The “truth” of combat is walking all around us, right under our noses, so we had better start listening to the truth about what happens to our sons and daughters in war.
—Karen Wall, Major, U.S. Army (Ret.), and Psychiatric Nurse, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
Moral injury is real. There is no turning away now. We know that the men and women we send to war can feel strengthened by their experiences, and also damaged. We know that living through combat endows veterans with awful knowledge that we ourselves have avoided. And we have abandoned the rituals of cleansing and forgiveness and healing that welcomed returning combat veterans in past eras and other cultures.
Major American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are over, but we have unfinished business with those wars. As we honor the stories of Nik Rudolph and Darren Doss and so many others, it’s becoming clear that their healing will come only as they’re able to tell their stories, to share their knowledge with us. Asking and listening is not easy. “Most people, for good reasons, don’t want to hear the truth about the battlefield,” Jonathan Shay once told me. “You see good kids doing terrible things. Who wants to hear that stuff? And so the truth of war is constantly being submerged.” But it’s our responsibility to reach for ways to deeply understand these stories, these veterans, before their moral injuries harden into isolation and despair. And for us to understand and weigh the human costs of the new wars that are coming. Time is slipping away.
I think what Karen Wall said, that the truth of war is all around us if we’d only listen, is right, but only half right. Yes, we do need to start listening to veterans and their families, listening in careful and validating ways. But what I have in mind goes beyond listening.
The healing of moral injury demands participation. The long years of war have left us with unshared stories and emotions, unexamined issues and unanswered questions. What did we feel during those years of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan? Some at home felt apprehension and the dull ache of sorrow knowing that young Americans were in peril and that the morning news would bring portraits of the battle dead. Some sought a connection by sending care packages to troops. Some didn’t know what to do. Many of us did nothing. What does that feel like to us? To those who were away at war?
For those few who persevered through long deployments, what was it like to do good in a conflict America had decided was wrong? To lose buddies in a cause that seemed to have been casually abandoned at home? What pride, what guilt, sorrow, and regret linger from the roles each of us played during the war years? How do we feel now about the weight of military service falling on so few of us? About the way the White House and Congress treat the decision to send troops into combat, lurching between partisan rancor and casual hubris? What promises can we make to the next generation we will send, those wide-eyed teenagers now self-consciously trying on their new combat fatigues at marine boot camp and army recruit training?
We should demand that the Department of Defense acknowledge that moral injury is real and that the military services find ways to prepare our troops to meet the moral challenges of war. We should push the Department of Veterans Affairs to better understand moral injury and develop new ways to help veterans find their own paths to cleansing and healing.
We must start by listening to one another. How to begin?
First, let’s stop defining veterans in terms of PTSD and twenty-two suicides a day. That’s wrong and offensive. Some veterans do have post-traumatic stress. And too many come to feel they can’t continue living, a decision that’s often an indication of moral injury too painful to bear. Every suicide is tragic, and we can do something to help. But suicide and PTSD do not define the generation newly returned from war. Where healing is needed, it cannot begin with pity.
Next, let’s acknowledge that as much as we’d like to absolve ourselves of responsibility and let the government do it, the fact is that the Department of Veterans Affairs alone cannot remedy these veterans’ moral injuries. No government agency, no matter how thoroughly reformed or creatively managed, can do that, even with more money. And we’ve seen that the mental health profession, despite impressive gains in understanding moral injury, isn’t making helpful connections with many veterans. “Right now,” Bill Nash told me, “the situation for the most part is that individuals who are morally injured use their chaplains, use their friends, they pray, just ignore it—whatever!”
Yet it is not only those who served in our longest wars who suffer moral injuries. It is all of us. We made it possible for Darren Doss to be recruited, armed, and sent to Afghanistan; our attention was elsewhere while he was struggling through gunfire to help save Kruger and during the Christmas-tree-theft caper. We sent Gunny DeLeon to war twice, but we weren’t watching as he came home haunted and broken. We recruited and trained Sendio Martz, but we weren’t aware that he needed forgiveness. We enlisted Jake Sexton and sent him into the fight, but we didn’t listen to the stories that troubled him until it was too late.
Like it or not, fair or unfair, we are all connected by the wars.
Now what?
Let’s set aside the question of war itself. Like many others, I have considered the idea that killing and destruction are something we should never under any circumstances impose on others. Nor should we send our youngest generations into wars in which we ourselves are too squeamish, or too wise, to engage. My earlier life as a Quaker and conscientious objector and my experience in war strongly tempt me in this direction. Yes, for a long time I found war captivating. But the man who writhed and bled and died in front of me long ago in a dusty village in Ethiopia has shadowed me to many Pentagon briefings and presidential speeches and stirring patriotic ceremonies where, in the urgency of that moment, war seems thrilling and meaningful. It is not, he reminds me. It is also true that in war I have seen individual acts of breathtaking generosity and quiet nobility. But from a larger perspective, it’s clear that good rarely comes of war. The human misery and the wreckage are hard to overstate.
I was astonished, walking through my first battlefield after the smoke cleared, at the scale of ruin: burned carcasses of trucks, miles of fine wire from antitank guided missiles, and brass shell casings littered the ground along with rags, shattered glass, a puddle of blood and an empty boot, abandoned rifles and used rocket-launcher tubes, a few crumpled bodies, torn cardboard boxes, an empty bag of IV solution, and cast-off broken helmets. And scampering among the deadly land mines whose rims protruded from the sand, children scavenging for precious metal and food scraps.
Beyond this criminal waste, the inevitable strategic miscalculation and wildly unpredictable consequences of war far overbalance the glorious benefits of armed conflict touted by politicians.
In that conviction I have found harmony with those who have fought in combat, for they have the keenest appreciation of the ugly depravity of mass state-justified bloodletting. I once lived for much of a year with a marine battalion whose senior enlisted marine, a towering, tattooed, broken-nosed sergeant major, had served in Vietnam. I felt instinctively that he detested liberals and especially the “liberal media”—I’d sometimes notice him seeming to glare at me. A Quaker liberal journalist probably was at his outer limits of tolerance. I tried to avoid him, but one day during a pause in a long combat operation he cornered me.
“You were a conscientious objector during Vietnam,” he said. It sounded like an accusation.
Glancing around for an escape route, I admitted, Yes, Sergeant Major, I was.
“You know I lost a lot of good people in that war.” The word came out whoa-ah in his syrupy Tidewater Virginia accent.
Yes, I am sorry, Sergeant Major.
“And you were out on the streets protestin’ while I was out there fightin’.”
Yes, I was.
Long pause. Then he said with unexpected bitterness, “Well, that’s where I should have been, out there on the streets protesting that damn woah-ah ’stead of fightin’ it.”
And yet.
I once stepped onto a field of tall grass near the town of Chimoio in western Mozambique, and when the wind shifted I staggered against the stench of putrefying flesh. It was a time of bitter fighting; a nearby guerrilla camp had drawn an attack, and there was a massacre, mostly women and children whose bodies were strewn everywhere. In my helpless revulsion, I wanted justice, a battalion of marines to hunt down and kill whoever had committed the atrocity.
I felt the same blind impulse when I stood in the street outside the mayor’s office in Srebrenica, a mountain town in Bosnia. There, in July 1995, Serb militiamen swept in and massacred more than eight thousand Bosnian civilians, mostly Muslim men and boys. Eight months later I was being jostled there by Serb thugs laughing away what they’d done and jeering at me and the unwillingness of the United States and its allies to bring them to justice. I wanted a company of Army Rangers to come set things very straight. I wanted revenge. I wanted a killer like Jim Gant. And I didn’t stop to think about the effect of that killing on young marines or rangers or even seasoned killers like Gant.
In that I am like most of us.
But when there is casual talk in Washington about putting “boots on the ground,” I want to bellow a furious correction: Americans on the ground! Let’s name it—humans! Our kids. I want us to be more careful with them. While we’re figuring out whether and how to end war, I want us to be more skeptical of lofty claims of what military force can achieve and more mindful of the costs that will be borne by the people we send to fight.
For that, we need the insights gained by those who have come back.
It’s not easy to initiate and carry forward a conversation with a combat veteran. Often there’s awkwardness on both sides, even suspicion. I’ve found a good icebreaker is to ask about the veteran’s job in the service. I know what it means if the answer is “Eleven bravo,” but don’t pretend to know if you don’t. It’s okay to ask; in fact, that’s the whole point. “Eleven bravo,” or 11B, is a military occupational specialty—MOS—or job title, in this case for an infantryman. There are hundreds of MOSs, and only a few personnel experts know them all; even seasoned troopers might be stumped by a 21L, a lithographer. Next question might be “Can you tell me about that?” Veterans like to talk about their military jobs; from there, guided by questions like “Tell me more,” “How did that feel,” or “What was that like,” the conversation can go deeper.
David Sutherland, whose familiarity with combat and moral injury was gained over fifteen months as a troop commander in Iraq, now campaigns for Americans to pick up where the VA falls short. “The VA and [the Pentagon] don’t solve all problems. This whole thing needs to be about listening, understanding. Asking and not thanking.” Bumper stickers and parades are appreciated, he said. “But no one sits there and goes, ‘How ya doin’? I can’t imagine what you’ve been through, but I’d love to listen to you, if you want to talk about it. And I’m not gonna compare my cat peeing on the carpet to your fifteen months in Iraq.’”
Still, grunts like Chuck Newton are skeptical. He was reluctant at first even to meet with me, and he scoffed at the idea that civilians should listen carefully to marine veterans. But seeing that I was interested, he talked for hours over several days. Even then, he was doubtful about what I was doing. “Who’s gonna read your book?” he demanded one day as we sat admiring the view of Manhattan from across the East River in Brooklyn. “Only people who already agree,” he answered himself.
To help with the awkwardness that can exist between veteran and civilian, a structured approach was developed by the clinical psychologist Paula Joan Caplan. Her idea was to match veterans with volunteer civilian listeners for a long session of uninterrupted, intentional listening.
In an experiment at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, she arranged for veterans to talk without interference for as long as three hours. The listeners were coached to begin by saying, “As an American whose government sent you to war, I take some responsibility for listening to your story, so if you want to talk about your experiences at war and since coming home, I will listen for as long as you want to talk, and I will not judge you.” And they were instructed to listen silently but with total attention, smiling where appropriate but not responding verbally. This is to avoid the understandable temptation to interrupt with a comforting “Oh, I understand,” when it’s likely that a civilian listener cannot understand the full breadth and depth of a combat veteran’s experience. Based on the positive response from veterans and listeners, Caplan has sought to make this model available nationwide.
For a more interactive experience, I went back and reread Michael Castellana’s directions for therapists dealing with morally injured marines. It’s good advice for all of us who approach veterans in a spirit of close listening:
These are remarkable, courageous men and women. We should laugh with them, grieve with them, and, most of all, empathize and inject a human perspective on the terrible experiences these service members have endured. We must bear with them, the distressing and challenging events they have lived through, and accompany them as they make their way to a new, fuller understanding and appreciation of their role in war and as fellow human beings in the world.
In short, listening with validation. Yeah, that was fucked up.
But also, an integral part of what Castellana teaches: I honor your service.
“When I came home, people were afraid to ask me about the experience. Because they were afraid it would disturb me. But I found it more disturbing to have that significant part of my life ignored.” This is Robert Certain, an unstinting advocate for listening as a way of helping veterans heal their moral injuries. Certain is an Episcopal priest and longtime military chaplain who began his military career as a young, redheaded air force captain, a B-52 navigator. His experience in war came four decades ago, but his own enduring moral injury can teach us about connecting with today’s new generation of veterans. During Linebacker II, the so-called Christmas bombing of North Vietnam in 1972, Bob Certain’s aircraft was shot down; three of the crew were killed. Certain was captured and held prisoner until all POWs were released in March 1973. Those searing experiences led him, on his return, to the seminary and into a new life in ministry.
Several weeks before his last flight over North Vietnam, Certain had been assigned to a mission on a B-52 bomber code-named Purple Two; the crew was told the targets had been carefully selected, like previous missions, as strictly industrial sites. “People targets were rarely discussed,” he told me. “Rarely would we be told we were going after troop concentrations, a North Vietnam battalion or something.” They returned safely from the mission, but later they learned that friendly ground troops had gone into the area after a B-52 strike and reported finding 156 bodies beneath the flight path of Purple Two. “Well, that was my airplane,” Certain said in a soft voice. “Those were people down there.”
His moral injuries, from the death of his close buddies and the deaths of Vietnamese from the American bombing, were devastating. But because no one asked, no one listened, it took Certain thirty years to break out of his protective shell of grief, loss, and guilt and to ask for and receive professional help. Central to his continuing recovery is sharing his story. Veterans, he said, “don’t want advice, unless they ask for it. I think they want to be able to talk, to sort out what is going on in their soul and mind. And a lot of us do that verbally.”
Certain is a gentle man with a kindly, grandfatherly demeanor. Moral injury, he said, “is not a psychological problem. It’s a problem of conscience, of spirituality. Of the soul.” We were talking in his comfortably modern riverside home in northern Georgia. When I asked whether the VA could play a constructive role in helping veterans verbalize their experiences, even helping heal moral injury, he visibly recoiled. “I don’t want the government to do it,” he said firmly. “They screw everything up. They got us into this! No, from my perspective it is a moral obligation for the population to take this responsibility, and it takes a lot more than applauding returning soldiers at the airport. It takes listening to them very carefully.”
The technique he described is simple. “‘What can you tell me about your experience over there?’ You’ll never get the whole story,” he said. “But over time you might learn more and more. It takes time to build that trust. You might get nothing. But be prepared. You might get a dump.”
The idea may be simple, but I think it’s not so easy. I know former marines who don’t want to talk to anybody except other marines. And the deep divide between military and civilians, one of ignorance and perhaps suspicion, hostility, and guilt, becomes harder and harder to cross. And yet I believe there is a reservoir of goodwill on both sides, perhaps even a desire to step over the military-civilian divide. It seems clear that encounters between veteran and civilian most easily can happen in a community context where there is already social engagement. By “community” I mean religious gathering, neighborhood association, sports team, book club, service project—however we each define “community.”
There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of nongovernmental projects under way across the country, providing ways for civilians to get involved with veterans. The Mission Continues, a national nonprofit, has launched fifty-three service platoons with more than five thousand members, including active-duty and reserve servicemen and -women, veterans, and civilians; the teams undertake local service projects. Another nonprofit, Team Red White and Blue, involves eighty-one thousand members, including twenty-four thousand civilians, in sporting and social events, in an effort to close the military-civilian divide. Many of these veteran-oriented nonprofits welcome civilian volunteers; no experience necessary.
Similar efforts are under way in the faith community. An organization called Care for the Troops, led by Robert Certain, trains community leaders, therapists, religious congregations, and social-service providers to understand how to receive and relate to veterans. Retired army chaplain Dave Smith, who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, runs a program called the Soul Care Initiative to help connect church congregations with veterans.
“What has worked for me is when people are unabashed, not afraid to ask tough questions,” Stacy Pearsall said to me as we nursed our beers. She’s the combat camera who worked two tours in Iraq, and while her physical problems have eased, her moral injuries are still painful and the temptation of suicide lurks. “It’s taken a lot of work to stay on the right side of the dirt,” she said.
I had been telling her of all the opportunities for civilians and veterans to start talking and listening. But I confessed that I didn’t see it actually happening much. She nodded. “I think a lot of what society does now is dance around the cancer. You can’t do that. We keep it in hushed tones because it may be painful and maybe the people asking the questions are afraid of what answers they may get; the answers may not be the ones they really want to hear. But it’s important to make sure these things are out in the open.”
She paused, dabbing absentmindedly with a napkin at the dark circles of condensation the beer bottles were leaving on the bar.
“You don’t have to talk military language to really understand the emotions of it. You should never say, ‘Oh, I understand,’ because you can never understand unless you’ve been there. However, you can say, ‘I can’t imagine what that must be like, can you just explain to me a little more why you feel that way, or what draws you to the conclusion you feel guilty?’ You don’t have to sympathize—I don’t want your sympathy,” she said. “But your understanding would be nice.” She stopped to chuckle. “And empathy maybe?”
To what end? I asked. Why is it so important to you that people listen, and understand and respond?
Long pause, while she folded and refolded the napkin, pressing it into smaller and smaller squares.
“I would hope we would think a lot more deeply about sending people to war, given the impact it’s had on our society and community and nation with the whole ripple effect that war has,” she said. “We went there and fought on behalf of our nation. That’s what we signed up to do. That’s the job we raised our hands for and said we would give our lives to do. So I don’t regret that. And I cannot say—and I’ve battled with the morality of this—that Iraq was not worth it, because then I would be diminishing the sacrifices my friends made on the battlefield, and I cannot do that.”
She turned to see if I understood and then went on, “Not every war is favorable, not every war is popular, and the outcome is not always what we had hoped it would be. But then again, that’s the cost of war.
“I would hope that, given this length of combat in Afghanistan and the impact that Iraq had on all of us, we would think a little bit more smartly before jumping headlong into another one.
“Gotta run,” she said, slipping off her stool and shouldering her camera bags, and off she went to capture in haunting photographs the pride, vulnerability, and moral injury etched on the faces of combat veterans.