI) in 2009 and, incredibly, sent back to war one more time, in 2010.
Beyond this demanding operational tempo were other factors that made these wars such fertile ground for moral injury. For the first time, a slight majority of those we sent were married, many with children. Young soldiers not only had to face their own anxieties of another battlefield deployment but had to deliver a morally troubling message to their families: I’m going away for a year and I might never come back, because what I do over there is more important than being with you. With the active-duty force struggling to meet the wartime demand for troops, the Pentagon mobilized National Guard soldiers and airmen from small towns across the country, ordering part-time troops to leave families and jobs for full-time combat roles few had expected.
And unlike previous American wars, the U.S. missions in Iraq and Afghanistan quickly morphed from pure warfighting of the kind that Alexander the Great or George Patton would instantly recognize into a disorienting mix of killing and altruistic campaigns to protect civilians and help them raise strong democracies. (“As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down,” as President George W. Bush memorably envisioned it.) Before the marines of One-Six went to Afghanistan for their second tour, they were lectured by General David Petraeus and even President Obama on the counterinsurgency (COIN) concept of protecting the civilian population and helping them build a better future rather than simply chasing down and killing the enemy. It didn’t go down well. “I know how to put a rocket in a window from two hundred fifty meters,” Chuck Newton remembers thinking, “and these guys are telling me I’m going there to hand out MREs [meals ready to eat]? Something is not lining up. And we get there, we start killing people, and our friends die… I’m not seeing this whole COIN thing.”
Nor were local civilians always grateful for American counterinsurgency missions. Resentment at the presence of foreign combat troops often spawned local resistance. In one minor case, I once accompanied army troops in eastern Afghanistan attempting to meet village elders to ask what help they needed. Instead we retreated from a confrontation with an angry rock-throwing mob fearful that American soldiers would search their homes for weapons. Local resentment sometimes turned to treachery, with civilians helping plant IEDs and tipping off insurgents to approaching American patrols.
The effect of the new emphasis on counterinsurgency was magnified for younger troops by a shift in military doctrine that pushed responsibility for tactical decision-making down to the lowest possible levels, enabling small units to operate more or less autonomously. Far more than in our previous counterinsurgency war in Vietnam, it was common in Iraq and Afghanistan for convoys or foot patrols to be planned and led by lieutenants or sergeants well short of their twenty-fifth birthdays.
As Rebecca Johnson, dean of the Marine Corps War College, has pointed out, that meant these young leaders were required to “calculate the second- and third-order effects of their mission.” Would the justifiable search of a villager’s home for weapons breed ill will and perhaps turn civilians against them? What are the tactical and moral repercussions of continuing a firefight with insurgents, given the increasing probability of civilian casualties? Better to protect civilians and risk that the insurgents who got away will later kill one of your marines? For the first time, Johnson wrote, junior leaders on deployment after deployment had to make “sophisticated tactical judgments that carry complex moral ramifications,” moral decision-making that is “not supported by current military training and educational initiatives.”
The unpleasant reality of death, anger, and destruction, the killing, the sense that their leaders had betrayed them, all made it more difficult for some troops to justify leaving their families. But they went. Even at the peak of the fighting, in 2007, the rate of desertion was remarkably low: less than 1 percent, compared with about 5 percent between 1969 and 1971 during the Vietnam War.
These realities, and stories like Stephen Canty’s, raise troubling questions for those of us outside the military as well, about wartime morality and about our rationale for killing in “just” wars and about our own responsibility for war’s moral injury. What is the accountability of those who engineered the wars? Of the politicians who pushed for and funded the fighting year after year? Of those of us who silently accepted the rationales for war, voted for those in power, and paid our taxes?
Just as those returning from combat often suppress the emotional pain of their experiences, so do we all draw the cover of collective amnesia over our part in war. Perhaps we are morally injured as well and, like so many combat veterans, are reluctant to peer into that darkness. The SUPPORT OUR TROOPS stickers that blossomed as the battle casualties mounted hinted at a deeper disquiet. Too easily we have forgiven ourselves for neither taking part in the wars nor demanding an end to them. We have turned our eyes from the realities of war. To those veterans who return troubled, we assign the term “PTSD” and criticize the VA for not moving quickly enough to help.
But we have not acknowledged what we know to be true about war. We have not acknowledged our regrets, nor burned them in a makeshift battlefield baptismal font.