I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, and bad things still happened.
—Clint Van Winkle, Combat Veteran, Iraq
It’s near the end of their twelve weeks of Parris Island boot camp, and the marine recruits are struggling, wading through muddy South Carolina water with rifles held high, desperately heaving themselves over walls, squirming under barbed wire, and being blasted with the sound track of the opening minutes of Saving Private Ryan: the roar of battle, exploding shells, the snap and squeak of rifle rounds, bellowing sergeants, red-hot machine-gun slugs thudding into flesh, and the screams of gruesomely wounded men. Here, actual drill sergeants are yelling at the recruits: Move it! Move it, move it, mooooove it! C’mon, recruit, git yer butt over the wall! Up next: a grueling overnight march with forty-five-pound rucksacks. It’s the culmination of their final exercise, two and a half days of hell when the drill sergeants keep them short of food and sleep, driving them day and night through exhausting obstacle courses. It will end as those recruits who’ve not fallen out struggle onto the parade ground at dawn, standing at weary attention to receive their coveted Eagle, Globe, and Anchor insignia and hear a senior officer declare them United States Marines. Then they’ll summon their last reserves of strength and sprint for an all-you-can-eat breakfast of steak and eggs.
The next morning, here they are, all fresh and laundered, their burning resentment of the drill sergeants now coupled with beaming pride. They’re coming at a trot down Parris Island’s Boulevard de France, a blur of olive-drab PT shorts and tees shouting cadence from their precise ranks as they stream past the families gathered on the sidewalk. Before Stephen Canty got to Afghanistan, he and Darren Doss, Chuck Newton, Nik Rudolph, and the others who would fight together in Charlie One-Six endured the privations of boot camp and celebrated with this formation run for Family Day and the graduation ceremony on the following day. It happens like clockwork forty times a year here as young Americans are processed into the corps. For graduation, the visitors’ parking lot is crammed with families emerging from vans and pickups with license plates from New Jersey and Indiana and Louisiana, the dads in pressed jeans and boots, Grandpa with his KOREAN WAR VETERAN ball cap, lots of MOM OF A MARINE T-shirts, and girlfriends decked out in frilly dressed-to-kill outfits. With shouts of “There he is!” the families strain to gawk at the miraculous transformation of the awkward teens they sent here three months ago into the tightly focused warriors now marching out in immaculate formations onto the parade field.
It’s a proud and painful scene to watch, with the flags snapping in the breeze and the Sousa marches, blaring from loudspeakers, that bring the audience roaring to its feet. But there is an undertone. The toughness these new marines display is thin, fresh, and uncured. After all, it’s been only eighty-four days since they arrived as nervous, self-conscious civilian recruits. Nik Rudolph, like many others, rode a Marine Corps bus to get here early in 2008, a grim, sixteen-hour ordeal with one youngster already broken, weeping softly far in the backseat. But recruit training is only the first step of what is arguably the best combat training in the world. Young men and women go on from this and other marine and army recruit training bases to more advanced tactical fieldwork, mastering the techniques of warfighting and leadership far beyond what I’ve seen of other nations’ military forces. They learn to kill, but nothing here or in their formal training prepares them for the acute moral dilemmas they will face in war.
Marine boot camp and army basic are famously rigorous, and by the end, the recruits, or “boots,” have become lean and hard. They grow used to being shouted at. They learn to work in teams, to obey orders without hesitation or question, to shout back “Aye, sir!” in unison, to fire an assault rifle at human-silhouette targets. They march in close-order drill, demonstrate how to treat a sucking chest wound, and fight one another with pugil sticks and boxing gloves. They are constantly urged to emulate the heroes who have gone before them and reminded that they are preparing to fight and win no matter the cost. The weaker ones are bullied and grow protective calluses, or they may “recycle” and start over.
It’s all part of building what the military calls resilience, its catchall word that encompasses the physical and mental toughening meant to stiffen recruits’ outer shells, like body armor, against the physical and mental challenges of war.
Boot camp and army basic aren’t just body and mind toughening; the long days are laced with lessons on morality and values. Drill instructors teach a rigid moral code of honor, courage, and commitment. The goal, according to the Marine Corps, is to produce young men and women “thoroughly indoctrinated in love of Corps and Country… the epitome of personal character, selflessness, and military virtue.” The army’s ethics codes are similar, demanding that soldiers “live the values of respect, duty, loyalty, selfless service, integrity and personal courage in everything you do” and always to do “what’s right, legally and morally.”
Loyalty, integrity, virtue: all these may sound like the ideals by which most of us hope to live. But the military’s ethics codes have to be more exacting. They are issued to each recruit along with the means, the training, and eventually the authorization to kill. Success on the battlefield, accomplishing the mission, may call for the suspension of basic notions of civilian morality—such as the idea that it’s wrong to kill a child. That is why the military backs up its list of values with a requirement for rigid and unquestioning discipline and obedience to orders. Every army recruit is required to memorize, and to recite on order, the Soldier’s Creed:
I am an American Soldier.
I am a warrior and a member of a team.
I serve the people of the United States, and live the Army Values.
I will always place the mission first.
I will never accept defeat.
I will never quit.
I will never leave a fallen comrade.
I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough, trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills.
I always maintain my arms, my equipment, and myself.
I am an expert and I am a professional.
I stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy the enemies of the United States of America in close combat.
I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life.
I am an American Soldier.
Marine recruits bellow out the three marine values, sometimes while doing push-ups. The first is honor:
This is the bedrock of our character. It is the quality that empowers Marines to exemplify the ultimate in ethical and moral behavior: to never lie, cheat, or steal; to abide by an uncompromising code of integrity; to respect human dignity; and to have respect and concern for each other.
But make no mistake: along with promising to respect human dignity, marine recruits are expected to be fighters, memorizing and internalizing the Rifleman’s Creed. It is a bellicose call to arms, but notice it never uses the word “kill” to describe the act for which every marine is recruited, trained, and deployed:
This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. Without me my rifle is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless.
I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than the enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will. My rifle and I know that what counts in war is not the rounds we fire, the noise of our burst, or the smoke we make. We know that it is the hits that count. We will hit.
My rifle is human, even as I am human, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its strengths, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel. I will keep my rifle clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of each other.
Before God I swear this creed. My rifle and I are the defenders of my country. We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life.
So be it, until victory is America’s and there is no enemy.
To civilians, all this may sound either appalling or ridiculous. In the confusion of battle, when terror and a desperate instinct for self-preservation can dominate, it is neither. If the military can be said to equip its warriors with a kind of emotional armor, this is it. I have heard them mutter the words in times of crisis, and I’ve watched them struggle to use these values in practice.
Curiously, though, none of this training prepares them to manage the moral challenges of warfare that everyone else knows are coming. It’s an odd oversight. Recruits are taught to yank a tourniquet tight on the spurting stump of their own arm after an IED blast; they are not introduced to the idea that they may have to deal with their own moral injuries. Nothing in what the military teaches recruits about behavior in war instructs them to recognize, in the chaos and confusion, “what’s right.” They are required to master the complex process of assaulting and clearing a three-story house held by the enemy, and even the greenest privates memorize the nine-line radio message that will summon a helicopter to evacuate a casualty. They are taught to field-strip and reassemble an M60 machine gun while drill sergeants bellow at them and to use a topographic map and compass to find their way in the dark through miles of wooded hills. They are not taught how to think about the challenging moral terrain of war, much less how to navigate it safely. Marines who were taught at Parris Island to memorize “respect human dignity” as a bedrock marine value got to Afghanistan only to find themselves assigned to fight alongside and protect Afghan soldiers who were said to be using small boys as sex toys.
More challenging, after boot camp, they will find themselves killing without being helped to understand whether or not that violates the Old Testament commandment Thou shalt not kill. As army chaplain Paul D. Fritts explains, “The institution demands moral excellence of soldiers in order to maintain discipline but at the same time requires that combatants be prepared to perform the morally injurious act of killing human beings.”
Like Nik Rudolph, Sendio Martz learned these same rules and values and recited the same creeds in marine boot camp. He never shot a child, though sometimes he wonders if he should have. His moral injury still pains him every day.
Sendio is a handsome, stocky man with a gentle demeanor and a quick laugh. We first talked around a picnic table outside the Wounded Warrior barracks at Camp Lejeune, a neat, three-story brick building with manicured lawns. He addressed me repeatedly as “sir.” Born in Haiti, Sendio was adopted by an Illinois couple and homeschooled in an environment of loving support and high expectations. Before he enlisted, in 2006, he’d done two years of college, studying early childhood education, then worked with teenagers just out of prison. When he told his parents he’d decided to join the marines, they advised against it: the marines were too tough, they thought. Wrong answer! Tough was what he wanted, and shortly he was on his way to marine boot camp—this time to the West Coast version of Parris Island, at San Diego. It was tough, and he loved it. “A lot of the [Marine Corps] values matched up with what I already had,” he told me. “Being responsible, disciplined, loyal. Training together to where you have trust in the other people to do what they’re supposed to do.” At San Diego he carried around what the marines refer to as the Book of Knowledge, a list of character-building guidelines on how you are supposed to conduct yourself.
“You get that training in the beginning, then you get to prove yourself and your worthiness for the next rank by how you took those basics and applied them,” he said. “I thought it all made sense, because that’s how my parents raised me.”
In all the throngs of young men and women who have passed through marine boot camp, there have been perhaps few who absorbed the toughening and internalized the rules and values more seriously and thoroughly and eagerly than young Sendio Martz. He was the kind of brand-new marine about whom the drill sergeants would boast, Now there’s a marine! I’d go to war with that guy!
Private First Class Martz was deployed right away to Falluja, Iraq, in 2006, a hard combat tour. The city was “blown to shreds” is how Sendio described it. He was assigned as the turret gunner on a gun truck, crouching in his body armor, helmet, scarf, and goggles and swiveling to target insurgents with his mounted .50-cal. machine gun. “You gotta stand up there, a lot of the attacks were on gunners, so our anxiety was very high,” he said. His commander once told him his job was to “take one for the team.” It was life on the edge: the next moment could hold boredom, the crack of a sniper rifle, or seeing your buddy’s legs blown off. “You feel an invisible hand controlling stuff that you don’t know nothing about,” Sendio said. “But at the same time you got rules you gotta follow, because we are representing the U.S. nation. That falls under honor and courage.” He did well, as the drill sergeants had expected. Promoted to corporal, he went again to Iraq in 2008, around the time I was in Afghanistan with One-Six. On his return Sendio reenlisted, made sergeant, got married, and had a child on the way before his third combat deployment in 2010. This time it was to Afghanistan, and he was assigned to lead eleven marines as a squad leader.
Parents and girlfriends and wives gathered at Camp Lejeune to see them off. “They were talking to me, saying like ‘Make sure you bring my boy back!’ and ‘Keep my boy safe!’” Sendio fidgeted all the way on the long plane ride to Afghanistan. Bringing all his guys back safe was his responsibility, and it was a pretty high order, he thought, thinking back to the marines he’d seen die in combat, even guys you thought were invincible, guys who followed all the rules. He thought about all the near misses, the sniper shots and IED blasts that just missed his men, and he felt this good luck was accumulating day by day, mounting up on one side of a dangerously overbalanced ledger. And now they were headed to Kajaki Dam in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, an area whose arid rolling grassland was notorious for Taliban ambushes and the deadly pressure-detonated IED: a footstep would close its circuit and ignite the charge. Sendio vowed to put his faith in God and in the values and rules he’d learned at boot camp. Treat everyone with respect and dignity. Accomplish the mission. He could feel himself rigid with stress. Discipline, honor, courage.
Martz and his marines got to Kajaki around the same time that Chuck Newton, Darren Doss, Stephen Canty, and the rest of One-Six were arriving in Marjah, also in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province but some ninety miles away. Kajaki was as bad as Martz had anticipated. Fighting was constant: close-in gun battles, IED blasts, long-range artillery barrages, mortar duels, and air strikes. It was exhilarating and terrifying. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so stressed in my life,” Sendio said. Patrols twice a day, with his riflemen plus attached specialists—engineers, intel guys, bomb-disposal experts, sometimes a forward air controller, the occasional reporter or visiting general, and some Afghan soldiers. Sendio was responsible for them all. “I had never been put in a position where I had so many souls in my charge,” he said. “Wandering around on foot and you don’t know where the next bomb is, you really have to watch the villagers, where one day there’s a field with a bunch of people working, and the next day you do a patrol and there’s no one there,” a common indication of imminent trouble.
He sighed heavily. “And I have to be the one directing these guys where they had to go. And I don’t know where anything is. I can’t say to my guys, ‘Don’t go there, there’s a bomb over there, stay away, and there’s a guy over there, make sure you watch him and don’t get shot.’” He paused and took a deep breath. As he recalled the scene to me, Sendio was getting agitated, his words tumbling out. “In the heat of it all you only have control over your guys and you are praying the decision you make is the right one, and if it’s the wrong one, which a couple of my decisions were the wrong ones, you are paying the price and you’re living with it.”
He was thinking of the day when his squad was patrolling with another unit, and a buried sixty-pound IED was command-detonated beneath them, meaning that someone was watching and fired the device at the moment that would cause maximum casualties. The blast knocked Sendio and his guys unconscious and wounded, some severely. When he came to, he found that no one in his squad was dead, but some marines in the accompanying squad had been killed instantly, and others had lost legs and arms. Sendio ordered medevacs for the wounded, passing up medical help for himself. (“Just because you get banged up a bit doesn’t mean you can take yourself out of the game,” he explained. “I am not a quitter.”) He quickly organized a defense perimeter and sent for reinforcements. “It was just very catastrophic, but as a leader you can’t—I wasn’t allowed and couldn’t allow myself to crumble under the pressure or just give in to depression or… despair,” he said. “As a leader you can’t show a sign of weakness to your men.”
In the following days they had to go out again and again. “I had issues, but I could hide them,” he said. “I had some semblance of control. My fear was that they’d take me away from my men. Because as bad as it was, no one wanted to leave. It’s the whole brotherhood thing, the courage and commitment it took to go back out there. Knowing it could be you next is really profound after someone gets hurt. I was scared out there, but I had to go back out. It’s the honor among men, that we weren’t gonna quit. It’s what you learn in boot camp.”
In the blast in Kajaki, Martz and his men suffered mild traumatic brain injuries and assorted other injuries. But the moral damage was worse than that. Earlier, they had befriended a young Afghan boy who would come around their forward operating base (FOB), trying out his English and bringing bread and other gifts; in return they gave him books and candy. The boy eventually would turn in villagers’ weapons, and would point out places where IEDs had been planted. Then one day he disappeared—and a few days later came the IED blast. Soon they found out it had been the boy himself who set off the charge, and that discovery demolished their trust, soured their relations with the Afghans, and led some to question what the hell they were doing there anyway.
“To have the same kid turn around and blow you up… your trust has been ruined and broken,” Sendio told me. “It shatters your reality of what’s okay and what’s not okay.”
Sendio toughed it out. He followed the rules. He was that marine who made his drill sergeants proud. He came home with mild traumatic brain injury, PTSD, and other conditions, but he felt the moral injuries caused his sense of dislocation, bitterness. Bits and pieces of his old moral certainties and the newer realities of battle added up to a disjointed sense of himself, like a Picasso portrait. The rules and values had gotten him through combat, but when he got home, he said, “It’s a different story.
“Even though you’re home you don’t feel at home. You don’t feel safe—that was the case for me. And you become reserved. When you try to talk to someone, they don’t understand, they start making their own assumptions about, like, ‘Well, I don’t think we should have been fighting that war in the first place.’ Really?
“What you learn in boot camp, that you’re not doing it for the money but because you want to serve and protect your country? It takes a long time to come back full circle and realize, Why do I care? The majority [of civilians] don’t understand and don’t care. We had brothers die in our arms, we’ve picked up the pieces of people… all the stuff you’ve seen and done, you went there with friends but came back without them—there’s a guy [who was killed] back there who had a one-year-old son, and he’s never going to see the light of day again, you know?”
Back home at Camp Lejeune, Sendio found himself replaying the IED blast detonated by the kid over and over in his mind, wondering what he should have done differently. “The only people you can trust,” he decided, “are the guys you went and came back with.”
As part of his treatment for traumatic brain injury he was assigned a therapist. Memories of the IED blast, his wounded soldiers, and the treachery of that young kid haunted him. “I constantly replay every decision I made while out there,” he told her. “I’m just kind of stuck in a revolving, recurring thing, dreams and doubts.”
Sendio’s most acute moral injury was in the way he now felt about children. He and other marines sometimes experienced powerful impulses of murderous anger toward the Afghan kids who they believed were being used by the Taliban to spy on them, help plant and detonate IEDs, carry ammunition during running firefights, and even fire at them directly. “I’m still dealing with the effects of that set of moral issues,” Sendio told me five years after the 2010 IED blast. “I hate being around children, because a child attacked me and my squad. I deal with the moral issue of whether or not I should engage [shoot] a child who is causing a very real threat or action toward us.” Even today, medically retired from the military and at home in North Carolina, he said he has “a hard time seeing children in a different light. I know they are innocent but over there they are used as tools, spies. Do you want to attack a child even though a child is shooting at you? Is it right to end their existence? That was the kind of moral struggle that we dealt with on a regular basis.”
Sendio Martz has three children of his own, all young girls. “That’s where my moral conflict comes in,” he said. “That’s a struggle right there. I love them very much. I don’t have any problem with my own children; it’s with the other children the same age or older. I just don’t trust the innocence of children.” Birthday parties, family outings in the park, going to movies together, even attending his oldest daughter’s dance recitals—he avoids them all. “It’s sad that I can’t give my kids what my parents gave me,” he said.
Years of therapy have helped. One counselor tried to reassure him that he’d done the best he could, that he couldn’t have foreseen the IED blast, that actually all his guys did come back. But Sendio was thinking, “All my guys got hurt and I let them down. And I’m angry because it’s something I wasn’t fully prepared for, and you start questioning, Why did I do this?
“It tests the foundations of your faith. What was this war all about? Guys got hurt for just doing their jobs and trying to save others. I question that. I had very angry talks with God, but at the same time, whenever we survived a close call, I thanked God for it.”
But after five years, Sendio Martz is beginning to heal. He found therapists who were also Iraq War veterans to help with his TBI and PTSD. Inspired by them, he’s gone back to school, studying psychology with the intention of becoming a mental health counselor for other combat veterans.
What’s helped him the most is his community of other combat veterans. “You talk to your guys, and it’s kind of reassuring to know that what you’re going through, this guy is going through, so it’s okay—I’m not losing my mind,” he said. “You kind of reassure each other that we’re not going insane.”
While Martz was in Kajaki in 2010 struggling with the morality of children at war, the marines of Charlie One-Six in Marjah were engaged in a different kind of moral struggle, one in which the rules and values they’d memorized in boot camp seemed at best irrelevant to the reality of the war. Canty, who has a way of turning things over and over in his mind, trying to make sense of his experiences, once told me about manning a vehicle checkpoint. He and other marines were supposed to be working with an Afghan National Army (ANA) unit, training and mentoring Afghan soldiers and sharing living quarters with them. One day along came a middle-aged Afghan man on a moped with two little boys on the back, their faces and necks and arms blotched with darkening bruises. The kids had makeup on, and their mascara was running because they were crying. The marines knew they’d been raped.
“So you check ’em,” Canty said of the man and boys, “and they have no weapons, and by our mission here, they’re good to go—they’re okay! And we’re supposed to keep going on missions with these guys.” Seeing that kind of stuff, he said, “your morals start to degrade. Your values do change real quickly.”
War is morally corrosive not just for grunts like Sendio Martz and Stephen Canty. The generation of Americans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan did so under a military high command that was trashing its own code of ethics in an astonishing and demoralizing display. Where, some grunts have wondered, was “the ultimate in ethical and moral behavior” when the George W. Bush administration based its decision to invade Iraq on fabricated evidence, widely debunked at the time, that Saddam was harboring nuclear weapons and building an unholy alliance with al-Qaeda? Where were the military values when the U.S. military authorities oversaw the atrocities at the notorious Abu Ghraib detention center and other detainee abuses?
In 2007, shortly after Canty had finished memorizing military creeds and rules at Parris Island and was able to recite them in a parade-ground yell, Army Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Jordan was dismissed from a military courtroom at Fort Meade, Maryland, and told to go home. Jordan, a heavyset, balding, fifty-year-old Army reservist, had been a commander at Abu Ghraib and was the only officer ever criminally charged with offenses relating to the abuse and torture of Iraqi men at the prison. After most of the charges against him were dropped on technicalities, Jordan had been convicted of disobeying an order not to discuss the case outside the courtroom. But even that minor wrist-slap eventually was dismissed.
From the highest levels of the Defense Department down to lowly enlisted soldiers, the treatment of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib and the official response to public disclosures of the scandal amounted to a squalid evasion of moral responsibility. Under policies set and approved and supervised by the “chain of command” that ran from the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, to then defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Army prison guards and interrogators were “breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.” The investigation was ordered not by Rumsfeld or the Pentagon, but by Sanchez and the U.S. Central Command, the regional military headquarters. Sanchez appointed Major General Antonio Taguba to head the investigation but dictated that the investigation be confined to alleged wrongdoing by junior soldiers; senior officers and policy makers were not to be investigated.
The Defense Department sought to suppress news of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, but once it leaked out, Pentagon officials professed to be stunned by the revelations. “It breaks our hearts that in fact someone didn’t say, ‘Wait, look, this is terrible. We need to do something,’” Rumsfeld told a congressional committee after he saw the Taguba report. “I wish we had known more, sooner, and been able to tell you more sooner, but we didn’t.” After that guileless remark, Taguba told journalist Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker that “a lot of people are lying to protect themselves… From what I knew, troops don’t just take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups.” But, he added, “I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority.”
Ninety-two low-ranking enlisted soldiers were convicted of abuses. The most senior soldier convicted was a staff sergeant, precisely halfway up the enlisted rank ladder from private. Sanchez, nominally in charge of the prison, was allowed to quietly retire, as were other senior commanders. No one in Washington was officially accused of wrongdoing. While Canty and tens of thousands of other young Americans were headed into the war to do their best with duty, honor, courage—doing “what’s right”—the war’s entire chain of command evaded responsibility for the most damaging atrocities of the war.
But more moral rot was becoming evident. A rising army star, Brigadier General Jeffrey Sinclair, admitted to military charges of adultery, improper relationships with female subordinates, and other violations; he tearfully pleaded for leniency from a military court and was allowed to retire at a slightly lower rank, keeping his military pension and benefits. William “Kip” Ward, a four-star army general, was forced to retire after investigators found a pattern of lavish and improper spending. While marines and I were sleeping in the rain and eating cauliflower-and-potato hash for dinner in western Iraq, Ward was billing the government for personal travel and lavish hotel suites and having his staff take his wife shopping and to a spa, among other acts of misconduct detailed by the Pentagon’s inspector general. Ward was ordered to repay $82,000, but he was allowed to retire as a three-star, collecting an annual pension of $208,802. In 2010, while Stephen Canty and his buddies were fighting in Marjah, Gary Alexander, a senior employee of the navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, was sentenced to seventy-five months in prison after admitting that he accepted $400,000 in cash bribes in a contract-award scheme. Air force missile-launch officers were found cheating on exams, as were navy sailors training on nuclear-reactor operations. Three navy admirals were censured and allowed to retire after investigations found they had accepted gifts and sexual favors from a ship provisions contractor known as Fat Leonard. In the ongoing investigation, another naval officer admitted having accepted cash bribes, luxury-hotel vacations, and the services of a prostitute.
A top military ethicist, Don M. Snider of the army’s Strategic Studies Institute and professor emeritus at West Point, observed that the moral standards of the U.S. military profession had been “deeply corroded” by a decade of war. “How else,” he thundered in a November 2012 essay for the institute, to account for the “as-yet uncontrolled escalation in suicides among the military, the unprofessional levels of sexual harassment and assault within the ranks, the spiked divorce rate in military families… the high rates of toxic leadership in command and resulting reliefs for cause?” The eruption of high-profile corruption and misconduct cases forced General Martin Dempsey, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to order in late December 2012 that all officers undergo new training to “reinforce” the military’s values.
But the problem went much deeper than a few sensational cases. The pressure of war had warped the moral code of the army’s officer ranks, and lying had become not just common but essential, according to a study by the U.S. Army War College published in 2015. War College professors Leonard Wong and Stephen J. Gerras confirmed what warfighters like Sendio Martz and Nik Rudolph knew from experience: that while they were struggling to apply their moral codes to the chaos of combat, those above them were blatantly violating the military’s own moral code of values, both to accomplish their mission and for their own career advancement. Certifying, for instance, that understrength battalions were fully manned, that vehicles all had passed required maintenance checks, or that soldiers had been adequately trained when in fact there was insufficient time before deployment. After fourteen years of high-stress war, the War College study found, army officers “have become ethically numb… Sadly, much of the deception that occurs in the profession of arms is encouraged and sanctioned by the military institution. As a result, untruthfulness is surprisingly common in the U.S. military even though members of the profession are loath to admit it.” It was a damning indictment of an institution that claimed to be built on high moral values.
Yet pinning blame on officers who set aside the code of ethics is letting the institution off too easy, a trio of army officers wrote in Military Review, the army’s professional journal on the art and science of land warfare. The military’s values themselves are the source of trouble, wrote Lieutenant Colonel Peter Fromm, a retired officer who taught ethics at West Point; Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Pryer, an intelligence officer serving at the Pentagon; and Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Cutright, a graduate of the army’s elite School of Advanced Military Studies who also taught ethics at West Point.
By requiring strict adherence to its values, the three officers argued, the army “contributes to self-deception by convincing people that they are good, an ethical member of a values-based organization, even though [the army] does very little to actually encourage the right action.”
For example, they wrote, until the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 made “enhanced interrogation” illegal, “one could employ army values to endorse harsh treatment of detainees. Those who used torture could argue they displayed ‘loyalty’ to their nation and fellow troops by helping extract intelligence that might save lives. They could display adherence to ‘duty, country and selfless service’ by their hard, dirty work for good ends.”
In fact, they wrote, it’s hard to think of any tough ethical problem that army values could help a soldier actually resolve. By sloganeering its values, the military has in effect provided moral cover for almost any act: lying, for instance, to protect one’s fellow soldiers and to accomplish the mission. Army values, they wrote, “can actually set the stage for unethical action by inspiring moral complacency and allowing us to justify nearly any action that appears legal.”
“During my combat deployments,” Pryer wrote elsewhere, “I never once witnessed a staff debate about the perceived justice of an act. Unless a lawyer says a tactic is illegal, the typical U.S. military leader believes he or she has the moral ‘green light’ to do it.”
Put another way, the military’s own values thrust its troops into conditions of intolerable moral dissonance. Alyssa Peterson, a Mormon with a degree in psychology, was a young Arabic-speaking intelligence specialist with the 101st Airborne Division, assigned to interrogate Iraqi prisoners inside the detainee cage at the U.S. base in Tal Afar in northern Iraq. According to reporting by Kevin Elston of public radio station KNAU in Flagstaff, Arizona, Peterson’s hometown, she refused to participate further after only two nights of interrogations. Elston reported that an army investigation found that Peterson had been reprimanded for showing “empathy” for the prisoners. Echoing the dislocation many warriors experience as they straddle the separate moral worlds of war and home, she told army investigators that “she did not know how to be two people; she… could not be one person in the cage and another outside the wire.” She was reassigned to guard duty and sent to suicide-prevention training. But on the night of September 15, 2003, she killed herself with her service rifle. She was twenty-seven.
As the wars deepened, the military continued to demand that its recruits memorize high moral standards and rules, and the American public continued to believe that the military acted on a higher moral plane than they did. Few spoke of the reality. “The whole ‘moral code’ thing is bullshit, a fake,” Stephen Canty said to me one day recently, looking back on his two tours in Afghanistan. “Things are more complicated.”