Moral Injury and Soldiers in Conflict

Political Practices and Public Perceptions

Tine Molendijk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367546380
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000365078
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History

This book advances an interdisciplinary understanding of moral injury by analyzing the stories of military veterans of combat and peace missions.

In the past decade, the concept of moral injury has emerged to address the potential moral impact of deployment. This book contributes to an interdisciplinary conceptualization of moral injury while, at the same time, critically evaluating the concept's premises and implications. It paints an urgent and compassionate picture of the moral impact of soldiers' deployment experience and the role of political practices and public perceptions in moral injury. It does so by drawing on the experiences of close to a hundred Dutch veterans deployed to Bosnia (Srebrenica) and Afghanistan, and analyzing their stories from the perspectives of psychology, philosophy, theology and social sciences. Ultimately, this book advances the understanding of moral, political and societal dimensions of moral injury and contributes to practical efforts aimed at its prevention.

This book will be of much interest to students of ethics and war, cultural anthropology, conflict studies and international relations.

Part I

Setting the stage

1 Introduction

A government decides to contribute troops to an international military intervention. On the mission, the deployed soldiers confront difficult circumstances. Casualties mount: among the opponents, among the own troops and among civilians. Meanwhile, the mission is the subject of debate in parliament and media, which heats up when something happens to draw the legitimacy of the mission into question. How did it happen? Who is responsible? What should they have done differently? Was this mission not doomed from the start? Eventually, these questions are translated into Lessons Learned to prevent similar failures in the future.

This is one way to describe military intervention and related issues of justice, responsibility and blame. Its bird’s-eye view approach provides a structured and legible overview, allowing a clear understanding of a military mission’s course of events. As such, however, it offers little insight into the experience of those involved in the mission.

Another way to describe an intervention is as follows. The veteran – still a young man – recounts the difficult circumstances he and his colleagues confronted while on deployment. Initially, he speaks about his deployment and homecoming experience in a matter-of-fact and almost casual manner, yet visibly tenses when discussing disturbing experiences. He has struggled with lingering doubts about situations in which he made choices he did not want to make. Is he responsible for those people’s suffering? What should he have done differently? These questions still haunt him. At the same time, he feels that he did what he did because he had no other option. He often asks himself, what were they doing there in the first place? Was this mission not doomed from the start? The government sent them there with limited resources and then abandoned them to their fate. Over there, and back here. On returning home, he started to work hard and party hard. He became aggressive, at work and at home, driven into a spiral of guilt and anger. At first, however, he did not link any of this to his deployment. Even so, he refused to talk about it because he was afraid of being condemned. Accusations about what they had done wrong over there would slice into him like a knife and infuriate him, because people had no idea of what had happened there. At the same time, the accusations hurt so much because self-reproach was what kept him up until early in the morning. Still, for a long time he thought he was fine, and that in fact he was the lucky one for not developing problems, up until his haunting thoughts and feelings finally made him collapse. He sought help and eventually received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Yet, even if his PTSD-focused therapy helped counter his persistent tension, it could not rid him of his feelings of guilt and anger. His family and friends insisted that nobody was to blame for what had happened, but he kept struggling with the sense that he and others should have acted differently.

In this book, I take this second approach of considering moral dimensions of military practice from below. In doing so, I attempt to better understand how moral challenges at both the personal micro-level and the sociopolitical macro-level affect soldiers on the ground and potentially generate distress among them.

Moral injury: linking the ethical and the psycholo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary of military terms and ranks
• Maps of mission areas
• Part I: Setting the stage
• Part II: Soldiers in conflict
• Part III: Conclusions: Practical and theoretical implications
• Index