Praise be to the Lord my Rock,
who trains my hands for war,
my fingers for battle.
—Psalm 144
On his first combat deployment, Army Major Doug Etter had been in Iraq all of two hours when a tall soldier in dusty, frayed fatigues slouched into the chapel and asked for the chaplain. Etter is a Presbyterian minister and as an army chaplain wore a gold cross on the collar of his tan desert uniform, at that time freshly laundered. He gestured to a white plastic chair. The soldier lowered himself and cleared his throat. Etter waited. “I want to talk about the second guy I killed today,” the soldier began.
Etter was not exactly unprepared for such an opening conversational gambit. He is a man of deep faith, trained in both military and religious practice. He is one of a cadre of thousands of ministers, imams, rabbis, and priests the military commissions to minister to its men and women, to guide their spiritual and ethical lives, and, as the army puts it, to “strengthen strong personal character and moral well-being” of the troops. If the military offers any aid to those with moral injury, these men and women are among the first responders.
But Etter also was a soldier through and through, from a proud line of warriors dating back to the Revolutionary War. Now it was his turn: 2005 in western Iraq, one of the most perilous times and places of the Iraq War, and Etter had just arrived at Camp Habbaniyah on his first deployment, with Task Force Panther, composed mostly of soldiers from the Pennsylvania National Guard. After a year, when they would complete their twelve-month deployment, they would stand with heads bowed as their scrawled regrets rose in smoke from a stone baptismal font. In the interim, Task Force Panther would be mauled. Fifteen of its soldiers would go home in flag-draped coffins, sixty-one would be wounded, and they would see many atrocities and kill many insurgents in some of the most brutal fighting of the war. Etter’s boyish face, benign gaze, and mellifluous voice belied a steel interior. He was an activist chaplain: wearing his body armor and helmet, he often rode into battle with the soldiers of Task Force Panther as they fortified themselves with the black humor of the Molly Hatchet song blasting over the intercoms, “Flirtin’ with Disaster.” Occasionally Etter would carry a military shotgun, a visible emblem of his belief that war was a sin but sometimes a necessary one and a demonstration of his solidarity with the troops. Chaplains are noncombatants under international law, prohibited from engaging in combat. Under U.S. policy, chaplains may not carry weapons. But Etter, a former high-altitude mountaineer and paramedic, a man with a strong sense of history, is certain of his place on the battlefield as a representative of God. “I am not taking any unnecessary risks,” he wrote home, “but I am also not sitting back waiting for soldiers to come to me. I am going to them.”
There can be few more disorienting places for religious clergy than in the midst of war. Profound cases of moral injury come to them literally through the open door of the chapel. The raw ugliness of violence, the relentless maiming and death of human beings, and the scale of destruction seem to deny the existence of the benevolent God of our childhoods. Existential issues flood the war zone: if there is an Almighty God, why would He allow all this to happen? Then there is the tricky issue of killing. The military is organized, equipped, trained, and deployed to kill, a purpose that transgresses the direct command of God. Even for the most devout, belief can be severely tested in war. In some cases, war has shattered the faith of military chaplains themselves. “There’s a saying that there are no atheists in foxholes,” Etter once told me. “Untrue. There are lots of atheists in foxholes.” There are stories, of course, of miraculous battlefield epiphanies, of soldiers finding God in the midst of mayhem. But for the most part, it may be that the best that can happen is that the warriors grit through it as best they can, that the military chaplains hang tight to their own faith, and that they listen and comfort as they are able, and leave the deeper healing of moral injury until after the war.
But being heard, in a deep nonjudgmental way, can be the beginning of healing. The soldier who walked through the chapel door was just finishing a twelve-month deployment in western Iraq, and Etter assumed he had killed many times. How was “the second guy I killed today” any different? The story came out in a torrent. The soldier was in a unit assigned to assault a house where insurgents were holed up. He was in the second “stick,” or group, and as the first stick of soldiers warily stepped into the ground-floor rooms, he crept up the stairs toward the second floor, and near the top, a long hallway stretched into the shadows where an insurgent was raising his weapon. It misfired, and as the soldier brought up his own weapon, it, too, misfired. Desperately, he pulled the charging handle back to clear it, and it misfired again, and at the end of the hallway the insurgent was bent over, beating his rifle on his leg to clear it, and the soldier dropped his weapon and charged, pulling his bayonet from its sheath as he sprinted. In seconds he reached the man and slammed into him, driving the bayonet deep into his heart. The man slumped to the ground and died.
Standard military procedure is to search the body for any usable intelligence, and the soldier found the man’s wallet and opened it. Inside, a weathered snapshot of a man posing with several women and children. The man in the picture now lay dead at his feet, and the soldier made the presumption that the photo showed the man’s wives and children.
“So he felt very guilty about that,” Etter told me later. “Someone who had tried to kill him, someone who had been his target, suddenly became human. Intellectually, he knew he had done the right thing. But emotionally he felt that this taking of a life was in some way morally wrong. And he was unable to synthesize the two in any peaceful way. He came looking for a word of grace, a word of hope, looking for a word of forgiveness. Looking for, I want to say, some way out of the remorse and guilt he was feeling.”
In the months ahead Etter would sit with many soldiers he described as “seeking a release from the pressure that was on their soul, their heart, their mind.” We were talking late one night in the kitchen of his house in the rural hills of eastern Pennsylvania while a late-spring snowfall frosted the fields outside. How, I kept asking, are you able to give them that release, that grace? Representing a God who unmistakably forbids killing, and the prophet Jesus who taught love, how can you comfort someone with deep remorse over a killing? There was a long pause while Etter reflected. When he began speaking, it was in his slow, soothing voice, the words coming in complete sentences and paragraphs uninterrupted by the “um” and “like” of our modern speech.
For that soldier who killed with his bayonet and for the many others who came seeking comfort, he said, he would remind them that talking to a chaplain in a confessional manner is confidential and protected speech and they could talk freely. He would listen without judgment and ask if they wanted to pray, and maybe half of them would say no, and the others usually wanted Etter to pray for them. “I would remind them that we have all fallen short of our own hopes, aspirations, and dreams for ourselves. That we have all sinned, and that in spite of that God loves us, and in that incredible love God has for us there is freedom, freedom to live boldly, freedom to live happily, freedom to live without guilt and remorse.”
Toward the end of their twelve-month combat tour, the soldiers of Task Force Panther were coming to see Etter more often. “There’s something I’d like to get off my chest,” they’d say. “I’d like to confess. I just want to talk this out.” It was an incredible honor to be trusted with such intimate details, Etter felt. “To see them bare their souls… after living together for months. I’d seen them naked in the showers, so to see them bare their souls is a whole different level of intimacy. That deserves our respect, our dignity, our highest and best. I think one thing chaplains would agree on, regardless of our religious affiliations, is that you are in a very holy place at that time. It’s a place of great vulnerability and must be approached with love and compassion.”
But listening can’t be all there is to it, I argued. How do you comfort a soldier who just realized he’s killed a real human being—and that his country will call him a hero for it? If that soldier feels he has violated some deeply held moral belief, how does he reconcile that with the person he thought he was, before he killed? How can you help him work toward forgiving himself for what he feels was a sin? How does he earn God’s forgiveness?
I had recently read a paper by Shira Maguen of the San Francisco VA Medical Center. “Following traumatic events that involve acting in ways that transgress deeply held moral beliefs,” she wrote, “veterans may develop views about self, others, and the world that make engaging in self-forgiveness particularly difficult.
“In our experience,” she wrote of herself and her clinical research colleagues, “some of the reasons that veterans struggle with self-forgiveness is because they believe (a) self-forgiveness would mean that they are condoning their actions, (b) self-forgiveness would lead to forgetting what happened, (c) they are unworthy or undeserving of forgiveness, and/or (d) they need to be punished to atone for what they did.” But there is hope, she continued: “In these situations, helping veterans recognize that although their actions have violated their values, and they may regret their actions, they can work to accept that those actions need not define who they are.” I am an American, a good soldier, a good husband and dad, and also I have killed to protect my buddies, whom I love and honor. “Moving forward with a focus on values,” Maguen wrote, “can be healing for veterans who have killed in combat.”
It’s not easy, Etter agreed, for anyone to think through the issues relating to killing. “Our society repeatedly tells everyone killing is wrong, killing is wrong. We say it’s okay in self-defense, but it should be avoided at all costs. And then we take weapons designed to kill, put them into the hands of our young men and women, and say, ‘Go forth with the blessing of our nation and defend it.’ And as you know, I think war is sinful but sometimes morally justifiable. And the same is true for killing. I don’t know if it is ever not a sin. But there are times when I do believe it is the morally right thing to do.” He paused. “And holding those two truths, which are almost diametrically opposed and antithetical to one another, is the paradox and complexity of combat that we as warriors experience.”
That seemed like a considerable burden to put on people just trying to stay alive in combat. Especially when they are seven or eight months into a life of constant danger and stress and filth and heat that roll on without letup, without ever a day off. But that’s what we ask. It seemed to me to virtually guarantee a moral injury, no matter which way an individual soldier or marine chose. I thought of Nik Rudolph and Darren Doss, Joey Schiano and Jake Sexton. Sinners?
What exactly is a sin? I asked Etter. And if you sin, don’t you require absolution, a formal release from guilt?
“A sin is a violation of God’s will, as we understand it,” he said.
And you can be forgiven for a sin?
“Yes, absolutely. You must confess; your remorse must be genuine.” But forgiveness, absolution, Etter said, likely comes over time, not necessarily in one ritual or one long late-night talk in the chapel at Habbaniyah. It was that understanding, that forgiveness, are more a process than a single act that prompted him at the end of Task Force Panther’s twelve-month combat tour to summon soldiers to commit their regrets to index cards to be consumed in flames in the baptismal font. “I wanted to express, as a person of faith, a person of hope, that their sins could be forgiven, that their guilt could be expunged,” he said. “My goal was that by the very physical witnessing, the banishing of those cards in fire, they would begin the process of healing. I did not think,” he said, standing and stretching, “that they would leave there immediately thinking that everything was great or that all of their sins and troubles had been removed. But I wanted it to be the start of the process where they could find healing and wholeness again.”
Finding healing and wholeness back in the civilian world would be a difficult process for Etter himself. In Iraq, he felt strengthened in the presence of other soldiers, comforted in the intimacies shared with those who struggled with the same perils and demons. After several months in Iraq, he felt estranged from the civilian world outside that alternate moral universe of war. Midway through his combat tour, his best friend, Lieutenant Colonel Michael E. McLaughlin, was killed in a nearby IED blast. Etter flew home to Pennsylvania to officiate at the memorial service. When it was over, he turned to his wife and said, I want to go home. She responded, I’ll go get the car. No, Etter said. Back home to Iraq, to the battalion. Back to war.
When Etter finally returned to Pennsylvania for good, he found he had absorbed too much of his soldiers’ stress and trauma, in addition to his own. He was burned out. Compassion fatigue. “I had nothing left,” he explained. “I was spent, emotionally, physically, mentally.” The sudden disappearance of danger and stress and camaraderie from his life was disorienting. And he had no one to talk to. The chaplain had no chaplain. His emotions swung violently. He started driving recklessly. Drinking heavily. One day he found himself standing in his driveway, a cigar and glass of scotch in hand. It was 9:00 a.m.
To explain himself, he once told me of one of his warrior ancestors who fought in the Civil War. Wounded and captured, he was sent to the notorious Confederate prison at Andersonville, where some thirteen thousand Union prisoners died of starvation, disease, and exposure. Great-Grandfather survived. When he came home in 1865, he parked himself in the kitchen and never left. He was twenty years old. “I don’t know what he did to stay alive at Andersonville,” Etter said one evening. “I’m certain he stole food from other prisoners. Was that wrong? Never leaving the kitchen… now I understand.” When the fighting is done, when soldiers come home, “some of those spiritual, moral wounds are like an abscess just beneath the surface. Enormous pain, and if left untreated… they can poison the heart and the soul.”
Etter eventually sought help and found a caring therapist. But what sustained his moral and spiritual strength during the war, what prevented deeper moral wounds, was not only his religious faith but his unshakable belief in the mission. When soldiers would come to him for comfort, he said, “I always tried to give them my very best, my full attention, all the love and compassion I had—while still maintaining army standards, reminding them of the things we still had to do. For example,” he continued, “whenever I did a funeral I always had three goals: to honor the fallen, to comfort their buddies as best I could, and to push them back out the door. Because as we say in a warrior’s creed, the mission comes first. I will always place the mission first. That’s why we’re here. That’s my job and I totally support that.”
Like many Americans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, Etter had gone to war filled with moral outrage and an Old Testament desire to strike back at the insurgents who were attacking Americans. “Our enemy has chosen war as his course and we shall fill his plate to overflowing,” Etter wrote home one night, shortly after he led a memorial service for one of his soldiers killed in action. “We will dish it out to him in such a way that the very thought of it will nauseate, sicken, and repel him. We will give it to him in such a way that he will never have the stomach for it again.”
Some chaplains, though, found it was more of a struggle to absorb the moral realities of war. Steve Dundas, a navy commander and Catholic chaplain, grew up in a military family passionate about the ideals of patriotism, duty, and service. Conservative Republican to the core; a devotee of Rush Limbaugh. After 9/11, Dundas was one of the many people who wanted revenge. Let’s go get those bad guys and Saddam, too, he told his military colleagues. But it wasn’t until 2007 that he was reassigned from his post at the naval hospital at Camp Lejeune to a mobile training team in Iraq. A year after Doug Etter’s soldiers burned their regrets and left Iraq, Dundas and his team began working out of Al-Taqaddum Air Base, where Marine Lieutenant Sarah Plummer was on duty monitoring drones. Dundas and the team traveled constantly through hostile territory in western Iraq visiting remote U.S. outposts where Dundas would hold worship services and counsel troubled young soldiers and marines.
Steve Dundas is a small man with a polished bald head and an engaging smile; he peers out at the world through wire-rim glasses with a benevolent gaze. A baseball fanatic, he feels most comfortable at a ballpark. (“I know as a Christian that the Bible says to ‘cast all of your cares on him [Jesus]’ and I do try to do that, but sometimes the ballpark brings me closer to him than a church,” Dundas wrote on his blog, Padre Steve.) But far out in desolate western Iraq, he was uncomfortably aware that al-Qaeda considered chaplains a high-value target. As the team traveled, he began to realize the immense scale of destruction and misery, beyond what he’d experienced as a trauma chaplain. Back home, he’d ministered to the severely injured. He had seen suffering. He thought of himself as hardened to human pain, untouchable by trauma. But this was devastating: young Americans gruesomely injured or dying; villages and towns turned to rubble; streams of refugees; the few who ventured out to the market or mosque risking being maimed by suicide bombs. And by that time, the rationale for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq had been exposed, Dundas realized, as a fabrication. It all struck him like a physical blow. “I felt lied to. And I felt those lies cost too many thousands of American lives and far too much destruction,” Dundas told me over a couple of beers one sunny Sunday afternoon in Virginia Beach. What he had seen from afar as a righteous intervention to unseat a barbaric dictator and bring democracy to Iraq’s people now appeared as “one of the most incredibly disastrous foreign policy things we ever got involved in. That aside,” Dundas said, “seeing the devastation of those Iraqi cities and towns, some of it caused by us and some of it caused by insurgents and by the civil war that we brought about, that really hit me to the core.”
Up until that point, he said, he had always believed that the government would do the right thing, that the country’s leaders would tell the truth. That the nation would ask its military volunteers to do only “what’s right.” Now he was left with the awful knowledge that he distrusted all of them. What’s worse, he felt, was that the war had been “a calculated choice by my leaders who all claimed to be Christian. And I didn’t see anyone in the churches, at least the type of church I was in at the time, questioning anything. And I wondered where God was, and I began to wonder where God was in my life, and for almost two years I was an agnostic, just hoping that maybe God would show up again.” A fellow naval officer once asked him, So where do chaplains go for help? “I said, ‘Right now, I don’t know.’” But he went to see a therapist, who was the first one to ask: So how are you with the Big Guy? “At this point,” Dundas replied, “I don’t even know if there is a Big Guy.”
It took what Dundas calls “a Christmas miracle” to bring him back into his faith. He had terrible insomnia when he returned from Iraq, and he flung himself into his work at the Naval Medical Center in Portsmouth, Virginia, as a way to reorient himself. He was on duty one night during Advent, the Christian season of preparation for Christmas, when his emergency pager went off. He grabbed his hospital stole, oil, and Book of Common Prayer and rushed downstairs, where he found an elderly patient, in his nineties, in his last moments. Dundas gave him the sacrament of last rites and a final Prayer of Commendation. Over the man’s face passed a sense of tremendous peace, Dundas felt, and the patient took one final breath before he died. “I found out later the guy was a saint, a naval officer, a doctor who would donate his time to take care of prisoners in jail, did pro bono care for pregnant women, deeply active in the Episcopal Church,” Dundas said. “I was really in the presence of a saint. I felt… God is still around. It became a reawakening of faith.”
With his renewed faith—in which he focused less on the details of liturgical ritual and more on living in grace—Dundas began to work closely with marines coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. “There were a lot of marines who’d come to the hospital because they knew there’d be a chaplain who’d respond any time of the day or night simply because we had a light on, and if you go to the hospital chaplain the guys in your unit don’t really know about it.” He would see all kinds—believers, agnostics, Wiccans, and questioning Christians. “They came to see me because they knew I wasn’t going to run them off, like some chaplains from very conservative congregations,” Dundas said. After Iraq, he said, “I became a lot more open to people with questions. And [had more] respect for those who reject faith, because I understand their arguments. I still believe. But I get where they’re coming from.”
The marines who were most troubled were guys like Nik Rudolph, who was forced from the corps for acting up after his three combat deployments in Afghanistan. Many others were being “med-boarded out,” declared by a medical review board to be unfit to serve for physical or behavioral health reasons and dismissed against their will. “These guys with their short careers have been through so much, emotionally and physically,” Dundas said. “They would just rend my heart. Because you know they are struggling. And most of them knew what they really wanted to do in life was to continue serving as a marine, and they knew that was not going to happen and that they were being processed out. That was their biggest moral injury, realizing that they could no longer serve.”
A waitress brought two more steins of beer. Dundas took an appreciative sip and sneaked a glance at the Orioles game on the wide-screen TV bolted to the wall.
I was curious: Why was being dismissed from the corps a moral injury? Dundas turned back on his stool. “Because their fundamental belief,” he said, “was that their service in the Marine Corps or navy or the army was paramount in their lives. That being there for their fellow marines or sailors was an overriding value. Even more than ‘I can’t serve my country anymore’ or ‘I can’t trust the government’ or even ‘I lost my faith’ is ‘I can’t be there for my buddies.’ And they feel they’ve let their buddies down. And they feel abandoned by the system. They can no longer do the things that they believe define them as a person.”
Eventually that afternoon I asked Dundas what the future held for him, whether he’d retire and go do something else. His long answer was no. He’s found a new purpose in ministering to those young marines and sailors who find themselves suddenly out of the service and feeling lost and abandoned, with the depression, anxiety, sleeplessness, distrust of authority, and suspicion of social relationships that often accompany moral injury.
“One of the hardest things to say to them is that even though you can no longer do the things you most value, you can go on. That you can find value in new things. It takes a while for them to process,” Dundas said. “And you hope they do, eventually. Because so many of them are such good people. How do we get them to the next part of their lives? That’s one of the things we will struggle with in the next ten or fifteen years: how we take all these guys who have been injured, physically and emotionally, who are going to get put out of the military? How do we… help them redeem their loss and turn that into something that helps others?”
He drained his beer just as I was wondering aloud whether the act of forgiving is essential if veterans are to find new life. Dundas waved his hand dismissively. “Forgiveness? I don’t know how that works,” he said. “I’m still working through a lot of this. It’s not like you can say the magic word and forgive.” After a pause he added: “I guess forgiveness, whether it’s to the people who blew you up, or the people who sent you there, or the people who treated you like dirt when you came back, forgiveness has to be a part of it. But you can’t just spring forgiveness on people. It’s not a cheap thing. A lot of people, sometimes even in the church, are saying, ‘Oh, just forgive them!’ Okay, yeah, got that. But what if after you forgive them, something happens and you’re still pissed off? Forgiveness is a process. It’s not a onetime thing. But I think it is essential to the healing of moral injuries. And I have to confess,” he said as he slid off his stool to head home, “sometimes I know I’m not there.”
Whether forgiveness is a part of it or not, whether it comes slowly or not at all, there are ways to help heal moral injuries, and the military’s multifaith Chaplain Corps should lead the way. That’s the conviction of many chaplains with whom I’ve spoken. Army Colonel Thomas C. Waynick, the senior chaplain at Fort Benning, has helped spur the Defense Department’s Chaplain Corps to adopt a new training program on moral injury. “Combat comes at a cost,” said Waynick, who rode with the Third Infantry Division in the assault and capture of Baghdad back in early April 2003. “The good news is that in the safety of caring relationships, people can find forgiveness and healing for moral wounds. They don’t have to be mortal wounds.” It is religious communities, he believes, that can best provide that safe, caring environment. “Religious traditions provide a framework to process moral injury and moral dilemmas,” he said. “There are also nonreligious ways to approach the issue, but it is predominantly a spiritual, existential issue.” Veterans of any religious belief can speak with their God “as a source of unconditional love without judgment. Chaplains and clergy can support service members by facilitating conversations with God to work through guilt and find forgiveness.”
I put that idea to Etter, who virtually burst with enthusiasm. Yes! he said. Healing moral injury “is in our primary lane. It is our work, the work of the church, the synagogue, the mosque. We’ve been in the business of guilt and confession and pain and suffering for a long, long time. Nobody—nobody!—should know more about it. Nobody should be better prepared to help others through it than us.” What chaplains, civilian clergy, and veterans should understand, Etter said, is that there is hope, “ways of finding peace and wholeness and forgiveness.”
In fact, clergy and religious groups already are beginning to grapple with veterans and moral injury, looking for ways they can help. In Illinois, Wheat Ridge Ministries has funded outreach to congregations across the country, coaching clergy and parishioners on how to listen to veterans and provide support for healing physical, psychological, and moral wounds. Networks of veterans, therapists, and religious leaders are active in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Point Man Ministries of New York links Christian congregations with veterans; the Atlanta-based nonprofit Care for the Troops trains religious congregations to reach out to veterans, involve them in joint service projects, and begin to talk about moral injury. In Fayetteville, North Carolina, Quakers are working with chaplains at Fort Bragg—home of the Army Special Forces and the Eighty-Second Airborne Division—to brief commanders and troops about moral injury. Brite Divinity School’s Soul Repair Center in Fort Worth provides education and resources to support faith communities working with veterans.
“We’re not trying to tell anyone to ignore their pain or to justify their pain,” Etter told me. “We’re not trying to tell anybody to ignore it. We are looking it in the eye, squarely facing it. And then we’re going to move through it like someone moves through a valley of shadows, to a new place of light and wholeness. This falls right in the chaplain’s lane. No one should be more qualified to speak of this than chaplains. It is a matter of the soul and heart. And it’s only when the soul and heart are addressed that people can find true healing.”