The horrors make the fascination.
—Henry James, “The Moral Equivalent of War”
In the dusty Ethiopian village of Jijiga, I once watched a man die from his combat wounds, and I did nothing to help him. It was my own very minor but personal introduction to moral injury and might have informed my reporting on war and warriors over the following decades. It should have been the seed of this book. But for too long I let it go unexamined, not even having a name for this most common but largely unrecognized injury of war.
As a Time magazine foreign correspondent, I was covering my first battle, in a sporadically vicious war in 1977 fought between Somalis and Ethiopians. Somali warriors had swarmed in from the desert behind a couple of World War II Russian-built tanks and after a bloody battle had sent the Ethiopian garrison fleeing. While the Somalis were celebrating, three fighter-bombers of the Ethiopian air force showed up. Two American-built F-5 jets and an ancient but effective British Canberra bomber each made three shrieking passes with bombs and rockets and then raked the survivors with 20-millimeter cannon fire. I was unwounded but stunned, terrified in the bone-rattling thunder of the jets at treetop level, at the concussion of the bombs, the blizzards of steel shrapnel, and the pounding of cannon fire, and when the pilots finally relented, they left behind the crackle of burning wreckage and the cries of the wounded rising with columns of dirty smoke into a brilliant blue sky.
I had crawled to a place of relative safety, a low stone wall beneath a stunted tree, where I huddled in terror, dreading the return of the planes and unable to move. Near me, a man sprawled semiconscious on an olive-drab stretcher. He had been a patient at the local medical clinic that was badly damaged. Its pale-green walls of sheet metal were peppered with shell holes, and two bodies lay crumpled in a pool of blood in the doorway. The man in front of me had been wounded again in the air strikes and now lay partially covered with a blanket darkening with blood, his head swathed in bandages and his chest a mangle of flesh. Blood dribbled across his chin. He mouthed a word, then again: Maji. Water. I knew he wanted a drink. I also knew I was too scared to go find water. I was not going to risk my life to ease his suffering. I sat still, looking away, and a few minutes later he coughed and died and flies landed on his face.
For me, a flicker of guilt and shame has stayed with me, an event that subtly altered my view of myself as a good person. It should have given me an early insight into the far more troubling experiences of those we recruit and send into war. It should have awakened me to the cruel moral choices they must often make and to the moral injuries they bring home. But like most of us, I looked away.
I grew up in a Quaker family in a comfortable, leafy suburb of New York, far from any military base. My mother and father were the gentlest people I have ever known. They worshipped in a plain meetinghouse built in 1812, tucked away behind high walls. As a child I fidgeted through hour-long silent meeting on Sundays, dreaming of far-off adventures and swinging my legs beneath the hard wooden bench until Mom put a quieting hand on my knee. Gunplay and the imagined glory of war were an important part of my childhood, as for most kids in the neighborhood. We spent hours, long-division homework abandoned, shooting our toy cap pistols at imaginary enemies and perfecting the art of toppling over in romantic, immaculate death. I was ten when my family began hosting a young Japanese woman who had been badly burned and disfigured in the atomic blast in Hiroshima in 1945, one of the “Hiroshima maidens.” They had been schoolgirls at the time, and a decade later Quakers brought them to the United States for reconstructive surgery. It was she, not a heroic soldier in a splendid uniform, who was the first person I met with direct experience of war. I had to steel myself not to stare at her sticklike arms from which flesh had been burned and to meet the eyes in her heavily scarred face.
At Quaker gatherings, we studied Gandhi and nonviolent resistance, a way to force social change that seemed like an obviously good alternative to incinerating schoolgirls. As I reached high-school age, I came to appreciate silent meeting as a respite of peace, the silence deepened on lazy summer mornings by the sleepy drone of bees and swish of distant traffic. When I turned eighteen I was required to register for the draft. I signed as a conscientious objector. With the clarity of youth, I told my draft board that I wanted to serve my country but that killing was morally wrong and I would not take part in it. I did two years of civilian service with an international Quaker relief agency and then became a journalist. In 1977, Time magazine assigned me to Africa; the editors wanted up-front coverage of the guerrilla wars, civil conflicts, and violent coups that were racking the continent in the late 1970s. And with no special training or preparation, I went.
Out in the blasted wastelands of Somalia, the bloody terrors of Mozambique and Ethiopia, and among the scowling young killers of Uganda and Congo, I was often scared. I was stunned by the carnage and waste of war, the casual killing, the scale of human suffering. The dead-of-night dread, cowering as detonating mortar rounds and heavy machine-gun fire crept closer, turning my guts to liquid; the drunken, murderous young soldiers at checkpoints; the empty dirt road that held either land mines and death—or a good story. The air seemed always scented with burning tires and lush bougainvillea, rotting fruit and rotting flesh. At the same time I was inspired by the courage of those caught up in war: the refugee families, the volunteers at hospitals that lacked sanitation, antibiotics, and sometimes even beds. The slender young Ugandan nun who smuggled Catholic believers out of a mad dictator’s grasp. Less nobly, I was mesmerized by the adventure, by the adrenaline rush. I was thrilled, afterward, at my own escapes from peril. I saw myself as the heroic, calloused foreign correspondent. I drank. I had nightmares, outbursts of anger I could not explain. And I wanted more. To be clear: having once acted on my conviction that killing was morally abhorrent, and having been accorded the government-certified status of conscientious objector, I found war itself to be irresistible.
I left Africa after four years, returning to cover the Pentagon. I immersed myself in nuclear-war-fighting theory, defense budgeting, and weapons technology. With a small pool of reporters I traveled the world with the secretary of defense and even had my own desk in the Pentagon pressroom. But I got bored with Washington and was eager to learn what the military actually did. I discovered that they welcomed my interest, and I sailed on attack and strategic missile submarines and aircraft carriers, flew on bombers, and climbed down into a silo where an intercontinental ballistic missile, armed with multiple nuclear warheads, hummed on alert.
The most compelling work of the American military, I found, happens away from Washington, in its obsessive training in grueling combat exercises. I spent as much time as I could with troops in the field, out in the piney woods of Fort Bragg, Fort Drum, and Fort Polk and the swampy scrubland of Camp Lejeune, where the clatter of helicopters, the shrieking of tank turbine engines and rumble of treads, and the firing-range crackle of M4 carbines and thudding of .50-cal machine guns rise beyond the manicured lawns, neat split-level housing, child-care centers, and sports clubs of modern military life. At the vast training ranges at Twentynine Palms and Fort Irwin, in the Mojave Desert, I watched as marines and soldiers maneuvered by the thousands, with tanks, artillery, and air strikes by jets and helicopter gunships, replicating the tempo and confusion if not always the live ammunition of modern warfare. Every skirmish and battle would be followed by an after-action review: enlisted infantrymen and artillerymen, scouts and tank gunners, privates and sergeants and colonels gathered to review what went right and who did wrong, and I have seen commanders accepting responsibility for unclear commands or tactical errors pointed out by nineteen-year-olds. As the troops trained, I learned: when to duck and when (and where) to run. How to live out of a rucksack and stay relatively comfortable in rain, snow, heat. My Quaker mother was mildly offended but intrigued that I knew how to fire a mortar and treat a sucking chest wound and that I had worked for a few hours in the bowels of a Marine Corps M1A2 main battle tank as a loader, wrestling live fifty-four-pound high-explosive shells out of the rack, ramming them into the breech of a 120-millimeter gun, and then squeezing out of the way as the huge gun thundered and recoiled with flame, smoke, and bits of burning ash.
When there were wars, I went, wearing my own helmet and body armor—a thirty-two-pound Kevlar vest with hardened ceramic plates front, side, and back—and living in the mud and rain and desert heat with soldiers and marines in their squads and platoons. Counterinsurgency missions with marines in Somalia, then the Persian Gulf tanker war, Saudi and Iraq for Desert Storm; Bosnia before and during the U.S. peacekeeping operations; then Afghanistan and Iraq again and again. I came to know guys like Nik Rudolph, Darren Doss, Stephen Canty, and others, men and women I like to think of as the blue-collar, working class of the military. They are the mostly young, mostly enlisted soldiers, airmen, sailors, and marines who are the infantry grunts, the trigger pullers, the wrench turners, the watch standers, the tank drivers, the helicopter crewmen, the medics. Those in higher ranks (referred to, usually not fondly, as “Higher”) make strategy, write doctrine, and devise tactics. The working-class military is responsible for making it all work in the real world, even when they think Higher has it wrong. For all their youth, the twenty-three-year-old female turret gunner, the twenty-five-year-old jet fighter maintenance chief, the twenty-one-year-old infantry squad leader, carry immense responsibility. They handle it well and with passion. They get their hands dirty.
In Afghanistan I once met a young medic, Private First Class Randall Bone, a short, stocky guy with a boyish grin. On his first combat patrol, on a soft spring evening, the lead truck in his convoy was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG). It smashed into the cab, sliced across the face of the driver, and detonated in a blinding flash where a lieutenant was sitting beside him. The explosion drove glass shards into the driver’s face and into the legs of the turret gunner. The lieutenant took the full force of the blast and shrapnel on his face and head.
Medic Bone ran up from a following vehicle and wrenched the door open and gently drew the lieutenant down from the wreckage. He was barely conscious, his skull covered in blood, his eyes swollen shut. As other soldiers took up security positions and began radioing for help, Bone tended to the lieutenant, gently wrapping his head in gauze and trying to keep him conscious through his pain, while patching up the gunner and the driver. The wounded officer needed brain surgery, Bone knew. In a story I wrote several weeks later, Bone explained: “It’s extremely tough when all you can smell is blood and people are suffering and there’s not a lot you can do for them. You can’t miraculously heal somebody with an RPG wound. When you get somebody with head trauma as bad as the LT, there’s not a lot you can do for him in the field.” But Bone kept him alive. It took all night for the wounded to be medevaced and the damaged vehicle to be towed back to the U.S. base at Bagram. Bone helped clean the blood out of the truck, then went to check on the lieutenant at the base hospital. The officer had undergone emergency surgery and was doing well, Bone was told; he would be flown out shortly on an air force aeromedical plane. “As soon as I made sure I hadn’t lost anybody, I asked if there was a sink I could use,” Bone recalled. “The sleeves of my shirt were soaked with blood, there were patches of blood on my pants and face, and my hands were caked with blood.” A nurse directed him to a sink. “I probably spent a long time at that sink,” Bone said. The photo I took of Private First Class Bone shows him with a cocky smile and hard eyes. At the time, he was nineteen years old.
Living with people like Bone and others of the blue-collar military, I came to stand a little straighter, wear my hair a little shorter. From them I absorbed the creed of immediate and direct personal responsibility, taking care of your buddies always, no matter what; trusting they would do the same for you. Doing the right thing when no one’s looking. I came to admire their grit, their sense of honor and commitment, their unfailing humor, their courage, their spontaneous generosity. I have watched them wrestle with difficult decisions and have sometimes winced at the directions they chose. I have known some of their families. I have watched tense leave-takings and joyful homecomings. In the chilly predawn hours beside a distant runway, I have stood motionless with hundreds of saluting soldiers as flag-draped coffins were carried gently up the ramp of a waiting cargo plane, and with grieving families I have attended burials at Arlington Cemetery. At war, I have seen Americans at their best. In a very personal way, I admire and honor their service.
Eventually, though, I could no longer ignore the nagging sense that something was wrong, that I was looking away from the dark side of war, which was causing real damage to the men and women I knew. Too many good people were returning home disquieted by their experiences. Some sought therapy, but most did not. Some were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Most were not. But so many were ill at ease with something deep inside themselves, not entirely comfortable with the way they had changed. It’s only now, as the flurry of combat deployments slows, that we can pause and take stock. Being at war, I’ve found, is rarely conducive to introspection; you’re too anxious, too busy, or too stunned by heat and boredom or the sudden surge of adrenaline to find quiet. Stephen Canty explained it well. “None of us really knows what it’s like until we go over there, and we go two, three, four times before we ever pause to think about what we’re doing,” he once told me, several years after his last combat tour, in Afghanistan. “Only now,” he said, “do we start to look at the mental effects of killing other human beings.
“We keep going regardless of knowing the cost, regardless of knowing what it’s gonna do,” Canty said. “The question we have to ask the civilian population is, Is it worth it, knowing these mental issues we come home with? Is it worth it?”
In early 2008 I went to war with Stephen Canty’s battalion, the First Battalion of the Sixth Marine Regiment—familiarly, One-Six. Marines and soldiers—grunts—typically deploy as part of a brigade of three to four thousand people, divided into battalions of eight hundred to one thousand; the numbers vary by service and mission. Guys like Canty identify from the bottom up. First is their fire team of four. Three fire teams make up a squad, usually twelve or thirteen marines. Squads make up a platoon of forty to forty-five marines; four platoons make up a company of perhaps two hundred or two hundred fifty marines. Companies are identified by code words representing letters: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie. In combat, marines often fight in fire teams of four, perhaps led by a lance corporal who may not have reached legal drinking age.
Canty served with Second Platoon, Charlie Company, One-Six, along with others I would get to know, Nik Rudolph, Chuck Newton, Darren Doss, and Xavier Zell, and others who died before I could get to know them: Lance Corporal Zachary “Smitty” Smith, Sergeant Daniel M. Angus, and Lance Corporal Joseph Schiano. Two of the One-Six marines I did come to know would be killed in Afghanistan: Captain Brandon Barrett and Lieutenant Jason Mann. Gunnery Sergeant Rosendo DeLeon, who befriended me in Afghanistan, would die tragically at home after his combat tours were finished.
During weeks of training with One-Six before we left, I accompanied the marines as they practiced detecting IEDs and assaulting and clearing houses, rehearsed nighttime patrolling and hasty attacks, and slogged through swamps to ambush off-duty marines pretending to be insurgents. We lined up for shots and malaria pills and shopped at the PX for last-minute gear. I recall squirming on a folding chair in an overheated room for a droning lecture on Afghan culture, but I’m pretty sure there was no class on PTSD and definitely no mention of moral injury or how to prepare for any kind of psychological war trauma.
But the thousand marines of One-Six and its attached units barreled into Afghanistan with impressive energy, enthusiasm, and confidence. And gear: They took their M4 carbines and antitank weapons, rockets and various explosives, and armored gun trucks—Humvees mounted with a .50-cal machine gun or a 40-millimeter grenade launcher. They took their attack and transport helos, seabags of personal gear, and wooden ammo crates of linked brass .50-cal machine-gun rounds, 5.56 ammo and grenades, boxes of MRE rations, computers, radios, spare parts, boots, mortar tubes and base plates, generators, Xboxes and video games, smokes and dip, trauma medical kits, and coils of razor wire, all logged on packing lists that ran to hundreds of pages and then packed into rugged steel shipping containers called conex boxes. The conexes went by ship to Karachi and then overland through Pakistan by truck. The marines and I flew out of the New River marine air base in North Carolina, stopped briefly at Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan, then loaded onto a C-17 cargo plane that flew us into Kandahar Airfield (KAF), the major U.S. air hub in southern Afghanistan. The conexes were waiting. Marines emptied them, and engineers stacked them two or three high in a stockade around their desert encampment adjacent to the runways.
I took a backpack with my laptop and a satellite phone and a duffel with my body armor and helmet (B-NEG, my blood type, embroidered on both). I also packed a stack of new notebooks and several dozen pens, a combat first-aid kit and tourniquets, and malaria pills. And a new softcover copy of Homer’s Odyssey, a treasure at the end of a long day when I’d wrap myself up in my olive-drab poncho liner, an indestructible thin quilted blanket, click on my headlamp, and disappear into the aftermath of the Trojan War.
I was an embedded reporter, living as an observer inside the life of the battalion. I went where they did, carried what I needed on my back, slept where they did, and ate when and what they did. Marines couldn’t get over the fact that I had volunteered to come—had fought to be with them. Having set up many embeds, I was familiar with the long process: convincing my editors to let me go, then running the gauntlet of required permissions from the Pentagon, and finally receiving officially stamped orders authorizing me to fly on military aircraft and excusing the Defense Department from responsibility if I was killed. It all moved quickly for us after that, in a blur of jumbled packs and gear, mounting excitement, and last-second hugs with anxious wives and crying children, until we departed Camp Lejeune in buses to the New River airfield.
In the weeks before their first combat mission in Afghanistan, One-Six learned to endure 120-degree heat and incessant windblown dust. We sweated through classes in detecting IEDs, struggled through close-order combat drills, jogged along the dusty airfield perimeter road with full packs, and idly speculated on the life span of the Afghan peasants hired to prod the soil of adjacent fields for land mines. At dusk, I’d thread my way through sweating marines sitting cross-legged, stripping and cleaning weapons, and between gun trucks swarming with marines doing maintenance. I’d prop up my laptop on an upended ammunition crate (empty). There, I’d peer at my notes with my headlamp, trying to compose a story while sergeants bawled at their grunts, helicopters whined to life on an adjacent aircraft apron, generators rumbled, and, a short walk away, F-16 jets shrieked off KAF’s main runway and thundered away over the distant mountains.
Story written, I’d unfold the foot-square wings of my satellite-phone antenna, rotate them toward the sky, and mutter a brief prayer. If I got a good signal from an Inmarsat satellite high over the Indian Ocean, I’d connect to the Internet and e-mail my story back home. It almost always worked.
I wrote a daily blog from Afghanistan, about marines and their lives; about the food (chow) and the weather; about the latrines (sparkling clean!), the grunts’ wagers on whether they’d be home for Christmas as Higher kept promising; about the anxieties of young marines; and about the battalion’s first two combat deaths, which left everyone shocked and sobered. One evening I opened my laptop and stood for a while. I’d gotten an e-mail from my wife that morning, a crisp, clear Sunday dawn in the Afghan desert. Call me, she wrote. I dialed the number on my satellite phone. Your mother died last night, she said. She died peacefully. Your sister Anne was with her. Is there somewhere you can go to be alone? I took a shaky breath and stared out through coiled razor wire at the bright, flat desert and the hazy horizon of barren mountains. Armored vehicles growled along a distant road. Two platoons of One-Six marines in battle gear trudged by, raising plumes of dust. On the runway behind me a C-17 cargo plane touched down and reversed its jet engines with a deafening roar. We will have a memorial service, I heard Beth say. I know you probably can’t make it.
News of an event like this, a death in the family, is not uncommon here, I wrote, and when it comes, it penetrates painfully. A thousand marines are sent away to war knowing that among their many loved ones there will be triumph and tragedy. Babies will be birthed while they’re gone, and grandparents lost. Romances will bloom and wither; a beaming child will excel, beyond expectations, on a math test. A championship game will be narrowly lost. Someone will be arrested, someone married. In this battalion alone, One-Six, fifty-eight marines would become fathers. Only faint and indirect echoes of this rich other life reach us from home, I realized, through a scratchy phone connection or a terse e-mail. Can you call home? Yet we clutch at these precious glimpses, preserving them like grainy snapshots folded lovingly into a wallet. It is perhaps the most we ask of those we send. Those rich moments occur far away and are lost forever. A child has a fourth birthday only once. The losses, like repeated body blows, accumulate in a deepening moral injury.
Men and women at war absorb the hard living with black humor, steel themselves against the risks of combat, temper their fatigue, homesickness, and apprehension by loving their buddies and being loved in return. They endure. Back home, we often count the cost of war in dollars, in the billions or trillions. We calculate strategic gain or loss. We honor with sorrow the dead and the wounded.
How do we measure the sacrifice of home?
It was here as well that I caught other glimpses of moral injury, how it differs from PTSD, and how people in combat deal with what the Marine Corps delicately calls combat and operational stress. One day in the spring of 2008, in the stifling tent that served as the mess hall for One-Six, Staff Sergeant Julian Lumm remembered the story of Molly and the leg. Lumm and Gunny [Gunnery Sergeant] DeLeon and a couple of others and I were dawdling over a table strewn with lunchtime remains of chili mac, tomato salad, and pineapple cake, the marines straddling the metal benches with their M4 carbines slung over their shoulders. The story had unfolded in Iraq the previous year, when One-Six had fought Sunni insurgents in Ramadi. One day a suicide bomber had come at the marines at a checkpoint, and when they got him stopped, he blew himself up. No marines had been hurt, but the bomber’s body parts had landed all over the place. In the retelling, Lumm and DeLeon started to laugh. Both were handsome, tall and hefty with dark liquid eyes. DeLeon was forty at the time, on his second combat tour in two years.
On that deployment in Iraq, the marines had befriended a dog they named Molly, DeLeon explained to me, pushing aside his tray and hitching up his carbine. Already, he and Lumm and Gunny Carlos Orjuela, who had served with them in Iraq on that deployment, were starting to sputter and guffaw as they described that scene—Molly! Yeah! Here comes Molly, trotting back to where they’d taken cover, and she’s got a piece of the guy’s leg in her mouth, and the marines are going, “Molly! Bad dog! Put that thing down!” Lumm collapsed in helpless giggles, unable to continue telling the story.
Orjuela: “And Molly’s going like What’d I do? She’s lookin’ so proud, ya know, like a cat bringing a mouse, and she keeps on comin’ and we’re goin’ No, Molly! Go away! Git that thing outta here!!” We were all in stitches.
Lumm swiped a tear. Oh man, he managed. That was hilarious, wasn’t it?
The marines of One-Six recently told me a similar story from their second deployment, in Afghanistan two years later, in 2010. This one had to do with what they called the Meat Wagon. They’d sometimes go out on patrol, get into a firefight, chase off the Taliban, then set up a primitive base, securing it with sandbags and razor wire. A day or two later, they’d be assigned to head out in a Humvee they designated as the Meat Wagon to pick up Taliban and civilian bodies, and after all that time in the sun, or in the shade of a tree, the corpses had started to putrefy and stink. Chuck Newton was often assigned to go get the bodies. Chuck is a tall, rangy guy from Brooklyn with a slow, deliberate manner. His dark hair, shaved down below stubble in Afghanistan, now is grown out almost shoulder length. He takes time to gather his thoughts before he speaks, as if his words are precious and not to be wasted or misunderstood; he lets them out a sentence or two at a time and checks your eyes to make sure you’ve got it. Often his stories start out dead serious and end in a burst of laughter. This story he’d told many times, but Canty, Xavier Zell, and other marine veterans from One-Six, sprawled across the beds in a New Jersey hotel room on a Sunday afternoon drinking beer, were eager to hear it again.
The bodies, Chuck Newton said, “were, like, all blown up. Some of them you’d touch and they’d deflate. If it was in the sun, it had turned to jerky, or in the shade it would just melt and turn to goo, and you’d pick it up and the leg would stay there on the ground.”
Zell interrupted. “The manicotti!” he prompted.
Newton: “Oh, yeah… The smell was like—you know those fake-cheese crackers? I couldn’t get rid of it.” On the drive back, “my foot was actually sticking to the gas pedal because I had like congealed blood on my boot, and my hands were sticking to the steering wheel.
“Anyway, we got back and I tried to clean up with, like, napkins. I was so hungry and I had a vegetable manicotti, this awful MRE, this tube with red goop on it, and I was eating it and my gunner on the truck goes, ‘You got a little on your sleeve,’ and I—Oh, God, that smell!—it was congealed blood from one of the… it was not manicotti! Well, at first everyone was like uuuggghhh [Newton making vomiting sounds], and for about five seconds I’m about to puke and cry at the same time, and then somebody starts laughing, and the floodgates open, and everybody is just like hilarious.”
Zell: “And later I’m telling this guy, ‘And then my buddy ate MAN-icotti!’ Everything becomes a joke, man. Life’s too fuckin’ short!”
But that was still to come, when peril and death and gore had become commonplace. When I went with them on their first deployment, in 2008, they were new, unbloodied, excited, and anxious, jumpy. With days to go before their first op, an attack on the dusty market town of Garmsir in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, they lifted weights at dawn, shaved one another’s heads, and relentlessly cleaned and oiled their carbines. They wound duct tape around their waists to keep their body armor from chafing. Sergeants came by to check gear and spread the word: We’re going into a Taliban hotbed so expect heavy resistance. Oh—and y’all carry three days’ water. That turned out to add forty or more pounds to everyone’s rucksack, even after we’d discarded extra socks and underwear and the cardboard packaging inside our plastic-wrapped MREs. Wearing the pack and body armor and helmet, I found in combat drills that I could fling myself down to take cover all right. Getting back up to resume running was not so easy, and I managed it only with a strong yank from Gunny DeLeon. Even with all my gear, DeLeon could yank me upright; he was that strong. He was hefty, with noticeably plump cheeks, immensely respected by younger marines and by me. DeLeon had assumed my well-being as a personal mission, and everywhere I went he was right behind me, ready to yank me out of trouble.
As the Garmsir attack approached, nerves tightened. Outside the gates, a convoy hit an IED, and two marines were killed, First Sergeant Luke J. Mercardante and Corporal Kye Wilks, and the war suddenly got real. Sergeant Major Charlie Stanford, a balding, muscular man of forty-two, told me that the death of a marine in combat “is like losing a child.” We were whispering inside a shelter during one of the frequent rocket attacks on Kandahar Airfield. Stanford, a martial-arts expert, had been in the marines more than two decades. A tough man, he was not given to expressing emotion. But he did now. Each death, he said, “drives you to your knees.”
The choppers came for us after midnight, blacked-out twin-bladed CH-46s clattering down out of an immense starlit sky, lowering their rear ramps onto the moonscape of powdery dust where we’d been waiting. We ducked under the blades and awkwardly clambered aboard. During the roaring forty-minute flight, each of us mentally rehearsed: As the helo drops the ramp, the first fire team races out and goes left, the second goes right, both lay down suppressive fire as the third and fourth fire teams—and the correspondent—come off and go right and dig in. Self- and buddy aid for casualties until the corpsmen, the navy medics who accompany marines, get to you. We rechecked straps and snaps, adjusted the night-vision devices attached to our helmets, and squirmed in damp fatigues.
Suddenly our chopper flared nose-high, the skids bumped to the ground, and the ramp yawned open. At the last second, it occurred to me that if anyone was shooting at us, we’d never hear it over the roaring din of the helo. When our turn came, we sprinted out into a warm night and soft sand. I went right, cleared the spinning rotors, and dove for the sand. Gunny DeLeon flopped down protectively beside me.
Late that afternoon, huddled behind a wall with the battalion command group, I opened my laptop, and as I began writing an RPG whistled low overhead and exploded against a nearby tree. I scrunched down lower and kept going, wanting to get the story done before things got worse. Finished, I got a good sat-phone connection and with relief hit SEND. Garmsir, Afghanistan, April 20—More than a thousand marines backed by artillery and helicopter gunships stormed into this Taliban stronghold before dawn yesterday…
I didn’t realize it at the time—too busy, too excited, my own brush with moral injury in the Ethiopian desert long forgotten. But the moral injury of One-Six was under way, as it was for many others who served before and after in Iraq and Afghanistan. The blue-collar military we sent to war was supposed to be strengthened against psychological injury by a rigid set of rules and values, hammered into them as new recruits. All of these rules would come under intense pressure in combat. Some would prove invaluable—You are responsible for your buddy no matter what! Most would not. And perversely, some would actually deepen the moral injury of those who went confidently into battle.