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What Terri bl e Wi sdom, That Awe- f ul Powe r t o Unmake
Surveying Moments of Moral Identity Amidst War


~


by Logan Mehl-Laituri

PASTORAL CARE 999-01, War & Moral Identity
Dr. Warren Kinghorn

Master of Theological Studies Thesis Submitted for Approval
July 18, 2013
Duke Divinity School, Durham, NC




Table of Contents
Introduction 22222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222 3
Setting the Stage of the Moral Drama: Conscience, Virtue, and Character 2222222222222222222 4
Creation: Moral Formation Before War 222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222 5
Fall: Moral Fragmentation In War 222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222 67
Redemption: Moral Reintegration After War 22222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222 88
Conclusion(s) 222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222 98
Works Cited 222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222 95




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I have borne your terrors with a troubled mind

Psalm 88:16b, according to the Book of Common Prayer (p.713)

Introduction

In 2009, several VA researchers published the first scholarly article on what they
called moral injury in combat veterans.
1
Another Boston VA clinician had, in two books
exploring Greek epics as archetypes for modern war fighting,
2
coined the term that Litz et. al.
later managed to enter in to common parlance. In 2012, moral injury formed the central
focus of a new research center at Texas Christian University, called the Soul Repair Center,
led by theologian Rita Nakashima-Brock.
3
But decades prior to these publications, Peter
Marin had written about moral pain experienced by Vietnam veterans coming home from
South East Asia.
4

All of these accounts constitute the latest thinking on what has in times past been
variably titled soldiers heart, combat/battlefield fatigue, shell shock, or war neurosis. Each
turn of the tongue attempted to give shape to the post-combat reaction of significant
numbers of troops, characterized by the presence of insomnia or extreme nightmares, hyper
vigilance, emotional volatility ranging from rage to numbness, and invasive
thoughts/memories or general lack of mental control. Treatment of symptoms usually

1
Brett Litz, et. al., Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Intervention
Strategy, Clinical Psychology Review, Volume 29, Issue 8, December 2009, pp.695706.
2
Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York, NY: Scribner, 1995)
and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma & the Trials of Homecoming (New York, NY: Scribner, 2003) (Brett Litz,
2009)
3
She has written a book, with Gabriella Lettini, on the subject Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury After
War (Boston, MA: Beacon, 2012)
4
Peter Marin, Living in Moral Pain, Psychology Today November 1981
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$
involved brief recuperative periods in which the person was removed from their combat role
for as long as it took for symptoms to dissipate, at which point they were returned to the
frontlines.
Informing this modern method was the Victorian assumption that combat simply
took a stiff upper lip and a firm resolve, that anxiety was unbecoming of soldiers and the
injury it inflicted was indicative of nothing more than a temporarily disordered person. Such
sentiments remain in place today, with many clinicians expecting that, being an injury,
combat trauma can be treated formulaically, as though the patient can overcome their
symptoms and move onto to a fulfilling and stress-free life. But for an injury to occur, there
must be a self upon whom it is inflicted. To understand the challenge of moral injury and
pain, communities would do better to focus not on clinical models, but those built upon
character and virtue. They must begin to explore how moral bodies are created and sustained,
how agency is built prior to war and fragmented within, in order to properly reintegrate full
moral agency thereafter. Whatever the world has called this terrible wisdom that combat
veterans carry back from war, it is in fact both a curse and a blessing in simultaneity. Largely
dismissed by and large as the former, the latter is equally important as an inconvenient
reminder of everything all humans can be, for good or ill.
From the perspective of identity and agency, we are able to ask whether the scars
combat trauma leaves upon moral agents can, or even should, be cosmetically repaired in the
first place. Rather than focusing on healing, reparative models should focus on integrating
the experiences into the self. For if an injury is sustained, we must first have a grasp of the
moral person upon whom it has been inflicted. The paradigm of the clinic, in as far as it is
not a moral community, will not suffice to respond appropriately to a moral injury. The
work is better left to those places in which moral lives and people are formed and
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%
maintained, where we learn what it means to be a particularly moral person. For this reason,
combat trauma is fundamentally an issue of personal and collective conscience.
In this paper, I try to focus on three major modes of what can be called moral
health, and the state and effect of our conscience in each phase. Because moral injury and
health assume moral communities in which people live and work and because the moral
community to which this American belongs is the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church,
I will focus my attention on the resources and shortcomings of the Christianity in the United
States of America. Methods and resources for other religious and moral communities are
every bit as important, but would not benefit most from outsiders looking in.
First, moral formation occurs within frameworks as wide-ranging as just war and
pacifism, creating what will be our consciences before war becomes a reality. We internalize
a moral lexicon long before we step foot upon the battlefield and we learn what war should
be before we get there. Whether through movies, radio, oral tradition, scripture, or the
Internet, war takes shape long before we ourselves are shaped by it. Whether pacifist or just
war, the genesis of our moral conscience is in what Hilde Lindemann-Nelson calls our
found communities.
5
Our found communities are those we are born into without self-
election. The stories they transmit are often the first to reach our ears and the first to lay a
foundation upon which all other moral teachings may rest. Their affect can be either
coercive (do as I say) or exemplary (do as I do), but each leave a lasting effect upon the
moral self. Our earliest archetypes lie just east of Eden, with the first family.
Second, as we grow older, various elements affect our consciences and continue to
shape and mold our moral agency, our moral selves. In as far as war in concerned, it is a
place in which deep moral fragmentation can and does occur. The fragmentation of self-

5
Lindemann-Nelson, 9
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identity and understanding is made possible by poor formation, either by unreliable accounts
of war such as those that are primarily for the purpose of propaganda or entertainment. But
poor formation can also occur when a deep sense of right and wrong fail to be instilled,
when the things by which we claim to live turn out to be superficial. For example, if just war
is not taken seriously enough to affect concrete action, like when it is merely apologetic (as
in propaganda) or distractive (as in entertainment). Our conscience in war has been shaped
either to be identity-constituting or identity-denying, in which case the identity is found first
within those moments of crisis that demand from us an answer to the question Christ asks;
Who am I? In combat, ones identity comes to reluctant fruition, as soldiers face moments
and decisions of ultimate import, how they have been formed will either sustain or destroy
them. When we inevitably Fall, we must learn how to get back up, and stay up.
Finally, if our formation holds, or if the moral pain is tolerable, we continue in life.
But if our formation has proven insufficient, if our consciences are weak, the injury demands
attention. We must unlearn the destructive lessons combat instilled in us or reinvent our
moral selves, which to do so requires that we become like children. In Christian terms, we
need to learn how to remember our baptism and know what it is to be a redeemed people.
Reintegrating into our moral communities, even those that failed us, requires concerted
effort of our moral authorities and fellows. Redemption requires every ounce of our skill and
effort to welcome morally injured people back into the life of the community. Stories must
be reexamined; identities and authorities will be scrutinized in order for trust to be restored.
When narratives prove insufficient or unreliable, counter-stories must be asserted.
Authoritative voices may be reimagined; perhaps we abandon the apologetic or distractive
archetypes and adopt other, more credible paradigms through which to speak of war.
Ultimately, we must learn forgiveness without forgetfulness. Reintegrating our whole selves
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as redeemed people requires that we trust that the words Let there be light have every bit
as much power as Father, forgive them.
Setting the Stage of the Moral Drama: Conscience, Virtue, and Character

Knowledge is not always active, like learning how and why 2+2=4. As infants, we
acquire knowledge rapidly, usually by sensory acquisition. Before long, we learn to speak and
we become able to form and maintain cohesive thoughts. As we are able to gain and
maintain thoughts, our conscience is formed. Conscience derives from the Latin conscientias,
which is a compound word formed from with and knowledge. To have a conscience is
not only to acquire knowledge within our self, but to share it within a community, from
conscire, to be mutually aware. Before we were woven together in our mothers womb, God
knew us. God knew; God had knowledge of us, was conscious of us. We became real the
moment God knew us and spoke us into being.
It is any wonder why we cannot retain memories until we acquire the ability to speak
amongst our community? Our first and primary community is our family and our first moral
authorities are our parents. From them we learn what it means to be not just a person, but a
good person. If raised well, we ascribe to our parents a near-God like moral authority. We
learn from example how to walk and speak. Before we learn to communicate effectively, we
cannot be taught actively (what does 2 mean in the first place?). Army Ranger and
psychologist LTC David Grossman observes, We do not tell school children what they
should do in case of fire, we condition them.
6
The first way we learn is by imitation, by
absorbing the habits we see in those by whom we are surrounded. Indeed, the field of

6
Grossman, xviii
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developmental psychology suggests that we model our parents behavior while very young.
7

As we get older we continue to imitate those we trust and admire, we model ourselves after
not just our parents, but other moral authorities as well. Adolescent rebellion is often a time
at which we question the moral authority of our parents, to either abandon or eventually
reinstate their original influence over our lives.
In academic circles, the claim that we acquire habits in moral communities can go by
the name Virtue, Narrative, or Character ethics. Known also as post-liberalism or neo-
orthodoxy, these schools of thought are highly critical of the liberal enlightenment of the
17
th
century and look back to the early Greek philosophical models espoused by the ancient
Greek philosophical schools. For the Church, Aristotle has been by far the more influential
philosopher, and his Nichomachean Ethics can be found in a number of divinity libraries
around the country. Virtue ethics have made resurgence in recent scholarship after Alisdair
MacIntyres influential book After Virtue, in which he claims that the effect of the
enlightenment has been to divorce action from belief. Depending on whom you read, this
divorce gave rise to such catastrophes as the two world wars and the industrialization of the
world since the 19
th
century. That many scholars are reaching back past the liberal
enlightenment of the 17
th
century is an indication that action and belief stand to be reunited
in such a way that the duplicity made possible in the modern era (in which we claim to be
able to make peace through war, for example) is undone. In such a world, to have
knowledge would be very near to having integrity, to act in ways that do not betray what we
know to be true, what we believe.

7
The technical name developmental psychology gives for this type of formation is observational learning.
Models are not restricted to just parents, however, and can include siblings, friends, or schoolteachers.
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Indeed, Aquinas remarks in his Summa, Power is of two kinds, namely, power in
reference to being and power in reference to act.
8
Who one is, their being, is wrapped up in
what they do. Virtue theology claims that we discover who we are by habituating the virtues
necessary for the community to which we belong. If Christians are to be humble, we find we
are Christians as we embody humility, when it erupts involuntarily in our everyday deeds.
For this reason, Christ can tell his disciples By this, everyone will know you are my disciples,
if you have love for one another.
9
In loving one another, we become Christians in the very
act of strangers seeing us express our love. As Lindemann-Nelson craftily displays, personal
identity is a complicated interaction of ones own sense of self and others understanding of
who one is.
10
To believe I love is not enough, it must be displayed by my actions in order to
come to fruition. Who I am is determined not just by being the person I am told I should be,
but by actually performing in ways congruent with such an identity, and having my
neighbors affirm me therein.
In terms specifically martial, this means good people act in ways that humane
people are supposed to. That atrocities occur belie the things we want to believe about war
(and those who wage them), that it could be a place in which honor truly is won, that men
(and women) not lose their humanity, that the supposed fog of war is cleared by
conscientious participation, by virtuous behavior. That we think such a thing like a just war
would exist remains evident in our vocabulary, and its presence is no mistake. Honor in war
is spoken about because at one time it could happen. Justice through regrettable force did
not manifest from the ether, but clung to life from the ethical behavior of soldiers past.

8
[Under the question of Whether human virtue is an operative habit? From printout of #55 from
Directed Study. Need to find citation]
9
John 13:35, New Revised Standard Version. All Biblical citations will be from the NRSV unless otherwise
noted.
10
Lindemann-Nelson, xi
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*
Modern wars, like the enlightenment that produced them, require alienation between man
and work, between integrity and action. The industriousness of warfare in our age does not
easily allow for the good person to both enter and leave the battlefield. A good person might
enter, but that title often gets incredibly muddled by the time they depart the battlefield. The
moral content of war has been evacuated by mechanical, moral, and physical distance.
11
To
restore the moral substance of war, communities that wage them, no matter the size, must
reunite action and belief, must allow for the honorable conduct of good people and reward
champions of virtue. Our martial acts must match our moral formation, for when they do
not, the product is not peace, but fragmentation.
Creation: Moral Formation Before War

Before we ever go to war, we hear about what happens on the battlefield. The
abundance of martial narrative is confusing and difficult to navigate. In On Killing, David
Grossman places primary responsibility on mass media like movies and television.
12
Both
operant and classical conditioning play a part in desensitizing young men and women to the
moral significance of modern war. Movies and video games bring people as close to the
emotional and experiential act of killing on the field of battle as possible, albeit
unintentionally. Boot camp serves a similar purpose; every jab of the bayonet into the rubber
tire and every live round fired through the center mass of a human-shaped silhouette on the
firing range similarly marches young recruits closer and closer to the act of killing, bringing
them just short of the actual practice. The entertainment industry takes a beating in

11
Grossman focuses on emotional and physical distance. I am not sure these terms do justice to the complexity
of what goes on in the act of killing, though his account is more adequate than any other I have read.
12
Grossman, 306-316.
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Grossmans account in part for the symbolic modeling involved with films that depict
violence.
13
Especially important to our purposes is not just that there is violence in movies,
but how such violence is contextualized (or, more precisely, how it denies contextualization).
One movie in particular draws my own ire, as it depicts a global war with which I
have firsthand experience. Katheryn Bigelows The Hurt Locker, about an Explosive
Ordinance Disposal (EOD) team in Operation Iraqi Freedom, was released in 2008 and won
an Oscar for best picture. Upon its release, the veteran community largely agreed that it was
a gripping theatrical presentation, but by no means an accurate portrayal of war.
14
One of the
films main subjects in development, EOD expert SFC Jeffrey Sarver, sued Bigelow et. al. for
defamation of character. Many other EOD service members voiced similar concerns that the
film was drastically unrealistic in its main characters swaggering disavowal of military
procedures and values, and was at times an endangerment to unit safety. Sentiments amongst
the military community suggested that, were a character like Blaster One to actually exist,
would endanger the lives of his team as well as bring discredit to his unit. In other wars, one
unnamed veteran recounted to me, he would be a magnet for a fragmentation grenade.
However, the movie did not appear at first glance to have a political agenda, making
it more distractive than apologetic. Entertainment is like that, often not much more than a
way to burn excess time. Everyone needs a distraction from work occasionally, and the

13
Grossman,306. He is citing a Navy psychiatrist discussing techniques deliberately designed to desensitize
sailors, but the parallel public effect on the cinematic viewing public can be easily observed. Is it any
coincidence that the Aurora shooter committed his crime in the midst of the latest Dark Knight feature film
installment?
14
This is a disproportionately polite way of phrasing veterans perception of the film. Reviews by veterans from
such sites as The Huffington Post, VetVoice, Defense Tech, and Variety Magazine used phrases like inaccurate,
nonsensical, ruinous, and absurd. A senior EOD team member wrote in Air Force Times that the movie
was grossly exaggerated and not appropriate. Christian Lowe, a civilian reporter for The Military Times and
embedded with units in the time the film depicts, wrote "Some of the scenes are so disconnected with reality to
be almost parody. Mark Boal, the Oscar-winning screenwriter for The Hurt Locker, boasted (ironically and
insultingly) that no Army extras were used during filming.


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movies are a popular option for many. Some media can be apologetic, making a case one
way or another for some predetermined end. In the war genre, a perfect example would be
the 1941 release of Sergeant York, starring Gary Cooper, who received his first Best Actor
Oscar for his portrayal of the most decorated WWI soldier. Memos passed back and forth
between the production team reveal the timing of the release (July 2
nd
, 1941) and editorial
choices made throughout development served the purpose of inciting the otherwise
noninterventionist American public to war in Europe. Though the bombing of Pearl Harbor
five months later did more than any movie ever could to that end, the effect of seeing a
pacifist seemingly abandon his religious scruples gave many a chicken hawk butterflies in
their stomach. But they were not the only ones who would have been affected by the war
scenes (which it is important to note, York himself originally prohibited from being shown).
The ways in which military service and war are depicted effect those who consume
mass media, just as boot camp effects those who endure the nine months of training
required to wear the Army uniform. Any enlistee can likely recount the first moment that
they realized boot camp was not all fun and games; their first vomit-inducing water guzzling
marathon, the first time they were smoked by a drill sergeant to the point of physical
collapse, or the crack of a baseball bat on their helmet as they mistakenly pointed their
loaded rifle up-range. The gap between popular depiction and lived reality, even just in terms
of military service, is wide and dangerous, for it presents habits that have no tangible value.
There is no place for swaggering chivalry in the uniform of a United States soldier, and those
who think there is will frequently find themselves ridiculed and alienated from the very
community to which they think they were formed.
The Church, on the other hand, has its own accounts of war. Ecclesiastical accounts
are similarly varied and diverse, though the most well known would likely be the tradition
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known as just war. Conversations about Christian soldiers quickly turn their attention to
just war criteria like proportionality, last resort, legitimate authority, etc. The earliest origins
of classical just war tenets are often attributed to Augustine of Hippo, for in his letters and
writings, Christian will indeed find references to those same principles. In particular, his
letter to Boniface, Augustine insists, war should be waged only as a necessity in order
that peace may be obtained.
15

However, Augustine provides a troubling foundation upon which to divorce act and
belief. He is the first of the theologians to suggest that soldiers performing otherwise
necessary evils can be assured moral distance from war by nature of their inner disposition, if
such a disposition is love, as though motive trumps deed.
16
Indeed, peace should be the
object of your desire,
17
her tells Boniface even if peace is not manifest in our actions.
Here we see that within the linguistic gymnastics he deploys rest the seed of theological
incoherence, for we must question whether a human being can possess a moral position, a
virtue, distinct from the morality of an act that the person is committing. As though, while
committing a necessary evil, a person can inwardly dis-position themselves and thereby
effectively dispossess their act from their being. In effect, Augustine proposes that motive
trumps deed, that the Lord looks on the heart.
18
While this appears appealing, it belies that
the heart is shaped by habits absorbed from the Christian community, that the character of
our love is such that others look at us and know us thereby. We cannot be at all certain that
our inner disposition can look so differently than the behavior it produces, for our action

15
Augustines Letter to Boniface, #189.6
16
I have encountered the term inner disposition before in reference to Augustine, but I cannot recall
precisely where. It is referenced here in a similar tone;
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2001/septemberweb-only/9-17-55.0.html?paging=off
17
Augustine, Letter #189.6
18
1 Samuel, 16:7, NRSV
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proceeds from the heart,
19
not the other way around (as though our actions can be evil
while our hearts are clean, or that a clean heart can overflow into necessary evil).
20
Our
bodily actions can defile our otherwise pure disposition, and an inner disposition cannot be
maintained apart from its external counterpart, the deed.
Far from denying the narrative influence of just war traditions, the Church must
reconsider the extent to which doctrines like it can provide the narrative framework
necessary for understanding the moral significance of war. Unlike other pacifists, I do not
want to set the centuries old doctrines adrift or claim that they are hopelessly archaic.
21

Certainly the church must think through ways in which modern war requires a thorough
revision of its understanding of war, but it remains a powerful pastoral resource for moral
authorities like priests or parents of Christian soldiers. This is the foundation of Augustines
concern, that the men and women who look to him for pastoral guidance have some kind of
moral content by which to buttress the moral dyslexia that combat produces, which we will
turn to in a moment. At least insofar as it continues to be pointed to as a moral framework
for Christians, just war remains relevant for our time, even if it does need revision. Many
Christian soldiers are able to draw up in their minds several criteria and can weigh their
deeds against jus in bello tenets such as discrimination, noncombatant immunity,
proportionality, right intent, etc. After all, Augustine responds to General Boniface not
doctrinally, but pastorally.
22


19
Matthew 15:18, NRSV
20
In case the accusation is made that I have earlier made the case that actions indeed precede and form the
heart, my defense is that evil actions like violence will form an evil (or at least hardened) heart. Virtuous deeds
produce a virtuous heart, and a virtuous heart sustains the person of virtue. Violent deeds cannot proceed from
a heart of love and a violent heart cannot a loving person make.
21
Among those that suggest they would do away with just war in some form are Daniel Bell of Lutheran
Seminary and Robert Meagher of U Mass
22
In fact, it is notable that the first letter that Augustine sends is theologically dense and focuses intensely upon
rebutting the Donatist controversy, but his second and third letters to the commander are much more focused
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If Lindemann-Nelson is right about identities, that they are collaborative ventures
requiring a number of people to bring them into being,
23
churches everywhere share the
responsibility of forming morally mature men and women by whom just wars might move
from speculation to reality. Leveraged by communities prior to war, just war (particularly jus
ad bellum) criteria can provide meaningful resources for Churches engaging the governing
authorities that are considering war. The solemn duty of parishes to discern the justice of
wars being considered can have a productive trickle-down effect on those congregants who
themselves are considering or anticipating martial service. They hear and are formed by their
communities deliberate efforts to take serious the notion that war is a moral act with
theological consequence. After all, [just] war is a communal practice of the Christian
community. Therefore, the Christian faith is the primary source of moral guidance for what
constitutes justice and injustice in war.
24

However, too often churches outsource their political contemplation and theological
imagination. Pacifist and patriot camps alike have their pundit-champions who are endowed
with deliberative powers that local churches otherwise should wield themselves on behalf of
their congregants. Ad hominem attacks and wafer-thin theologizing frequently dominate the
airwaves. As we have seen, war is a communal practice, a social-moral construct that has and
will continue to evolve and change. From hand to hand fighting, to swords and spears, to
arrows, bullets, and high altitude bombing, war is neither static nor predictable. The moral
formation that soldiers need takes place within communities, and local churches must take
responsibility for the moral maturity of their members, both combatants and civilians. An

specifically on war. I can sympathize with Bonifaces impatience at the abstracting theologizing of letter #185,
and needing the doctor of the church to deal more directly with his particular situation.
23
Lindeman-nelson, xiii
24
Bell, 75
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entire community goes to war, not just an individual. Therefore, a community (ecclesial or
national) must form itself justly in order to conduct just wars.
At best, us versus them protects against the moral vacuum to which communities
in the Global War on Terror frequently condemn returning soldiers, for it insists that they
have not fought alone. Nations that send soldiers to just or unjust war are all responsible for
the wars conduct, though only a few individuals may be directly guilty. The communality of
war prevents me versus them mentality that can produce Blaster One type characters while
simultaneously protecting individual service members from feeling the burden placed
exclusively upon their shoulders. Just war criteria simultaneously prohibit self-interest and
prevent self-incrimination. Taken seriously, they restrain the passions and reinforce the
virtues, both individually and societally. Communities must own the us in us versus them
statements, not just for honestys sake, but for the moral health of those who necessarily
subsume their justifiable actions into the collective will. William Mahedy, a Catholic chaplain
during the Vietnam War, confirms that norms of war are a crucial backdrop against which
to set ones own personal war story, for the veteran is not his own moral universe.
25

As war looms, Christians must be people of their word, for it is the Word that
formed and sustains us. In the beginning, God saw a formless void in darkness, and of all
things, God chose to speak. Abraham Heschel insists, Every word has power
26
to create or
to destroy. Spoken vows and oaths are of particular concern in this regard. Every soldier in
the United States takes an oath of allegiance, and most denominations have some form of
creedal vow or statement of faith. In each realm, the secular and the sacred, vows prove to
be fundamentally binding. Many veterans remember their one-time oath of enlistment with

25
Mahedy, 128
26
From the last question of his final interview before dying on the eve of the Sabbath, on December 23, 1972,
accessible at http://www.philosophy-religion.org/religion_links/aj_heschel.htm
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"'
ease while stumbling weekly over the Nicene Creed. Vows create a debt to a community that
binds both parties, whether between soldier and nation or Christian and God. However,
American Christians often give much more power over their bodies to political allegiances
while failing to do the same for religious vows that are taken at their baptism.
In the church and in the military, ill formed consciences emphasize or de-emphasize
particular passages that otherwise call for deep thought and conscientious participation in
liturgy in the former and politics in the latter. In the pews, Christians rarely seem to consider
the embodied implications of looking for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the
world to come. The clause about obeying the orders of the officers appointed above a
soldier is mistakenly thought to trump the earlier and therefore primal clause about
defending the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. When all things are
said and done, I knew that each man standing beside me during morning formation was
ready to die for me, and I for them, but in Morning Prayer I am not always left with the
same impression.
Words indeed have power. We should, and often do, instill in our words deep
conviction. Being people of the Word helps us be people of our word. Indeed, Stanley
Hauerwas frequently quips that shorthand for the moral life might be something like Dont
Lie. Accounting with our lives for the words that escape our lips makes us trustworthy
people in the moral transaction described above; we perform virtuously, are observed and
affirmed, which consequentially strengthens our ability to be virtuous. We become loving by
doing so, and the subjects of our love affirming what they see. It is similar with moral
formation before war. Perhaps the best way to equip young and impressionable men and
women is to continually affirm that they are good people, people of their and The Word. As
they consider military service, the church must remind them what virtue looks like in war,
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"(
what honesty and humility require in the midst of the killing fields.
27
Perhaps a viable phrase
for this hopeful preparation could be eschatological realism; by reminding Christians of their
original and ultimate character as very good,
28
our own words of affirmation may buoy
them through the deepest depths of the valley of the shadow of death that is war. Good
people act in particular ways that are not the most efficient, logical, or safe. Sometimes being
good requires that we lay down our lives for our friends.
29
With the rest of the church, it is
imperative that we always remember our baptism by remaining true to the very goodness
God saw and instilled in us all at our Genesis. Anything else would lack in truth and
inadequately buttress their moral maturation.
Fall: Moral Fragmentation In War

In the Garden, Adam and Eve could have been said to be without knowledge, to
have been ascious,
30
prior to their consumption of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of
Good and Evil. Conscience is indeed a many faceted phenomenon. To know both good and
evil is to act as judge, to become nearer in the likeness of God, the eternal and ultimate
Judge. To be with knowledge is to not just become aware of good and evil, but to be capable
thereof. Before they ate, they were morally innocent, meaning that they could not
epistemologically conceive of their own ability to sin. Theirs may have been a kind of passive
faith, one prior to being challenged by the throes of evil and temptation. A similar state

27
On this subject, no book is more important than Dan Bells and I commend it to everyone.
28
Genesis 1:31
29
John 15:13
30
Related to conscious, ascious is to lack particularly moral knowledge. The withdrawal from knowledge,
descious/descientious/descience would be consciences antonym, as might be the case with punditry that
actively or passively denies basic facts and realities in the interest of propaganda, etc. As I will suggest later,
while veterans have a prophetic voice in the faith community, their knowledge is not super-conscious, but
simply a strongly articulated conscience that can call out the same in others in which might reside a weak, but
not void, conscience.
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might be one in which children exist prior to the popularly titled age of reason, which for
many faiths is approximated at about seven years of age. Coincidentally, prior to this
moment, they do not eat either; in the same series of liturgical events surrounding their
confirmation, children will take first communion as well, symbolically evoking their own
newly inaugurated epistemological reality, capacity, and culpability. They voluntarily enter,
and involuntarily become knowledgeable of and responsible for the full moral spectrum.
They become like the first family more fully aware of good and evil.
Adam and Eve stepped foot on this new moral terrain by transgression, though
minors do so only by nature of their advancing age and (we hope) moral reason. Whether
Adam and Eves eating of the fruit was only a matter of time, while certainly an engaging
debate, is not one with which we will concern ourselves here. Suffice to say for now that
they entered a new epistemological reality hinted at by the serpent when you eat of this
tree, it hissed, your eyes will be opened.
31
No longer innocent, no longer ascious and
without moral knowledge. This state is borne of evil,
32
yet filled with good, for the Lord
confirmed that the first family had become like one of us, knowing good and evil.
33

Likewise, Gods response to the first family was not a curse alone, for God provided for
them by clothing them in animal skins and giving them land to till and care for.
These stories must be identity constituting for Christian communities. Ours is a faith
and a tradition bound up in good and evil. Even the protestant reformation can be summed
in similar terms; the evil of Christians killing one another over doctrinal disputes nonetheless
gave rise to an enriching and beautiful diversity that strengthens the Church universal.

31
Genesis 3:5
32
Borne of evil should evoke the doctrine of original sin, passed on by nature of our forefamily having
transgressed in order to acquire this heightened moral state, with its dual character of good and evil.
33
Genesis 3:22
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"*
Combat is no different, for there is both beauty and tragedy in every combat deployment.
34

But if our identities are not properly and strongly constituted by Biblically based and
theologically sound stories in which we can identify ourselves, combat will undoubtedly
provide the impetus for moral formation that our communities lacked.
The example we explored earlier, of movies is helpful still. There are helpful movies
and harmful movies, and they frequently form our consciences, especially about war. Sergeant
York had ill motives and poorly articulated moral grounding. Its ultimate effect is distracting
at best and deforming at worst. Movies that depict violence cavalierly and without coupling
it with its social and moral consequences do a grave disservice to the consciences of our men
and women we eventually send to fight our wars. That one can reference John Wayne and,
in the United States at least, can simultaneously evoke war films such as The Green Berets, The
Sands of Iwo Jima, or The Longest Day, illustrates my point well. The movies themselves are less
injurious than the character Wayne frequently conjures up the same swaggering solitary
stoic figure that Blaster One evokes (who would have, in actual combat, been a magnet for
a fragment). The character of this kind of figure is passed off as virtuous, though the actual
persons he factiously represents declare openly as vice.
Credibility, however, should rest on the latter the moral authority to speak of war
belongs not to paid actors, but soldiers themselves. The fog of war has formed their
identities and we would be wise to follow the path they have forged before us. The character
of the guide we choose should matter immensely. John Wayne, after all, was too young for
WWI and by the time WWII rolled around, he was Republic Studios biggest moneymaker

34
I drew this literary coupling from West Point Professor of Ethics Pete Kilners keynote at the After the
Yellow Ribbon Conference, the title of which was The Beauty and Tragedy of a Combat Deployment,
available here; http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/milites-christi/id477245098.
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#+
and made ineligible for the draft by being classified 2-A (in the national interest).
35
Jimmy
Stewart on the other hand left a lucrative movie career and fought against being used as a
propaganda tool in USO tours or as a spokesperson for war bonds. After coming home
from the war as a full colonel in the Army Air Corps after numerous combat missions over
Europe, remarked to LIFE Magazine, no more war pictures.
36

Our moral formation should be informed not by distractive or apologetic narratives
produced by the loudest or most vociferous voices in society. Too often, such voices do not
belong to those who have been to war, for there is a saying popular amongst the military;
those who talk dont know, and those who know dont talk. War, being narratively very
near to hell, is not something repeated amid good company. Careful analysis and
rehabilitation from war leaves those formed thereby solemn without being stoic, careful in
word without being cacophonous. A just war theology is no more formulaic than the people
that war produces, and the modern tendency to attribute abstracting Thomistic notions
about war to Augustine are not helpful.
37
Pastoral instincts that treat war and violence with
care and solemnity should be prioritized over formulaic speculation about the nature of sin
qua sin. For the nature of transgression in war is different than it is encountered in everyday
life the emotional intensity is like nothing everyday life produces or makes possible.
Veterans often speak of their experiences in war as more real than the lives they return to
after combat. It should come as no surprise that even of Augustine, combat veterans are
suspect of the moral anguish produced by stealing a pear, after their own produced after
having taken the life of another human being.

35
According to http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2010/02/28/John-Wayne--World-War-II-and-the-
Draft
36
LIFE Comes Home With Jimmy Stewart, LIFE Magazine (issue September 24, 1945), p.127
37
The evolution of criteria around just wars can be traced to Thomas Aquinas, the 11
th
century theologian
whose Summa was a manual for priests taking confession at a time when sin was divided into specific categories.
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Before stepping onto the field of battle, churches must have done the moral work of
producing and sustaining just persons who know the virtues especially necessary in combat
like prudence in discretion, love of enemy, temperance between survival and self-sacrifice,
and courage to bind them all together. Just war theologies can and should be identity
constituting. They form just men and women capable of performing in accord with virtue in
the midst of great vice. Virtuous Christian veterans can and must speak credibly about the
true danger of temptation particularly in war and what it might require that we defend our
principles over our persons, that survival is not a virtue. Justice in (or despite) war can
provide a kind of rite of passage for just people engaged in war. The strength it requires to
persevere despite temptation to great evil like war crimes can leave profound marks of virtue
upon the human soul and psyche, just as violating our conscience leaves marks of vice.
Soldiers can become virtuous by preserving their honor and integrity in war, but such
behavior will not be possible without exemplars in the faith.
Trustworthy guides abound in Christian tradition, such as the military martyrs and
soldier saints.
38
Their witness speaks against blind obedience that secular militaries in war too
often assume of their personnel. But obedience to the state is always contingent upon its
adherence to the other virtues and the end toward which we are oriented. Orders must not
be merely lawful by worldly legal standards but morally legitimate in the sharpened minds of
Christian warriors. Just wars are inherently restrictive, not permissive. This is why it should
be taken seriously, for it restrains the passions and enables virtue in the midst of war. The
governing authorities have, at best, the benefit of the doubt. Christian soldiers are permitted
only qualified participation in war, for our activities must not violate the vows we make to

38
Examples abound in my For God and Country (in that order): Faith and Service for Ordinary Radicals (Scottsdale, PA:
Herald, 2013)
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##
God at our baptism, to reject Satan, even as we storm his gates in the midst of the hell of
war.
Besides, true loyalty is fraternal, between equals. It is not coercive and does not flow
only from the bottom up. Commanders must be loyal to their men, whether Christian or not.
As we stated above, vows bind individual to a community in each direction a commander
to his men and his men back to him. Even Christ, our heavenly commander, calls us friends
instead of servants.
39
He does so because Christ has hidden nothing, it is he who has
opened our eyes to show us the beauty and tragedy of combat so that we may choose the
former and reject the latter. Just war theologies must be taken seriously for Christian
communities for it is they who are the primary source of moral guidance for what
constitutes justice and injustice in war.
40

The absence of strong moral formation before war leaves the act of moral
confirmation to the moment of first encounter on the battlefield. When churches gloss over
the importance and significance of wars moral substance, soldiers discover it quickly, and
with catastrophic effect. Daniel Somers was an Iraq war veteran who recounts, During my
first deployment, I was made to participate in things, the enormity of which is hard to
describe.
41
Language failed him because it was not there to begin with. Whether legal or
moral, his vocabulary lacked the capacity to substantiate, give substance to what he
encountered in combat. He took his own life on June 10, 2013, his own life having lost the
meaning his community never gave to the war in which he seemingly found his only
fundamental identity. All day, he mourns, every day a screaming agony in every nerve
ending in my body. It is nothing short of torture. My mind is a wasteland, filled with visions

39
John 15:15
40
Bell, 75. See note 24.
41
See http://gawker.com/i-am-sorry-that-it-has-come-to-this-a-soldiers-last-534538357
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#$
of incredible horror, unceasing depression, and crippling anxiety. He could not make sense
of himself because all meaning and morality had been evacuated in the face of immanent
danger and the moral wasteland we have made of war.
What soldiers discover in the moral vacuum created by communities illegitimately
narrating war and combat is their own worst selves, the embodiment of the worst possible
person they might become. The superficial talk of being good little boys and girls is exposed
as fraud and creates a moral dissonance between the good little boy and girl and the man or
woman who had to do the things they did in order to survive. For in a liberal worldview,
there is nothing more sacred than the self, in which survival becomes the highest virtue.
Liberal persons loftiest aspiration is to get out of this life alive.
42
In the face of such deep
and fundamental crisis, soldiers often make what psychologists call a psychotic break from
reality.
43
But in terms more deeply personifying, they have internalized (and, in suicide,
expressed) the moral dissonance characterized by modern war. If God possesses the
awesome power to create ex nihilio, soldiers discover in themselves an awe-ful power to
unmake,
44
to annihilate Gods good creation upon the squeeze of a trigger finger or in the
midst of radio static between transmissions for indirect fire missions.
45

Mahedy calls this first encounter with the devil (and the details) of combat, the
moment of first awareness,
46
which should evoke our etymological treatment of conscientias,
above. Indeed, in combat, Christian soldiers gorge themselves on the fruit of the Tree of

42
For example, Hauerwas says Youre not going to get out of this life alive in here
http://chreader.org/contentpage.aspx?resource_id=625, but also several times in his introduction class on
ethics at Duke Divinity School.
43
Grossman, 45
44
From my testimony before the 2010 Truth Commission on Conscience in War, accessible here;
http://loganmehllaituri.com/2010/03/21/tccw-testimony/
45
The Latin phrase creatio ex nihilo is the theological doctrine that God created out of nothing. It is short hand
for confessing that God alone creates and is the source of all created things. Annilihare, from which we derive
annihilate, is its inverse, to reduce to nothing, and is ominously evocative in its comparable brevity. It takes
so much to create and so little to utterly destroy
46
Mahedy, 25
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#%
Knowledge of good and evil. Narratively, operational tempo in war is exponentially greater
than normal life back in the real world;
47
the highs are higher and the lows lower then
we have ever experienced and likely ever will. But we were likely told in Sunday school: do
not eat of that tree; do not go to war, for thou shalt not kill. But the GI Bill and vaunted
veteran status beckon us; we want something and do not have it, we covet something and
cannot obtain it
48
by morally safe means, and so we go to war under the banner of justice
(even for us, so that we may have what we need, like education, financial stability, and
human dignity).
Alas, In that unforgettable moment of discovery, a person realizes that within
himself lies an almost limitless capacity for violence.
49
No longer ascious, without moral
knowledge of our capacity and culpability for violence, the veil of blissful ignorance comes
crashing down. Our story, who we have become, becomes immediately overwhelming. We
find God if we have not already; God as the great transcendence, Who knows and judges all,
and we know we are not worthy. It is no coincidence that unworthiness is attributed most
literally to the Centurion of Great Faith,
50
for he knew the burden that combat produces in
the souls of those who enter: I am not worthy to receive you! he exclaims penitently. I
shall be hidden from the face of God! cries his forebear Cain. The moment of first
awareness, if it has not happened somehow before war, can cripple soldiers conscience and
have injurious effects upon their moral health.
Camilo Mejia, for one, was appalled that his ability to decide what to do had been
taken away by his training.
51
Having fired eleven rounds from his rifle at a young boy

47
Normal and real in combat referred to our home of origin back in the United States.
48
James 4:2, paraphrase.
49
Mahedy, 25
50
Matthew 8:5-13 and Luke 7:1-10
51
Nakashima-Brock and Lettini, 34
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holding a grenade without even thinking, his moral agency had been dissolved by reflexive
training. There was no moral escape for him, it was a child on the one hand, but he held a
grenade (in the other). In war, there are no amoral choices, and each carries with it a nearly
indecipherable mix of both vice and virtue. Every moment drips with consequence, even
those seemingly benign. The hours my own platoon spent playing HALO 2 in Kirkuk is a
prime example at any second a mortar could have come crashing through one of our
conexes and we would suddenly have been thrust into considering how and to what extent
we could have prevented or lessened the utterly unpredictable catastrophe.
Many times, soldiers bear the moral weight of their actions, and in situations where
there is no morally right or good option, fragmentation of self can occur and they are left to
a lifetime of wondering and wandering about the moral wasteland society [their situation?]
has created. Even if the choice made was disproportionately good, as in Mejias example, in
which a young child held a grenade ready to throw at his friends and comrades, moral pain
often results. Indeed, Grossman confirms that, At some level, every psychologically healthy
human being who has engaged in or supported killing activities believes that his action was
wrong and bad.
52
Moral pain associated with events in combat is a normal and humane
response to morally ambiguous and/or psychologically traumatic incidents.
In other instances, when they dehumanize the enemy in order to get through combat
in one piece, the effect is to mirror the very inhumanity they ascribe to the Other (their
enemy) back into themselves. The act of dehumanizing is itself dehumanizing. The terrible
equalizing effect of war is a kind of zero sum game, such that combatants on both sides
know that the behavior they are capable of is by no means beyond the capacity of their
enemy. If they cut off ears or testicles or urinate on bodies of war dead, they are not so dull

52
Grossman, 279
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as to think the same would never be done to their own lifeless bodies. The same nature of
awareness is present here; the first time a soldier considers or enacts an atrocity, they
simultaneously become aware, if even subconsciously, that they may be treated similarly if
the shoe is placed on the other foot. The absolute reciprocity in war (I can kill you and you
can kill me) implies that what you do to their dead, they can (and probably will) do to you.
Soldiers want their memory honored, so soldiers should honor the memory of their
enemies.
53
Just war is not about passions, but necessity.
54

Back in the real world, the work of removing the moral content of war has already
taken place on the lips of patriots and pacifists alike.
55
Ideological extremes that dominate
moral discourse around war create what Lindeman-Nelson calls mandatory identities in
that they set up expectations about how [soldiers] are supposed to behave, what they can
know and what others may demand of them,
56
including the supposed right to narrate
their stories for them. Of the The Hurt Locker civil suit, in which Sergeant Sarver accused the
production team of defamation, a California lawyer quipped, Soldiers dont have privacy.
57

Such situations forcibly marginalize soldiers to morally degrading identities
58
in which the
public for whom they fought restrict their full moral agency prior to and following a combat
deployment, cultivating a ground upon which moral fragmentation is both possible and
likely.

53
Edward Tick and Karl Marlantes (see bibliography) are in agreement about spiritual ceremonies of
remembrance for enemy dead, even in the midst of combat.
54
See above about how just war frames remove the individualism of war.
55
I use these two words paradigmatically. I am aware that relying on stereotypes does the very work of moral
evacuation that I critique, but at best it may be considered a sample of the homogenizing medicine dished out
to soldiers to see whether self-described patriots or pacifists like its flavor. I suspect they will not, and therefore
may come to see how bitter the swill is they conjure up for our nations service members who are similarly not
one generic mass.
56
Lindeman-nelson, xii
57
See http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2010-03-03-hurt-locker-lawsuit_N.htm
58
Lindeman-nelson, xii
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Patriot camps celebrate the war as a place for men to go to win glory and honor, to
return bronzed heroes and champions of American rugged individualism. Just war loses its
moral teeth as chickenhawks hurry off their young to war without taking serious the
grotesque and dehumanizing tendencies that have become increasingly characteristic of
modern war. Soldiers, it is believed, will return from combat all the better for their
experience. They will walk taller and speak deeper, for they will come home heroes.
Assigning moral value in absentia, as non-combat experienced civilians (including actors,
lawyers, university professors, etc.) do, is narratively illegitimate, for the story of war and the
language of the military community is not theirs to determine. The vocabulary does not
belong to them, and this is why they frequently get it wrong. War is both beauty and tragedy
at once, bestowing it with virtue it does not uniformly produce.
But the positive moral value assigned in advance to war by patriot camps is as
injurious as the instinctive rejection of war and soldiering made by the pacifist camps, who
refuse to imagine that the courage given expression in war could possibly have legitimacy.
Like the patriots, they perch atop their broadcast or ivory towers, besmirching those who
dare enter the hell of war to carry back with them the yolk of a people awakened to both
good and ill. War protests too often become self-gratifying and as ad hominem as the
churches mentioned before. But, in fact, the main difference between isolationary pacifists
and combat veterans lay not in what each had done, but in what each knew about
themselves. The protesters maintained the myth of their own innocence, but the vets
understood the truth about human evil.
59
If this is the case, and experience suggests it is,
does the moral dissonance belong only to the vet, or to wider society? Whom indeed has
taken flight from reality?

59
Mahedy, 30
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The moral fragmentation that occurs in war is often sealed by something like a moral
hangover; it is either penultimate or a precursor to injury (which I cannot be sure). If war
once was a rite of passage that ushered young boys (or girls) toward adulthood, it is by no
means identity constituting (if at all it once was). Edward Tick corroborates that war has
become, if anything, a failed rite of passage, enabler of a stunted personal growth that can
enslave young hearts and minds to an amoral and meaningless mental state. He writes, The
more destructive war has become, the more one of its original functions as a rite of passage
has been compromised.
60
The early church drew significantly from Greek narratives,
though we would do well to remember that the Greek god of war, Ares, was also tried,
convicted, and submitted to Themis, the goddess of justice. War must submit to justice, even
in the church, for the Areopagus, where the goddess Themis tried Ares, is also where Paul
preached to the pagans of Rome (Acts 17) and remains to this day as the seat of Greeces
Supreme Court. If war once served civil society by creating fully formed young adults after
severe moral and physical testing, todays version, heavy on gore and light on justice, it may
yet still. But in the divorce of war and justice, what is left produces not formed and mature
persons, but morally injured and fragmented individuals, who are keenly aware of the
acrimonies relationship between Ares and Themis.
Soldiers, after all, deploy to war keenly aware of the reasons and rational funding
their moral imaginations. In Iraq it was weapons of mass destruction and for Afghanistan
it was to put a stop to terrorism on American lands. The identities that such a vocabulary
produces are tentative and fragile, for they depend upon observable developments, like
finding said WMDs and a more secure America. Soldiers themselves pay the heaviest
narrative toll when the first cracks appear in the integrity of the claims within which their

60
Tick, 5
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#*
narrated identities rest. It is upon their shoulders that the weight of substantiating those
claims weighs most heavily. Consider Vietnam; it was the soldiers who were spat upon and
called baby killer, not the policy makers that created the urgency and necessity of the
conflict they encountered. The gap in responsibility between the language used to make the
military possible, like the claim that a commander (including in chief) bears the fullest
burden of guilt when things go wrong, is found to be a farce. And if a farce, so to the
vaunted and venerable identities they were issued upon the tarmac on their way to war.
Camilo Bicas recollection of Vietnam is representative of this failure of command
responsibility to play out in reality, of the highest levels of the governing authorities to take
their share of the guilt for something like Vietnam. He writes, we are the victims of
politicians hypocrisy, the scapegoats for the inevitable affront to the national conscience,
and the sacrificial lambs sent to slaughter in retribution for our collective guilt and
inadequacies.
61
Vietnam soldiers bore the brunt of the collective conscience attempting to
protect itself, for in a democracy some might be guilty, but all are responsible.
62
The
refusal of the public by whom a soldier is sent to self-possess the moral weight of war
(whether just or unjust) creates a moral confusion akin to a hangover.
However, the ability to disavow all knowledge of this gap is a luxury soldiers do not
possess. Men and women whose narrative being is born and bred upon honor and integrity
are simply incapable of looking easily past its violation. That honor and justice are present in
war is necessary for their narrative survival. Colonel Theodore Westhusing was the honor
guard of his graduating class at West Point, serving at the outset of the Iraq War as a
professor of Philosophy at his alma mater. By no means did he have to be deployed. He

61
Nakashima-Brock and Lettini, 21
62
Abraham Heschel said this of Vietnam numerous times in his writings. It is as true now as it ever was, and
publics that go to war must wrestle with this corporate culpability not just for the sake of their soldiers, but
their own moral rectitude.
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volunteered because he believed it was a just and noble cause, and would seek out classmates
and colleagues who felt differently in order to convince them it was. But when he got there,
he observed, of this formerly just war, that he didnt volunteer to support corrupt, money
grubbing contractors, nor work for commanders only interested in themselves. [He] came to
serve honorably.
63
The moral foundation he deployed with fell out from beneath him and
he took his own life on June 5, 2005. Of his service, he wrote in his suicide note that he felt
dishonored, that trust had been violated. Why serve when you cannot accomplish the
mission, when you no longer believe in the cause, when your every effort and breath to
succeed meets with lies, lack of support, and selfishness? No more. His note was addressed
to General David Petraeus, strongly implying that the lies, lack of support, and selfishness
described was exhibited by the disgraced former CIA chief and Iraq commander.
Our purposes here are not directly to indict senior military of civilian political figures.
It is, however, to highlight the discrepancy between the popular claims about war and its
conduct and the ways in which it actually shakes out. In light of these reflections, it is
important to remember that soldiers themselves do not direct the war, and therefore the war
must not define the soldier. A prominent and gifted political scientist, Michael Walzer, put it
thusly; the trigger is always part of the gun, not part of the person.
64
The purpose of his
line is to indict the perpetrators at My Lai; soldiers cannot assume that the trigger can pull
itself. But the inverse must also be true, that to the extent to which soldiers indeed forfeit
some fraction of their agency, they act as the trigger and politicians as the person doing the
pulling.

63
http://www.texasobserver.org/2440-i-am-sullied-no-more-faced-with-the-iraq-wars-corruption-col-ted-
westhusing-chose-death-before-dishonor/
64
Walzer, 311
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Indeed, killing in the heat of the moment is most often completed reflexively,
without conscious thought, it is as though a human being is a weapon.
65
For every
measurable amount of personal agency that is forfeited by soldiers is necessarily inherited by
those with political agency. In this case, agency is a zero sum game. Wars waged are morally
compelling upon even macro-level trigger pullers, for the communities that make war
possible create persons (supposedly) capable of committing violence on everyones behalf.
Tragically, this has proven societally unreliable; the American people and politicians
collectively responsible for the last several wars have persistently refused to acknowledge and
internalize their own complicity. The nature of this zero-sum game is such that it forces the
foreseeable culpability upon those most directly knowledgeable of what is required of
modern war the individual soldier. This does a disservice not just to them, but to the
community of sending, for their own narrative trajectory, upon any careful scrutiny,
collapses as well. This is done infrequently, but is marked by things like the anti-patriot
and/or expatriate movements that accompany most every war.
66
Even citizens sense (and
frequently reject) that the moral ramifications of war touch them as well, whether they like it
or not. I am not my brothers fellow citizens keeper, we hear echoed down main street
USA.
But this model does not hold either individually or collectively, for the narrative of
national identity is found, not chosen.
67
Hildemann-Nelson speaks of found communities
as those into which we are born and reared.
68
They are involuntarily constitutive; creating
or joining communities of choice does not absolve us of our prior constitutive characteristics,

65
Grossman, 233
66
For the most recent example of this, see this article from CNN published this past fourth of July;
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/07/05/mourn-on-the-fourth-of-july-inside-the-christian-anti-patriot-
movement/
67
Lindemann-Nelson, 9
68
Lindemann-Nelson, 9
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though many of them may be reimagined. Instead, we can recognize that found communities
are the source of binding moral norms that will remain with us incessantly (and much to our
chagrin), but which can be reinterpreted so as to undermine the oppressive nature of
degrading moral identities. Better to think more critically about what it means to be
American (or, for those un-Churched, Christian) than to attempt in vain to dissolve one
of our most fundamental identities.
We are creatures of multiple identities and conflicting allegiances. Each that we
embody may at times become fragmented. This can be true oven of our identify as
Christians, as many young people leave the church in disgust over poorly addressed
situations of clerical abuse, financial mishandling, or inattention to the least of these.
However, the significance of combat experience is such that it can reach deeper than most
others, but fragmentation of self can occur within other, lesser identities as well. When I
moved to North Carolina to begin seminary, for example, my identity as a surfer had to be
reimagined and at times put on hold, since the waves were famously inadequate compared to
Oahus North Shore. The deeply moral nature of combat and the intensity of emotions and
ethical challenges can create a foundational crack in our overall identity that can and very
often does cause significant pain that can lead to a near total lack of meaning in a persons
life. But pain, as veterans learn upon entering the VA healthcare system, persists. It is not
about ridding ourselves thereof, but finding ways to cope with it holistically and cultivating
habits and practices that compensate for our acquired disabilities.
We never rid ourselves of our physical or spiritual scars, and medical or therapeutic
models that assume this is possible share a fundamental flaw that the Church can help
correct. If Sherman is right and war is hell, then our archetype, according to the Apostles
Creed, descended and returned on the third day and retained his own scars. That he bore his
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$$
scars remained a tested proof of his identity as the Christ. The patron of soldiers, Martin of
Tours, famously encountered a vision of Jesus robbed in beautiful purple velvet in his own
post-war wandering.
69
Though taken aback by this glittering apparition, he was not so quick
to confess My Lord and my God,
70
taking a slightly different Thomistic approach.
71

Instead of consulting a formulaic model to knowing Christ, he insisted suspiciously, Let me
see your scars!
72
At once, Satan departed from him and Martin went on his way. Soldiers
themselves should not be so quick to hide the scars they bear from even the hidden wounds
of war. Scars can be markers of character and carry profound narrative importance, as we
will see in our next and final section.
Redemption: Moral Reintegration After War

Stanley Hauerwas, preeminent theologian and ethicist, believes that even the act of
considering violence in a real and immediate/tangible sense creates a moral injury that
leaves a scar. Theres a silence because theres a shame to it, that you dont know quite
what to do with.
73
The nature of this shame is inherently communal, for shame is not felt
without an interpretive (and in this case, judgmental) community. This silence that follows

69
Sulpitius Severus, Martins biographer, describes Satan visiting the saint surrounded by a purple light, in
order that he might more easily deceive people by the brilliance of the splendor assumed, clothed also in a royal
robe precious stones and gold, etc. Just as importantly, Satan presented a tranquil countenance, and a
generally rejoicing aspect, so that no such thought as that he might be the devil might be entertained.
Recounted in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series, Volume XI,
ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 15-16.
70
Saying attributed to the Apostle Thomas in John 20:28.
71
Thomas Aquinas is credited with taking Augustines ruminations on war to General Boniface and reducing
them to a strict formula, in character with his Summa Theologae, which was a manual for priests taking confession
by penitents. See notes 15 and 17 for Augustine to Boniface.
72
Severus writes of Martin rebuffing the devil for refusing to [openly display] the marks of [Jesus] wounds on
the cross. Satan, it seems, cannot stand to admit weakness, and the challenge to bear the marks proved a
reliable way for later saints to tell between Christ and con artist. This can and should reorient Christians
historic disapproval of the Apostle Thomas confusion as simultaneously a confirmation.
73
Stanley Hauerwas, http://sites.duke.edu/aftertheyellowribbon/2011/08/29/video-interview-with-stanley-
hauerwas
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war comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, and for veterans it is a moral silence, a wasteland
of lost meaning in which they wander at times the rest of their lives. Tyler Boudreau, a
Marine Captain and veteran of Iraq, reflects
74

Hell aint got no coordinates. You cant find it on the charts because there are no charts.
Hell is no place at all,
75
so when youre there, youre nowhere youre lost. The narrative, thats
your chart, your own story. There are guys who come home from war and live fifty years without a
narrative, fifty years lost.

Societally and ecclesiastically, the silence is literal. The American people has lost
interest in war after a dozen years, it has failed to captivate our attention because it has
become repetitive and static. For high school students I have spoken with, war has been an
ever-present reality in their lives and they have difficulty remembering a time when our land
was not at war. The nature of collective silence in this time of war is a betrayal of the binding
vow that our service men and women took, funded by the cries of 9/11 that We Will Never
Forget. The American people and church have not held up their end of the bargain, of
never forgetting. Their lives and energies have checked out, the checks their mouths wrote
has bounced as veterans attempt to cash it in by seeking mental health, job security, and a
community willing to hear the things they have said and done in the name of the American
people. Silence is not an option for these wounded warriors who return to a complacent and
disinterested populace, and silence is a betrayal of their service by the community that sent
them to the hell that is war.
Veterans do not have the luxury of sound sleep and moral wholeness, for they are
fragmented, injured, and in deep moral pain, often failing to see the light at the end of the

74
Nakashima-Brock and Lettini, 65
75
Here he sounds a bit like Augustine, who insisted that evil is actually a non-thing, a privation of good.
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tunnel. There is for them, all too frequently, no horizon toward which to slowly tread toward
healing. Remember Daniel Somers, who after two combat deployments reminisced, My
mind is a wasteland, filled with visions of incredible horror, unceasing depression, and
crippling anxiety.
76
With him, Cain cries, I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth,
and anyone who meets me may kill me.
77
Another veteran, Audie Murphy, the most
decorated soldier of WWII, who found moderate success in Hollywood, wandered the
nights as a vigilante when he was unable to sleep. His autobiography, To Hell and Back,
78

recounts an incident in which he was searching a house and fired upon a shadowy figure in a
corner, only to discover he had glimpsed a mirror and shot himself in effigy. Suicide is more
prevalent in the veteran community than any other demographic, with 22 taking their own
lives every day.
79
In the active duty contingent, at least one currently serving soldier will kill
himself or herself every day. A distinctively martial read of Genesis 4 suggests that Gods
mark on our fratricidal forebear, however, was not for condemnation or punishment, but
protection. Cain is cursed, as veterans themselves can relate, to wander the wilderness of
moral pain amid disinterested communities. But God marked the founder of civilization so
that no one who came upon him would kill him,
80
even Cain himself.
81
Soldiers under Gods
watchful care can rest assured that God intends them no harm, moral or otherwise, for they
have already bore their own heavy yoke of moral fragmentation and despair.

76
See Gawker link, note 41, above. Emphasis added.
77
Genesis 4:14
78
Audie Murphy, To Hell and Back (New York, NY: Holt, 2002)
79
www.va.gov/opa/docs/Suicide-Data-Report-2012-final.pdf
80
Genesis 4:15
81
As someone who has a number of tattoos, I found myself wondering about what would it mean to suggest to
other Christian veterans struggling with conscience to brand the mark of the cross (or an iconographic tattoo,
or some kind of bodily imprint) on a hidden place on their bodies, as a silent and permanent marker of their
protection and love by God? I, for one, can say with certainty that I have never doubted or regretted a single
tattoo I received, each of which I discerned over many months and which each artist actually messed up in
some way. One would think the mistakes they made would haunt me, as they are permanent, but I have found
myself to be nonplussed by their foible, for the symbolism, their iconographic value, far outweighed whatever
physical or tangible value they might demand as part of my body.
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The Bible recounts that Cain wandered less than three verses, for he soon finds a
companion to help him all the way home and settles in the land of Nod, evoking a strong
connection between violence and civilized societies. Cain is thought of as the founder of
civilization, as he builds the first city and names it after his son, Enoch. Indeed, the
relationship between society and soldier is timeless, and even the most critical of citizens
cannot rid themselves of the violence inherent in modern cultures. Romulus kills his own
brother, Remus, and goes on to found the eternal city of Rome, becoming its first citizen
and soldier. Civilizations and its discontents cannot quite rid themselves of their culpability
in such a timelessly communal practice as war. In soldiers, we see that defensive repression
and denial of emotions appear to have been one of the major causes of post-traumatic stress
disorder.
82
Insisting it has not happened, or that combat can be bottled up and partitioned
off internally or isolated to one group called the military (as though service members are a
homogenous sect by which such a word can adequately describe) is a convenient lie
communities rely on to maintain the myth of their moral distance. But the moral disordering
characteristic of PTSD touches society as well, for in isolationist dissident groups, The sins
of the people are no longer confessed, but denied.
83

The mirroring effect of war cannot be evaded without inflicting a moral injury upon
those who in error believe they need not consider the weight of their actions and inactions.
Veterans personify this experience, and their plight is well recorded, even if not adequately
responded to. The martial virtues disabled by modern war are made necessary by and
therefore impact the community, the polis in which they originate. If the heart of a
community produces the deeds committed in war, the actions in turn reflect back upon the
heart and similarly shape it. Those more guilty in Heschels formulation exist in direct

82
Grossman, 279
83
Mahedy, 60
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$(
relation to those responsible. Veterans both virtuous and vicious necessarily reflect back
upon the communities that shaped and sent them to the communal practice called war.
Indeed, Heschel confirms, If we admit that the individual is in some measure conditioned
or affected by the spirit of a society, an individuals crime discloses societys corruption.
84

Veterans, like prophets of old, are bound up in the very communities to which their
troubled vocation calls them to rebuke and chastise. Anti-war veterans groups like Iraq
Veterans Against the War and its predecessor, Vietnam Veterans Against the War,
85
not to
mention the WWII-produced Veterans for Peace, despite being secularly based, act as
prophetic voices in America. Their flag-burning,
86
medal-throwing,
87
fear inducing
88
public
behavior riotously enacts righteous indignation and offends civil religion, such that they earn
the ire of many a public official. The terrible wisdom they impart to the communities that
formed and sent them to war on their behalf is by no means super-conscious, but a burning
conscience that calls out the same in others in which might reside a weak, but not void,
conscience. Society, for as much as it desires to hide from the prophetic voice of its veterans,

84
Heschel, 16
85
One of the best histories of VVAW is by Richard Stacewitz, Winter Soldiers: An Oral History of the Vietnam
Veterans Against the War (Chicago, IL: Haymarket, 2008)
86
Not long after the 1989 Supreme Court ruling on Texas v. Johnson that sought to ban flag-burning as an act of
protest, numerous Vietnam Veterans (including at least one Medal of Honor recipient, Gordon Roberts)
threatened to burn flags as an expression of their disapproval. Reasons varied from forced patriotism to
infringing freedom of speech. On March 20, 2012, Matthis Chiroux of IVAW burned an American flag
during a protest rally organized by the ANSWER Coalition. His actions were personal in nature, but his status
as a member of the Board of Directors implied a tacit approval by the organization as a whole. My inclusion of
these anecdotes should not imply my support of them, but only to illustrate their provocative nature. Whether
they are prophetic acts would be a lively and enriching debate.
87
Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) conducted what they called Operation Dewey Canyon III in
April, 1971, including a ceremony on April 23
rd
in which 800 vets threw their medals onto the steps of
Congress, symbolically rejecting the war and their association thereto. On May 20
t
, 2012 Iraq Veterans Against
the War (IVAW) conducted a very similar action in Chicago to protest the NATO and G8 summits, which they
dubbed The March for Justice and Reconciliation.
88
Over the course of several months in numerous major American cities, IVAW performed street theater
intended as dramatic reenactment of combat patrols in Iraq and Afghanistan. Calling the performances
Operation First Casualty (based on the adage that truth is the first casualty in war) was meant to bring the
war home to the streets of the United States, a place that seemed to forget that there was a major war being
conducted. A comprehensive history of the series of actions does not exist, though it is hinted at here;
http://www.vvaw.org/veteran/article/?id=795
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is not ascious so much as it is self-denying and accommodated. Communities that decry
veterans as crazed, compromised, or damaged goods indict themselves in their attempt to
discredit the very people who have been energized by the awe-ful power to unmake
discovered in war but intrinsic to every culture. After all, If such deep sensitivity to evil is to
be called hysterical, what name should be given to the abysmal indifference to evil which the
prophet bewails?
89
What may we call the society that refuses to see the depravity within and
without, that turns a blind eye to the violence it insists upon year after year?
For the church, the voice of our veterans must also be interpreted well within the
prophetic tradition. Their voice, crying out from the wilderness of post-combat trauma is a
herald of hope. Just as they struggle to come home, churches too must recognize their
pilgrim progress toward a God distinct from worldly identities and citizenships. As resident
aliens in worldly lands, Christians all navigate the tumultuous seas of society together. We are
called to recognize in rebuke a beckon to come home, to return to the ways of the Lord.
After all, if the Spirit convicts as well as renews,
90
we can recognize in the prophet not just
righteous anger, but motivating love. Recognizing the accommodation to and in a world of
necessary evil the prophet is neither a singing saint nor a moralizing poet, but an assaulter
of the mind. Often his words begin to burn where conscience ends.
91
Veterans in our
churches are an indispensable voice working against complacency and superficiality. When
they speak, it is most often in the interest of communal self-improvement, an urging to take
the narrow road that few will find toward collective honesty and strength of character. Again
Heschel usefully articulates that, to the prophet satiety of conscience is prudery and flight

89
Heschel, 5
90
Mehl-Laituri, 96
91
Heschel, 10
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from responsibility.
92
Their voice is uttered in love for the communities that formed and
sustained them, to become the body they are called to be in Christ.
Enforced isolation for the sake of preserving the publics innocence,
93
besides
being morally unconscionable, only shields the public from healing properly and ensuring it
repeats its past mistakes. It is for this reason that the prophetic nature of combat veterans is
borne not of contempt for their country, but a deep and abiding love. Many veterans speak
of their deep patriotism informing their post-war political activity.
94
More often than perhaps
is noticed, veterans want desperately for America to learn the lessons they carry about war,
so that we do not continue to send our brethren uniformed and uninformed, like wind up
toys, off to war. The socially reinforced moral isolation of the American people from war
can be overcome if we listen to the voices of those who know war in its most undiluted
form. The lessons learned by them were by no means easy or painless. Indeed, moral pain
accompanies both vice and virtue in war. The Church in America should not be surprised
that a vets experience poses a direct challenge to the shallow spiritual life of much of
American Christianity.
95
Challenges, as veterans learn early on in Boot Camp, are not to be
taken as personal affronts, but opportunities for growth. Though in need of significant
qualification, it can be true that, in a sense, pain indeed can be weakness leaving the body
politic as well as the Body of Christ.
For Mahedy, the paradox of the war in Vietnam was that young men and women,
sheltered by a myth that masks the evil of war, rediscovered the biblical God because they

92
Heschel, 9
93
Mahedy, 61
94
A few years ago, I reflected on the prophetic nature of certain street theater by anti-war veteran organization
Iraq Veterans Against the War. Operation First Casualty, street theater employed in various major cities across
the United States, seemed to me to be deeply prophetic, despite originating from a secular community. Let the
Stones Cry Out: IVAW and the Question of Secular Prophetic Action can be accessed online at
http://academia.edu/3985444/Let_the_Stones_Cry_Out_IVAW_and_the_Question_of_Secular_Prophetic_A
ction
95
Mahedy, 181
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%+
came to realize his commands were to be taken seriously.
96
The same may very well be the
case for Iraq and Afghanistan, should the Church be given the eyes to see and the ears to
hear. Remaining silent in order to keep from experiencing the moral pain our veterans
embody is damaging not just to them but to the whole community. Dissimulation, remaining
silent to keep from lying, is a disservice to human relationships. That dad doesnt talk about
Vietnam, or that my friend always wants to be alone are signs of moral pain that must be
addressed deliberately, meeting painful silence with difficult but contextualizing conversation.
Indeed, God breaks the chaos of silence by the Word, Jesus Christ. The creation of
our world and ourselves is a conscious, active choice by an act of love. From Eden to
Golgotha, Christians must reckon with the fact that the words Let there be light
97
have
every bit as much power as the words Father, forgive them.
98
At least as far as the latter is
concerned, the difficulty that Jesus would have faced in uttering anything at all in the midst
of a crucifixion, where asphyxiation is the common cause of death, is a witness to the power
of words, even the face of the harrowing silence that death represents. Before inestimable
horror and uncertainty, men and women of the community of God must speak, for to do so
breaks the awful silence that is moral fragmentation. As Karl Marlantes puts it, part of
soldiers reintegration into their moral communities must involve [breaking] the damaging
code of silence.
99


96
Mahedy, 188
97
Genesis 1:3. This is also the title of an Army initiated and funded documentary of soldiers experiencing
psychoneurosis after WWII. The film was suppressed for 30 years for fear it would harm recruitment
numbers. In fact, copies provided to its director, John Huston (screenwriter for such films as The Maltese Falcon
and Sergeant York), were confiscated moments before a planned screening at the Museum of Modern Art,
ironically enough (considering note 57, above), for invading the privacy of the soldiers involved.
98
Luke 23:34. That some early manuscripts omit the sentence containing this imperative is as much an interest
of accuracy as it is a testament to the scandalous nature of grace.
99
Marlantes, 206. He actually suggests soldiers being required to meet with older veterans trained in group
dynamics in a kind of ritual decompression prior to finalizing their discharge paperwork. I cannot say I disagree
with this instinct, though the nature of the ceremony will look different for varying moral communities.
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%"
As important as speaking is, though, we must temper our words carefully and be on
the guard against speaking simply for the sake of speaking, for not every word builds up.
Imposing improper moral value upon soldiers can be harmful and frustrate the reintegration
process. Positive value like thank you risks being laid over the most recent or morally
significant act they recall, though the deed itself may require mourning, instead of rejoicing.
Upon my return to the Dallas airport in February 2004, I saw star spangled banners reading
Thank You!!! and strangers hugged me, saying the same. But less than a few days prior, my
platoon had killed a pair of insurgents after dropping a grenade into the turret of one of our
Humvees. For what was I being thanked? On the other hand, negative valued words like
Im glad you arent in that place anymore risks ignoring the fact that combat can be
addicting and the service member may still associate a deployment with a desire to serve. We
must also remember that some veterans legitimately feel that their service has been
honorable and productive.
Any words that take shape must be informed by the veterans own experience, and
that requires careful attention on the part of the welcoming community. Tyler Boudreau
insists that the experience he holds belongs to him and nobody else. More importantly, If I
can own it, I can disown it.
100
Implied here is a sense of self-possession that is necessary for
reintegration to occur, for the balance of responsibility between guilt and innocence is
delicate, and none know it better than the soldier herself. Members of the moral community
at large do not know the things committed and omitted in any concrete sense. Surveying and
appraising the moral terrain can only be done in direct relation with the soldier in question.
The military is not homogenous, and society does severe injury to its service members by
insinuating that the military has uniform meaning and moral viscosity. The homogenizing

100
Boudreau, 207.
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%#
force of stereotyping human beings has a long history in the West, and can be illustrated
easily by evoking the problems of flattening each and every African-American into one
category called the blacks or LGBTQ persons into one called the gays. The same is true
of the military, as though the embodied reality and moral character of the Military
Occupation Specialty of 92R is no different than that of an 11B.
101
There is no such thing as
the military in a morally uniform sense, for every job and individual face unique moral
challenges and are not of one single substance.
Society will not benefit from telling itself what military experience is like, for it has
tended to produce endangering caricatures like Blaster One. For this reason, veterans must
be given the space to self-define. Moral definition is central to the reintegration of fragments
of moral identity shattered by the experienced gap between depiction of war and its reality.
As we have seen, there are moments of good and evil alike in war, and the veteran must not
[evade] the moral consequences of his actions. He must live with this truth about himself,
[but] must not accept personal responsibility for events beyond his control.
102
By owning, in
Boudreaus terms, their experience, they are given the space to disown those morals acts for
which they bear no responsibility. The homogenizing instinct in society can obstruct the
otherwise deliberative tendency of which humans are capable. God invites humans to
reason together,
103
and communities and their members must do the work of
differentiating between the things they should experience guilt and the things for which they
should not. Remembering that at best we live in the us versus them mentality, and not one
of me versus them, individual soldiers and their communities together must do the work

101
If you require that the military occupational specialty (MOS) nomenclature referenced be explained, I rest
my case. The former is a parachute rigger, who is highly unlikely to see combat, and the latter is an infantryman.
We must not conflate combat arms MOSs and combat support.
102
Mahedy, 115
103
Isaiah 1:18, RSV
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of discernment, to take up Gods invitation to reason together, for it is when two or more
are gathered that a We exists that enables restitution, of returning full moral agency to
soldiers but also to the community itself.
Self-definition is an essential element to recovery after moral fragmentation, and
Biblical models can illuminate how individuals and communities both succeed and fail at this
task.
104
Job is a prime example cited by a number of commentators. Losing everything he
considers valuable in a traumatically short span of time, his friends come and sit Shiva with
him for seven days. During that time, we see the silence that trauma imposes in a healthy
sense. Silence is natural after violence, for it demands a certain solemnity that we rarely
create. The operational tempo of modern war does not allow for periods of respite, of
healthy silence and somber reflection. Tick and Marlantes agree that the absence of such
honoring silence on the battlefield creates a miscarriage of what Christians might call just
war. Sometimes the best thing we can say upon the return from combat assigns no moral
value at all. Instead of thanking our service members immediately, we nonjudgmentally
express our pleasure that they are home in a setting made possible by love. Creating a space
in which they feel welcome to express painful emotions and experiences begins with
Welcome home, I love you. Perhaps welcoming veterans home is more about hospitality
than anything else. Jobs friends sat there with him in the ashes, waiting, ready to listen, and
no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.
105


104
Lindeman-Nelson, 15. She writes of creating a moral track record that substantiates ones moral history as
a way of narrating against imposed morally degrading identities like those inherent in positive or negative value
assignment (of the instinct to either thank or condemn soldiers uniformly)
105
Job 2:13
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%%
When he does speak, Job [curses] the day of his birth, but he is careful not to curse
God.
106
His interpretation of events was not what his attending friends was, for they seem
incensed at Jobs refusal to endorse their theology, through which they insist that Job must
have done something to deserve the loss of his health, wealth, and prosperity. Their
narration dominates the interaction, with Job continually rebuking them over and over again.
Here we see a fine example of Lindeman-Nelsons notion of morally degrading identities
imposed by a dominant paradigm. The friends indeed outnumber Job, and we can hear in
their voices our own contemporary prosperity-based theological tendencies. You must be
guilty, they claim, for we can see how harshly he has treated you. But again and again, Job
insists that he knows better, and readers of the Book that bears his name know as well, for
that man was blameless and upright, he was the greatest of all the people of the east.
107

Indeed, he is especially careful to guard even his offspring by consecrating their houses the
day after they would hold feast, just in case they had inadvertently violated Gods covenant
in the course of the festivities.
Throughout the book, God affirms that Jobs faith is true, that he is a trustworthy
person. His friends, and his readers, should take him at his word. Similarly, soldiers know
their experience best and should be given the benefit of the doubt. Barring good reason to
distrust them, they should be given the grace to self-define, letting their own recollection
guide the moral community in the process of reintegration. Churches and friends must be
careful not to overwrite veterans experiences with bad or hasty theology. They should take
the time to sit and dwell in the ashes of post-combat moral ambiguity. Meaning may return

106
Job 3:1. Its a Wonderful Life (RKO Radio Pictures, 1946), the first post-war movie by WWII bomber pilot
Jimmy Stewart, is about a man who gets to see what it would have been like had he not been born, after
alluding to suicide (Im at the end of my rope) in his prayer that God show [him] the way. In a world in
which so many veterans commit suicide, is it any coincidence that this combat veterans most well known film
dealt with this very subject?
107
Job 1:1 and Job 1:3b, respectively.
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%&
in time, but it must come on the veterans terms and at their own pace. Moving toward that
horizon requires that we navigate somewhere between victim and victor, since veterans
themselves (being themselves not autonomously complicit in the communal act of war) are
neither full nor void of the guilt that war fighting carries with it.
However, it should be considered that veterans are capable of poorly re-narrating
their experiences in ways that weigh too heavily on either self-contempt or self-
aggrandizement.
108
Life within a culture that leans toward extremes can color the way we
understand our own experiences. The Church therefore must recover its intellectual
impartiality and invigorate its determination to think critically with God and with one
another. Furthermore, we must affirm that reason does not grant certainty; it can only
acquire a proximity to the Truth that God alone possesses. In like manner, we must
acknowledge the finite nature of our efforts to achieve healing as though it will ever be
complete and unhindered. Moral fragmentation, like any injury, will leave scars. Instead of
hiding our scars, we must integrate them into our healthy and encompassing self-identity.
How that can be done is not difficult to imagine.
Lindeman-Nelsons approach, which she situates within the frame of narrative
repair, is vastly helpful. Central to her proposal is a strategy she calls the Counter-story; a
cluster of histories, anecdotes, and other narrative fragments that resists an oppressive
identity and attempts to replace it with one that commands respect.
109
Society creates
master narratives through the media and various oral traditions that largely reflect
ideological agendas that veterans quickly sniff out. The paradigmatic identities provided

108
For an example of the latter, see Carey Cash, A Table in the Presence (New York, NY: Ballantine, 2005).
Examples of the former can be seen in things like the testimonies of Somers and Westhusing. I recognize the
danger of overwriting their narratives in trying to elucidate my point, but I maintain that it must be a balance.
Being a fellow combat veteran gives me some unique insight to reflect on the soldiers experience generically
that I otherwise would not have were I to have never been in uniform.
109
Lindeman-Nelson, 6
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%'
thereby include such archetypes as Blaster One, lone rangers, John Waynes, etc. Insofar as
these identities are not internally produced integrally
110
by the military community and rely
upon vices like arrogance and isolationism disguised as virtue, they constitute an abusive
power system. Creating substantial profit for non-military community members compounds
the complicity of some persons in society and furthermore creates not just an abusive system
by overwriting first-hand narratives but also an exploitative one that (socially and materially)
robs veterans of their ability to self-define. If veterans must navigate between victor and
victim, civilians similarly must be careful to not become voyeurs, by consuming media
uncritically for apologetic or distractive purposes that abuse and exploit veterans, even while
filling them with platitudinous gratitude.
Crafting counterstories must be as communal an act as war itself, for identity is a
complex web of narration, revision, and recollection that continuously informs and
reinforces who and whose we are. History is replete with examples of soldier saints and
patriot pacifists that can nuance and enrich our understanding of war, peace, and
soldiering.
111
From the Bible to denominational tradition and even up to recent history, we
see examples of conscientious participation in war and patriotic pacifism craftily shaping
public discourse and challenging the hegemony of martial homogenization and voyeurism.
The church has her saints and the world has its heroes, but the way in which they are
interpreted is important.

110
Integrally implies that there is some unity within the military community itself, which would include bridging
the gap between officer and enlisted ranks. Incredibly underexplored is the socio-economic gap between the
comparative privilege of officers over enlisted, though it dominates the reality of military life. Things like
Officers Clubs, the practice of saluting, etc enforce the inequality explicitly. An integral identity would be one
that could be somewhat agreed upon by both these sub-communities. I.e.; what a Joe (lower enlisted), NCO,
or an officer is as understood and agreed upon by all parties such that the best and worst features are generally
identifiable by the entirety of the martial fraternity.
111
My upcoming For God and Country (in that order): Faith and Service for Ordinary Radicals (Scottsdale, PA: Herald,
2013) lists no less than 48 such examples that I found with this precise interest in mind.
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%(
Tim OBrien, in his book The Things They Carried, said that you could tell a story
about war is true by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.
112

Movies or books or other wise master narratives that refuse to honestly depict such
obscenity are at best inaccurate and at worst deliberately exploitative and abusive.
Counterstories therefore must retain a sense of such obscenity but must also be careful not
to serve up the voyeuristic instincts society often displays. Memoirs of war often try to do
precisely this, though the danger of reproducing the very characters against which they
otherwise do battle persists. War films are akin to social silence upon a soldiers return in
that they produce morally degrading identities via an oppressive dominant narrative that
robs vets of the power of telling their own stories in their own terms and for their own well-
being. Needless to say, the balance is difficult to strike, and writers cannot be held
accountable entirely for how their works are received reading and listening, like war, is a
communal act of both fidelity and failure at once.
Popular Christian imagination about war is confined largely to a formulaic,
Thomistic account of war. But firsthand accounts of Christian soldiering challenge this
tendency in the modern church, especially since no such formulaic accounts seem important
in the midst of combat.
113
After all, anecdotes about aged veterans sitting around playing
cards and drinking beer while they discuss proportionality, legitimate authority, and last
resort are hard (if not impossible) to come by. When soldiers gather to talk (including about
war), stories ill-suited to situational quandary ethics emerge, for the morality of war is
ambiguous and mixed. Some things deserve acclaim, while others beg for absolution. That
these conversations do not occur outside what Marlantes calls The Club reveals a deep

112
OBrien, 65-66.
113
In the 13 years I have spent speaking with fellow soldiers and veterans, I literally have not once heard
reference to the criteria of just war popularly construed (what Bell likens to a Public Policy Checklist).
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distrust of non-veterans for deep morally nuanced experiences.
114
That these whispered tales
are protected by the bounds of the martial fraternity masks a kind of shame they carry and
impose upon those to whom they belong, for the veterans are engaging in the act of
confession, albeit an truncated expression thereof.
The shame revealed by the martial clique recalls Hauerwas comment above, about
the silencing effect of violence, but he continues by saying that the language of confession
is a powerful speech act [in which veterans] dont have to feel that [theyve] got anything to
hide.
115
Confession indeed is a deeply human and social event, evidenced by Marlantes
discussion of The Club, or other, similar evocations of the Band of Brothers that is the
martial community.
116
The experiences acquired by war should not and cannot be contained;
no shoulders are broad enough nor back strong enough to carry the burden of battle.
Sometimes the burden comes gushing out after a few drinks or the passage of many decades,
but it comes out.
117

But there is no reason for these sacramentally incestuous utterances to be confined
within the high walls of The Club. Confession, otherwise known as the Sacrament of
Reconciliation, is most often between a priest or a pastor and a penitent individual. The
relationship between the contrite person and the perceived moral authority is important to
highlight. In such a transaction, a liturgically more pure person absolves a less pure person
who seeks forgiveness. A problem with so-called rap sessions, for a Christian account of

114
Marlantes dedicates his entire tenth chapter to this phenomenon, and it deserves widespread attention.
115
http://sites.duke.edu/aftertheyellowribbon/2011/08/29/video-interview-with-stanley-hauerwas/
116
Irony alert: the author of the 1992 classic that spawned the HBO miniseries, Stephen Ambrose, was himself
not a veteran and has been heavily discredited for instances of plagiarism, historical inaccuracies, and occasional
fabrication. A classic example of master narratives creating an exploitative identity not reminiscent of the
virtues made both possible and necessary by war.
117
One such example includes personally relayed memory of a family reunion in which an aged and otherwise
stoic great uncle had a few too many drinks and let spill a few details of his 1945 release from a German POW
camp in WWII. When the Russian liberating officer extended to him a loaded pistol, the uncle dispatched the
commander of the camp with nary a thought. Until 50 years later, that is. If memory serves, the uncle took his
own life a few years later.
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%*
moral reintegration, is that the penitent are never allowed to leave the moral gene pool. Put
another way, we have nobody under whom to apprentice so that the moral architecture is
trusted to masters of the craft. When novices are left to remodel a house, it rarely is as sound
as it could be. Veterans need trusted and legitimate moral authorities from whom we can
achieve a relative assurance despite our moral discrepancies; what is needed is someone that
we trust to say that we are going to be alright, that we are not only as evil as our worst
mistakes (or only as good as our best attempts).
Once a relative assurance can be made that we are morally integral and coherent
persons, penance must move from the immediate and interpersonal to the communal. Again,
if war is a communal act, it requires a communal response. Veterans are, like every human
being, deeply social animals we must find belonging within a community that helps narrate
not just our lives, but the life of the group, as having significance, respect, and also
culpability. What such communal penance could look like is very open to debate, for the
ease of slipping into either voyeurism or vilification or veneration is too facile to ignore.
Many a veteran have spilled their guts before televised audiences no more interested in
their moral health than viewers are in what they may find on another channel. Confessional
transactions must be between a penitent and a captive, deep-listening audience (either an
individual moral authority or their moral community of choice
118
).
The confessing veteran can share their experience in any number of ways within a
liturgical setting. Whether as part of the service of word or table, within the prayers for the
people or the opening order of worship, their voice must be expressed and accepted without
assigning moral value to the veteran alone, for war is a communal act with communal

118
By community of choice, I do not intend to mean whatever old church will listen, but Lindeman-Nelsons
use of the word to suggest that community into which one voluntarily enters. In Christian terms, perhaps this
means your baptized community or other denominational home in which a veteran is a recognized member.
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&+
repercussions. The purpose of a corporate confessional action is to diffuse the guilt felt by
one into responsibility shared by all, shifting the burden from one pair of shoulders to many.
To be very clear; the nature of this sacramentally expressed moral diffusion is not of
punishment. We must not misread the mark of Cain as being punitive, for the consequence
of wandering was itself punitive. Consequence should not be confused with castigation. God
cited matter-of-factly that Cain would wander, not that he should; one could easily read this as
descriptive instead of prescriptive. The result of violence is a moral wasteland, and God
foresaw that the result of fratricide was to feel isolated and at threat of retribution.
119

Governments are charged with keeping amorality from becoming the norm, from everyone
doing what is right in their own eyes,
120
and to keep the order according to Gods word.
The collective reception of a soldiers confession is important for the Church herself
to better understand her own holy story more wholly. Their experiences are part and parcel
to being the presence and persistence of God in the world. Evacuating all morality from war
is both dishonest and heretical for God never abandons his people. The eschatological
irony of Jesus cry upon the cross is that God had not forsaken him, that God was right
there on the Cross, as he suffocated and died, but also when he begged forgiveness upon those
who killed him, the soldiers surrounding him.
121
Soldiers to this day have an integral part to
play in illuminating within and for the church the paradoxical existence we call human being.
We are all capable of both audacious charity and horrendous atrocity. Soldiers therefore can

119
Genesis 4:12 has God saying that Cain will be a fugitive and a wanderer. (emphasis added) According to
Grossman, less than 2% of the male population experiences no moral pain as a result of inflicting violence.
This exception to the rule proves that for nearly all those who commit violence, they experience negative
spiritual/emotional fallout as a result of their violence. The names given by the psychological profession to this
2% (which should be evacuated of their negative connotations) are psychopath and sociopath. Grossman,
180.
120
Judges 17:6 and 21:25, paraphrase.
121
Cried by Jesus on the cross, Matthew 27:46 is the feeling of many soldiers on the battlefield. It is important
to note that Jesus was quoting a seasoned veteran who knew what violence did and used poetry to process the
burden he carried all the way to the throne of Israel, for it is the opening line to Psalm 22, a song of David,
preceding the most popular war psalm, #23 (though I walk thru the valley of the shadow of death).
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&"
help the church better understand this particular piece of the puzzle that is human
experience, for it is in persona milites that the church confesses together Lord, I am not
worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.
122

A healthy ecclesial response to combat trauma is not about punishment, but the
rightful reintegration of the person into the community, which shares in the responsibility
for sending or failing to prevent people to the hell of war. War is punishment enough,
physically and spiritually, and communities must not heap insult upon injury by castigating
those who manage to return in one visible piece. After all, Cain wanders less than three
verses before he arrives in the Land of Nod and finds a companion to help him come all the
way home from his violence and the resultant wandering. Coming home from war is
inherently difficult and rife with pain and difficulties, punitive in their own way. The code of
silence, as Marlantes reminds us, is itself damaging.
123
It is for this reason that we must
explore penitential practices that marked a contrite church of ages past. Indeed, when
[penance] existed, there was the possibility that you could bring your silence to God. The
first thing the church does is listens.
124

Another tendency is to frame reintegration around purification, to which Tick
focuses an entire chapter of his book.
125
Under this model, effort is made to rid the veteran
of feelings of remorse and injurious guilt. On a narrative plane, this might be akin to
cosmetically removing or concealing unsightly scars, but its effect to is produce partial
people, whose history is excised like a disease. At worst, avoidance only delays discernment
and ignores deeply compromised moral architecture. Numerous symptoms of PTSD make

122
Paraphrase of Matthew 8:8 and Luke 7:6b-7, from which the Roman Catholic Church recites together the
final collective speech act before the priest consumes the holy Eucharist every Sunday.
123
Marlantes, 206. See note 99, above.
124
http://sites.duke.edu/aftertheyellowribbon/2011/08/29/video-interview-with-stanley-hauerwas
125
Tick, 201-216.
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clear that we will never be truly rid of our memories; they invade our thoughts, terrorize our
dreams, and profane our lives at times on a daily basis. It is better to reintegrate our
memories into a richer, more mature and comprehensive view of self that veterans may draw
from in engaging the community about what it means to live the moral life. By accepting our
failures as our own, we can disown those for which we are not guilty. In Boudreaus example,
if I can own it, I can disown it. Purity will prove unachievable no matter how hard we try;
truth will always belong to God. Humans are wiser to reach for perfection but settle for
being what they are, which is "very good."
Moral reintegration, therefore, does not partition off parts of the moral self that are
bounded by memory, for this actually reinforces fragments created by war. Veterans and
their communities must not assume that one part of me is good while another is profane,
for this is a modern manifestation of Manichaeism. Neither is reintegration about cosmetics,
which is self-righteousness in disguise, as though vets can say to themselves those acts can
remain hidden. No, veterans must bear the scars that make them who and whose they are,
just as Jesus emerged from the harrowing of hell marked by his victory against sin. Victory
for veterans is not pure or superficial, it absorbs the ugliness and the beauty into one, fully
human paradox we know as the moral life. Instead of looking for ways to excuse or hide our
history, veterans must look at their whole lives and say with the whole church, This is my
experience and I accept it; good, bad, and everything in between. We may be whores, we
may be murderers, but we are one, and we are loved by God and one another, for I am
convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things
to come, nor powers,

nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to
separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
126


126
Romans 8:38-39
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Conclusion(s)

To call this final section a conclusion would be ironic, for the previous pages show
that this is only the beginning. As we have discussed, the increasing (and encouraging)
discussion about moral injury is helpful and needed. However, we must get to the deeper
issue, which is to better articulate the self that is formed such that an injury may be inflicted
thereupon. By no means should we discount or wipe away the discussions surrounding
moral injury that results from war. Quite on the contrary, more work is called for by the
frame proposed initially by such figures as Marin, Shay, and Litz et. al and being expanded
upon by the work of Keizer and Nakashima-Brock at the Soul Repair Center. Their
important work only highlights the depth and breadth of this unsolved problem of combat
trauma and its effect on moral identity and health, including its implications for the church. I
hope we have seen that using the frame of virtue ethics is helpful, but it should not be
construed as exclusive, as though it is the only method by which we can develop resources
and strategies to combat moral fragmentation and the undoing of character that results from
modern war.
If we follow the frame I have proposed, of tracing an linear trajectory from
inadequate moral formation to fragmentation, reintegration can be seen in more sweeping
ways than even just that made necessary by war. In a Church that sees numbers dwindling
amidst ecclesial scandal and malfeasance, what might reintegration of Christian identity itself
entail? After all, Christianity is itself one identity by which we are composed (and hopefully it
is our most determinative one), and thinking through strategies of recovering from the moral
dissonance produced by the perhaps at times demonic behavior of religious authorities may
be a logical extension of the work suggested here. In order to do so, as with combat trauma
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and moral fragmentation, we must be careful to get at the underlying issues. To propose
treatments and strategies, we must first accurately appraise the fundamental issues at hand.
In the words of George Bernanos, a Roman Catholic writer, The worst, the most
corrupting of lies, are problems poorly stated.
127

We must be careful to properly analyze the forces at play that make moral injury
possible, or we risk misdiagnosing the problem. I have no fear that such is the case currently
in the subject of moral injury, although such debates have a tendency to stratify quickly and
take on lives of their own, with all the fear of narrative adolescence that accompanies any
familial relationship.
128
After all, behind the specific matters at issue in any debate there is
always the further question of the quality of human community that the debate itself
represents.
129
As the church and the world continue the important work of deliberating
about war, peace, and the communities that makes such things possible and necessary, we
must do so with keen attention to the convictions at play. The church as a moral community
has something different to say than does the national community, or the community of
nations. Therefore, my attention has been focused on what the church has to offer this
discussion. With this in mind, at heart has been my impression that asking moral questions
well begins when we learn to be the church well.
130

Churches are in fact moral communities that narrate particular lives into being; they
imagine a world determined by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. They

127
According to J. Bryan Hehir, in Harvard Divinity Bulletin Vol.26, No. 1 (1996). Cited in Smudge, 7.
128
Personally, I was surprised by Newsweeks 2012 Hero Summit on moral injury in Washington D.C., right
as the Soul Repair Center was being commission, as my impression was that the term was still relatively young
and carefully being explored by a few leading experts, such as Lettini, Nakashima-Brock, Keizer, Shay, etc. It is
very likely that I may be misreading the chain of events and failing to comprehend the advance planning that
most certainly was done. The publicity that accompanies something like Newsweek made me nervous for how
popular and uncritical attention threatened to spill over into and dilute critical research. I cannot say that such
is the case, but only feel compelled to register my apprehension.
129
Smudge, 8
130
Smudge, 9
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bring people into being by modeling what it means to be a moral person in light of the
conviction that Jesus is Lord. Just war frames help situate the persistence of violence in a
world cared for by God and assist those who conduct violence deemed necessary to be a just
people capable of waging war (as opposed to mass slaughter, for example). Proper moral
formation precedes our recognition of the moral spectrum and the church has both stories
and practices that evoke this reality. Stories of Eden and narrating the Fall as both evil and
mysteriously good provide churches with a way of understanding the embrace of moral
knowledge as a significant event in the creation of a moral self capable of either great evil or
audacious charity. At its best, just war taken seriously helps restrain the passions and give
space for martial virtue that occurs in war alongside significant vice. Doing away with the
tradition or discounting wars moral content can prove injurious as wars and rumors of war
persist and the church remains embedded in societies that insist upon the permanence of
war.
War must not be that place in which ones ultimate and fundamental moral identity
comes into view and takes shape, for it reveals the communitys failure and can lead to
identity fragmentation and loss of a sense of meaning. Superficial formation leaves the moral
architecture unsound and endangers those who must (for economic or social reasons)
inhabit the structures of war and military service. Leaving formation to entertainment
industries or perpetuating illusions of moral autonomy from such found communities as the
nation to which one belongs are equally unconscionable. Equally injurious can be those
communities that foster an uncritical acquiescence to the national ideologies on offer.
Qualifying any war as good is as much an evil as homogenizing all those who fight in a
war as evil, for the paradox of war is that it is at once beautiful and tragic.
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Reintegration requires moral communities traverse the wasteland created by the
moral vacuum of modern war with those who return from the similarly chaotic field of battle.
They must wrestle with the pangs of conscience, the thorn thrust in their sides by the
necessity of violence that soldiers conduct. They must help put voice to the cry from that
wilderness of war that, whispering or wailing, cries out Who am I? and Where is God? Veterans
must find spaces of sanctuary in church marked by a confessional community ready to do
the work of penance and lamentation. God is not in the self-righteousness of protesting
progressives or chickenhawk conservatives, not in the mighty wind, the devastating
earthquake, or the raging fire, but in a soft voice. That voice comes to veterans,
131
they need
not go to it, and churches must bear witness to this by their active engagement in meaningful
habits and rituals of reconciliation. Such practices refuse to hide the wounds of war, instead
absorbing the scars into a fuller, more comprehensive moral self that has overcome the
chaos of war with the help of a committed community.
In the end, communities interested in moral health, especially as understood through
the case study of war and veterans, must question whether injury the best paradigm
through which to get at soldiers comprehensive experience of war. Mahedy reflects, of the
Vietnam era, stress became the all-inclusive category that alone defined the relationship of
the vets to the war they had fought.
132
Marin, his contemporary, preferred the term moral
pain,
133
as we have tended in the above survey. Pain, after all, does not necessarily assign a
negative moral value, for natural and good events may cause pain as well, from childbirth to
pulling out a splinter. To reorient our language may give space to the diversity of experience
that veterans report after war, from deep tragedy to profound beauty. Injury, however,

131
1 Kings 19, after the wind, earthquake, and fire of vv.11 & 12, verse 13 states then there came a voice to
him. (emphasis added)
132
Mahedy, 109
133
See Works Cited, under Marin.
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immediately implies something has gone wrong and needs urgent attention. Whereas we
agree that the great many veterans in moral pain do indeed require our attentive concern,
moral pain provides a wider narrative space in which well-adjusted and fulfilled veterans
may also speak from their perspective without alienating those veterans whose experiences
were dominated by negative memories. Even Medal of Honor winners can and do speak of
pain as a necessary threshold they encountered on the battlefield. Any linguistic framework
that encourages commonality amongst veterans is a step in the right direction.
After all, an injury is something that afflicts one part of the body or a specific range
of body parts and systems. As any toddler will tell you, pain can be all over. The narratively
inclusive nature of pain, contrasted with the medical/clinical model assumed by injury, can
be an impediment to more exhaustive and broad discussions of combat experience and
military service. Bodily metaphors are helpful, however, and we will conclude with a final
reflection drawing upon our introductory rumination on the history of combat trauma. As
we saw from the opening lines, one of the most enduring phrases used to describe the
martial conundrum was soldiers heart, which described both the pain experienced in war
and the fraternal bond that beckoned warriors to return to the field of battle to accompany
their compatriots. Nakashima-Brock and Lettini reflect that a good heart might be one way
to describe a war veteran with a moral injury.
134
A good heart, not a broken or a weak heart,
encapsulates the rhetorical character touched by war. Indeed, one fundamental assumption
underlying the discourse about PTSD and moral injury is that each is a normal moral
response to the ambiguities of war.
135
Our actions are caught up in our being, and who we
are shapes what we do while our actions paradoxically shape our identity. Remember, what

134
Nakashima-Brock and Lettini, 124
135
From http://brite.edu/programs.asp?lefnav=sr&BriteProgram=soulrepair_faq, accessed July 18, 2013.
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our body does proceeds from the heart,
136
and our heart is the figurative foundation of
who we are. Veterans are by no means weak, regardless of what the harsh stigmatization of
things like PTSD, for Only a strong heart can bear bitter invectives
137
brought by war. May
the church bear the terrible wisdom wrought by war with those who fight, for us and for
themselves, each and every day.


136
Matthew 15:18. See also note 19, above.
137
Heschel, 16
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Works Cited
Bell, D. (2009). Just War as Christian Discipleship: Recentering the Tradition in the Church
Rather Than the State. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos.
Boudreau, T. (2008). Unpacking Inferno: The Unmaking of a Marine. Port Townsend,
WA: Feral House.
Brett Litz, e. a. (2009). Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A
Preliminary Model and Intervention Strategy. Clinical Psychology Review , 29 (8), 695
706.
Heschel, A. J. (1969). The Prophets (Vol. 1). New York, NY: Harper and Row.
Knight, K. (1887). New Advent. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers , 1 . (P. Schaff, Ed., & J.
G. Cunningham, Trans.) Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co.
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