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In what seems like another life, I used to interview American veterans of the Vietnam War. Over the course of a decade, I spoke with hundreds of them, mostly about one topic: war crimes. Some were unrepentant. An interrogator who had tortured prisoners, for instance, told me that such actions beatings, waterboarding, electric shock were standard operating procedure in his unit and that, faced with the same situation again, he would do exactly the same thing. Others were ambivalent. But many were wracked with deep regret.
During one marathon phone call, a veteran with a big, bold laugh regaled me with innocuous war stories before I directed him back to the subject at hand. I had good reason to believe he had seen, maybe even taken part in, a massacre. When I asked about it, he suddenly fell silent. The seconds ticked away, but I let the silence linger" and linger" and linger" until he finally broke it. He couldn't recall the massacre but didn't doubt it happened. (It wasn't the first time I'd heard such a response.)
He remembered so many stories from the war but, he explained, when it came to the darkest corner of the conflict, all his memories had gone missing in action except for one.
He told me that story in a drawn-out, meandering way, but basically, his unit was burning down a village, which was something it did as a matter of course. In this particular "ville," however, a woman ran up to him, enraged, shouting, blocking his path. She was no doubt complaining about the group of American teenagers destroying her home and all her worldly possessions. She grabbed his arm, chattering excitedly, until he pushed her off. She came back again, only to be met with another, harder shove. She kept at it and so did he. Finally, he turned away to break free, but only for a second. When he whirled back around, he slammed the butt of his automatic rifle into the bridge of her nose. It was an explosion of blood, he told me, followed by shrieks and sobs. He then spun on his heel and walked away laughing.
That veteran knew he had seen, and probably done, far, far worse, but the most terrible parts of the war had somehow been distilled into this single vile memory. At the time, he confessed, the Vietnamese woman's suffering was meaningless to him. Decades later, however, he found himself reliving it every single day. Like a movie in his mind, he watched her nose shatter, the spray of blood, the screams. And each time he asked himself: How could I have done that? How could I have walked away laughing? I suggested that he was 19 years old, poorly trained, scared, and immersed in a culture of violence, but nothing I said satisfied him. Though he replayed that incident every day, that veteran was clearly never going to solve the riddle of how he could have done it, just as he was never going to forget that woman, what he did to her.
Soldiers have been grappling with the terrible things they've done since at least the dawn of Western civilization, and no doubt much earlier than that. In certain cases, they mete out bodily injury to others and contract moral injury in the process a continuum of pain that, for some like that Vietnam veteran, can last decades, if not a lifetime. Others can't bear to let the anguish fester and seek a more immediate remedy. Today, Kelly Denton-Borhaug, a professor of global religions at Moravian University and the author of And Then Your Soul is Gone: Moral Injury and U.S. War-Culture, examines the concept of moral injury; why so many veterans of America's twenty-first-century forever wars have suffered from it; and why, for some, suicide has been the only solution. Nick Turse
Moral Injury and the Forever Wars
What Americans Don't Want to Hear
This summer, it seemed as if we Americans couldn't wait to return to our traditional July 4th festivities. Haven't we all been looking for something to celebrate? The church chimes in my community rang out battle hymns for about a week. The utility poles in my neighborhood were covered with "Hometown Hero" banners hanging proudly, sporting the smiling faces of uniformed local veterans from our wars. Fireworks went off for days, sparklers and cherry bombs and full-scale light shows filling the night sky.
But all the flag-waving, the homespun parades, the picnics and military bands, the flowery speeches and self-congratulatory messages can't dispel a reality, a truth that's right under our noses: all is not well with our military brothers and sisters. The starkest indicator of that is the rising number of them who are taking their own lives. A new report by Brown University's Costs of War Project calculates that, in the post-9/11 era so far, four times as many veterans and active-duty military have committed suicide as died in war operations.
While July 4th remembrances across the country focused on the symbols and institutions of war and militarization, most of the celebrants seemed far less interested in hearing from current and former military personnel. After all, less than 1% of Americans have been burdened with waging Washington's wars in these years, even as we taxpayers have funded an ever-more enormous military infrastructure.
As for me, though, I've been seeking out as many of those voices as I could for a long, long time. And here's what I've learned: the truths so many of them tell sharply conflict with the remarkably light-hearted and unthinking celebrations of war we experienced this July and so many Julys before it. I keep wondering why so few of us are focusing on one urgent question: Why are so many of our military brothers and sisters taking their own lives?
The Moral Injuries of War
The term moral injury is now used in military and healthcare settings to identify a deep existential pain destroying the lives of too many active-duty personnel and vets. In these years of forever wars, when the moral consciences of such individuals collided with the brutally harsh realities of militarization and killing, the result has been a sharp, sometimes death-dealing dissonance. Think of moral injury as an invisible wound of war. It represents at least part of the explanation for that high suicide rate. And it's implicated in more than just those damning suicides: an additional 500,000 troops in the post-9/11 era have been diagnosed with debilitating, not fully understood symptoms that make their lives remarkably unlivable.
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