Any army, ancient or modern, is a moral construction defined by shared expectations and values.
—Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam
The moral injury of Sarah Plummer didn’t begin with the killing, although that came to be a part of it. It began when she suffered a violent assault, a personal betrayal that grew into an institutional betrayal, jarring experiences in which Plummer felt her fellow warriors and superiors profoundly violated the moral codes of honor, loyalty, respect, and professionalism she had believed were the very embodiment of the United States Marine Corps.
Betrayal is a violation of trust, and trust is the bone and sinew of the military. Daily military life is sustained by trust embodied in the common phrase “Got your six,” “six” referring to the blind spot immediately behind a fighter pilot’s helmet. Six o’clock on a clockface as you face twelve. A pilot’s wingman watches his buddy’s six so nobody sneaks up behind him. More broadly, it means “I’m protecting you. Depend on it no matter what.” Those who volunteer for military service live daily with the responsibility for someone’s six and trust that somebody’s got theirs. Trusting and being trustworthy are learned skills not deliberately practiced in civilian life, but in the military trust is bedrock, taught from a recruit’s first day. In army basic training, I have watched new soldiers instructed to topple over backward from a five-foot-high platform, trusting that fellow recruits gathered below will catch them. After more weeks of training, recruits are required to complete a buddy team live-fire event, in which a soldier low-crawls while her buddy is laying down suppressive fire with live bullets, from behind. The exercise, drill sergeants say, teaches new soldiers to put their lives in the hands of other soldiers.
Beyond that immediate moral covenant, the men and women we send to war trust that the physical preparation and other training they’ve been given will enable them to survive and prevail in combat; that their weapons and equipment work and are better than those of the enemy; and that their superiors, up to the commander in chief, are competent and act in their best interests. They have to trust that their friends and allies won’t shoot them in error or in anger; that they won’t be left behind; that medics will save them if wounded; that their lives will not be squandered by politicians back home. That the war they are fighting is moral and just, and that their service will be seen as honorable.
In war, betrayal of that trust is inevitable. That’s a truth that runs through military history and the literature of war. Betrayal forms the basis of the Greek classics—Homer’s Iliad and Sophocles’s Ajax among many others—and appears in such classics as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Karl Marlantes’s Vietnam memoir, What It Is Like to Go to War.
In the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, betrayal seemed to come from all directions. Some Americans joined the military eager to participate in the noble work of building peaceful, prosperous democracies as the White House promised, and individuals did good work in mentoring judicial and municipal officials, building bridges and schools, and working with farmers to increase crop yields and exports. Yet much of that progress was thwarted or undone by a lack of consistent long-term support from Washington and by bureaucratic rules that delayed or strangled innovation in the field. A common belief among those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan is that the politicians in Washington never gave them enough manpower, time, and other resources to do the job right. Grunts in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance, at first traveled in unarmored vehicles until casualties from IEDs skyrocketed; then soldiers and marines began devising and installing their own makeshift armor plates, often at their own expense. Finally, after years of prodding from parents, journalists, and politicians, including the late senator Edward Kennedy, help from Washington arrived in the form of heavily armored Humvees and blast-resistant armored trucks.
At home, people turned against the war even as military families braced for second and third deployments, sending their own loved ones back into wars the public had decided were lost causes. In the war zones, civilians that the troops were there to help sometimes turned out to be the enemy, planting IEDs and targeting American patrols for insurgent snipers. Americans assigned to work with Iraqi and Afghan security forces sometimes were shot by the soldiers they were mentoring, in what the military came to label “green-on-blue” violence.
This betrayal of trust is the most basic violation of our sense of right and wrong and can carve a jagged moral wound deep in the soul. Betrayal sours into cold fury and a bitterness that veterans know civilians find hard to understand. Betrayal corrodes their ability to trust again, extending the moral injury through families and colleagues and impairing participation in civic life.
Brandon Friedman was a young lieutenant with a combat tour in Afghanistan behind him when he and the platoon of 101st Airborne infantrymen he commanded took part in the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. The premise of the entire war, Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, had been exposed as a falsehood, and the U.S. invasion had unleashed a bloodbath of violence and killing. The night that two of the unit’s sergeants were killed, Friedman lay on his cot and simmered with pent-up fury. Recalling that night in his 2007 book, The War I Always Wanted, he wrote,
I had always wanted to fight. But I never wanted any part of something like this. I was a professional soldier. I wanted to believe in my work. Instead I was watching as politicians with no military experience hijacked the army… Two guys in our battalion were dead, two families ruined. And try as I might, I couldn’t figure out what the purpose of that was. Things that had been welling up inside me all summer suddenly exploded in my head like a dozen roman candles. I hated the president for his ignorance. I hated [then defense secretary] Donald Rumsfeld for his appalling arrogance and his lack of judgment. I hated their agenda. I hated Colin Powell for abandoning the army—for not taking care of his soldiers—when he could have done something to stop these people… I hated them because now, it meant that my guys could be next… I felt like we had been taken advantage of. We were professionals sent on a wild goose chase using a half-baked plan for political reasons.
Recently, I asked Friedman if he still felt that way. Oh, yeah, he said. Brandon is tall and rangy with a thatch of brown hair, deep blue eyes, an informal style, and a pleasant grin. He had completed his army obligation in late 2003 and later gone to work for the Obama administration in Washington, D.C., advocating for veterans. Married with a family, he was settled, but the war was still with him.
“The moral imperative for me is to stay away from anybody who served on President Bush’s national security team. I won’t socialize with them. I don’t trust them as equals. I pulled out of being considered for a job when I found out who I’d be working for. To me, it’s not like ‘Well, all that happened a long time ago, we’re all good.’ That’s not how it works. I was at Walter Reed a few years ago and saw a guy in a motorized wheelchair, which he operated with his mouth. Because he had no arms or legs. It’s one thing to hear stories like that on the news. But go to Walter Reed and see for yourself. That’s the cost of war—in this case, a war that never should’ve happened. And I won’t sit here and say that’s okay. The Iraq War was bullshit. And I’m not gonna shake hands with the guys responsible for it.”
That same bitterness gripped Stephen Canty when he and other marines of Charlie One-Six were on their second tour in Afghanistan, where they’d been assigned to train, mentor, and fight alongside Afghan National Army soldiers. “You go out there and at first you want to do the best thing you can, be the nicest you can, you really believe in the hearts-and-minds stuff,” he said. “You really want to help these guys. Then you realize, it doesn’t work like that. We got guys sleeping next to us in the ANA who are Taliban, and we’re supposed to be guarding these fucks, supposed to be training them? And we’re supposed to count on them during missions to watch our backs? You have Washington saying, ‘Hey—hearts and minds! Hey! Partner with the Afghans!’ And these motherfuckers are shooting your own buddies, soldiers and marines, in the back? And you’re gonna sit here and keep telling us to partner?”
Canty said it got to where “you couldn’t trust a single person except the guys next to you.” Five years after he returned from Afghanistan, Canty told me, “That’s why we have trouble trusting people.”
Sarah Plummer was a bright twenty-four-year-old marine lieutenant who went to war in 2005, in charge of an intelligence unit based in western Iraq that operated small, unmanned surveillance drones. Working out of Al-Taqaddum Air Base, she and her enlisted marines flew Pioneer and ScanEagle drones equipped with video cameras and monitored and analyzed the live video feeds to hunt for insurgents planting IEDs or setting ambushes of friendly troops. Often they were asked to track individual insurgent leaders, so-called high-value targets. They’d guide an attack by hunter-killer teams of commandos or by air strikes or artillery, then advise the U.S. command of the outcome, called a battle damage assessment, or BDA: number of bodies, number of vehicles or houses destroyed.
It was a painfully close-up view of the ugliness of war, the drones’ powerful video cameras drawing Plummer and her operators and analysts into an intimate communion with death. As in any war, the violence sometimes was inflicted on innocents. “We were seeing some of the murders and beheadings, and we were not pulling the trigger, but we’d do target recon beforehand for marines or soldiers,” she said. Often, she and her marines were not told who the target was or why it was being hit but were just given map coordinates and told to keep an eye on that location. “Then we’d see pretty much an entire family get murdered on the roof of their house, even though we’d be told to go off target [that is, look away] before we could see what was happening. But we knew… we did a lot of BDA during or immediately after the bombs had been dropped or artillery fired.”
That was years before the U.S. military noticed that many of its drone operators, whether they were based overseas or in the United States, were becoming emotionally sickened by watching people being killed. By 2013, for instance, when I visited a highly classified drone operations and intelligence center at Langley Air Force Base in southern Virginia, the rates of trauma had risen so sharply that the air force had begun helping its people cope by adding to the staff a full-time psychologist and a chaplain. They’d walk the floor, stopping to check in with the operators and analysts bent over their screens on twelve-hour shifts monitoring video transmitted from drones soaring high over Afghanistan.
But in Iraq between 2005 and 2007, even though the carnage Plummer saw up close was horrific, she never sought out a chaplain or mental health counselor to talk it through. “All that actually made a pretty big impact on me and on my marines, but we didn’t have a context to talk about it,” she told me. “When you’re in a trigger-puller environment” of hard-core warfighters “and you’re just the support person, you feel you don’t have the space to say how that affects you.”
At the start of her career, Plummer was determined to become a marine aviator, a highly competitive and sought-after assignment for which she was well positioned after graduating from the University of Virginia on a navy scholarship and completing four years of Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC). She’d done her civilian flight training, excelled at athletics, and gotten top grades. Her dad had been an air force navigator. Now she was officially accepted in the naval aviation program. “Flying was what I always wanted to do,” she said.
Then, she said, she was raped, by a fellow ROTC midshipman.
It was two weeks before graduation and her commissioning as an officer. “It was someone I knew and cared about. I was screaming and punching, it was pretty black and white, I fought him off me, but that’s not how it was interpreted later when I did report what happened.” She went the next day to her marine instructor, intending to tell him exactly what had happened. But like many rape victims, she found herself unable. “I felt shame, I felt bad and dirty, that somehow it was my fault, that I could have prevented it,” she said. Because it had happened within the university’s small military family, she felt as if she had been raped by her brother and now had to tell her father. At the last minute, she couldn’t do it. Instead, she just told the officer that she was having a hard time with things, and let it go at that.
After graduation she went to the Basic School, the tough Marine Corps officer-training course, and during orientation week she and her fellow fledgling officers were given a briefing on sexual assault. The briefer, a female officer and lawyer, gave several examples of sexual assault. One of the stories was similar to what had happened to Plummer. She and a friend talked after class; her friend urged her to report her rape. If she didn’t, Plummer thought, he might rape again, “and I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. I knew this wouldn’t turn out well, but it was the beginning of getting some agency over what had happened.”
It went badly. An investigation went nowhere. Like other victims of military sexual assault, she was questioned and then requestioned in a way she felt was hostile. One day the military lawyer handling her rape case passed her in the hallway. “We put a note in his record,” the officer said. No further action would be taken. Case closed.
Sarah sought out a mental health counselor. She told the story of her rape and discussed other concerns, acknowledging that after the rape she had experienced periodic depression. Emotionally drained but undaunted, she showed up at Naval Air Station Pensacola to begin formal military flight training. But after her first flight physical, she received a shock: the corps had disqualified her from ever flying.
She had been told that seeing a mental health counselor would not affect her chances of being selected as an aviator. “They told me this was the new Marine Corps and counseling wouldn’t affect my career,” she said. “I was never on medication, I was not suicidal, I was a top performer with great grades and physical-fitness scores.” But it turned out that attitudes in the corps weren’t so modern, after all.
“I was deeply disappointed with and utterly wounded by the institution which not only let me down but continued to punish me in one way or another for years afterward for having reported the rape,” she later wrote in her blog, Semper Sarah.
Eventually, she took an assignment with marine intelligence and ended up deploying twice to Iraq. There, on her second deployment, the story of her rape surfaced among some of the unit’s officers and she started seeing a mental health counselor. “I felt I had done well seeking therapy,” she told me, “but then it was thrown back in my face. It felt even worse than the immediate aftermath [of the rape], because being deployed and dealing with the retraumatization of telling my story, being shuffled around from chaplain to commanding officer to therapist and having to tell my story about thirty more times and meantime working fourteen-hour days, seven days a week… for me it felt like basically every area of my life was touched by trauma or stress or drama.”
Finally, a navy psychologist and a senior officer rescued her and found her a new assignment, and after a few months she rotated back to the United States where she finished her six years in the Marine Corps.
Sarah found healing from her moral injuries not so much through formal therapy dedicated to relieving the shame and bitterness and depression but through her own personal faith and drive. She’s found meaning in working as a life coach, yoga instructor, speaker, and nutritionist and by developing a habit of positive thinking. Her healing began during her second deployment in Iraq, when she discovered yoga. “Those days I got on the mat, I could actually breathe,” she wrote in her blog. “Even if it was only for a few minutes at a time it was a life-saver, because the rest of the time I literally felt suffocated.” Yoga helped bring her to the recognition that healing from her trauma was up to her, that she had the power to take control of her life and move on. “To me, choosing to live out of love instead of fear or anger is not due to an absence of trauma, but in spite of it…
“No one is going to do it for you, even if you have an amazingly supportive spouse, family, or friends. I spent years wishing people would do something more for me, believing they should be doing more for me, until it clicked that, in some ways, it almost did not matter what anyone did for me because ultimately true healing would only come from within me.”
But she cautions that healing from the moral injury of betrayal doesn’t come quickly or easily or even completely. “We don’t heal never to be in pain again; we heal so that we’re strong enough to take that hill, persistent enough, courageous enough,” she says in a video she recorded in the mountains of Colorado, where she sounds like the soccer athlete she once was.
“On bad days you push yourself—it still hurts… if you’re one of those people, and we’ve all been there, and you’re feeling that pain, pick up the phone and talk to somebody and let yourself feel the pain… being strong enough to ride the tide.”
She makes it sound easy. But from the combat veterans I’ve spent time with, I know it’s not easy. Some, like John Lee, keep it locked up for almost a lifetime.