In the spring of 2006, Christopher Aaron started working twelve-hour shifts in a windowless room at the Counterterrorism Airborne Analysis Center in Langley, Virginia. He sat before a wall of flat-screen monitors that beamed live, classified video feeds from drones hovering over distant war zones. On some days, Chris discovered, little of interest appeared on the screens, either because a blanket of clouds obscured visibility or because what was visible—goats grazing on an Afghan hillside, families preparing meals—was mundane, even serene. Other times, what unspooled before his eyes was jarringly intimate: coffins being carried through the streets after drone strikes; a man squatting in a field to defecate after a meal (the excrement generated a heat signature that glowed on infrared); an imam speaking to a group of fifteen young boys in the courtyard of his madrassa. If a Hellfire missile killed the target, it occurred to Chris as he stared at the screen, everything the imam might have told his pupils about America’s war with their faith would be confirmed.
The infrared sensors and high-resolution cameras affixed to drones made it possible to pick up such details from an office in Virginia. But as Chris learned, identifying who was in the crosshairs of a potential drone strike wasn’t always so easy. The feed on the monitors could be grainy and pixelated, making it easy to mistake a civilian trudging down a road with a walking stick for an insurgent carrying a weapon. The figures on-screen often looked less like people than like faceless gray blobs. How certain could Chris be of who they were? “On good days, when a host of environmental, human, and technological factors came together, we had a strong sense that who we were looking at was the person we were looking for,” he said. “On bad days, we were literally guessing.”
Initially, the good days outnumbered the bad ones for Chris. He wasn’t bothered by the long shifts, the high-pressure decisions, or the strangeness of being able to stalk—and potentially kill—targets from thousands of miles away. Although Chris and his peers spent more time doing surveillance and reconnaissance than coordinating strikes, sometimes they would relay information to a commander about what they saw on-screen, and “sixty seconds later, depending on what we would report, you would either see a missile fired or not,” he said. Other times, they would trail targets for months. The first few times he saw a Predator drone unleash its lethal payload—the camera zooming in, the laser locking on, a plume of smoke rising above the scorched terrain where the missile struck—he found it surreal, he told me. But he also found it awe inspiring, experiencing a surge of adrenaline and exchanging congratulatory high fives with the other analysts in the room.
Chris’s path to the drone program was unusual. He grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, in a home where red meat and violent video games were banned. His parents were former hippies who marched against the Vietnam War in the 1960s. But Chris revered his grandfather, a quiet, unflappable man who served in World War II. He also had a taste for exploration and for tests of physical fortitude: hiking and wandering through the woods in Maine, where his family vacationed every summer; wrestling, a sport whose demand for martial discipline captivated him. Chris attended the College of William & Mary in Virginia, where he majored in history. A gifted athlete, he cut a charismatic figure on campus, cultivating an air of independence and adventurousness. One summer, he traveled to Alaska alone to work as a deckhand on a fishing boat.
During his junior year, in 2001, Chris woke up one morning to a phone call from his father, who told him that the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were on fire. Chris thought instantly of his grandfather, who had served for three years as a military police officer on the European front after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He wanted to do something similarly heroic. A year later, after spotting a pamphlet at the William & Mary career-services office for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a national-security agency that specializes in geographic and imagery analysis, he applied for a job there.
Chris began working as an imagery analyst at the NGA in 2005, studying satellite pictures of countries that had no link to the “war on terror.” Not long after he arrived, an email circulated about a Department of Defense task force that was being created to determine how drones could help defeat al-Qaeda. Chris answered the call for volunteers and was soon working at the Counterterrorism Airborne Analysis Center. He found it exhilarating to participate directly in a war he saw as his generation’s defining challenge. His pride deepened as it became clear that the task force was having a significant impact and that the use of drones was increasing.
Chris spent a little over a year at the task force, including several months in Afghanistan, where he served as the point of contact between the drone center in Langley and Special Forces on the ground. After this, he worked for a private military contractor for a while. In 2010, an offer came from another contractor involved in the drone program to serve as an imagery-and-intelligence analyst. But as Chris mulled the terms, something strange happened: he began to fall apart physically. The distress began with headaches, night chills, joint pain, a litany of flu-like symptoms that, every few weeks, would recur. Soon, more debilitating symptoms emerged: waves of nausea, eruptions of skin welts, chronic digestive problems. Chris had always prided himself on his physical fitness. Now, suddenly, he felt frail and weak, to the point that working for the contractor was out of the question. “I could not sign the paperwork,” he said. Every time he sat down to try, “my hands stopped working—I was feverish, sick, nauseous.”
Chris went back to Lexington to live with his parents and try to recuperate. He was twenty-nine years old and in the throes of a breakdown. “I was very, very unwell,” he said. He consulted several doctors, none of whom could specify a diagnosis. In desperation, he experimented with fasting, yoga, Chinese herbal medicine. Eventually, his health improved, but his mood continued to spiral. Chris couldn’t muster any motivation. He spent his days enveloped in a fog of gloom. At night, he dreamed that he could see—up close, in real time—innocent people being maimed and killed, their bodies dismembered, their faces contorted in agony. In one recurring dream, he was forced to sit in a chair and watch the violence unfurl. If he tried to avert his gaze, his head would be jerked back in place so that he had to continue looking.
“It was as though my brain was telling me: Here are the details that you missed out on,” he said. “Now watch them when you’re dreaming.”
A few years before Christopher Aaron entered the drone program, a U.S. Army veteran named Eric Fair applied for a job to work as an interrogator in Iraq. Fair was assigned to Abu Ghraib, a prison on the outskirts of Baghdad where American occupation forces began housing detainees after the invasion of Iraq. In April 2004, a cache of photos leaked to the press revealed the sadistic abuse to which many of these detainees were subjected, showing naked prisoners stacked in pyramids, hung upside down, and dragged around on dog leashes as U.S. soldiers smiled and flashed the thumbs-up sign. The photos shocked many Americans and embarrassed President George W. Bush, who had insisted “we do not torture” even as the pictures contradicted this claim. They did not shock Fair, who was not assigned to work in the cellblock at Abu Ghraib where the worst abuses took place but who meted out plenty of harsh punishment of his own. During one interrogation, Fair slammed a prisoner into a wall. He put detainees into “stress positions” and witnessed the use of devices such as the Palestinian chair, onto which detainees were bound with their weight thrust forward and their hands behind their back. A Presbyterian, Fair later published a memoir, Consequence, in which he described the crisis of faith and recurrent nightmares that he experienced when he returned home. “I am a torturer,” he wrote. “I have not turned a corner or found my way back. I have not been redeemed. I do not believe that I ever will be.”
Torturers like Fair dirtied their hands in ways that were visceral and tactile, which, in turn, made many Americans feel dirtied. The pilots and sensor operators in the drone program, by contrast, carried out “precision” strikes on video screens, an activity that seemed a lot cleaner. As the journalist Mark Mazzetti noted in his book, The Way of the Knife, remote-control killing seemed like “the antithesis of the dirty, intimate work of interrogation.” The shift away from interrogation and torture was overseen by Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, who came into office determined to reduce America’s military footprint in other countries and to alter the moral tenor of the “war on terror,” an expansive phrase that he quickly disavowed. At the start of his first term, Obama signed an executive order banning the use of torture and calling for the closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, where detainees had been subjected to waterboarding and other so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. During his tenure, Obama also dramatically increased targeted drone assassinations, authorizing roughly five hundred lethal strikes outside active conflict zones, ten times the number under Bush.
Early on, when it was first becoming clear that capturing and interrogating suspected terrorists was giving way to secret “kill lists” and targeted assassinations, even some hawkish observers questioned whether the United States knew whom it was killing and whether citizens understood the gravity of what was being done in their name. “Every drone strike is an execution,” Richard Blee, a former CIA officer who headed the unit responsible for hunting down Osama bin Laden, told Mazzetti. “If we are going to hand down death sentences, there ought to be some public accountability and some public discussion about the whole thing.” For more than two decades, the United States had barred targeted assassinations, a prohibition codified in an executive order that was signed in 1976, after the Church Committee exposed various “illegal, improper, or unethical” activities carried out by the CIA and other government agencies during the Cold War, including a slew of assassination attempts. The executive order established a norm against targeted killings that held sway until 2001, both because policy makers were aware of the order and because of legal and ethical concerns. But if, as Blee maintained, overturning this norm was a serious matter that merited discussion, you would never have known it from the level of public debate that took place. The escalation of the drone wars was met with strikingly little congressional or popular opposition, both under Obama and under his eventual replacement, Donald Trump. In 2016, Trump campaigned as a critic of expansive foreign interventions, which he promised to end. At the same time, Trump made it clear that under his watch the United States would feel even less constrained to carry out extrajudicial killings than under Obama, striking not only militants but also their families. In Trump’s first two years in office, more drone strikes were launched in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan (three undeclared war zones) than during Obama’s entire presidency, and civilian casualties from airstrikes in Afghanistan surged. U.S. commanders were also given free rein to hit a wider array of targets, among them the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, a high-ranking state official who, on January 3, 2020, was killed by a missile fired from an MQ-9 Reaper drone. Agnes Callamard, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, described the strike as a violation of international law that could set an alarming precedent. “It is hard to imagine that a similar strike against a Western leader would not be considered as an act of war,” she said.
While human rights advocates like Callamard voiced concern, the public fell silent. Unlike the harsh interrogation methods that were adopted after 9/11, which sparked vigorous debate about the morality of torture and indefinite detention, drone warfare scarcely registered in public discourse. One explanation for this is that since the Vietnam era and the end of the draft, Americans had grown increasingly disengaged from the wars fought in their name. If something morally troubling happened on the distant battlefields where the conflicts raged, it was easy enough for the public to ignore. On the rare occasions when civilians did pay closer attention, as with the debate about torture during the Bush era, the outrage and opprobrium tended to be directed at individual perpetrators rather than at the system within which they operated. In the case of Abu Ghraib, for example, the blame fell on low-ranking reservists like Charles Graner, who was sentenced to ten years for his role in abusing Iraqi detainees, and Lynndie England, who was given a three-year sentence and dishonorably discharged. No senior officials were held accountable. As with the brutality in America’s prisons, which was often pinned on a handful of sadistic guards, the violence in America’s military campaigns could be attributed to a few “bad apples,” diverting attention from the system of war, which retained its moral legitimacy.
Another factor deterring robust debate about the drone program was that it was swathed in secrecy. According to U.S. officials, the laser-guided missiles fired from drones caused minimal collateral damage and were authorized for use only against high-level targets who posed an “imminent threat” to national security and could not be captured. Like so much else about the drone program, however, the identities of the dead were not shared with the public. As a 2017 report by the Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic and the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies noted, the U.S. government officially acknowledged just 20 percent of more than seven hundred reported drone strikes since 2002 in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. It also failed to respond to nongovernmental organizations that had requested explanations about strikes in which “credible evidence of civilian casualties and potential unlawful killings” had surfaced.
The criteria used to approve drone strikes, the number of civilian deaths: all of this was kept hidden. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a London-based organization that independently tracked America’s drone program, U.S. drone strikes killed between 8,858 and 16,901 people outside acknowledged war zones between the date it began collecting data and the end of 2020, including as many as 2,200 civilians. But because most of these strikes occurred in remote areas that were inaccessible to reporters, the public rarely heard about them. The sanitized language that public officials used to describe drone strikes (“pinpoint,” “surgical”) reinforced the perception that drones had turned war into a bloodless exercise.
The lack of transparency prevented ordinary citizens from knowing even basic facts about who their country was bombing and why. On the other hand, one could argue that the opaqueness was convenient, sparing citizens from having to think too much about a campaign of endless war to which many were tacitly resigned. As Everett Hughes might have noted, remote-control killing had an “unconscious mandate” from the public, solving a problem in a nation that had grown disillusioned with the “war on terror” but didn’t necessarily want real constraints placed on America’s use of force. As exhausted by war as Americans had become, many were accustomed to the idea that the United States could exercise its military might on a geographically limitless scale and perhaps saw this as necessary, both to keep America safe and to project U.S. power.
Tuning out the drone campaign was all the easier because no U.S. soldiers risked dying in it. In contrast to messy ground wars like the invasion of Iraq, which cost trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives, drones fostered the alluring prospect that terrorism could be eliminated at the press of a button. It was war without risk—without consequences, at least for our side, which made it easy for “good people” to keep the dirty business of targeted assassinations out of mind.
The “joystick warriors” pressing the buttons also experienced no consequences, some analysts suggested, owing to distance and technology, which sheared war of its moral gravity, turning killing into an activity as carefree as playing a video game. Serving as a drone operator was not, to borrow Erving Goffman’s terminology, “people work” that required daily interaction with “human materials,” as was the case for prison guards like Bill Curtis and for military interrogators like Eric Fair. It was detached, impersonal desk work, filtered through technology that desensitized the human beings involved to the consequences of their actions. In 2010, Philip Alston, the former UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary killings, warned that because drone operators “are based thousands of miles away from the battlefield and undertake operations entirely through computer screens and remote audio-feed, there is a risk of developing a ‘PlayStation’ mentality to killing.”
It was a logical theory, albeit one formulated without input from pilots who had actually participated in remote combat operations. When military psychologists began talking to imagery analysts and sensor operators about their experiences, a different picture emerged. In one survey, Wayne Chappelle and Lillian Prince, researchers for the School of Aerospace Medicine at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, drew on interviews with 141 intelligence analysts and officers involved in remote combat operations to assess their emotional reactions to killing. Far from exhibiting a sense of carefree detachment, three-fourths of the subjects reported feeling negative emotions—grief, sadness, remorse—related to killing. Many experienced these “negative, disruptive emotions” for a long duration (defined as one month or more). Another study conducted by the U.S. Air Force found that drone analysts in the “kill chain” were exposed to more graphic violence—seeing “destroyed homes and villages,” witnessing bodies burned alive—than most Special Forces on the ground.
For the people staring at the screens, remote-control killing wasn’t so clean, the studies suggested. It was messy and disturbing, albeit in ways that differed from conventional warfare. Because they never set foot on the battlefield, drone operators were not exposed to roadside bombs, a common cause of brain injuries and PTSD among veterans of America’s recent wars. They did not experience haunting flashbacks of improvised explosive devices detonating on the streets they were patrolling and destroying their Humvees.
What, then, did they experience? One morning, I visited the Creech Air Force Base in Nevada to find out. Located forty miles north of Las Vegas, Creech is a constellation of windswept airstrips surrounded by sagebrush and cactus groves. The base is home to nine hundred drone pilots and sensor operators who fly missions with MQ-9 Reaper drones. It is also home to a group of embedded psychologists, chaplains, and physiologists called the Human Performance Team, which was established to address the rising levels of stress and burnout in the drone program.
All members of the Human Performance Team possess the security clearances required to enter the ground control stations where drone pilots do their work, in part so that they can get a glimpse of what they experience. A psychologist on the team named Richard (who, like most of the airmen I spoke to, asked to be identified only by his first name) told me that two weeks into the job he poked his head into a ground control station just as the crew was “spinning up for a strike.” A veteran of the Marine Corps, he felt his adrenaline rise as he watched the screen flash. Then he put the incident out of mind. A few weeks later, he was at his son’s band concert; as the national anthem played and he peered up at the Stars and Stripes, the memory came back. “I’m looking up at the flag, but I could see a dead body,” he said. He was shaken, but he couldn’t say anything to his family, because the operation was classified.
Drone warriors shuttled back and forth across such boundaries every day. When their shifts ended, the airmen and airwomen drove to their subdivisions alone, like clerks in an office park. One minute they were at war; the next they were at church or picking up their kids from school. A retired pilot named Jeff Bright, who served at Creech for five years, described the bewildering nature of the transition. “I’d literally just walked out on dropping bombs on the enemy, and twenty minutes later I’d get a text: Can you pick up some milk on your way home?” he said. Bright enjoyed serving in the drone program and believed that he was making a difference. But other airmen in his unit struggled to cope with the stress, he told me; there were divorces, and some cases of suicide.
Unlike office park employees, drone operators could not reveal much about how their day went because of classification restrictions. Unlike conventional soldiers, they weren’t bolstered by the group solidarity forged in combat zones. Richard told me that when he was in the U.S. Marines, “there was a lot of camaraderie, esprit de corps.” Although drone operators could get close to their coworkers, at the end of every shift they went home to a society that had grown increasingly disconnected from war. The disconnect was especially profound at Creech, where the desert scrub surrounding the base soon gave way to billboards advertising live entertainment and gambling resorts in Las Vegas, where many of the service members lived. An hour after visiting the base, I wandered the Strip, watching tourists snap selfies in front of various landmarks—the Fountains of Bellagio, the High Roller at the Linq—before making their way to the endless procession of lounges, nightclubs, casinos, and all-you-can-eat buffets. The atmosphere of gaudy excess underscored the strangeness of the fact that forty-five minutes away a war was being fought in the name of these very same revelers.
Before the drone personnel at Creech made their way home, some dropped by the Airman Ministry Center, a low-slung beige building equipped with a foosball table, some massage chairs, and several rooms where pilots and sensor operators could talk with clergy. A chaplain named Zachary told me that what most burdened the airmen he spoke to was not PTSD. It was inner conflicts that weighed on the conscience. Zachary mentioned one pilot he met with who asked, “I’m just curious: What is Jesus going to say to me about all the killing I’ve done?” Despite their distance from the battlefield, drone operators’ constant exposure to “gut-wrenching” things they watched on-screen—sometimes resulting directly from their own split-second decisions, other times from their inability to act—could cause them to lose their spiritual bearings and heighten their risk of sustaining a very different kind of battle scar: a wound Zachary described as a “moral injury.”
The term was not new. It first appeared in the 1994 book Achilles in Vietnam, by the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, who drew on Homer’s epic war poem, the Iliad, to probe the nature of the wounds afflicting veterans of the Vietnam War. Shay read the Iliad as “the story of the undoing of Achilles’ character,” which, he argued, changes when his commander, Agamemnon, betrays his sense of “what’s right,” triggering disillusionment and the desire “to do things that he himself regarded as bad.” Experiencing such disillusionment might not seem as traumatic as being shot at or seeing a comrade die. Shay disagreed. “I shall argue what I’ve come to strongly believe through my work with Vietnam veterans: that moral injury is an essential part of any combat trauma,” he wrote. “Veterans can usually recover from horror, fear, and grief once they return to civilian life, so long as ‘what’s right’ has not also been violated.”
After 9/11, the term “moral injury” began to appear more frequently in the literature on the psychic wounds of war, but with a slightly different meaning. Where Shay emphasized the betrayal of what’s right by authority figures, a new group of researchers expanded the focus to include the anguish that resulted from “perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs,” as a 2009 article in the journal Clinical Psychology Review posited. In other words, from wounds sustained when soldiers wading through the fog of war betrayed themselves, through harmful acts they perpetrated or watched unfold. This definition took shape against the backdrop of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, chaotic conflicts in which it was difficult to distinguish between civilians and insurgents and in which the rules of engagement were fluid and gray.
One author of the Clinical Psychology Review article was Shira Maguen, a researcher who began to think about the moral burdens of warfare while counseling veterans at a PTSD clinic in Boston. Like most Veterans Affairs psychologists, Maguen had been trained to focus on the aftershocks of fear-based trauma—IED blasts that ripped through soldiers’ Humvees, skirmishes that killed members of their unit. The link between PTSD and such “life-threat” events was firmly established. Yet in many of the cases she observed, the source of distress seemed to lie elsewhere: not in attacks by the enemy that veterans had survived, but in acts they had observed or carried out that crossed their own ethical lines.
Soldiers were not, of course, the only people who risked committing such transgressions. All of the counselors I interviewed at the Dade Correctional Institution struggled with inner conflicts related to horrifying things they’d witnessed but failed to prevent. What kind of person was she? Lovita Richardson wondered after seeing a prisoner bound to a chair get bludgeoned and not intervening to help him. “Why didn’t I do more?” Harriet Krzykowski asked herself after learning about the “shower treatment.” Many of the prison guards I’d interviewed had alluded to incidents where they’d done things they knew they shouldn’t, as when Bill Curtis slammed a man to the ground, nearly fracturing his skull. Moral injuries were an occupational hazard for anyone whose job involved “perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs.” For most dirty workers, that is.
Among the veterans she counseled, Maguen grew particularly interested in the emotional toll of killing, which was sanctioned in the military but not when defenseless civilians were involved. “I was hearing about experiences where people killed and they thought they were making the right decision,” she told me, “and then they found out there was a family in the car.” To find out how heavy the burden of killing was, Maguen began combing through the databases in which veterans of conflicts dating back to the Vietnam War were asked if they had killed someone while in uniform. In some cases, veterans were also asked whom they killed—combatants, prisoners of war, civilians. Maguen wanted to see if there might be a relationship between taking another life and debilitating consequences like alcohol abuse, relationship problems, outbursts of violence, PTSD. The results were striking: even when controlling for different experiences in combat, she found, killing was a “significant, independent predictor of multiple mental health symptoms” and of social dysfunction.
Later, when she started directing a mental health clinic at a VA hospital in San Francisco, Maguen convened groups where veterans came together and talked about the killing they had done. In the VA no less than in the military, this was a taboo subject, so much so that clinicians often referred to it euphemistically, if at all. To ease the tension, a scene from a documentary was shown at the beginning of each session in which a veteran said, “Out there, it’s either kill or be killed. Nothing can really prepare you for war.” Afterward, Maguen would ask the veterans in the room a series of questions about how killing had impacted their lives. Some reacted angrily. Others fell silent. But many seized the opportunity to talk about experiences they later told Maguen they had never spoken about with anyone, not even their spouses and family members, for fear of being judged.
The veterans in Maguen’s groups didn’t talk a lot about fear and hyperarousal, emotions linked to PTSD. Mostly, they expressed self-condemnation and guilt. “You feel ashamed of what you did,” one said. Others described feeling unworthy of forgiveness and love. The passage of time did little to diminish the depth of these feelings, Maguen found. Geographic distance didn’t lessen them much either. Maguen recounted the story of a pilot who was haunted by the bombs he had dropped on victims far below. What troubled him was, in fact, precisely his distance from them—that instead of squaring off against the enemy in a fair fight, he had killed in a way that lacked valor. Obviously not all pilots felt this way. But the story underscored the significance of something Maguen had come to regard as more important than proximity or distance in shaping moral injury—namely, how veterans made sense of what they had done. “How you conceptualize what you did and what happened makes such a big difference,” she said. “It makes all the difference.”
Unlike PTSD, moral injury was not a medical diagnosis. It was an attempt to capture what could happen to a person’s identity and soul in the crucible of war, which is why it struck a chord among veterans who did not feel their wounds could be reduced to a medical disorder. “PTSD as a diagnosis has a tendency to depoliticize a veteran’s disquietude and turn it into a mental disorder,” observed Tyler Boudreau, a marine officer who served in Iraq and came back haunted by doubts about the war’s morality. “What’s most useful about the term ‘moral injury’ is that it takes the problem out of the hands of the mental health profession and the military and attempts to place it where it belongs—in society, in the community, and in the family—precisely where moral questions should be posed and wrangled with. It transforms ‘patients’ back into citizens and ‘diagnoses’ into dialogue.”
Not everyone welcomed this transformation. The meaning and magnitude of moral injury remained contested. “It is not a term widely accepted by the military or the psychological community,” Wayne Chappelle, of the School of Aerospace Medicine at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, told me, adding that he did not believe it was prevalent among drone operators. This was somewhat surprising, because Chappelle was an author of the study revealing that many drone warriors struggled with unresolved negative emotions after strikes, feeling “conflicted, angry, guilty, regretful.” Then again, perhaps it wasn’t so surprising. The idea that war may be morally injurious is a charged and threatening one to many people in the military. Tellingly, Chappelle described moral injury as “intentionally doing something that you felt was against what you thought was right,” like the wanton abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The definition used by researchers like Maguen was at once more prosaic and, to the military, potentially more subversive: moral injury was sustained by soldiers in the course of doing exactly what their commanders, and society, asked of them.
By the time I met Christopher Aaron, he had spent several years recuperating from his experience in the drone program. We first talked at length in a pub, not far from where he was living at the time. Chris was in his mid-thirties, with thick dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. He had a calm, Zen-like bearing, honed in part through yoga and meditation, but there was a trace of worry in his eyes and a degree of circumspection in his voice, especially when pressed for details about particular missions (he could not talk about anything classified, he told me). At the pub, we spoke for two hours and agreed to continue the conversation over lunch the next day so that he could pace himself. As I was heading to that lunch appointment, my cell phone rang. It was Chris, calling to reschedule. Our meeting the previous day had triggered a flood of anxiety, aggravating the pain in his back during the night.
Some analysts in the drone program sensed immediately that their work left an emotional residue. In Chris’s case, the feeling unfolded gradually, coinciding with a shift in worldview, as his gung ho support for the “war on terror” gave way to glimmers of doubt. The disillusionment crept up in stages, starting, he realized in retrospect, a few months after he returned from Afghanistan. Although he felt proud of the work he’d done to help establish the drone program, he also started to wonder when the war’s objective was going to be achieved. It was around this time that his manager asked him if he wanted to obtain resident CIA employment status and become a career intelligence officer, which required taking a lie-detector test used to screen employees. Chris said yes, but halfway through the test, after losing circulation in his arms and feeling hectored by the questions, he got up and abruptly left. The next day, Chris told his manager that he had reconsidered.
Chris ended up taking a trip to California instead, renting a motorcycle and riding all the way up the coast to Alaska, where he spent a week at a monastery on a small island, sleeping in a wood-framed chapel surrounded by spruce trees. Chris had grown up attending an Eastern Orthodox church, and the experience was faith reaffirming. When he went back to the East Coast, he felt refreshed. But he was also out of money, which led him to apply for a job at the only company he figured would hire him—a military-and-intelligence contractor involved in the drone program and the war in Afghanistan.
By now, Chris’s idealism had waned. It receded further when, at the end of 2008, the contractor sent him back to Afghanistan. The first time he was there, in 2006, the “war on terror” seemed to be hastening the defeat of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Now it seemed to Chris not only that progress had stalled but that things were sliding backward. “We were actually losing control of vast areas of the country,” he said, even as the number of drone strikes was “four or five times higher” than before. The escalation under President Obama had begun.
As it happened, Chris had taken a copy of George Orwell’s 1984 with him to Afghanistan. He had read the book in high school and, like most people, remembered it as a dystopian novel about a totalitarian police state. This time, what stuck in his mind was the book-within-the-book written by Emmanuel Goldstein, the rumored leader of the resistance, titled The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. In the book, Goldstein describes the onset of a “continuous” war waged by “highly trained specialists” on the “vague frontiers” of Oceania—an opaque, low-intensity conflict whose primary purpose was to siphon off resources and perpetuate itself. (“The object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war,” Goldstein observes.) Chris had an eerie sense that a perpetual war was exactly what the “war on terror” was becoming.
As his disillusionment deepened, events that Chris dismissed before as unavoidable in any war began to weigh more heavily on him. He recalled days when the feed was “too grainy or choppy” to make out exactly who was struck. He remembered joking with peers that “we sometimes didn’t know if we were looking at children on the ground or chickens.” He also thought back to the times when he would be asked “to give an assessment of a compound where they had suspicion: there was fill-in-the-blank low-level Taliban commander in a remote region in the country. And we had seen other people come in and out of the same compound over the course of the preceding two or three days. They come and say, ‘We’re getting ready to drop a bomb on there. Are there any people other than the Taliban commander in this compound?’ I’d just say no because they don’t want to hear ‘I don’t know.’ And then two days later, when they have the funeral procession in the streets that we could observe with the Predators, you’d see, as opposed to carrying one coffin through the streets, they’re carrying three coffins through the streets.”
Chris kept his misgivings mainly to himself, but his friends noticed a change in him, among them Chris Mooney, who picked him up at the airport when he returned from Afghanistan in 2009. Mooney and Chris had been friends since college, when Chris had exuded a robust sense of confidence and enthusiasm. “He was magnetic,” said Mooney, who recalled taking road trips with Chris and marveling at his energy and assertiveness. At the airport, Mooney could scarcely recognize his friend. His affect was flat, his face a solemn mask. They went to dinner, where, at one point, a patron who overheard them talking came up to Chris to thank him for his service. Chris thanked him back, Mooney said, but in a muted tone. Mooney didn’t press him for details, but he knew that something was seriously wrong. “It wasn’t the same guy,” he said.
The renewed interest in moral injury could be viewed as an effort to revisit ethical issues that had been lurking in our narratives of war all along—and to address sources of trauma that some veterans and military analysts recognized before the “war on terror” even began. In his influential 1995 book, On Killing, Dave Grossman, a retired army lieutenant and former professor of psychology at West Point, drew on historical studies and the personal accounts of ex-combatants to argue that the psychological costs of killing were often devastating. The novels and memoirs of veterans were filled with characters haunted by such incidents. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, for example, the narrator confesses that he can’t shake the image of the Vietnamese man he killed on a footpath with a grenade—his body splayed, blood glistening on his neck. Later, the narrator indicates that he didn’t actually kill the man, but he was there and watched him die, “and my presence was guilt enough.” Literature could evoke the inner conflicts that played on a loop in the minds of veterans tormented by their troubled consciences.
In the early 1970s, some psychiatrists listened to soldiers talk about such incidents at “rap groups” organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Until this point, soldiers bearing psychic wounds tended to be dismissed by the military as cowards and malingerers. (“Your nerves, hell—you are just a goddamned coward,” General George Patton snapped at a soldier in a hospital during World War II.) The Yale psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who sat in on the VVAW rap groups and wrote about the disfiguring effects of killing and participating in atrocities in his 1973 book, Home from the War, helped to recast these veterans as sympathetic figures. The participants in the rap groups were burdened not by cowardice but by the guilt and rage they felt at their involvement in a misbegotten war, Lifton argued, “a filthy and unfathomable war” from which they returned “defiled … in the eyes of the very people who sent them as well as in their own.” In Lifton’s view, moral and political questions were inseparable from Vietnam veterans’ psychic wounds, to the point that he believed activism to end the war could lessen their guilt and foster healing.
When PTSD was officially recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, in 1980, many hoped it would lead society to reckon more honestly with the ethical chaos of war. The first definition of PTSD included among the potential symptoms not only survivor’s guilt but also guilt “about behavior required for survival,” language that addressed acts soldiers perpetrated that went against their own ethical codes. Over time, however, the moral questions that animated reformers like Lifton were reduced to “asterisks in the clinician’s handbook,” notes the veteran David Morris in his book The Evil Hours, as military psychologists shifted attention to brain injuries caused by mortar attacks and roadside bombs. One reason for this may be that focusing on such injuries, and on harmful acts in which veterans were the victims, was less threatening to the military. Another is that it might have been less fraught for VA clinicians, who weren’t trained to address veterans’ moral pain and who “may unknowingly provide nonverbal messages that various acts of omission or commission in war are too threatening or abhorrent to hear,” noted the authors of the 2009 article on moral injury in Clinical Psychology Review. Avoiding such conversations was particularly untenable with service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, who were enmeshed in counterinsurgency campaigns that often involved close-range killing and noncombatants. According to Brett Litz, a clinical psychologist at Boston University and an author of the 2009 article, “35 percent of the traumatic events that led soldiers to seek treatment for PTSD in a recent study were morally injurious events.”
When the drone program was created, it seemed to promise to spare soldiers from the intensity (and the danger) of close-range combat. But fighting at a remove could be unsettling in other ways. In conventional wars, soldiers fired at an enemy who had the capacity to fire back at them. They killed by putting their own lives at risk. What happened when the risks were entirely one-sided—when the ethic of survival that prevailed on the battlefield (“it’s either kill or be killed”) didn’t actually apply? In his book Killing Without Heart, M. Shane Riza, a retired U.S. Air Force instructor and command pilot, cited a dictum attributed to the French philosopher Albert Camus: “You can’t kill unless you are prepared to die.” By making them impervious to death and injury, unmanned aerial vehicles turned warriors into assassins, Riza averred, a form of warfare that was bereft of honor. Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired army colonel and former chief of staff to Colin Powell, shared this view, fearing that remote warfare eroded “the warrior ethic,” which held that combatants must assume some measure of reciprocal risk. “If you give the warrior, on one side or the other, complete immunity, and let him go on killing, he’s a murderer,” he said. “Because you’re killing people not only that you’re not necessarily sure are trying to kill you—you’re killing them with absolute impunity.”
Unlike conventional soldiers, drone operators were not eligible for Bronze Stars or combat pins adorned with the letter V, which stood for “valor.” In 2013, the then defense secretary, Leon Panetta, announced that a special “Distinguished Warfare Medal” would be awarded to remote combat operators who had made important contributions to national defense. The proposal elicited a flood of complaints from military veterans, with some dismissing the decoration as a “Nintendo” medal. In the face of this backlash, the military shelved the plan, eventually agreeing to award cyber warriors pins with the letter R, which stood for “remote.” The negative reaction underscored how, within the military as in society at large, the “joystick warriors” in the drone program were seen as less honorable and courageous than real soldiers who stepped on the battlefield and put their lives on the line. It also underscored an irony, which is that this inferior status derived from the very thing that made drone warfare appealing to politicians and the public—namely, the fact that it enabled America to carry out lethal operations in other countries with no risk of incurring more casualties. Drone operators who killed from afar were very much the agents of a society that, after the protracted conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which squandered hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives, wanted to have the military conduct its business at a minimal cost in blood and treasure, at least for our side.
Langley Air Force Base in Virginia is home to a division of the 480th Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Wing, a unit of six thousand “deployed in place” cyber warriors. They work on what is known as the ops floor, a dimly lit room equipped with a riot of computer screens streaming footage from drones circling over numerous battlefields. Many of the enlistees arrayed around the screens are in their twenties; were it not for their military boots and combat fatigues, they might pass for stock traders or Google employees. But the decisions they make have far weightier consequences. According to a survey by a team of embedded air force researchers who surveyed personnel at three different bases, nearly one in five ISR analysts said they “felt directly responsible for the death of an enemy combatant” on more than ten occasions. One analyst told the researchers, “Some of us have seen, read, listened to extremely graphic events hundreds and thousands of times.”
“Overall, I.S.R. personnel reported pride in their mission, particularly supporting successful protection of U.S. and coalition forces,” the survey found. But many also struggled with symptoms of distress—emotional numbness, difficulty relating to family and friends, trouble sleeping, and “intrusive memories of mission-related events.”
As at Creech, steps had been taken to try to mitigate the stress: shorter shifts, softer lighting, embedded chaplains and psychologists. But the workload of ISR analysts had also increased as drones assumed an increasingly central role in the battle against the Islamic State and other foes. According to Lieutenant Colonel Cameron Thurman, who was the unit’s surgeon general during the time I visited, the number of acknowledged missile strikes ordered by Central Command in the United States rose substantially between 2013 and mid-2017, even as the size of the workforce remained unchanged. “You’ve got the same number of airmen doing the same number of mission hours but with a one thousand percent increase in those life-and-death decisions, so of course their job is going to get significantly more difficult,” he said. “You’re going to have more moral overload.”
A bald man with a blunt manner, Thurman sat across from me in a windowless conference room whose walls were adorned with posters of squadrons engaged in remote combat operations. Also in the room was Alan Ogle, a psychologist who was an author of the survey of the 480th Wing. On the PTSD scale, Ogle said, members of the unit “didn’t score high,” owing to the fact that few had been exposed to roadside bombs and other so-called life-threat events. What seemed to plague them more, he told me, were some forms of “moral injury.”
Two members of the ISR Wing described to me how their work had changed them. Steven, who had a boyish face and sensitive eyes, was originally from a small town in the South and joined the military straight out of high school. Four years later, he told me, he no longer reacted emotionally to news of death, even after the recent passing of his grandmother, with whom he was extremely close. The constant exposure to killing had numbed him. “You’re seeing more death than you are normal things in life,” he said. On the ops floor, he’d watched countless atrocities committed by ISIS. During one mission, he was surveilling a compound on a high-visibility day when ten men in orange jumpsuits were marched outside, lined up, and, one by one, beheaded. “I saw blood,” he said. “I could see heads roll.” Ultimately, though, what troubled him most was not bearing witness to vicious acts committed by enemy forces, but decisions he had made that had fatal consequences. Even if the target was a terrorist, “it’s still weird taking another life,” he said. Distance did not lessen this feeling. “Distance brings it through a screen,” he said, “but it’s still happening, and it’s happening because of you.”
Another former drone operator told me that screens could paradoxically magnify a sense of closeness to the target. In an unpublished paper that he shared with me, he called this phenomenon “cognitive combat intimacy,” a relational attachment forged through close observation of violent events in high resolution. In one passage, he described a scenario in which an operator executed a strike that killed a “terrorist facilitator” while sparing his child. Afterward, “the child walked back to the pieces of his father and began to place the pieces back into human shape,” to the horror of the operator. Over time, the technology of drones had improved, which, in theory, made executing such strikes easier but also made what remote warriors saw more vivid and intense. The more they watched targets go about their daily lives—getting dressed, eating breakfast, playing with their kids—the greater the operators’ “risk of moral injury,” his paper concluded.
This theory was echoed by Shira Maguen’s findings. In one study, she discovered that Vietnam veterans who killed prisoners of war had especially high rates of trauma. Maguen believed the reason was that the victims were not strangers to them. “When someone is a prisoner of war, you get to know them,” she explained, “you have a relationship with them. You are watching them; you are talking to them. It may be that with drone operators they also know their subjects fairly well: they have watched them, so there’s a different kind of relationship, an intimacy.”
For Christopher Aaron, the hardest thing to come to terms with was that a part of him had enjoyed wielding this awesome power—that he’d found it, on some level, exciting. In the years that followed, as his mood darkened, he withdrew, sinking into a prolonged funk shadowed by shame and grief. He avoided seeing friends. He had no interest in intimate relationships. He struggled with quasi-suicidal thoughts, he told me, and with facing the depth and gravity of his wounds, a reckoning that began in earnest only in 2013, when he made his way to the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, to attend a veterans’ retreat run by a former machine gunner in Vietnam.
The weather during the retreat was rainy and overcast, matching Chris’s somber mood. The discussion groups Chris sat in on, where veterans cried openly as they talked about their struggles, were no more uplifting. But for the first time since leaving the drone program, Chris felt that he didn’t have to hide his true feelings. Every morning, he and the other veterans would begin the day by meditating together. At lunch, they ate side by side, a practice called “holding space.” In the evenings, Chris drifted into a deep slumber, unperturbed by dreams. It was the most peaceful sleep he’d had in years.
At the Omega Institute, Chris struck up a friendship with a Vietnam veteran from Minnesota, whom he later invited up to Maine. In the fall of 2015, at his friend’s suggestion, he went to a meeting at the Boston chapter of Veterans for Peace. Soon thereafter, he began to talk—first with members of the group, later at some interfaith meetings organized by peace activists—about funeral processions he’d witnessed after drone strikes where more coffins appeared than he expected. It was painful to dredge up these memories; sometimes his back would seize up. But it was also therapeutic, a form of social engagement that connected him to a larger community.
At one interfaith meeting, Chris mentioned that he and his colleagues used to wonder if they were playing a game of “whack-a-mole,” killing one terrorist, only to see another pop up in his place. He had come to see the drone program as an endless war whose short-term “successes” only sowed more hatred in the long term while siphoning resources to military contractors that profited from its perpetuation. On other occasions, Chris spoke about the “diffusion of responsibility,” the whirl of agencies and decision makers in the drone program that made it difficult to know what any single actor had done. This was precisely the way the military wanted it, he suspected, enabling targeted killing operations to proceed without anyone feeling personally responsible. And yet, if anything, Chris felt an excess of remorse and culpability, convinced that targeted killings had very likely made things worse.
The relief Chris drew from talking about his experience would not have surprised Peter Yeomans, a clinical psychologist who trained with Shira Maguen and who ran an experimental treatment for moral injury that was rooted in the sharing of testimonials, initially at weekly meetings where veterans came together to talk among themselves. After ten weeks, the treatment culminated in a public ceremony that the participants invited members of the community to attend. One goal of the treatment was to help veterans unburden themselves of shame, Yeomans told me. Another was to turn them into moral agents who could deliver the truth about war to their fellow citizens and, in turn, broaden the circle of responsibility for their conduct.
One evening, I attended a ceremony in a small chapel on the third floor of the VA Medical Center in Philadelphia, where Yeomans worked. Seated on a stage in the chapel were a number of veterans, among them a slightly built man with an unkempt brown beard who sat with his eyes closed and his hands folded in his lap. His name was Andy, and when invited to speak, he told the audience that he grew up in a violent home where he watched his older brother and baby sister endure abuse, which made him want to “protect the defenseless.” After high school, he enlisted in the military and became an intelligence operative in Iraq. One night, on a mission near Samarra, a city in the “Sunni triangle,” a burst of sustained gunfire erupted from the second-story window of a house. Andy said he “called air” to deliver a strike. When the smoke cleared from the leveled home, there was no clear target inside. “I see instead the wasted bodies of nineteen men, eight women, nine children,” Andy said, choking back tears. “Bakers and merchants, big brothers and baby sisters.
“I relive this memory almost every day,” he went on. “I confess to you this reality in the hope of redemption, that we might all wince and marvel at the true cost of war.”
The room fell silent as Andy went back to his chair, sobbing. Then Chris Antal, a Unitarian Universalist minister who ran the weekly meetings with Yeomans, invited members of the audience to form a circle around the veterans who had spoken and deliver a message of reconciliation to them. Several dozen people came forward and linked arms. “We sent you into harm’s way,” began the message that Antal recited and that the civilians encircling the veterans repeated. “We put you into situations where atrocities were possible. We share responsibility with you: for all that you have seen; for all that you have done; for all that you have failed to do,” they said. Later, members of the audience were invited to come forward again, this time to take and carry candles that the veterans had placed on silver trays when the ceremony began. Andy’s tray had thirty-six candles on it, one for each person killed in the airstrike that he called in.
Yeomans and Antal told me over dinner afterward that they believed audience participation in the ceremony was crucial. Moral injury, they suggested, was exacerbated by society’s growing disengagement from war, which left veterans like Andy to struggle with the costs and consequences on their own. Antal added that, in his opinion, grappling with moral injury required reckoning with how America’s military campaigns had harmed not only soldiers but also Iraqis and civilians in other countries.
For Antal, broadening the scope to include these civilians was both a spiritual mission and a personal one, because he bore a moral injury of his own. It was sustained when he was serving as an army chaplain in Afghanistan. While there, he attended ceremonies in which the coffins of fallen U.S. soldiers were loaded onto transport planes to be sent home. During one such ceremony, held at Kandahar Airfield, Antal noticed drones taking off and landing in the distance and felt the flicker of conscience. The contrast between the dignity of the ceremony, during which the fallen soldier’s name was solemnly announced as taps was played, and the secrecy of the drone campaign, whose victims were anonymous, jarred him. “I felt something break,” he told me. In April 2016, Antal resigned his commission as a military officer, explaining in a letter to President Obama that he could not support a policy of “unaccountable killing” that granted the executive branch the right to “kill anyone, anywhere on earth, at any time, for secret reasons.” In a doctoral dissertation he later submitted to the Hartford Seminary, Antal reflected on the “moral hazard” created by the covert drone program and the growing reliance on special operations forces, which enabled civilians to “know less, risk less, and thus care less” about “the violence inflicted in their name.” Consequently, he wrote, “veterans are often the ones left holding the pain society would rather ignore or forget. Meanwhile, the US military has a presence in almost every country on earth, and has more funding and greater kill capacity than ever before.”
The secrecy of the drone program made it all the more essential that the public heard more from service members about what they saw and did. But it also made it riskier for people who had served in the program to share their stories. Jesselyn Radack, a lawyer for national-security whistleblowers, told me that several former drone operators she represented had suffered retaliation for talking about their experiences (she said one client had his house raided by the FBI and was placed under criminal investigation after speaking on camera with a filmmaker). When Christopher Aaron began speaking publicly about his own past, he contacted Radack, fearing the same thing might happen to him. Initially, nothing did happen. But in June 2017, after someone hacked into his email, a stream of anonymous threats began flooding his inbox. The hostile messages, calling him “scum” and warning him to “shut his big blabbermouth,” were also sent to his father, whose email was likewise hacked. The barrage of threats eventually prompted Chris to hire a lawyer to try to identify who was behind the harassment (the attorney he worked with, Joe Meadows of Bean Kinney & Korman, specialized in internet defamation), and to contact both the FBI and the police.
The experience left Chris shaken. It did not stop him from continuing to speak publicly about his experience. On one occasion, Chris was invited to speak at an event titled “Faithful Witness in a Time of Endless War.” It took place on the campus of a Mennonite high school in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, in a small auditorium whose stage was festooned with a drone memorial quilt. The quilt had thirty-six panels. On each one was the name of a person who had been killed by a U.S. drone strike. Chris approached the lectern wearing a brown blazer and a subdued expression. He reached forward to adjust the mic and thanked the event’s organizers for inviting him to tell his story. Before sharing it, he asked for a moment of silence “for all of the individuals that I killed or helped to kill.”