Moral Injuries of War

by Caroline H. Knowles
Sermon preached on Sunday, February 5, 2012

A few decades ago, I was living in Thailand, in a culture where the spheres of the living and the spirit world interpenetrated each other.  The Thai’s ancient culture had inherited the Chinese tradition of Hungry Ghosts.

Most homes had a charming little replica of a mansion at the entrance to the property, and tiny bowls of rice and other bits of food were regularly set out in the little “spirit house.”  I thought the custom quaint.  The Spirit House was supposed to confuse and deflect the ghosts of ancestors and even ghosts of wandering strangers who could otherwise threaten the tranquility of the living.  On a special day in the Seventh Lunar month, around the end of August, little pastries marked with red Chinese characters were left on doorsteps for the hungry ghosts.  This was to appease their envy of the living by showing them respect and feeding their need.

I no longer see these ritual arrangements as “quaint” and foreign, as mere superstition. Rather, this communal practice acknowledges our unfinished business with the dead, and tries to control the potent residues of grief, guilt, remorse and shame that haunt us as survivors.

I got to know some hungry ghosts who have been stalled on the threshold of the living for decades, in my work with veterans in the San Francisco Presidio. I was conducting a monthly spiritual support service for veterans, at the Main Post Chapel.  My service included meeting in a small group where the veterans wrote about their lives and challenges.  Most served during the Viet Nam war.  These veterans were and still are haunted by their memories.  These many decades later, they carry grief that has never healed.

One had a desk job at an airbase, but still dreams about the pilots who flew out on mission and never came back?or they came back and drove crazy drunk and died on the roads around the base.  Another vet was nineteen when he was drafted. His closest buddy was killed in Viet Nam.  Recently, he went to see a traveling replica of the Wall, the Viet Nam War Memorial.   He nearly passed out when he found his friend’s name on the wall.  Other anonymous men come again and again to wander around the Presidio Chapel and garden.  There’s one who visits at twilight to meet his two friends who died in Viet Nam.  These ghosts come and stand beside him, while he mourns.

Veterans coming home from today’s wars write how they are haunted by what they witnessed, and by their nightmares about those whom they killed or abused.  A marine in Iraq obeyed orders and cut down a car that wouldn’t stop at a checkpoint.  Then he saw inside a child sitting beside her father, his body severed by weapons fire.  Another soldier flails and wakes from his dreams of Iraqi detainees he saw, young men his own age, lined up with burlap bags over their heads, being abused by fellow American soldiers.  Recurrent nightmares are among the most common experiences of men and women who return from war.  Over and over, in dreams, come the images of fallen or maimed comrades, or enemies slain, or innocents caught in the cross-fire.

These bad dreams are not unique to our modern wars.  In cultures all over the earth, returning warriors have dreams like that.  These dream images of the dead, in many cultures, are called “hungry ghosts.”  They hunger for something from the living.  Often, it’s more than food of they want.  They hunger for respect, for sacred burial, for honor, for redemptive acts by the living.

In Greek sagas and tragedies, the failure to give the dead proper burial rites was a cardinal wrong.

Families and comrades of MIA’s in Viet Nam have been relentless in seeking the remains of the fallen.

Generations of Japanese still make the grievous journey to Tarawa to gather and bring home the bones of the 4,500 Japanese soldiers who perished there in 1943.

Recently, there’s been an uproar about the improper disposal of body parts of dead servicemen and women on arrival at Dover Air Force Base, when it turned out that some remains were being incinerated and thrown like trash in the landfill.

Yet, as a culture, we have only a narrow understanding of how to put ghosts to rest.  Our science has little patience with ghosts.

When returning warriors seek help for their nightmares and depression and explosive emotions, they’ve been commonly diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  But mental health professionals and their patients have been rethinking that diagnosis.  PTSD, for short, applies when a person has been badly frightened by an event that threatened death or serious bodily injury, and suffers related anxiety and depression.

Yes, servicemen and women back from Iraq and Afghanistan have faced the immediate threat of death and injury.

Yet a psychiatric diagnosis doesn’t really address the deep grief for fallen comrades that goes on forty years without healing, and it doesn’t cover the ache in the soul over killing or abusing a fellow human being, or standing by, helpless to stop the carnage. These are wounds to the spirit, and psychiatric drugs and ordinary talk therapy do not relieve these injuries.  These are the moral injuries of war?the wounds of grief for fallen comrades whose lives were ended by violence?the wounds of shame and guilt at abusing and killing other human beings.  We are only at the threshold of understanding how the wounds of the spirit may be healed.

If moral injury is not PTSD, how should we define it, and how is it created?  What promotes moral injury in our warriors?  And what can be done to heal a moral injury?

A moral injury is a wound to the spirit in which the individual believes that what they have done or witnessed has violated their deepest sense of right and wrong.  Most individuals, by adulthood, have incorporated values and taboos which guide their thoughts, beliefs, choices and behavior.  We call these “conscience” or “ethical sense” or “superego.”

These processes spring from our loving connections to the people who nurtured us in early life and our connection to our surrounding culture.  They are the source of pride and self-esteem when we obey our conscience, and the source of guilt and shame when we violate our values.

Paramount among these values is the taboo against taking human life. “Thou shalt not kill” is embodied in the most ancient codes of law and conduct.

Yet the basic task of training warriors is to overcome this taboo, to create an effective killer.  This takes several stages.  Start preferably with the young.   Then, realign the conscience by isolating the individual from parents and friends, and replace loyalties to the core family or community with the present peer group. Create a deliberately stressful situation.  Issue commands from a powerful authority that run directly counter to the old taboos.

Does this sound familiar?  It’s called brain-washing.  The Nazis did it.  The Stalinists did it.  Gangs do it. It is powerful, and life-changing.  And these strategies are likely as old as humankind.  Societies we call “primitive,” all over the world, have trained warriors to kill.  Adolescents are taken apart from their families, and initiated into the customs and traditions of the warrior with rites of passage. Often the rituals include the infliction of pain by circumcision or scarification.

Our highly industrialized society has gone beyond these rituals of initiation to perfect the modern human killing machine.    In World War II, only about twenty percent of men in combat ever fired their weapons at the enemy, despite orders to fire and the risk to their own lives.  We don’t have that problem anymore.  With sophisticated modern training, now more than 95 percent of our military in combat discharge their weapons to kill.

The modern training techniques intentionally block the ability to think logically or critically by exposing the person to contradictory demands and chaotic situations.  They’re exposed to sleep deprivation, physical exhaustion, humiliation, illogical commands, group punishment for infractions.  Finally, the recruit’s most sacred allegiance becomes the connection to the military unit, to fellow warriors, no longer the civilian world.  “Semper fidelis?we’re faithful to each other, we watch each other’s back, we don’t leave a comrade behind.”

Breaking the taboos against killing is a science.  Instead of the neutral target of concentric circles, the trainee shoots at a human figure.  The trainee shouts “Kill, kill” and plunges the bayonet into a man-shaped bag of straw?and marches to chants like this Marine training song:

Bomb the village, kill the people
Throw some napalm in the square
Do it on a Sunday morning
Do it on their way to prayer….

Trainees are warned their targets are not people like themselves, not children like their own.  They are enemies who threaten our country.  They were gooks in Viet Nam; today in Iraq and Afghanistan, they’re stupid hajjis and ragheads.

Finally the person is led to perform acts and/or to witness acts that were once unthinkable and repugnant, and to tolerate the violent deaths and maiming of comrades.

Yet combat conditions hold at bay the full awareness of injuries to the spirit.  In the context of constant danger, the warrior is sustained by the closeness of comrades, and by the internal flood of stress hormones.

Belief in a rational, just world is shredded, but loyalty to one’s comrades remains and, for a time, suffices.

So the wounds to the spirit typically don’t manifest until the warrior returns from combat, poised to re-enter civilian life.

You’ve seen the TV shots of their homecoming into the arms of husbands, wives, parents, sons and daughters.  Welcome home.  They’re released and out of danger –but now their ties to comrades are severed as their military units disband. There’s no reverse boot camp. They’re expected overnight to step back into their old selves.

Instead, many find themselves confronting the clash between their remembered acts of war and the taboos and rules of civil society.  Conscience begins to thaw.  The inner battle begins between the acts and values of war and the acts and values of peace.

Are you surprised that, last year, 468 service members on active duty committed suicide? Our fatalities for Iraq and Afghanistan combined for last year were 253.  Almost twice as many service members died by their own hand than were killed in war.  These statistics likely underestimate the true number of suicides.

For many, their sense of their own integrity and decency and humanity has been lost?and their trust in the integrity, decency and humanity of the country that sent them to war has been lost.

People express their torment in many ways?“I lost my soul.”  “How can I ever accept myself again, how can people ever accept me if they know what I’ve done, what I allowed to happen?” “How can I be forgiven?”  “How can God forgive me?”

Injury has been done to the soul, to the spirit, to the ethical core of the young person we sent to war.  This is why terms like shell shock and combat fatigue will not address the problem.

This is why many veterans don’t ask for help.  Some re-enlist to be back with their buddies, who understand.  Some veterans numb themselves out with alcohol and drugs.  Others throw themselves into work that maintains the adrenalin rush?police work, fire fighting.  Others just stuff their memories and emotions and keep up a front of being OK?but at the price of the capacity for intimacy.

Some, however, grow from their wounds and point the way to how moral injury can be healed.

Healing happens in community, but it needs to be first a community which can hear the stories they bring, without revulsion, but with understanding of the moral awfulness.   That community can best be built by veterans who come together to support each other.

I work with a non-profit that conducts retreats for veterans, where they come together to heal themselves and each other.

Ultimately, to get their souls back, returning warriors?and those who care for them?have to grapple with the eternal questions: where was God when horrible things happened? How can I feel good again? They struggle with how to feel forgiven by themselves and by the world, for what they did, for what they couldn’t prevent.  They struggle with how to be blessed and feel blessed again?and they cannot do it alone.

As a secular society, we are not used to thinking in terms of forgiveness, the need for blessing and the need for redemptive acts to restore the self and give life fresh meaning.

We would do well to look at how traditional societies restore their warriors to the community.

Songs and chants commemorate the transition from war to peace.  The warrior is honored, but also expected to take on new responsibilities, to be the wise leader, to teach and temper the feisty young.

Some communal rituals go deeper still.  The healers ask the dreamer, “What is your hungry ghost seeking?  What does it ask of you?  What does it ask of us?”  These hungry ghosts that trouble the warrior are not the dreams of the individual alone.  They belong to all of us.  Whatever the warrior did, we are capable of.  The awful lessons of their lives need to teach us and transform us.

Some Viet Nam veterans felt finally healed from their bad dreams when they returned to Viet Nam itself, and were welcomed by the people.  Some prayed or meditated back on the killing fields.  Some wrote their rage and sorrow in poems and stories, as a public witness.  Others built schools for children in the villages they’d wasted.  What a profound sense of forgiving and being forgiven.

No single ritual or redemptive act will give peace to the unquiet spirit.  But we can listen, we can ask what redemptive acts will satisfy the hunger of these ghosts.  And we can ask what redemptive acts we need– to cleanse ourselves, for we sent our sons and daughters to war. We sent the doctors and nurses to witness the destruction of war.

We know that no redemption is really possible without ending these wars that devastate our own military, ruin the people whose countries we occupy, and are destroying our nation with the catastrophic drain on treasure and human life and well-being.

A UU colleague, a minister, asked me, “Who’s going to tell these soldiers that these wars are useless and a hopeless waste?”  I said, “We don’t need to tell them.  They are telling us.”  A recent Pew survey shows now forty percent of active military believe we should not have gone into Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place, and we’re doing no good by staying.

We UU peaceniks mustn’t be smug.  I was at our UU General Assembly in June.  About 2.7 million Americans have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.  Yet I heard not a single word from the pulpit or the platform, raised against the wars, no statement of conscience asking the end of war.

Our veterans and their caregivers will never forget the horrors of war.

They are the ones who can rise up in their generation to become the messengers of peace.  Let’s ask of ourselves to reach out, to heal and empower them to redeem both us and themselves.  Let’s lend them the fire of our commitment to beat their swords into plowshares, so we all will live in peace and unafraid.

We’ll sing together, Dona Nobis Pacem.  Let our hymn be a prayer that wakens us, and strengthens them.

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