‘My fiancée’s worried that I’m not going to come back the same. I’ll never tell her what things I did here. I’ll never tell anybody. ’Cause I’m not proud of killing people. I’m just proud to serve my country. I hate being here but I love it at the same time.’ [...]
The story of the Trojan horse, delivered as a gift but transporting lethal agents instead, has long served as an allegory for the destructive power of secrets – like the unaddressed guilt hidden in the minds of soldiers, repeated with every homecoming for thousands of years. War’s simple premise, killing, is like that Trojan horse, devastating those sent to do it and, ultimately, the society they return to when the war is done. The insidious damage is only made worse because wartime killing, a philosophically problematic act, has been left out of the global dialogue. After all, how can humanity’s greatest civil crime, killing, become heroic in the context of war? There are practical considerations as well: will too much discussion of killing make soldiers hesitate or even rebel against protecting us from threats? [...]
What we’re beginning to learn now is that, of all those things Marlantes mentioned, unaddressed guilt might be the most dangerous for returning veterans. A recent study by the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) shows that nearly two-dozen veterans are killing themselves every day, nearly one an hour. This attrition, connected at least in part to combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other war-related psychological injuries, is an enormous price to pay for avoiding the subject. So great, in fact, that the total number of US active duty suicides in 2012 (349) was higher than the number of combat-related deaths (295). [...]
According to the VA psychologists Shira Maguen of San Francisco and Brett Litz of Boston, both experts on military trauma, the key precondition for moral injury, our so-called Achilles’ heel, is a sense of ‘transgression’, a betrayal of what’s right. ‘In the context of war,’ they write, ‘moral injuries may stem from direct participation in acts of combat, such as killing or harming others, or indirect acts, such as witnessing death or dying, failing to prevent immoral acts of others, or giving or receiving orders that are perceived as gross moral violations. The act may have been carried out by an individual or a group, through a decision made individually or as a response to orders given by leaders.’ Indeed, commanders are not just responsible for the physical wellbeing of their soldiers, but through the moral consequences of their orders, their future mental health.
Some military leaders are disturbed by the findings, and say the term moral injury impugns the character of their soldiers. But researchers argue it’s quite the opposite: if soldiers felt nothing about taking the life of another human being, that would be indicative of sociopathy. Disturbance caused by killing indicates the presence of morality, not its lack.
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