THE GRUNTS
pound to compound, trying to
find them [the insurgents]. Eventually they hopped in a car and
drove off into the desert.”
There is a long silence after
Nick finishes the story. He’s lived
with it for more than three years,
and the telling still catches in his
throat. Eventually, he sighs. “He
was just a kid. But I’m sorry, I’m
trying not to get shot and I don’t
want any of my brothers getting
hurt, so when you are put in that
kind of situation ... it’s shitty that
you have to, like ... shoot him.
“You know it’s wrong. But ...
you have no choice.”
Almost two million men and
women who served in Iraq or Afghanistan are flooding homeward,
profoundly affected by war. Their
experiences have been vivid. Dazzling in the ups, terrifying and depressing in the downs. The burning devotion of the small-unit
brotherhood, the adrenaline rush
of danger, the nagging fear and
loneliness, the pride of service.
The thrill of raw power, the brutal ecstasy of life on the edge. “It
was,” said Nick, “the worst, best
experience of my life.”
But the boy’s death haunts him,
mired in the swamp of moral confusion and contradiction so fa-
HUFFINGTON
03.16-23.14
miliar to returning veterans of the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is what experts are coming
to identify as a moral injury: the
pain that results from damage to
a person’s moral foundation. In
contrast to Post Traumatic Stress
Disorder (PTSD), which springs
from fear, moral injury is a viola-
He sees the shooter is a child,
maybe 13. With only a split
second to decide, he squeezes the
trigger and ends the boy’s life.
tion of what each of us considers
right or wrong. The diagnosis of
PTSD has been defined and officially endorsed since 1980 by
the mental health community,
and those suffering from it have
earned broad public sympathy
and understanding. Moral injury
is not officially recognized by the
Defense Department. But it is
moral injury, not PTSD, that is
increasingly acknowledged as the
signature wound of this generation of veterans: a bruise on the
soul, akin to grief or sorrow, with
lasting impact on the individuals
and on their families.
Moral injury raises uncomfortable questions about what happens