Military Moral Injury and Spiritual Care

A Resource for Religious Leaders and Professional Caregivers

Nancy J. Ramsay, Carrie Doehring

• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780827223790
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Ministro del culto cristiano

Military Moral Injury and Spiritual Care offers resources to inform and support practices of spiritual care for veterans and others affected by moral injury incurred in the context of military service. A dozen contributors, all experienced in the field, contributed to this work first published in Pastoral Psychology and now widely available. This book is published with the support of the Soul Repair Center at Brite Divinity School. Interreligious in its focus, the Center sponsors research and creates resources to inform and support religious leaders and communities of faith as they respond to veterans and their families and others affected by military moral injury. Proceeds from the book support the Center's work.

1: Moral Injury and Human Relationship:
A Conversation

— Michael Yandell —

Tell me everything that happened / Tell me everything you saw…Did they seem afraid of you?…Was there one you saw too clearly? Did they seem too real to you? / They were kids that I once knew / Now they’re all dead hearts to you.
(Millan et al. 2010)

Introductory remarks: Moral injury and human relationship

Moral injury is about human relationship. It is not merely a wound on the inside of a person, belonging solely to an individual. There is a sense in which moral injury exists outside of the individual, belonging to many people at once.

I am a U.S. Army veteran; I was an enlisted soldier from 2002 through 2006, and I was deployed to Iraq as part of “Operation Iraqi Freedom II” for six months in 2004. Those six months in Iraq, and those four years in the army, profoundly shaped who I am and how I think about the world. I self-identify as a person living with moral injury, but this moral injury is not solely my possession. I see it as a scar within me, as well as an untended wound cut deeply into the institutions and conventions that shape social and political life in the United States.

Moral injury is about human relationship. I have never waged a war, but I have fought in one. This is the position in which many military women and men find themselves. Is to say such a thing—that I have never waged a war, but I have fought in one—to shirk responsibility for actions taken during war? One could argue as much—walking a well-trod path shaded by the comfort of binaries. Here on one hand exists the image of the soldier who “follows orders,” no matter what the consequences, forfeiting any and all decision making. A comparison to Nazis will inevitably rear its head here. On the other hand, there is the image of the soldier who is free to deliberate over every action taken in war, a sort of moral paragon who can heroically stand in a morally ambiguous and dangerous situation and always do the “right” thing. These images of soldier are false abstractions; the binary ignores the reality in which actual military women and men find themselves. The binary ignores real human relationship.

Moral injury is about human relationship. One will find plenty of company while trafficking in stereotypical images of military women and men, but it will be company gained on a path to nowhere. These images work on the assumption that the only person(s) who matters is the individual warrior—that only the individual carries the meaning of morality and responsibility with her on the battlefield. The lie in this assumption is exposed when the warrior is judged, not by her own moral criteria, but by the moral measuring stick of the society which sent her to the battlefield in the first place. What happened on the battlefield, how it affected the individual, and whether the individual exercised a kind of heroic moral virtue or simply followed orders will tend to matter very little; all that matters is what the individual’s community thinks of what happened on the battlefield. To say “I never waged a war, but I fought in one” is an attempt to point toward the reality and the complexity of the relationships in which the war fighter finds herself. It is to say simultaneously that I am both far removed from the people and powers who made the decisions necessary to my actually going to war while also being in very close relationship with them—I was one of many who fought the war that others waged. The war is my responsibility at the same time that it is not my responsibility. I cannot absolve myself of the fighting, nor can the nation absolve itself by placing its guilt on the shoulders of military women and men. To do either would be to deny human relationship. The question I am most interested in as I write these introductory remarks is a question that will necessarily remain open: where do you find yourself in all this, Reader? Do you and I have any relationship other than that of writer and reader? Is the meaning you are looking for in this text a meaning that exists solely outside of yourself? Do you have a relationship to the wars of the twenty-first century—perhaps a first-hand experience, a relationship to those who waged it, a relationship to those who fought it, a relationship to those against whom it was fought? The purpose of this article is to explore these broad questions of moral injury and human relationship. I will explore these questions through engaging scripture, reckoning with the current widely used definitions of moral injury, borrowing some concepts from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and all while weaving in an account and reflection on personal experience.

You, me, and moral injury: Something in our eyes

Here is an ancient question: “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye?” (Matt. 7:3–4, NRSV). This passage from Christian scripture is quite germane to discourse on moral injury, but one need not be a Christian to see how. I argue that the site of moral injury is not fixed; moral injury exists at the site of human relationship, and its effects are as diverse as those relationships. I have something in my eye, left over from my war experience, and I suggest that you have something in your eye as well. Moreover, there is a collective obstruction of our vision as a nation. To illustrate this point, I will begin with my own concrete experience and “zoom out,” as it were.

An event—something in my eye

Where does one begin to write personally about moral injury? For many veterans, there is an acute experience—for instance, profound regret over a pulled trigger—from which all sorts of emotions flow. Others speak of the war(s) generally, or a collection of events and experiences taken together that form moral injury. My own living with moral injury involves more of the latter, though there are indeed events in the war that stand out specifically.

I recall how it felt every time I watched my leader and friend walk down-range to deal with a piece of explosive ordnance or an improvised explosive device—the fear that clenched down in my chest hoping we had made the right decisions. I recall an uneasy feeling while seeing people taken from their homes at night, detained for reasons unknown to me and for lengths of time unknown to me. I remember carrying a shell-full of Sarin, breathing it in and transporting it, feeling betrayed by my own body—and what it felt like to have that moment scrutinized, picked apart, and debated at levels high above me. I was a young explosive ordnance disposal specialist at the time. The encounter with Sarin nerve agent happened in May of 2004, during what seemed to be a routine examination of old, rusted, and obsolete ordnance. The event was anything but routine, and the dissonance between my expectations and my experience that I felt that day have come to characterize the dissonance I feel in regard to the war as a whole (for more information on the Sarin incident, see Chivers 2014).

I remember the shattered confidence in the aftermath, what it felt like to experience such a profound journey of inner personal crisis—questioning everything—that one day the mirror showed me a new kind of face, and I realized that I had become, in name and reality, unfit for duty. I know what it feels like to look at Facebook in the years after military service to discover one with whom one served has died in a place far away, doing the work one used to do. I remember what it feels like to become bitter, to be paradoxically both proud and ashamed of military service—to be paradoxically proud and ashamed of having the good fortune to build a life after military service.

I gesture broadly to these events and feelings, Reader, because any one of them might serve as a starting point for writing about moral injury. Maybe you know and remember these things as well. Perhaps they strike a chord with you. Perhaps you or someone close to you has experienced one or more of these, or something like it. I have no monopoly on moral injury, and I can only speak for myself. However, I hope that I am not merely addressing my keyboard and computer screen, but that I am writing to someone. In this way, again, my stories and experiences are not merely my own; on the contrary, they exist in relationship to others.

It will help, for the purposes of this article, to focus in on one experience, acknowledging that it is but one example toward getting at the meaning of moral injury regarding human relationship.

It’s April 2004 and I’m in Baghdad, anxiously waiting by our truck as my team leader takes a closer look at some ordnance our robot has deemed relatively safe. As I watch him, some kids approach me. They ask me for candy, as kids here often do. I don’t have any candy, but we have some water bottles in the truck, and they’re still cool from being in the freezer at the beginning of the morning.

I think: I’ll do a good thing and give these impoverished kids some water. So I get the water out of the truck and move to hand a couple of bottles to the kid in front. The boy, who’s probably about eight, refuses—after all, what he asked for was candy. Something sparks inside of me. Here I am, risking life and limb, with my team leader downrange checking out an explosive, and this kid won’t take something I’m offering out of the goodness of my heart.

I rip the cap off the liter bottle in my hand, dump some of it out on the ground, and throw it at him. An old man, most likely his grandfather, rushes up, grabs the boy, and pulls him away. The old man looks at me, not with anger, hate, or even sadness. His eyes are full of fear. He’s afraid of me.

In that moment, I don’t recognize that look, because I don’t recognize myself. How can he be afraid of me? I’m one of the good guys, after all. (Yandell 2016, p. 52)

Moral injury is about human relationship. Human relationship is happening regardless of any mission or task; relationship exists in the background of missions and tasks. Relationship happens alongside them, above and beyond them, in the midst of them. During this event, I was focused primarily on the task at hand—to have been focused on anything else would have been dangerous. And yet, here alongside this task is a boy and his grandfather. Moreover, there is my team-leader downrange. There are the family and friends of the boy. There is something called the “United States” and something called “Iraq” hovering over us, enveloping us. There are people, powers, and institutions shaping the physical and emotional landscape in which I find myself there with the boy. In the midst of all this, lest it be obscured, there is me—my capacity to make choices and shape the landscape a bit myself.

This event has left a speck in my eye. As much as I may write about it, reflect on it, or reinterpret it, there it stubbornly remains. My relationship to the boy was perhaps inconsequential; what makes the event consequential for me is that I dismissed him as something inconsequential. When the stakes were high, and the effort required quite low, I treated human relationship as if it were nothing. To speak here of moral injury as if it were isolated to myself is to rob the term of meaning. There was a boy. The story is not about me. This i...