By Peter Van Buren, who blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during the Iraqi reconstruction in We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. He writes about current events at We Meant Well. His newest book, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, has just been published. Originally published at TomDispatch
“My guilt will never go away,” former Marine Matthew Hoh explained to me. “There is a significant portion of me that doesn’t believe it should be allowed to go away, that this pain is fair.”
If America accepts the idea of fighting endless wars, it will have to accept something else as well: that the costs of war are similarly endless. I’m thinking about the trillions of dollars, the million or more “enemy” dead (a striking percentage of them civilians), the tens of thousands of American combat casualties, those 20 veteran suicides each day, and the diminished lives of those who survive all of that. There’s that pain, carried by an unknown number of women and men, that won’t disappear, ever, and that goes by the label “moral injury.”
The Lasting Pain of War
When I started Hooper’s War, a novel about the end of World War II in the Pacific, I had in mind just that pain. I was thinking — couldn’t stop thinking, in fact — about what really happens to people in war, combatants and civilians alike. The need to tell that story grew in large part out of my own experiences in Iraq, where I spent a year embedded with a combat unit as a U.S. State Department employee, and where I witnessed, among so many other horrors, two soldier suicides.
The new book began one day when Facebook retrieved photos of Iraqi children I had posted years ago, with a cheery “See Your Memories” caption on them. Oh yes, I remembered. Then, on the news, I began seeing places in Iraq familiar to me, but this time being overrun by Islamic State militants or later being re-retaken with the help of another generation of young Americans. And I kept running into people who’d been involved in my war and were all too ready to share too many drinks and tell me too much about what I was already up all too many nights thinking about.
As these experiences morphed first into nightmares and then into the basis for research, I found myself speaking with more veterans of more wars who continued to suffer in ways they had a hard time describing, but which they wrestled with everyday. I realized that I understood them, even as they seemed to be trying to put their feelings into words for the first time. Many of them described how they had entered the battle zones convinced that “we’re the good guys,” and then had to live with the depth of guilt and shame that followed when that sense didn’t survive the test of events.
Sometimes they were remarkably articulate, sometimes anything but. It seemed not to matter which war we were talking about — or whether I was reading a handwritten diary from the Korean War, an oral history of the Pacific War, or an old bestseller about a conflict ironically labeled “the Good War.” The story always seemed to be the same: decisions made in seconds that lasted lifetimes, including the uncomfortable balancing of morality and expediency in situations in which a soldier might believe horrific acts like torture could save lives or had to accept civilian casualties in pursuit of military objectives. In war, you were always living in a world in which no action seemed ideal and yet avoiding acting was often inconceivable.
PTSD and Moral Injury
Matthew Hoh, that former Marine, now a veterans advocate, introduced me to the phrase “moral injury,” though the term is usually attributed to clinical psychiatrist Jonathan Shay. He coined it in 1991 while working for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
We are, of course, beings with a complex sense of right and wrong, which can be messed with in disastrous ways. There are boundaries inside us that can’t be crossed without a great price being paid. Though the term moral injury is fairly new, especially outside military circles, the idea is as old as war. When people sent into conflict find their sense of right and wrong tested, when they violate deeply held convictions by doing something (such as killing a civilian in error) or failing to do something (such as not reporting a war crime), they suffer an injury to their core being.
Examples of this phenomenon are relatively commonplace in popular culture. Think of scenes from Tim O’Brien’s iconic Vietnam War book, The Things They Carried, William Manchester’s World War II odyssey, Goodbye Darkness, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, or films like William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives and Oliver Stone’s Platoon.
You can find similar examples as far back as the Iliad and as recently as late last night. Lisa Ling, for instance, was a former Air Force technical sergeant who worked in America’s armed drone program before turning whistleblower. She was perhaps typical when she told the makers of the documentary film National Bird that, in helping carry out drone strikes which killed people across the globe by remote control, “I lost part of my humanity.”
Once upon a time, society expressed skepticism or worse toward such formulations, calling those who emerged visibly suffering from the acts of war “cowards” or dismissing them as fakes and frauds. Yet today post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a widely acknowledged condition that can be identified by MRI tests.
PTSD and moral injury often occur together. “I think having both PTSD and moral injury are the normal things for us,” Ling says of those in the drone program. Moral injury, however, takes place at the intersection of psychology and spirituality, and so is, in a sense, all in someone’s head. When experiencing moral injury, a person wields guilt and/or shame as a self-inflicted penalty for a choice made. PTSD is more physical, more fear-based, and often a more direct response to an event or events witnessed in war.
Think of it this way: PTSD is more likely to result from seeing something terrible, moral injury from doing something terrible.
Civilians, Too
Moral injury doesn’t just affect soldiers, but civilians, too. Noncombatants are not just victims or targets, but often complex participants in war. This reality led me, as my book developed, to interview now-elderly Japanese who had experienced World War II as children. They described the horrific choices they faced, even at a young age. In a wartime landscape of hunger, survival often depended on small, grim acts that would never be forgotten.
Sometimes, I sensed in talking to them, as in interviewing former soldiers, that the psychic injuries of wartime don’t end until the sufferers do. Moral injury turns out to be a debt that often can never be repaid.
Those survivors of the end of the war in Japan who got the food necessary to live had to pay a price for knowing what happened to those who didn’t. In a landscape ravaged by war, just because something wasn’t your fault doesn’t mean it won’t be your responsibility. An act as simple as which of her children a mother offered a disappearing supply of water to first could mean the difference between life and death. And though, in truth, it might have been impossible in such circumstances and at such an age to know that you were responsible for the death of your sister or brother, 70 years later you might still be thinking about it with an almost unbearable sense of guilt.
And here’s a small footnote: Did you know that it’s possible to sit quietly on a Tokyo park bench in 2017, perfectly aware of whose distant relatives and countrymen dropped the bombs that took away the water that forced that mother to make that decision, and still shamefully continue taking notes, saying nothing as you witness someone else’s breakdown?
The Trip Back
What help can there be for something so human?
There are, of course, the bad answers, all too often including opioids and alcohol. But sufferers soon learn that such substances just send the pain off to ambush you at another moment, and yet, as many told me, you may still look forward to the morning’s first throat-burning shot of something strong. Drinking and drugs have a way, however temporarily, of wiping out hours of pain that may stretch all the way back to the 1940s. You drink in the dark places, even after you understand that in the darkness you can see too much.
Tragically, suicide is never far from moral injury. The soul isn’t that big a place.
One former soldier told me he’s never forgiven his neighbor for talking him out of going into the garage with his rifle. Another said the question wasn’t why he might commit suicide, but why he hadn’t. Someone I met knows vets who have a “designated driver,” a keeper not of the car keys but of their guns during emotional rough patches.
The Department of Veterans Affairs counts a stunning average of 20 veteran suicides a day in America. About 65% of those are individuals 50 years old or older with little or no exposure to the country’s twenty-first-century conflicts. No one tracks the suicide rate for civilians who survive war, but it’s hard to imagine that it isn’t high as well. The cause of all those self-inflicted deaths can’t, of course, be traced to any one thing, but the pain that grows out of moral injury is patient.
For such sufferers, however, progress is being made, even if the trip back is as complex as the individual. The Department of Veterans Affairs now acknowledges moral injury and its effects, and in 2014 Syracuse University created the Moral Injury Project to bring together vets, doctors, and chaplains to work on how to deal with it. In the meantime, psychologists are developing diagnostic assessment tools for what some call “soul repair.”
One effective path back seems to be through helping patients sort out just what happened to them and, when it comes to remembered transgressions, what part of those may be their own responsibility (though not necessarily their own fault). What doesn’t work, according to Matthew Hoh, is trying to convince veterans who view themselves as damaged that, in the present American manner, they are really heroes.
Others suffering moral injury may try to deal with it by seeking forgiveness.
Lisa Ling, for example, traveled to Afghanistan, with a desire to truly grasp her role in a drone program that regularly killed its victims from thousands of miles away. To her surprise, during an encounter with the relatives of some civilian victims of such drone strikes, they forgave her. “I didn’t ask for forgiveness,” Ling told me, referring to what she had done in the drone program, “because what I did was unforgivable.”
Killing by remote control requires many hands. Ling worked on databases and IT networking. Analysts studied the information in those databases to recommend humans to target. Sensor operators manipulated lasers to pinpoint where a drone pilot would eventually slam his missile home for the kill.
“Like all of us,” she added, “I spent time on the mission floor, or at briefings where I saw and heard devastating things, or blatant lies, but to actually connect my individual work to single events wasn’t possible due to the diffusion of responsibility. For sensor operators, it is more like stepping on ants. For analysts, they get to know people over time. As watchers and listeners they describe an intimacy that comes with predictably knowing their family patterns. Kissing the kids, taking children to school, and then seeing these same people die.”
Moral Injury and Whistleblowers.
Another way back is for the sufferer to try to rebalance the internal scales a little by making amends of some sort. In the case of moral injury, this can often mean drawing a line between who one was then and who one might be now. Think of it as an attempt to re-inscribe those internal borders that were transgressed so long ago.
Perhaps not so surprisingly, the connections between moral injury and whistleblowing, like those between moral injury and suicide, appear to run deep.
For example, Iraq War whistleblower Chelsea Manning’s decision to leak video of civilian deaths caused by members of the U.S. military may have been her version of amends, driven by guilt over silently witnessing war crimes. Among the acts she saw, for instance, was a raid on a printing facility that had been billed as an al-Qaeda location but wasn’t. The U.S. military had, in fact, been tricked into shutting down the work of political opponents of Iraq’s then-prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. Until Manning finally tells her story, this remains speculative, but I was at the same forward operating base in Iraq as she was and know what happened and how it affected me, as well as the others around us.
Whistleblowers (and I was one of them) talk of conscience, of a realization that we were part of something that was wrong. Jonathan Shay suggests that the failure of moral agency does not have to rest with the individual alone. It can involve witnessing a betrayal of “what’s right” by a person in legitimate authority.
That part of moral injury could help explain one of the most significant whistleblowers of our time. In talking about his reasons for blowing the whistle, Edward Snowden invoked questions of right and wrong when it came to the actions of senior American government officials. It would be a worthy question to put to Snowden: How much guilt and shame — the hallmarks of moral injury — do you retain from having been part of the surveillance state, and how much was your whistleblowing driven by trying to rid yourself of it?
After all, for those suffering from moral injury, the goal is always the same: to somehow reclaim the good parts of oneself and to accept — but not be eternally defined by — what one did or didn’t do.
I know, because for me, this is so much more than fiction.
My War at Home
“You mean that Vietnam helicopter thing?” A well-meaning family doctor asked me this when I got back from Iraq in 2010, referring to the way some vets react to the sound of a helicopter, sending them “back to the jungle.” No, no, far more than that, I responded, and told him a little about my sorry role in administering reconstruction projects in Iraq and how it left me more interested in vodka than my family. That was my own personal taste of moral injury, of a deeply felt failure to accomplish any of the good I’d hoped to do, let down by senior leaders I once believed in. It’s why I tell the story in Hooper’s War in reverse order, opening with a broken Nate Hooper in his late eighties finally finding a form of redemption for the events of a few weeks at war when he was 18. By moving toward an innocent boy as far away in rural Ohio as one can be from war, I felt I was working through my own experience of the damage war causes deep inside the self.
In tallying the costs of war, what’s the price of a quick death versus a slow one? A soldier who leaves his brains on the wall in the den two decades after his war ended or one whose body remains untouched but who left his mind 10,000 miles away?
The price of endless war is beyond calculation. As our wars continue to morph and roll on, the costs — financial, emotional, and in blood — only pile up as the men and women who have been welcomed home as if it were all over continue to be torn apart. The nasty conclusion on the scales of moral injury: that our endless conflicts may indeed have left our society, one that just can’t stop itself from making war, among the casualties.
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We’re all war criminals now.
Yemen.
When most people imagine the stress of combat, they think that it is the risk of being killed that causes it. And that does cause considerable stress. But people don’t tend to think about how stressful killing is. When you listen to the stories of veterans, the ones that stand out as the most remembered and stressful are those of killing somebody.
We have a volunteer military. In exchange for soldiers’ willingness to obey all orders, they are issued a license to kill strangers in foreign lands as situations arise. This rare and exceptional power is what attacks many to the military. Only later, after the fact, do some realize they were not suited to carry out their primary directive. The above article seeks to establish blame for this state of affairs by calling out the “stupid, endless wars” our country regularly engages in. Thus, it seems, the quality of a particular war becomes the issue and how it was carried out signals a defect in our society.
Ii seems everyone has unrealistic expectations about what war can accomplish, from the soldier to the general to the President. This is what causes war in the first place. Everyone, it seems, is always in search of a “good” war. These good wars generally occur with the same frequency as double yolked eggs, not very often.
Most wars are just plain senseless. Here is where messaging comes in. Our country, which is an Empire, is failing in its duty to properly contextualize our military campaigns and bring them into focus as part of an objective to establish and maintain a unipolar world. Simply saying we are exceptional and indispensable is not enough to make sense of the senseless. Soldiers need to know they are part of an vast imperial project and all their missions advance the cause of Empire. Subjugating people in distant lands is not the same as rescuing them. Dominating them is the primary goal. Those at the other end of the spear can decide for themselves if they want it make hard or easy on themselves. For those who choose the easy way out, we have a cultural bounty waiting for them of fast food, rock music and unbridled sexual freedom. Any sane person would say, “sign me up.” For those who choose the hard way, they should be viewed as necessary examples of what happens when the Empire does not get its way.
Our wars are part of a vast over-arching plan to create not just one, but many American centuries. If our solders understood their mission in this context and were rewarded in kind, they would not be ambiguous about what their mission accomplished no matter what the circumstances.
And please don’t tell me we should just stop all this nonsense and become Iceland. The train has left the station.
You make some very creditable comments on the senselessness of war. But then you seem to be rationalizing war. You note that “saying we are exceptional and indispensable is not enough to make sense of the senseless” but conclude that “If our solders understood their mission in this context and were rewarded in kind, they would not be ambiguous about what their mission accomplished” and then “please don’t tell me we should just stop all this nonsense and become Iceland. The train has left the station.”
1. Do you think that the US is in fact “exceptional and indispensable” in having “fast food, rock music and unbridled sexual freedom”?
2. Do you think that therefore the US should be “subjugating people in distant lands” and killing millions for those supposed advantages?
3. Do you blame the victims because they can simply “decide for themselves if they want it make hard or easy on themselves”?
4. Do you think that the only alternative to US genocides is to “become Iceland”?
5. Do you think that opposition to US genocides should be suppressed because “The train has left the station”?
That ends up sounding like the same excuses for murder, the same Koolaid that these veterans drank before their conscience awakened to reality.
Surely that is not what you meant to say.
Empires are a fact of life wether anyone likes them or not. There are many models for Empire.
No one is exactly alike.
America has been very successful in establishing it’s own unique footprint around the globe. The goal for all Empires is ultimately the same. Subjugation. Engaging in genocide comes with the territory. This is the path we have chosen. Please be advised this is who we are. I have not seen an alternative to this American model in my lifetime when push comes to shove. When things don’t go our way, we go all in. Our paid mercenaries need to be given the facts. This will help them decide if they can live with the outcomes, personally and professionally.
No alternatives to the current situation are presently viable. The unwinding of an Empire is always drenched in blood so anyone suggesting an alternative needs to consider the downside.
As a former Army Officer, I can assure you that soldiers are obligated to obey lawful orders, not all orders. However not everyone has the courage to say no (or the equivalent). Soldiers are also obligated to stop ongoing war crimes, which also takes a hefty amount of courage.
Of course, no good deed goes unpunished.
I believe there is a limit to loyalty but its not something that is ever discussed in military circles. Its a proper subject for an international conference, indeed Canada held such an event 30+ years ago and published the findings in a slim booklet “The Limits of Loyalty” but they never got the military on board.
These hidden costs of the militarization of society – suicides of vets, dissemination of weapons knowledge to the general public, increased tendency to approve violent solutions to every problem – this is the downside to the stock market profits of Lockheed and the rest.
I, uh, this is tricky for a total non-combatant like me to talk about. It seems like Mr. VanBuren is fighting himself in this very article. What anguishes me is the double-edged sword of this:
>to bring together vets, doctors, and chaplains to work on how to deal with it. In the meantime, psychologists are developing diagnostic assessment tools for what some call “soul repair.”
So there might be a day where we can send poor, no-prospects (because nobody but the top 4%’s children will have any prospects) Johnny down to a room in the center of town where he can, with another order of magnitude of visual resolution compared to today, blow people far away up. Before or after they kiss their spouse on the way out the door. After say 10 years of this, we can “fix” him and safely send him out into the crowds.
I do NOT want these people to suffer. But it seems Mr. Hoh and Ms. Ling have a much more nuanced view about this, unlike the author, who still has hopes of personal solace.
Thank you!
(From a more than 5 year vet…..one year NG late 1940’s; 4 years 1950-54 Navy…….)
I also was amazed at the seeming conclusions that we have to bring a better “message” to those vets when they face the total destruction of their own minds and beings after witnessing the horrors of killing others. “We just need a better message”. You’ve got to be kidding me!
A link from the article that I found interesting. From 2014, but it could have been written yesterday:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175912/tomgram%3A_rory_fanning,_why_do_we_keep_thanking_the_troops/
“Thank you for your service”. Gawd, how I hate that phrase. I have never uttered it & doubt that I ever will. When I meet a vet. from the Gulf wars, I think “You poor dumb s.o.b.” (the overwhelming majority are males) Of course, in most settings, it would be asking for trouble if I said that out loud.
I wish I could grab every young person considering joining the military by the lapels & scream at him/her “If you didn’t volunteer, they couldn’t have their wars”.
I do understand though, with a crapified economy providing fewer & fewer opportunities, the military looks like a possible way forward for many. (They, TPTB, wouldn’t be creating this situation deliberately would they? Nah, that’s just too foily…)
I think people keep thanking the troops as it helps to assuage their own collective guilt.
Great piece by the way. 20 suicides a day? Exceptional
Reading this post recalled to me an NC link from a some weeks ago: [https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/03/30/when-warriors-put-on-the-badge#.fVEDRtVzA]
[NC: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/03/links-33017-2.html in Police State Watch: “When Warriors Put On the Badge”]
This link reports on the Marshall Project which studies our police. I was struck by this tidbit:
“Most law enforcement agencies, because of factors including a culture of machismo and a number of legal restraints, do little or no mental health screening for cops who return from military deployment, and provide little in the way of treatment.” — further elaborated in the link text.
I think it lends a sense of anticipation and excitement to any possible future encounters with those who serve and protect.
“Most law enforcement agencies, because of factors including a culture of machismo and a number of legal restraints, do little or no mental health screening for cops who return from military deployment, and provide little in the way of treatment.”
And, that’s just the way the US law enforcement agencies want it!
Powerful post. The first precept of Sun Tzu in The Art of War is “The Moral Law”. This applies to both the moral justification for the war itself and to conduct within a war.
Along with the list of war crimes, this raises a question whether those who have sustained “moral injury” are themselves victims of a war crime, regardless of which side of the conflict they are on, as well as whether an entire population are to be considered victims of an immoral war that is initiated under false pretenses or is unjustly initiated, regardless of which side of a conflict they are on?
Particularly appreciated Van Buren’s concluding sentence, as it pertains.
See also Just War theory, closer to home.
I also very much appreciated the article. In light of the depth of the issue, it feels presumptuous to say more.
I recently listened to a CBC podcast on whistle blowers in Canada. They are not treated very well but there is a report being made that may be an incentive for the government to produce good protective legislation for whistle blowers.
Soldiers are recruited into the military on the pretext of defending democracy and freedom. (Incidentally, this is also how scientific experts in weapons of mass destruction and weapons of mass surveillance are also recruited).
What they tend to find, after being in the system for a while, is that they’re actually the front line of a global imperial system which does the opposite – it is aimed at preventing client states of the U.S. from becoming independent democracies, and aimed at overthrowing weak foreign governments and turning them into client states, aka “puppet regimes” such as Saudi Arabia (which noone can honestly view as a bastion of democracy and freedom). This gives rise to the phenomenon of ‘cognitive dissonance’ – it’s all a lie. U.S. claims about promoting democracy and human rights around the world are lies; if we really were interested in this, we’d pass laws banning military cooperation with countries that don’t meet basic democratic standards (Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, Qatar, UAE, Ethiopia, Honduras, etc.)
Now, at the same time, all countries rely on military forces to protect their borders; so, why can’t the American military move to a model in which this is their primary duty? This would entail closing the majority of foreign military bases, and relying on cooperation with other countries and diplomacy instead of military force to resolve international conflicts. It would also mean soldiers wouldn’t have their lives and minds sacrificed so some Wall Street bank could keep pulling down billions in oil revenue payments from a corrupt Third World dictatorships.
Very importantly, such a shift to a multipolar world would enable steep cuts in military spending, freeing up hundreds of billions of dollars in tax dollars, which are needed to repair American infrastructure, as well as finance public health and education programs, which would lift the United States out of the bottom ranks of industrialized nations when it comes to infrastructure, health and education.
This would mean the end of superpower/Empire status for the United States, but so what? In the future, negotations between states will be based on business deals and diplomatic talks, not on military invasions and covert regime change programs.
“This would mean the end of superpower/Empire status for the United States, but so what?”
That’s just crazy talk…/s
Talking about the now-elderly survivors of WWII in Japan made me think of Grave of the Fireflies. Amazing movie, must-see, but brutal for the soul to watch. Most people assume Isao Takahata made it as a pure anti-war film, but really his motivation was that he felt the Japanese public had become too dismissive and forgetful of what that generation went through in the waning days of WWII. It was a harsh reminder of that moral injury.
And that was a country, only 40 years removed from the events, that had never experienced a loss like that before. Which does not bode well for America, for whom true, total loss, occupied instead of occupier, is not even in their lexicon. Much too easy for us to either drown the sight of that moral injury in jingoism and patriotic thought-terminating cliches, or interpret that pain as a machismo-booster, fuel for so much more toxic masculinity.
Nice discussion of war’s impact on soldiers. Suspect A. Hitler’s WW1 trench experiences desensitized him to brutality. The Versailles Treaty’s vengeful enslavement of Germans also arose in a morally blighted postwar milieu. Lit the fuse and provided the Weimar tinder for Hitler’s ascent to power. Epic tragedy. War clearly solves nothing. But it can be profitable.
Although I read this post elsewhere a few days ago, I commend you, Jerri-Lynn, for making it available to everyone here at NC. It’s a real must read.
Great links today, as well. Thank you.
Speaking of survivor civilian suicides after an attack, which this article does, I hope that everyone will watch Roberto Rossellini’s great movie on this subject, “Germany, Anno Zero.”
I was good friends with that directors son, Gil, in Houston, Texas during the late 1970’s. We used to watch it together often.