Author’s Note

This book is about the Americans we sent to war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the moral injuries they sustained there. In those conflicts, civilians also were caught up in the fighting, as willing or unwilling participants or as bystanders. Even as our wars were getting under way in 2002, most Afghans and Iraqis were already enduring high levels of anxiety, depression, fear, grief, bitterness, and hopelessness from past conflict and repression. The years that followed must have deepened their physical and psychological trauma to levels of pain we can scarcely imagine. The moral injuries of the Afghan and Iraqi people are beyond the scope of this book but not, I trust, out of our thoughts.