Tend to troops’ moral injuries
Even as President Trump’s salute of a Navy Seal’s widow earned widespread praise last week, the father of that Seal — the first servicemember lost on this President’s watch — is demanding answers about the Yemen raid that cost his life, as well as the lives of more than a dozen civilians, including nine children.
This is a critical moment for us as a nation to reflect on the cost of combat, not only to those killed or visibly wounded, but to all who kill in the name of country.
I’ve seen it up close in years of covering our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Toward the end of one savage firefight that went on for hours, a Marine rifleman named Nik shot and killed a young Afghan boy.
It was one of those cruel moral dilemmas that confronted the young Americans we send to war. The boy, fighting with the Taliban, was firing at Nik and his Marines, and Nik’s split-second decision to fire back was tactically and legally correct. Even morally justified: Nik was protecting his fellow Marines whom he loved.
And yet he killed a child, a haunting experience that has followed him on into his civilian life.
Nik, like the Navy Seals who survived that Yemen raid, is among the 2.3 million American men and women who have returned from serving in our recent, and ongoing, wars.
For these veterans, whose rightful pride of service and devotion to their battle buddies endure, perhaps along with anxiety, insomnia, anger, depression or simple restlessness, it has become commonplace for us to diagnose Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and demand that the Veterans Administration fix them.
That’s misguided. Worse, it prolongs the time when we can openly and honestly welcome veterans home with full acknowledgement of what they experienced on our behalf.
Nik and many like him don’t have PTSD. I know a retired Army officer with PTSD. South of Baghdad, his convoy was ambushed; one of his tanker trucks was riddled with bullets and burning fuel caught the crowd of Iraqi onlookers who screamed as they burned while he tried to extricate his soldiers from the chaos.
His nightmares continue and a noisy crowd or slammed screen door can set off his involuntary panic and anger.
No, what haunts Nik and others like him was the impact on his own internal moral code, a violation of his sense of what the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay termed “what’s right.”
No matter the tactical situation, no matter that we have granted our troops a license to kill wartime combatants, killing a child seems deeply wrong even as it is justifiable.
From my years of observing war, I have learned to recognize Nik’s experience, and those of almost all the Americans I know with wartime service, as a moral injury, a jarring affront to our sense of right and wrong.
All of us, of course, experience twinges of conscience in daily life as we fall short of our ideals. But the moral injuries of wartime come faster and harder, and particularly so in the confused conflicts that comprise the war on terrorism.
A soldier is felled by a shot; his grieving buddy is tormented for having failed to spot the sniper in time. A wounded lieutenant is medevaced and consumed with guilt for having “abandoned” her platoon.
A medic holds a dying soldier, a beloved comrade bathed in blood, whom he cannot save. A rifleman looks into the eyes of an insurgent as he shoots, and is haunted by that killing.
No wonder words fail when they return to a society dominated by those who chose not to serve. Who would understand their stories? And so they are silent. A great deal of work is being done to find therapies that can help those who need it, and there are some promising results.
But I have come to believe that true healing — the kind of sharing and acceptance that ancient societies required for themselves and their returning warriors — will come only when we find ways and opportunities to listen to our veterans’ stories.
And it is difficult to listen without interrupting with platitudes: “Oh, I understand. It was war. You didn't mean to … It was him or you …”
When Nik told the story about killing a child, there was a long silence. Then one of the Marines with us said what I see as the perfect response. “Yeah,” he said. “That was f---ed up.”
The phrase recognizes that the men and women we send to war are often thrust into situations for which no one could be prepared and in which there are no easy or satisfactory answers. No blame is attached. The act doesn’t define you. And we, having heard your story, still accept you as the whole person you are.