War is a morally dubious and difficult activity.
—Michael Walzer, “The Triumph of Just War Theory (and the Dangers of Success)”
In early January of 2010, a squad from Charlie Company One-Six got pinned down in a gully under fire from Taliban fighters holed up in an adobe farm compound in southern Afghanistan. The marines had just arrived in the country, part of a “surge” of thirty thousand troops President Obama had ordered to strengthen prosecution of the war. The president had used his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech a few weeks earlier to justify his decision to expand the U.S. effort. After eight years of fighting, the physical, mental, and moral casualties were mounting. Jacob Sexton had shot himself that fall in a movie theater near Farmland, Indiana. Obama had visited the wounded at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and had come out shaken. “I don’t want to be going to Walter Reed for another eight years,” he said. Now in his Nobel speech in Stockholm, he explained:
I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.
“We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth,” Obama said. “We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations—acting individually or in concert—will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.”
It’s unlikely anyone in Charlie One-Six had heard the president’s endorsement of war as a necessary, lesser evil. Had any of them recalled and repeated aloud the eloquent phrases about “morally justifiable” war in the desperation of their shallow, stony gully on that awful day in early 2010, he might have been greeted with hoots of derisive laughter. At the moment, unable to move forward or back without exposing themselves to the Taliban’s deadly gunfire, the handful of marines of Charlie One-Six were too busy trying to survive.
It was a bad situation in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province in early 2010. Marjah, the town U.S. troops were charged with liberating from the Taliban, was spread out across a labyrinth of cross-hatching irrigation canals, adobe-walled compounds separated by dirt paths, and acres of alternating bare stony ground and steamy poppy fields. The marines of Charlie One-Six faced, at some distance, a compound typical of that part of southern Afghanistan: a modest farmhouse of three or four dirt-floored rooms, with perhaps a lean-to shelter for cooking and crude pens for goats and chickens, all of them enclosed by adobe walls that rose, in places, to five or six feet. Families living this hardscrabble existence would scatter when American troops moved into the area, fearing the gun battles that would ensue. And sure enough, this marine patrol came under fire from gunmen hidden somewhere within the compound, and the marines dove down into the gully’s modest cover to figure out what to do next.
Two of them, Joey Schiano and Chuck Newton, took turns cautiously raising their heads to see if they could pinpoint where the shots were coming from. Despite their age—Joey was twenty-two, Chuck twenty-five—they were seasoned combat infantrymen on their second deployment. They ducked at a whooshing sound, and a rocket-propelled grenade exploded in the tree over their heads, and branches and twigs clattered down on them. Finally Joey spotted a muzzle flash and slid down excitedly. Newton inched up to take a cautious look.
“I don’t see ’em—which window? Where?” Newton was trained and assigned as a SMAW gunner. The shoulder-fired multipurpose assault weapon was the squad’s most powerful weapon. But he couldn’t see the shooters.
“Lemme do it,” Joey yelled, and Newton shouted, “I’ll cover for you!” and handed over the SMAW. Joey lifted the fifty-four-inch tube to his shoulder, rose into a crouch, squinted into the viewfinder, and focused on a section of blank wall. Then he fired.
The SMAW is a descendant of the World War II bazooka, designed to disable tanks and blow apart concrete bunkers. Against adobe, it is devastating. The blast demolished one end of the building. As the rubble and dust settled, the marines could hear shouting and wailing. “They want to bring out the wounded,” the marines’ interpreter reported. The Taliban gunners fled, and the survivors dragged out the torn and bleeding bodies, some draped over wheelbarrows. It became clear that the Taliban had intended to use women and children as human shields, herding them behind the wall that the SMAW had struck. The marines were stunned. “I mean, all of us would have stopped for a kid. We would rather have the entire squad mowed down than to put a family in jeopardy,” Newton said later. “Joey’s thing was, we’re taking fire from that building and there are Taliban there. Who would ever think they’d put a family in there? That’s how they won the day,” Newton told me, still furious five years later at what he saw as the Taliban’s moral deceit. “That’s the only way they can get over on us, by tricking us. They didn’t outgun us or kill any of our guys, but they won the day by baiting us into killing civilians.”
Joey Schiano was shattered at the carnage he’d caused. “He just broke down sobbing,” said Stephen Canty, Schiano’s squadmate. “The thing is, you couldn’t have known.” It wasn’t within the marines’ mind-set at that time that the enemy would deliberately put women and children at risk for tactical advantage. Charlie One-Six was not yet hardened to the butchery that would characterize this combat tour in Marjah. But they were learning fast. And as Canty often reminded himself, once you know the truth of war, you can’t unknow it. Ever.
The doctrine of just war holds, as Obama noted, that war should be a moral response to a grave wrong, a self-defense response to aggression, or an effort to rescue or protect the victims of injustice. The value of just war lies in its being not only a salve to the conscience of the king or president who orders troops into battle, but as a reassurance to the troops themselves that the killing they do is morally righteous. Otherwise, it is murder.
Rationales for war have been around a long time. Political theorist Michael Walzer, professor emeritus at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, notes that ancient Greeks argued about the conditions under which war could be justified, and so did early Islamic scholars. There are references to such debates in the Bible. In Plato’s Republic, written some twenty-four centuries ago, the Greek philosopher justified war as a natural instinct for survival of a just state—that is, Athens—against the threat of surrounding unjust states. War making, the Greeks believed, was a legitimate and justified right of the people.
The early Christian church swerved sharply away from that idea, unambiguously rejecting participation in the military and in war in any form. Over time, that position proved untenable as the church sought to defend its holdings against the rising Germanic tribes, including the Visigoths, who sacked Rome in 410. Christians needed to make war and kill, and in the fifth century the theologian Saint Augustine, an African bishop, came to the rescue. Killing was okay, Augustine declared in City of God (published in A.D. 426), if God or political leaders said so:
They who have waged war in obedience to the divine command, or in conformity with His laws, have represented in their persons the public justice or the wisdom of government, and in this capacity have put to death wicked men; such persons have by no means violated the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.”
In essence, Augustine’s new doctrine relieved individual soldiers of responsibility for killing and put this immense power, to declare killing just or not, in the hands of higher authority. That was the church. By Augustine’s writ, Christian pacifists became Christian warriors.
Of course it was easy, demonstrably too easy, to claim “divine command” as your jus ad bellum. It was the concept of “just war” that enabled thirteenth-century Christians, directed by Pope Urban II, to crusade against—slaughter—Muslims. But the elaborate rhetorical and philosophical gymnastics that religious and secular leaders performed as they battled over religion and conquest largely faded away with the rise of sovereign nation-states, whose leaders felt their military excursions needed no justification. Save for some outspoken moralists, few raised just war objections to the Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, the opium wars, or the Spanish-American War. The United States swept into the final year of slaughter in World War I on a wave of indignant moral determination to “end all wars,” as President Wilson put it. That idea culminated in the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war altogether. It was solemnly signed by all the major nations that plunged into a global conflict just a few years later.
Not until the Vietnam War in the 1960s did just war doctrine come back into vogue, seized upon by the antiwar left as a legitimate basis for opposing what was seen as an unjust war. But critically, it was the military’s own embrace of just war that revived the doctrine as a useful tool of modern statecraft. The United States fought in Vietnam under a counterinsurgency doctrine, which required winning the hearts and minds of the local populations. That meant the American cause, its warfighting methods, and especially its treatment of civilians had to be seen as just. In practice, of course, carpet-bombing, Agent Orange defoliants, napalm, assassinations, and forced relocations made our hearts-and-minds counterinsurgency campaign a cruel hoax. But the idea was implanted, and some military strategists began speaking of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam as a failure to pursue a just war. That idea became thoroughly embedded in the strategies that framed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As Princeton’s Michael Walzer wrote in 2002, “There are now reasons of state for fighting justly. One might almost say that Justice has become a military necessity.” That meant, he wrote, “that we should not fight wars about whose justice we are doubtful, and that once we are engaged we have to fight justly so as not to antagonize the civilian population whose political support is necessary to a military victory.”
Much of the way the United States fights today stems from just war doctrine: the military’s rigorous effort, if imperfectly realized, to avoid causing civilian casualties; its practice of paying cash to the families of each civilian killed by U.S. forces; its placement of lawyers into tactical operations centers to ensure compliance with just war concepts; and issuing rules of engagement to guide the behavior of individual troops.
The modern adaptation of just war doctrine neatly resolves the problem of determining whether a killing is justified or murder. Fifteen centuries after Augustine, we have returned to the idea that if you are fighting evil, you are excused from the biblical commandment Thou shalt not kill. Your cause has to be just a bit less evil than the enemy’s. The Catholic Church put it this way in its 1992 catechism: “The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders greater than the evil to be eliminated.” Lesser evils, okay.
In its most recent incarnation, though, the application of just war has been too easy, too convenient. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, as confusion and fear hardened into a demand for revenge, President George W. Bush and many others invoked just war doctrine as the basis for the morally righteous killing of the alleged perpetrators in Afghanistan. But Bush, rather than simply acknowledging the emotionally satisfying and morally justifiable decision to strike back, invoked the concepts of good and evil, vowing to use the military to “rid the world of evildoers.” With U.S. troops pouring into Afghanistan to pursue evildoers, in February 2002, Bush declared: “Our cause is just… our war against terror is only beginning.” Within a few weeks, the terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks were gone from Afghanistan, fled into neighboring Pakistan. Washington accelerated the war inside Afghanistan anyway, with more troops, more and bigger American bases, more casualties, more destruction. When I arrived there with a company of Tenth Mountain Division troops in January 2002, we slept in leaky tents, shaved outdoors in icy buckets, and used a splintery plywood two-seat latrine (waste was burned off each day with diesel fuel). We dreamed of showers. A decade later, a half-dozen three-story brick apartment buildings had risen to house the military, with paved streets and parking lots, giant fitness facilities, and dining halls, and Pizza Hut and Burger King offering free delivery.
When the invasion of Iraq was ordered, it was against broad public misgivings: even if the president’s dubious claims about weapons of mass destruction were true, there was no basis in international law or precedent for his proclaimed right to pursue a “preemptive” war to prevent Saddam Hussein from ever attacking the United States. It was difficult to see how self-defense under just war doctrine could be applied to aggression that hadn’t yet happened. But Bush went ahead anyway. “If we wait for threats to materialize,” the president explained at West Point in 2002, “we will have waited too long.”
Of course, the bearded riflemen and suicide bombers who thronged back into Afghanistan to confront the Americans and, two years later, rose against the American presence in Iraq were armed with their own just war doctrine: “Do not kill the soul sanctified by God,” the Koran dictates, “except for just cause.”
In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military applied just war ideas to its tactical operations, with results that will be debated for years. It’s already clear, however, that just war provided little comfort to the troops on the ground. The men and women we agreed to send into our longest wars fought under clouds of doubt. If just war comforted the politicians and think-tank savants who supported the wars, those who did the fighting were left on their own to decide whether their actions in combat were justified killing or murder. The result was an epidemic of moral injury and personal tragedy.
When nineteen-year-old Joseph Schiano had come home to tell his mother, Debbie, that he was joining the marines, she reacted in a way most mothers would understand. She grabbed him around the throat with both hands, pushed him against the wall, and yelled, “You can’t do this! I have given you life and I am the only one who can take life from you!” Then she sighed and wrapped him in a bear hug. “I saw this was what he wanted to do,” Debbie told me.
Despite her deepest fears, Joseph came home after that second combat tour in Marjah physically unharmed. But the demons of his moral injuries, the nightmares of those torn bodies, the guilt over what he had done, followed close behind and eventually closed in on him, finally spilling over onto Debbie herself. It turned out, she realized too late, that war’s aftermath was more dangerous for Joseph than being in war.
Debbie and Joseph and her two other children, Tyler and Nicole, were close, intimate in the way families can get when times are hard. Debbie was a single mom, and they were scraping by. Their small two-story town house in a moderate-income housing development in Greenwich, Connecticut, was cramped and sparse. They did without. At one point they slept on the floor. They were proud and defiant. They fought and yelled at one another, but they always ended up laughing. They stood together. And her kids were smart. Joseph, her eldest, had a sharp memory, the kind of student who could neglect his homework and then ace his tests. By fifth grade at the redbrick Hamilton Avenue School, he’d published three poems in the school newspaper. One, written after a class lecture about drinking and driving, described the thoughts of a driver as he was dying in a car crash.
At elementary school, Joseph was bullied. Debbie complained to the school. When a teacher suggested her son might be “instigating” attacks on himself, Debbie marched into the classroom and told her: “You are instigating me to bounce a ball on your head!” Riding home in the car one day, Joseph pointed out the kid who’d bullied him. Debbie made him get out of the car and go punch him. “He didn’t want to hurt anybody,” she said, remembering his reluctance. Once, she punished Joseph for misbehavior, and he objected. “I can’t believe you did that—you’re supposed to be my friend,” he complained. She shot back: “I am your mother first. Then we can be friends.” And they were.
When Joseph grew into his teens, he kept his two most distinctively boyish features: his rosy cheeks and his short stature, around five-six. He compensated: earring, lip ring, eyebrow ring. He tried to harden himself by working out, but he was never what Debbie called “a washboard kid.” He went through what she remembers as his “black phase,” when he painted his fingernails black. Once he dyed his hair, yellow on one side, red on the other. Debbie and Nicole called him Half Head. All that dropped away when he went to Parris Island in 2007. When the other marines found out he hated the name Joey, they fondly called him Joey and taunted him for his rosy cheeks. “We made fun of the people we liked,” Chuck Newton once explained. “People we didn’t like, we never talked to.”
Joseph and Debbie stayed close, even after he and Charlie One-Six went away for seven months in Afghanistan in 2008, fighting in the southern town of Garmsir. “One thing Joseph and I have—had,” she corrected herself, “is communication.” She knew he had worried about the children in Afghanistan; he’d heard they could be aggressive, sometimes dangerous. Joseph had asked her once, What should I do if a kid threatens me with a gun? Shoot him, she’d replied. You’re okay defending yourself. She worried while he was gone. She knew his company was sometimes called Suicide Charlie because they felt they were always being dangled out as bait for the Taliban. Like moms across the country, Debbie stifled her fear with action: she sent them box after box of goodies, snacks, toiletries, boxers, cigarettes, socks, and ziplock bags. Cartloads of stuff from Costco. At home, she fretted, feeling alone in a sea of upscale suburban-Connecticut families whose kids were not fighting in Afghanistan. “You just go around like everything’s fine,” she said. “But I was losing my mind.” She wondered, Is it normal to be planning your child’s funeral? She was grateful when she found a website for marine parents that answered that question: Yes, normal. Something many military parents did.
Charlie One-Six was home at Camp Lejeune for fourteen months before they were sent back to Afghanistan, in December 2009. This time they were assigned to help clear insurgents from Marjah. The fighting was fierce and prolonged, and Charlie One-Six was in the thick of it. They started taking casualties even before the battle officially began. There was a lot of killing. “I know he was having anxiety issues over there,” Debbie said. “They lost close friends. They blamed themselves.”
It wasn’t until much later that she learned the details of that day when Joey fired the SMAW at a building where women and children were cowering behind Taliban gunmen shooting from windows and doorways. For Joey Schiano, it was a classic moral injury. Using a SMAW to try to stop the gunfire pinning the marines down was tactically correct and allowed under every international law and U.S. military doctrine. It was a military necessity. In the words of President Obama, Joey’s commander in chief back in Washington, it was “morally justified.” But the moral burden, the image of those bloody innocents, the guilt, the shame—the inescapable truth of what he had done—that’s what Joey evidently took away from Afghanistan. The way Debbie described it, the moral pain he felt was acute. “He loved people. He would do anything for anyone,” Debbie said. One image in particular haunted him, she said: he was convinced that the rocket he had fired had gone through the head of one of the children.
Even before One-Six got back to Camp Lejeune from Marjah in July 2010, navy psychologists had diagnosed Joey with PTSD. He was having trouble sleeping, so they dosed him with Xanax, an antianxiety drug, but when he did drift off, he’d jerk awake, sweating and trembling from nightmares of maimed children. In a panic he’d call home. To make Joey laugh and break the tension, Debbie would try to quickly think up something silly his brother, Tyler, had done. One by one his platoon buddies were getting out of the marines. Finally Joey did, too, and came home to Connecticut on January 12, 2011. He left behind Frankie, his beloved pit-bull mix; there was no place for him in Debbie’s crowded town house.
A day or two after he got home, Joseph called the VA to get help with his PTSD. He was told to send an e-mail request. As Debbie remembers it, he received a form letter from the VA two weeks later saying they’d get back to him in eight or ten weeks. That was a blow. After four years of hard-driven, mission-oriented life in the marines, Joseph was adrift back home in the civilian world. The sudden disappearance of his closest buddies stirred feelings of loss and grief. As much as he had chafed against the institutional confines of military service, he missed its structure, its predictability, its ideal of service. Like other veterans, he thought he could regain some of that by getting involved in law enforcement or emergency medicine. He got the books and studied, but none of it stuck. “Mom, I just can’t remember anything,” he said.
“It’s okay,” Debbie told him. “Take your time.”
One night, he came home from drinking with friends and stormed upstairs. Nicole yelled to Debbie, “Mom, you better come up here, there’s something wrong with Joe.” Debbie raced up the stairs. He was shouting at himself in the mirror: “I’m a marine! I don’t need anyone! I can do this by myself!” When Debbie tried to intervene, Joseph exploded, shouting that they were being shot at and needed to shoot back. Tyler tried to grab him, and Joseph turned with a look of hatred and screamed, “I’m gonna come fuck you up!” That’s when Debbie put her hand firmly on Joseph’s shoulder, and he slid down to the floor, his back against the wall. Debbie slid down with him, and as he burst into tears, she held him and rocked him.
“It broke my heart, he just cried so hard,” Debbie told me, through her own tears. “He just couldn’t understand why he had to lose so many friends, why he was the way he was. He kept saying it should have been him out there [who got killed]. And he just saw the image of those kids all the time. He lived with that image every time he went to sleep.”
But then he seemed to pull himself together.
He stopped drinking. Tried to quit smoking. Made plans to fix up a room for himself in his grandmother’s house and bring his dog, Frankie, up from North Carolina. He found a new girlfriend and would drive his Volkswagen Jetta the forty minutes up to Somers, New York, to see her. He’d go Friday night, come back Sunday, and along the way he’d put on Zac Brown. The music, with its haunting lines, often made him cry.
Just after noon on Sunday, March 20, 2011, Debbie felt sick and canceled plans to get a manicure. She was lying down when the police came to the door. Joey’s Jetta had run off Route 139, a narrow winding road in Somers, and struck a utility pole. At twenty-three years old, he was dead.
Joey Schiano had gone to war with the other marines of Charlie One-Six and hundreds of thousands of others, trusting—along with their families—that the United States held the moral high ground, that they fought under the banner of just war. Translated to an actual battlefield, that assurance meant that the killing Charlie One-Six would do was virtuous and morally sanctioned. Otherwise it would be murder, a profound violation of the moral dictates of the world’s great religions. It meant that even though the accidental killing of Afghan women and children was tragic, it was not murder.
But if U.S. military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan were believed to be morally just—not only by politicians far distant from any battlefield, but on a personal level by the working-class military, the trigger pullers—then why did the conduct of those wars produce so much moral pain among those who fought in them?
How did Joseph Schiano, who followed the rules and values he’d learned from Debbie and been taught at Parris Island, who fired his weapon against an enemy in a morally justified war, come to be haunted by that act? So haunted that he told his mother he wished he’d died on the battlefield? And why is it that we who sent Joey and the others to war have not also felt their moral pain?
The machinery of war continued to grind forward, the cycle of growing threat and growing response powering both wars well beyond their shaky moral origins. Instead of just war, these conflicts became war justified by war. And we let it happen. Not only was there no serious antiwar movement, there was precious little questioning of the moral justifications of the wars at all. Three days after the terrorist attacks in 2001 Congress had enacted the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which sanctified American killing of alleged terrorists anywhere on the globe. The war in Iraq was begun, fought, and ended, and new U.S. military interventions began in Iraq and Syria without any significant public pressure to rewrite the AUMF or even to discuss it. In 2014 and 2015 a few members of Congress wondered whether or how to renew the AUMF, but as of this writing, despite a raucous presidential campaign and an angry debate over how to fight the Islamic State, nobody could be bothered.
Thus the high moral purpose that fired our united response to 9/11 was allowed to wither, and the soldiers and marines I lived with at war after 2002 fought without the certainty that their cause was just, that every action, every decision, came under the umbrella of just war, that the killing in which they were engaged was not murder. In that sense, we all let them down. Because war is morally complex and constantly changing, Michael Walzer wrote, “decisions about when and how to fight require constant scrutiny, exactly as they always have… the ongoing critique of war-making is a centrally important democratic activity.”
News of Joseph’s death knocked the breath out of Debbie. For hours she could hardly move. Finally she levered herself up from the sofa, tottered into the kitchen, and smashed glasses, plates, and dishes. Then the tears came, the regret and anger and aching sorrow. At Joseph’s funeral, the marines of Charlie One-Six served as pallbearers and stood at attention as his casket was lowered into a grave under towering beeches and cedars at Putnam Cemetery, just off Parsonage Road in Greenwich. A glass display holding a folded flag and Joseph’s medals graces a wall in Debbie’s living room; on another wall, a large color photograph of Joseph, bare chested at the beach, embracing his dog, Frankie, and grinning at the camera. The VA never had gotten back to Joey. But after his funeral, they offered counseling for Debbie and Tyler and Nicole. Debbie and Nicole declined. Tyler went a few times, then gave up and enlisted in the marines. Debbie’s own grief runs deep, her loss beyond words. She can manage to say, “I miss Joey. But I think he’s in a better place.”
There are inevitable questions about whether he took his own life. “I know for a fact he didn’t commit suicide,” said Debbie. “He had problems. He felt like he didn’t belong. But he was making plans.” Like other veterans, Joey said he missed the adrenaline rush of combat. Maybe that’s why he drove so fast, Debbie thought. Tempting death.
It is a tragic measure of his moral injury that Joey may have felt the only way to surmount his pain was with reckless speed. Certainly he needed professional help, steady, insightful, and caring. The VA has acknowledged its shortage of mental health therapists and has hired additional therapists in recent years. But long waiting lists still are common. And while there are promising experimental therapies for moral injury under way, the therapy provided by the VA has had disappointing results. The mental health community, both military and civilian, is a long way from being able to reach veterans like Joey Schiano with consistent healing help. After all, the origins of his moral injury lay not in him but in the inability or unwillingness of our political leaders to pursue war under a clear, convincing, publicly articulated moral justification. Joey went to war without any moral structure to support him, and in that sense his wound may have been untreatable. Talking with an understanding therapist might have helped, but Joey was on a wait list when he died.
“It wasn’t Afghanistan where he died,” Debbie once reminded me. “It was right here.” Betrayal is at the center of her moral injury: the failure of her country to support her son at war, and its unwillingness to care for him when he came home. Betrayal, grief, anger. “Joey was dead inside of twelve weeks! How many guys are dead that were waiting those twelve weeks? Hire some more people!” Debbie said. “You’ve got a lot of kids coming home—this is a time of war. Cut back after the war!”
Toward the end of a long conversation, Debbie paused, exhausted. “I don’t know what the answer is,” she admitted. Except the obvious: “There need to be more people who can listen,” she said. “I don’t care how much the story makes you sick to your stomach, just listen. Don’t turn your back.”